First, the job search process came to an end.  On Monday night last week, at around 5:15 p.m., I received a call from the preparatory school that I applied to in response to their need for an event coordinator/scholarship steward.  They offered me the job.  Feeling underprepared, overwhelmed, and very grateful, I accepted.

After a hectic half-week of orientation at the school and evenings spent finishing projects at my marketing internship at the hospital, on Thursday, I officially closed out my marketing internship with all requisite exit interviews–and, of course, with a luncheon with my department there. I’m going to miss them, and their safe, lovely nest from which I flew. 

Now, I’m starting the slightly-less scary job transition process. I’m learning the history of the school, the fundraising software, the names and faces that I’ll be working with every day from now on, and researching (today) all of the previous events held there so that I’ll have an idea of where to put my feet before I can even move them.

And by the way, my neighbor rocks for helping me put my car back together. My replacement bumper cover arrived on Tuesday night, and I had my “butt” back on my car by Friday night, thanks to the amazing semi-retired metal worker/engineer living next door.  I made him brownies, a little compensatory check, and a funny thank-you card with a picture of a car with a bandaid on it for his troubles.  And I missed my dad more than a little while I was getting all dirty and sweaty working with him to get my tail lights off and back on around the installation process.

I’m convinced, after too many days of having things handed to me this week, that there’s a lot of God and only a little bit of your pal Ruth involved in this whole process. So I’m going to watch what happens next. Wish me luck!  I’ll be back to update when I can.  Right now, I’m off to write thank-you notes to my old nesters and to study up on my new digs.

Abbie is a bit more like Hobbes (tiger) than Calvin in this: when life dumps on her, she grabs an umbrella. Or runs inside. But God's working in the storm--and after it. So she's gotta stick this out.

So, the tiger-job-hunting thing?  It’s paying off. I have two interviews this week, which is about as much as I can cram in around work. The first one happened today, and I have a follow-up interview with the whole marketing/funding team next week. Tomorrow’s interview should be intensive, too.  Both of them are for marketing/event coordinating positions, and I know I wouldn’t have even gotten through the slushpile of applicants without my internship. So I’m grateful. And I’m grateful also for the networking that my friends and coworkers have done, which also opened a lot of doors and large windows.  Thank you!

Other stuff: My car had a little accident, and it’s costing me a lot of energy and funding to fix it.  I miss my dad and I miss having easy answers and I miss how my car used to look before the fender-bender.  I don’t know why such a relatively minor body/cosmetic issue with my car is beating me down at this moment, but I think it just feels huge because I’m out of my depth, and my mom’s out of her depth, and it just emphasizes the fact that we’re women living without a man in a man’s world.  I bet Ruth and Naomi had a similar experience while they were travelling and wished they knew some guy who gave a crap about what happened to them.

In other news: my romantic life is exploding.  Summer is dating season, apparently, and I feel like an absolute git for being almost too exhausted to enjoy it.  I do need a man in my life–and not just to fix my car–but I’m so stressed out about my big upheavals in career and transportation that I can’t really manage to find the extra ooomph at the end of my working days to go out and be va-va-va-voom with a guy who wants to go salsa dancing or rock-hopping or whatever else seems unisexically exciting.  I kinda miss the old concept of dating that involved relaxing and romancing, you know?  It’s the perfect time for it.*

*So, big hint to any guys who are reading this:  if you want to date a gal who is pulling her own weight at her job, looking for another job and actively stressing out over interviews, and recently had a car wreck, take it easy on her.  Go to her side of town (because her car’s a jalopy at this stage), find a place where you can talk and laugh for a few hours (not several, because then she’ll get over-tired and feel less than happy to see you), and feed her a little–I promise it will pay off.  Huge.

That doesn’t sound like a lot of job applications to you older folks, who used to go out driving and dropping off résumés, but consider the fact that today’s job searching is all done online. And consider, too, that hospital and university HR departments (where I’m mostly applying) want more than just a résumé and brief cover letter. They want writing samples, recommendation letters, and a complete online career history profile—including your high school jobs, your references, and your ethnic/sexual/relationship/police record history status.  It takes about six hours for me to apply to a single job, but about two weeks and thirty seconds to get a stock email back telling me my hours were wasted.  The current way of doing things—online applications only, please, no personal calls—sucks. 

