Serving the Nations in Kentucky

Yesterday - oops, I just realized I still haven’t written a full entry about yesterday.  I’ll try to remember to get back to that.  The point is, yesterday’s trip to the airport and evening with the young adult group refreshed my spirit and restored my enthusiasm for and pride in my work, which had waned over the past week.  Therefore, I set out to do better today, and I succeeded.  Last night, I made a list of about 15 things I needed to accomplish at work today, and I accomplished all but two of them.  (One of them was writing a full blog entry about yesterday.)  I added two families to the database, and completed the pickup schedule and directions for Monday, among other things.  I left my desk nice and neat, with only one piece of partially-completed work on it.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is visiting the Diocese of Kentucky this weekend.  Thanks to Amy Coultas, I got a ticket to the conversation she held tonight, in the comfortably large parish hall at my very own church, St. Matthews.  Amy Coultas’ parents were kind enough to drive me there and back, and I sat with most of our young adult group.

Hearing The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori speak was deeply encouraging and inspiring.  I am very glad to know that my Presiding Bishop and I share the same viewpoint on what’s important in living a Christian life, both as an individual and as a church: to reach out, to be God’s hands working in the world, is what’s important.  One of the most important points she made was that, in her experience, growth and vitality in the Church are found where the Church and its people are thus outwardly focused, rather than focused on internal issues and divisions.  She has a powerfully calming tone and presence, and conveys an openness and a desire to listen to and respond to the questions and needs of those around her.  For that reason, she kept her prepared remarks brief and spent the majority of the 90-minute session answering questions gathered from churches in the Diocese of Kentucky.  I was both surprised and encouraged to hear that there are no plans to spend time enacting legislation at this year’s Lambeth Conference.  Rather, the conference is designed to allow everyone to spend time together, get to know each other, communicate, and learn from one another.  I think that’s great, because I agree with what she said about legislation: too often, it is a source of division.

After tonight, I feel even more richly blessed to be part of the Episcopal Church, and even more certain that it is by God’s will that Katharine Jefferts Schori is its current leader.

Today I had the privilege of being there when a new refugee couple moved into their apartment for the first time.  It was an experience I can’t do justice to in writing while I’m this sleepy.  I will try to write more about this sometime in the morning.

Work was ordinary and unremarkable today. Due to a failure of communication, Amy Coultas didn’t find out about our lunch plans until it was too late, so Carol and I had a nice lunch together at a little Vietnamese cafe on the next block from our office. None of today’s deliveries were as problematic as yesterday’s - we did have to replace one king bed with a full bed (easier to get up to the second floor) and one apartment is short one table, but that’s a common problem, and we will be getting an influx of donations next week.

Tomorrow is the first time in quite a while that we’ve had new refugee clients arrive in Louisville at any time other than the middle of the night, so I jumped at the chance to be part of the group meeting them at the airport. I don’t recall which country they’re from, but it will still be a a joy and a privilege to be there.

Tonight, I enjoyed another good dinner with Marion and the boys, and another fun, joyful choir practice.

Today’s efforts to keep operations moving at KRM were an intense, suspenseful emotional roller coaster, at least for part of the day.  I’ll start with the low point of the day: I had to cancel that furniture delivery that I had worked so hard to pull together and fretted about so much.  Why?  The apartment was still being cleaned and having its carpet replaced today.  No one at the office knew this until today, but I still felt horrible that the new apartment couldn’t be set up.

The high point of the day centers around one of the phone calls that I handled yesterday.  The phone call was from Episcopal Migration Ministries, asking whether anyone at our office had contacted the distant relatives of a certain client who had been allocated to Louisville.  No one had, and I asked Dalay to do it because she knew said relatives, and I didn’t.  Today, she and Rodolfo finished making arrangements with one those relatives, who has agreed to assist the new client.  I got to call EMM and tell them about this development, signifying that the process was back on track.