So, I’m still applying, but I’m also taking a slightly passive stance. I’m finding that acquaintances of mine who are aware of my internship-ending-soon-with-no-openings-in-sight position are very helpful and are doing some networking for me.  I’ve been getting emails from these helpful saints about job leads, and I’d like to say ‘thank you.’  

The reason why I’m being “lazy” (to some minds) has something to do with my tendency to trust the things I see in nature as being facets of God’s original design. At my old volunteer gig at the Zoo, I watched a tiger hunt–stalking a bit towards the potential target, waiting, sneaking a little closer, waiting again–and this practice is, and has always been, efficient enough to feed and sustain the tiger.  Moreover, to quote God himself in Job 38, the situation is really out of my hands/paws: 

“Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?” v. 39-41 

I, maybe foolishly, see God’s providence in this job-hunting process, too: in one supportive networker friend at a time, flushing the career field bushes for me, or passing by with an easy opening in their hands and a personal insider in the company to boot.  All I have to do is wait . . . and pounce. 

Meantime, I’ll sharpen my newly learned marketing skills, and I’ll try—try not to freak out about all the life transitions I’m facing once again this summer as I re-enter the job market feeling only slightly prepared for a real career and very uncertain about where I’ll wind up if I miraculously land one.  Breathe. Be calm. 

After all, when tigers wait for a meal and get anxious or nervous about it, their tails start to move, and they give themselves away. That’s when the opportunities suddenly vanish. 

One more thought: a bit of wisdom from the eminent Bill Watterson and my favorite tiger of his. 

Calvin and Hobbes (c) Universal Press Syndicate

That’s not something  you really want to hear from a therapist.  It’s sort of a verification that, yeah, your situation’s gotten pretty sucky.

On the other hand, it’s also an opportunity to just get yourself together.

Yes, I got bad news. About three weeks ago, I did get my test results I was worried about, and I didn’t know what to make of it, so I didn’t write about it right away. I’m still conflicted.

On the intellectual edge of my brain, I think, yeah, big whopping deal: I carry a mutated gene (the BRCA2) that makes breast cancer.  Time bomb?  Yes, but I knew I was at risk anyway. 

And then I start analyzing and planning: So what does this test result mean?

Right now, it means that I’m twenty-three years old and should learn how to live with the knowledge that my health and my body, as they appear now, are only temporary, which is true for everyone. 

But it also means that I’ll need to undergo annual mammograms starting at age 25, with MRIs scheduled at varying intervals along with some uncomfortable ultrasounds (because the BRCA2 gene mutation carries ovarian cancer risk, too). It means that I’ll have to be extra mindful about what I eat (fried foods and sugar = cancer-cell heaven), how much weight I gain (fat stores estrogen, which feeds my kind of breast cancer), and how much I expose myself to cigarette smoke (duh).  It also means that I need to avoid estradiol-based birth control pills (because research currently suggests that they might feed estrogen-receptive cancer).  And I know I need to be doing my cardio, and it’d be great if I could get pregnant and have my estrogen get replaced with progesterone and make my cyclical fluxes stop and hence disrupt estrogen-linked . . . yeah, you get the idea.  To be utterly forthright about it, I just have to adjust and make some lifestyle changes starting now.

That all doesn’t bother me, really.  Dieting, exercising, and going to the doctor a lot more than is financially feasible when you’re a recent college grad doing pud jobs without medical insurance is just part of the package of my family history. I sorta knew that, test or no test.

It’s the future that bothers me. 

Now three weeks out from my results, my mind is still spinning over what I hope will never be. Because in the future, I know I might have the chance of really screwing over my kids’ childhoods if I don’t stay on top of my health and wind up needing to go through cancer treatment when my kids are still young and need me to just be “normal.” It also means I might screw over their childhoods even if I do stay on top of things, just based on current physician advisement that argues for me undergoing a prophylactic oophrectomy at age 40 combined with anti-estrogen type medication that will flip my female hormone levels upside down and turn me into a raving bitch with severe hot flashes while I force myself through an early menopause.  Makes for a lovely mom, huh?  Not to mention how this will change my sexual appetite. Yeah, bummer;  what a wife.  After just a little over a decade of marriage, this could be what the poor sap gets.

Knowing  that this could be, the risk involved in just trying to live a “normal” life seems very great.  That was my first thought, once I finished eking out one-syllable responses to the nurse who gave me my test results in friendly but very terse terms.  Why did this thought occur to me?

Well, it seems there is still a seeping, half-scabbed-over remnant of the deep traumatic wound of watching my father die and my family life fall apart that is still in my heart, and it warns me away from even seeking to bring a family into being. It’s a part of me that is afraid of hurting someone else just by sharing myself—with all my mutant, self-detonating genetic baggage—with loved ones in such a way that would cause them grief at my changing, at my passing.  I don’t even know what to call that. It’s not bad self-esteem, really; I acknowledge that I’m loveable. And that’s the problem—I don’t want them to love and be destroyed.

“But isn’t that the risk everyone takes—that the person they love now, that they marry now, will someday be someone different?” asked my therapist, who deals most often with depressed divorcees who have rudely awakened to this very knowledge.  “Don’t we all risk that we ourselves, by simply living, will change and weaken and die? The difference is, you know what might change you, and you can try to take control of it now.”

It’s true, I suppose.  Given what I know, I can decide ahead of time that I won’t “do” cancer the way my parents did: I won’t let it sneak up on me like it snuck up on my father,  who no one would have imagined would be cancer-prone after years of clean living and an active lifestyle.  And unlike my mom, I won’t let the changes cancer and cancer meds will make to my body change my mindset—I’ll fight the personality shifts like a cat fights going into the bathtub (and occasionally wins—true story, ask my Delilah). 

And because I’ve seen breast cancer and breast cancer treatment in action, I’ll know more what to expect. I could plan. If I’m smart, I can out-think it like a half-finished Sudoku puzzle. I might even have the foresight to imagine and escape the awful possibilities because I’ve seen a lot of them.  For example, I’d know that if I ever get a Stage 4 diagnosis, it’d be time to write my love notes and say my goodbyes because I won’t have much control over what time I have left anymore–and I won’t leave my family wondering where I left those notes and if I ever wrote them, like I wondered for a year about my father, who didn’t seem ready to die.  And yes—when it comes down to it—I could be more ready for death than he was.  I could do that.  If I were strong enough.  And maybe someday, I will be. Or I’ll have to be.

"Those glowing eyes have magic healing powers," Dad wrote in his e-mail, to which this post-procedure recovery photo was attached. That was his first surgery, in September of '06. And yes, the cat is Delilah.

I’m going to take a break from my pity-party now and put in some writing here that really matters and actually puts this whole freakishly morbid post into perspective. It’s an e-mail from my dad that I’ve saved for years, and I’m very glad I saved it. He wrote it about six months after his initial diagnosis, but he doesn’t really mention himself at all (typical Dad—and at this point, he was optimistic about his treatment. Sigh.).  So it’s not a goodbye letter—not the letter I look for every time a new notebook of his turns up when we go through a new batch of his things. No, Dad wrote this for me way back when I was trying to find myself in college (Ha!  If only I could go through that again!) and was having trouble just digging myself out of my own rut and struggling with feeling very afraid of my own future, academically and career-wise.

Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 8:00 AM

Subject: Sending our Love

Dear Sweetie,

I was troubled to hear about this trying time that you are going through, but also know that such times seem to be universal as part of our human condition.  It can be troubling to know that God allows such times, but also troubling to realize that we sometimes contribute to them and bring them on ourselves.  God is still with us and available to us as our guide and strength during such times.  His guide is His Word, and I found what I read this morning to be such a comfort:

Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me, for my soul trusteth in thee; yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. Ps. 57:11 

But I will sing of thy power; yea. I will sing aloud of thy mercy in the morning; for thou hast been my defense and refuge in the day of my trouble.  Unto thee, O my strength, will I sing; for God is my defense, and the God of my mercy.  Ps. 59:16-17

Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.  From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I.  Ps. 61: 1-2

I’m thankful this morning that Christ is that rock and that he is our guide during times of trouble.  I’m also thankful that I have a daughter like you and that you have brought great joy to my life!  Be strong!

 Love,

Dad

Incidentally, Dad also wrote the following in an e-mail addressed to the whole family regarding his own situation during something of a turning point for him months later:

“From my experience, one can move ahead with our own agenda in a crisis, or one can ponderously back off from the situation and learn what God is trying to communicate.”