I completed the usual donation-tracking chores (which took less time than usual because no new donations were picked up today), and spent an hour in the computer lab.  The confusion that I straightened out there today arose from the fact that the lowercase letter ‘l’ and the numeral ‘1′ look very similar in Times New Roman. Also, Amy Coultas, Carol Young, and I have a lunch date tomorrow.

I spent another unremarkable evening at home.  Still no word about this year’s Come to the Feast.  (I emailed the registrar on Sunday to ask for details.)

Today was a really good day at the office.  The more I do my job, and the more I ask questions of the people around me and learn from them, the better I get at it and the more I like it.  I wish I could have two more weeks here to enjoy what I’m doing.

I accomplished several things today.  I made yet another Publisher publication, this time a trifold brochure.  I sent out another donation thank-you letter and five more Lunch and Learn invitations, and received my first official positive RSVP for Lunch and Learn.  I successfully completed the scheduling of furniture pickups for next Monday, and printed out the schedule for tomorrow.  I also handled several phone calls, and worked out a few last-minute details of that one apartment setup tomorrow that was such a headache last week (with lots of help from Dalay from the C-H office, who was back at work today).

After work, I stopped by the mailbox to mail letters again, then went grocery shopping. I had a frozen chicken pot pie for dinner tonight, and spent a relaxing evening at home.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten the hang of disciplining myself to write my update emails (I blew it off on Sunday, again), apply for jobs, or write more than 300 words of my novel per night.  Sigh.

Last year’s Pentecost was among the most joyous days I had while I was in Japan (scroll to the bottom of the page at that link to read what happened).  This year’s was also joyful, but most of the joy was concentrated in the morning rather than the evening.

I deliberately wore the exact same clothes today as I did for last year’s Pentecost (black pants, red shirt that I bought at the Porta mall in Japan), for several reasons: I like them, they’re appropriate, and I knew that I would once again be celebrating the day by speaking another language in front of people, just like last year.  Last year’s Pentecost was the first day I started teaching my Japanese church how to say the Lord’s Prayer in English; today, I was part of a team of seven people who read our New Testament reading in multiple languages.  The languages in question included Spanish, French, Russian, German, Latin (read by the priest), and Japanese.  (I forget what the seventh one was.)   We all rehearsed half an hour before church.

As always, I sang in the choir.  I loved the songs we sang today.  The multilingual reading went just as planned, and it sounded really cool.  First, the reader started reading in English, and then, at a prearranged point, all of us joined in, reading those same words simultaneously in our various languages, while listening to the reader with one ear so that we could all stop speaking at a second prearranged point.  At that point, we each took a turn to say the words “God’s deeds of power,” or their equivalents in the translations we had, in our languages.  We’d decided on the order during rehearsals.  The reader concluded by saying “God’s deeds of power” in English.  It all sounded really cool, and on top of all that, it was windy outside the whole time we were in church.  We couldn’t hear it, but we could see the trees blowing around outside the windows.  I thoroughly enjoyed church today.

After church, I attended Marion’s family’s Mother’s Day brunch.  We had very good food at the home of Marion’s brother and his family. I got home, and spent the entire rest of the day on my guilty pleasure: reading a website called TV Tropes.  (Guilty, because it sucks up time like mad.)  I would have been more productive if it hadn’t rained all day, because then I would have gone out to a coffee shop and written.  (When I want to get work done, I find it helpful to go to any place other than where I’m living.)

(Note: Most of this was written after the fact, on 5/13.)

Since I hadn’t yet seen very much of the city, I decided last night (Friday night) that today, I would spend the morning visiting tourist attractions. I’m glad I did, too, because the weather was sunny, bright, and perfect, and I had a lot of fun. I got up at the same time as I do on weekdays in order to get on the bus to Churchill Downs (yes, the same one I backed out of taking last Saturday, just earlier in the morning). I took my bike with me, because I knew I would need it later. At that early hour (it was just past 9:00 A.M. when I got there), both the track itself and the neighborhood around it were practically deserted. I was one of about twelve people who were on the first walking tour of the day.