In both cases, Dad gives the same advice: Quit thinking. Quit planning.  Just listen. And wait. Wait for God to cover you and lead you to the rock.

You can’t say the man wasn’t consistent.

I’ll close with this, an excerpt from one of Dad’s many Bible study notebooks, written in his own paraphrase of Isaiah 30:18.

“Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, and therefore waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice.  How blessed are those who long for Him.”

Love you, Dad.  Miss you. Terribly.

If you’re reading this post and have no idea what Water for Elephants is about, I encourage you to google it or just pick up the novel by Sara Gruen. It’s an amazingly crafted, touching, hilarious, and fascinating read about the nature of grief, courage, and the spirit of adventure. I finished it in a day; had another gal pal that finished it in two (Maggie). Got guy buds reading it now, too.  It’s hard to put down!

Via Radar On-Line, we are happy to bring you new pictures of Rob looking smokin’ on the set of Water For Elephants!!! [caption id=”attachment_1471″ align=”aligncenter” width=”450″ caption=”I < … Read More

via Water for Elephants – The Movie – Starring Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz

I shouldn’t be worried, right?  The bridge isn’t even built yet, and I’m already thinking about crossing it.  I’m  freaking out internally over nothing . . . except my internal-most of internals, my genetic code.

Taken roughly three months afer my father's death by cancer. This photo's also dated almost exactly a year before I took the stupid test I'm waiting for results on today ... I look at this and I honestly don't feel any less fragile now.

That’s right.  I did it: I took the BRCA genetic test.  For those of you not in the cancer “know”, the BRCA test is a blood test that determines whether or not you carry the breast cancer/ovarian cancer mutation gene responsible for around 20% of breast cancer cases worldwide. 

Why did I take it?  Well, my family risk is high, for one thing: my maternal grandmother had breast cancer by the age of 60, my mother did by the age of 47.

And did I mention?  My mom took the BRCA test a few weeks ago and tested positive.  That means you can statistically flip a coin and figure out my chances of carrying the gene, too.

Heads or tails, reader?

Call it lack of faith, or whatever… But I can’t live with that kind of uncertainty.

And neither can my mom, being a mom. So she talked me/prescheduled me (however  you want to read it) into getting the blood test—to put our minds “at rest” on the issue.   HA!

The wait for results is worse than the actual blood test (which is saying something, coming from me, since I routinely turn green whenever someone comes at me with a needle –something in my memory about a bad “stick” from my early adolescence who, failing to find a vein in my arm that didn’t roll after several poorly-aimed tries, decided that she would draw blood from the back of my hand.  I felt like a freaking pin-cushion. And then the feeling of the blood in the tube funneling nearly hot over my pinkie into the testing vial… Yes, I almost passed out).  It’s been nearly a week since I got stuck, and I’m feeling more sapped by the day.

Read this article  to figure out why I might be worried—notwithstanding the risk level for cancer that the gene would give me (Mom’s oncologist would guess me around 85% chance of getting cancer before the age of 60 if I do carry the gene)–pay special attention to the part where they discuss what my docs might do to me if I test positive for the mutation.  If you don’t want to read the article, consider that the terms “prophylactic tissue removal” (meaning removal of high-risk organs like my ovaries and/or breasts), chemotherapy, and drugs like Tamoxifen are far too familiar to me–and aren’t something I would want to face just as a “precaution” sometime in my thirties or early forties.

I’m so sick of cancer just walking in and stealing from me whenever the hell it feels like it.  I really am. 

My one ray of hope is this: my phenotype  alone seems, to my eye, to discount my genetic link to the bad gene.   To put it simply: my cancerous mother and her cancerous mother were built like Dolly Parton back in their primes, and I—well, I ran for president of the Itty-Bitty Titty Committee in college.  My aunts who are similarly less than bustily-blessed have all been cancer-free.  Here’s hoping I can at least catch a break for being a barely-B cup for once in my life.

 For now, I wait.  And once I hear back, I’ve got more thinking to do. 

Just pray, okay?

I gave up looking for a recipient and returned the extra ticket to the event office, where it was given to a patient on the wait list.  This was the resasonable solution, as the ticket was to the event area only, and would have bored to death any man who actually wanted to watch the race from something other than an air-conditioned tent with closed-circuit live TV broadcasting from the Track itself but not actually giving visual sight of the Track.