The walking tour of Churchill Downs doesn’t cover very much ground, but it gets you oriented if you’ve never been there before. We started in the main lobby of the museum and walked past the wagering windows, through the garden, and out to the rail around the edge of the track, where we got to see racehorses in training. As it turns out, racehorses are trained by trainers, who are not the jockeys who ride them in the races (although many jockeys begin their careers as trainers). They weren’t going as fast as they do in the races, but it was still neat to watch. We stayed and watched for about ten minutes, then returned to the museum.

One of the things the museum has is a 360-degree movie theater. I was all excited about seeing something in CircleVision (TM), but when I got there, I discovered that it wasn’t CircleVision. It was OvoidVision. The screen was shaped like the racetrack. It still looked really cool, though. There were several 360-degree shots showing what the track looks like at different times of the day on Derby day.

I left (somewhat reluctantly; there were still museum exhibits I hadn’t finished looking at) at about ten minutes to 11 to catch my next bus. It took about 15 minutes to get from my house to the racetrack by bus, and the same amount of time to get from the racetrack to downtown. I followed the sketched map in my pocket to get from the bus stop to my next destination, the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory. On the way, I stopped first to look at the river from a park, and then to have lunch at Subway. These was my only departure from the itinerary I had created the previous night. Everything was going exactly according to plan, and I was feeling great, but I was getting hungry, and I knew I’d enjoy the factory tour more if I had lunch first, rather than waiting until afterward, as I’d originally planned.

I enjoyed the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory even more than the Kentucky Derby Museum. You actually do get to go inside the real factory, and see baseball bats being made. The coolest thing in there, in my opinion, was the machine for burning the brand logo onto new baseball bats. It’s over 100 years old, and it still works perfectly. I learned that some major-league players have bats made according to their preferences, with their weight, length, and balance specified very precisely. I’d had no idea that minute variations are as important to the performance of baseball bats as to the performance of reeds in woodwind instruments. And yes, I got my mini souvenir baseball bat. I know it’s dumb, but I feel like my experience of Louisville is that much more complete now that I’ve been to two of its signature tourist attractions. (This feeling is aided by the fact that several of my fellow attendees at the NSCS convention in 2006 went to the Louisville Slugger Museum, but I didn’t.)

After that, I bicycled over to the Episcopal cathedral here in town, which I was very pleased to learn is the oldest house of worship in the entire city. I joined Amy Coultas and the rest of the college crew for a hands-on, interactive activity focusing on the Millennium Development Goals. It was an adaptation of an activity from Camino, a young adult conference held back in September that I missed because I was moving into my dorm that weekend. Most of the activity stations were in the cathedral itself, some at round tables located around the aisles, and one in the chapel. The activities there were to do at the stations included making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the homeless, writing letters to children at an affiliated ministry center in Kenya, and creating collages of positive images of women. At the end, I finally got a ONE Campaign wristband, which I’ve wanted for quite a while, as well as a T-shirt. I helped clean up afterward. It was a very pleasant afternoon with some of my new friends, who are all cool people.

I don’t remember what I did after that; I probably just spent the evening at home. On a side note, while I was out playing tourist, I took my iPod with me and listened to one of the albums I picked out as theme music for my trip to Kentucky: Now Again by the Flatlanders. The other one is Hooray for the Moon by John Dee Graham. They’re both pop-rock albums with a country flavor to them. I like the former better. As a note to myself, I really need to record an Ear Buds segment about these new albums for the Deadpan Podcast.

Work today was very intense. I only had to make a few phone calls (and receive a few, as well), but I was kept busy all day working on pickup and delivery schedules for donated furniture. Thanks to a lot of help from Chris, everything is now as well-organized as it can be.