Here’s the cute ending, though:

After I finished working the event, I just wanted to go home. Maybe it’s because I’m a girl (and not a Danica-kind of girl), I could care less about watching a bunch of shiny, over-horsepowered cars zoom around an oblong track after seeing it in action for about three minutes.  That, and the over-aged frat boys hanging out in the Track yard were getting drunk and taking their shirts off to reveal copious amounts of gynecomastia.  Or maybe I was feeling overwhelmed at the foot traffic of over 15,000 people moving about in one place in search of a late lunch before their favorite driver went to the qualification round. At any rate, I was hot and tired, and I was done.

As I made my exit, I came across a small boy crying–a dark-haired, freckled boy maybe seven or eight years old.  He was looking around feverishly, obviously lost, and clutching his lunch box.  I thought I looked very unscary in my sneakers, ponytail, and children’s hospital tee-shirt, so I decided I could probablly approach him without scaring him further.

“Hey, bud. Are you lost?”

Sniff. “I can’t find my dad. Anywhere.  He was supposed to be going to the car–and I can’t find the car–and—”

My nanny instincts took over, and I started walking the lot with him, asking him where he thought the car was.  He sniffled and eventually got us close enough to a spot where I saw–being marginally taller than the boy–a 40ish year old man looking around with a worried look. 

“Looking for someone?” I called out.

And the man answered, “Yeah, my–”

“Dad!!!” squeaked the boy, recognizing the voice.

I still had my super-special Indy car garage pass, and I had no intention of using it. And the kid was still shaken and tear-stained. “Here, this will get you into the garage for free to go look at the cars.  Go ahead and take it. I won’t go.”

“Seriously? Awesome!!!”

So that, dear friends, is what happened to the other half of my own golden ticket.  So worth it, don’t you agree?

Lesson is:  calling up boys is silly when God decides to call you.

I called my brother (now heading to California for a week; he’ll be gone Saturday), my cousin (his paternal grandfather just died–funeral is Saturday), my uncle (has a ticket already–figures) . . .  and yes, even an ex-boyfriend who really liked NASCAR and the fast track (also already has tickets, but was very flattered).

And now there are a few other exes I could call… and I feel very silly digging into my personal archives.  Not that it isn’t good to reconnect in a friendly fashion and give a guy a chance for a free day of wandering around the Motor Speedway, but it is a rude awakening to discover that I’ve gotten so busy that I’ve essentially run out of men.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still looking. I’m working in an office building all week long, and I’m visiting in a hospital twice a week, with young men buzzing around somewhere, I’m sure.

But where are they?

Nominate your ticketeers in the comments.

I’ve had it looked at now and again. It’s my stupid IT band that’s the problem. For those not in the athletic know, the IT band is an overcompensating tight-wad of a ligament.  It’s one of the longest in the body, stretching up the length of the outside of the thigh from the iliac crest* (the edge of the hip bone) and down to the insertion point at the tibia below the knee.  It supports the alignment of the knee as it undergoes weight-bearing and stress from lateral flexing (like a tango twist).  Mine does a sucky job. 

That long white strip of fibrous tissue is the IT band. Illustration credit: SportsMD.com

I recently started running again, with the intention of pushing myself to join a running group at the hospital where I work.  So I’ve been training, increasing the duration of each run every week.  And I wasn’t stretching well enough, apparently, because that IT band got tight and a little achy.  When I set up tables for a hospital event on the 17th of April, I started feeling shooting pains in my hip, which I later learned was a result of my IT band rubbing and snapping across the  femoral epicondyle as my bent  knee moved from a flexed position into an extended position while I lifted displays and moved tables around.  By the time the event was over and I’d hit the fifth aisle of the grocery store during my after-work errand, I was seeing stars behind my eyelids and gritting my teeth. 

I came home with what I’d managed to stuff in my basket, and then I laid myself right down on the floor until I could get to bed. It literally felt like my whole hip was spasming with heat and needles, stabbing down the top of my thigh. I was crying like a baby.  I admit it.

And Mom was a mom–that means she brougth tissues, ice, and Oxycodone.

And, oh, blissful pharmaceuticals! I finally slept several sleep cycles through for the first time in days, waking up in a puddle of melted ice and a mildly throbbing hip.  It was great.  

And I felt like my lesson had been learned: I need time to stretch before running myself ragged, both physically and emotionally.

Then Mr. J called—yes, that Hispanic guy I went on a date with in Dating File #2 that I reallly didn’t want to see again–and he KEPT calling, even after I texted him and told him I was nursing an injured hip and planned on sleeping the weekend away under the fuzzy blanket of painkillers and anti-inflammatories.   Apparently, his English either reallly sucks, or he can’t take a hint.  He called seven times and left three text messages.

The upside is, he gave up after his tenth attempt and after he left a bratty voicemail message about how I obviously couldn’t appreciate/respect his concern for me enough to call him back.  ::Blah, blah, blah, insert the tiny whine of a miniature violin played by a Siamese cat in a sombrero. . . ::   I might have fallen for his guilt trip if he hadn’t stepped in his own trap by ignoring/disrespecting my obvious wish to be left alone to sleep and heal.

So, for those of you who’ve been asking what happened to Mr. J, there’s your answer:  Gone in a huff.

In the days following–full of intense time at work planning for another event, one of our biggest annual PR events (c.1,00o guests), to boot–it occurred to me that, while it was a good thing for this communication cut to happen in the case of Mr. J at this time, I’d run this script before with men during times of stress.  And that’s not a good thing . . .

While I’m sure many of you would agree that it’s understandable that, with my father’s death looming in the background, I was a bit of a basket case over these past months, and especially in the final year of his life.  But that makes two years now—TWO YEARS–of a running streak of failed relationships usually caused by my own flake-outs and inability to handle romantic relational stress on top of the major transitions in my life. 

Apparently, I, like my bitchy IT band, don’t handle being put through too many paces at once without the chance for some downtime to stretch, grow, and recuperate. 

So, I’m trying to figure three things out with God right now:

1.   How can I get the downtime to gently stretch myself emotionally in a relationship?

2. How soon can I do number 1, based on my emotional recuperation from the major changes in my life and the PTSD-induced effects of caring for my father during his dramatic decline and slow, drawn-out, suffering-filled death?  (Seriously, people, if I’m ever terminal with cancer, just shoot me or give me an OD of something. I’m not going through the organs shutting down/brain-chemistry-and-mind altering scary shit my dad did as he died.  And I’m not putting my kids through the nightmare of witnessing that, either.)

3. How am I ever going to encounter a potential mate in my current work life scenario, and how am I going to trust God during the waiting period?

I don’t have any answers to any of these questions, really, just hopes.  God only knows–and I’m trying to trust him again.  Ironically, Anne Rice is helping me do that.  That’s right–vampire authoress-turned-Christian-Anne Rice.  I’m reading Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, the first book in her religious series exploring the childhood and youth of Christ.  Fascinating?  Yes. I’ll be writing more about it once I finish.  It’s definitely worth your read, just because of the wrenching humanity of the young Jesus coupled with Rice’s intense historical research that places him in probable ways amidst some fascinating circumstances surrounding the early Jewish rebellions against Rome.  Picture Jesus as a precocious child who knows too much and too little all at once and often feels overwhelmed and very small—and very human–during a brutal time in history that did little Jewish boys no favors.  Oh, and he occasionally spaces out and sees angels, which freaks people out.   I’m in chapter 10 of 30 or so.  We’ll see what happens.

To read more about Anne Rice’s conversion, visit her website here.

Recently, she moved to Washington, D.C. to live closer to her sister (whose baby’s due soon–and it needs an Aunt Dub-Jay [Wendy Jane]).  She also just moved back in with her old college roommate, Beth, who is working near D.C.   In her new situation, Wendy’s now looking for work, stability, and a way around the public transportation system as she settles into her new town, the aptly named “Chocolate City.”  She probably spends her time looking for chocolate, too–in more than the literal sense.

Read her blog here, which will run the hilarious/insightful gamut of topics from social issues like illegal drugs and dating to deep thoughts on theology.  She might also throw in some of her kickass creative works of poetry and prose (please?).  I’ve added the link to the sidebar on the right, but I’ll post it here, too:  http://www.wjhollenbeck.wordpress.com

Visit today and show Wendy some love.  You’ll probably wind up on the floor laughing until you’re stuck lying there thinking about the things she said. . .

Miss you, Wendy!

Love,

Ruth