Holding down a specific position in an office all on my own has been a great growth experience for me so far. After spending the first month learning the ropes of Lee’s job, today I started to see how those ropes form a coherent order, a rope bridge on which to walk safely over a chaotic chasm. I found that I had to adjust the width of the bridge and the height of the handrail ropes to fit me. That meant hand-writing a list of the tasks that have to be done every day, to keep on my desk and look at. I believe I covered everything I was supposed to today.

On my way home, I stopped by the local post office (where I had mailed some cards out in the morning, before work) and put 40 Lunch and Learn invitations, two thank-you letters for donations, and three letters sent by coworkers in the mailbox. Getting the invitations I’d been working so hard on sent out was a great way to cap off the week. At home this evening, I had leftover spaghetti and a biscuit for dinner, and watched the movie Southland Tales, rented via digital cable. I watched it because it was the third movie chosen as the topic of group discussion by the Deadpan Podcast community. I have a few weeks to come up with some comments on the movie or other creative materials for the podcast.

Today was the first day of Lee’s vacation (and Rodolfo’s shorter vacation), so I have Lee’s workstation all to myself from now until Friday, May 23. I started the day feeling excited, happy, and confident about fulfilling the responsibilities I had been given.  I spent part of the morning working on the phone-calling campaign, and I was feeling really good about the progress I was making.

I was not expecting to find myself involved in a breakdown of communication that also involved several other office staff, as well as one client.

I know that happens once in a while in every profession.  It still made me lose a lot of confidence, and put me in a less-than-completely-pleasant mood for the rest of the day.  Chris and I talked about the problem, and it’s as worked-out as it can be for the moment.

Before that, when I wasn’t calling churches, I was upstairs observing the orientation of a family.  It was similar to the cultural and work orientations I’d already seen (it consisted of KRM staff talking to refugee clients through an interpreter about how to navigate life in the U.S.), but this was more interesting, and more inspiring, because it was more personal. Only one staff member, one interpreter, the client family of five, and I were in the room.

Because of all that, I was 15 minutes late to computer lab duty.  It wasn’t busy today, so I spent some of the time continuing the phone-calling campaign using my cell phone. My attempts to help clients with computers only led to my discovering that I could really use some administrative passwords.

I finally finished all my phone calls at about 3, so now all I have to do is wait for people to return them. I ended the day by catching up on donation thank-you letters. I came home, had dinner, wrote a little, then went out to the college group meeting.

That was a lot of fun tonight. We had five people for the Eucharist and eight, at one point, at the pub.  We had a great time chatting, and I now have a friend entering the Episcopal Church’s Young Adult Service Corps, which is great, because we can compare notes on missions activities.

Today was not bad, but it wasn’t particularly good, either.  At work, I completed a few minor, routine tasks, and went over my upcoming work duties with Lee and Chris, the ROW office’s case worker.  I’m as prepared as I’m going to get for taking over Lee’s responsibilities for the next two weeks.  A few things have been handed off to others; I said I wasn’t comfortable sending emails to Church World Service or Episcopal Migration Ministries to say, “Yes, please go ahead and assign this case to us,” so Chris will be doing that.  I’ve been instructed to ask Carol and/or Chris for any help I need.  I look forward to taking on this challenge, actually. I think, and hope, I’ll do better at it than I did at my NSCS responsibilities, because I’ll be filling a clearly-defined role in a supportive, friendly, and (most importantly) highly cohesive organization.

In other news, so far I’ve called about 40-45 churches to ask if they want to be invited to the next Lunch and Learn.  I’m on line 51 of the 119-line spreadsheet that is my invitation list.  I will do my best to get through the rest of the lines, and get all those invitations printed and mailed, tomorrow.  (I’ll have to ask Liz how to obtain that many postage stamps.) On top of that, I’ve got computer lab duty, and an orientation I want to observe, and I have to be in the C-H office around noon, filling in for Rodolfo.  It’s going to be a very full day.

Speaking of observing things, today I observed one of our World of Work orientations. I was bored, because it was so similar to Cultural Orientation in format, so I mostly played on the computer that was in the room.

I spent the evening relaxing and attending choir practice, which was fun.