You know what I like to do? I like to go sit on you tube and play home karaoke. I run around the board from phantom of the opera, to Christina aguliera. Evanesence, Leona Lewis, and anything else that sounds like fun.
I guess I like challenges.

Last pick today. We hope. 260 pounds of saskatoons sitting in the cooler, ready for market. A few totes of cherries tonight, and we'll be ready to go.
My fingers are stained blue.
This has been my first stint being on the manager end of farming. It's been on the low risk end of things. A few hours and zip-lock bags. What would it be like if I'd invested my year, and hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Reason #1 I would find farming-for-real hard. The gamble. I just can't do it.
Reason #2. The commitment. Period.
Reason #3. I'm a hard worker. But I like my paycheck. And I like being able to camp in season.
I love farmers. They're great. And they keep hiring me. It would just be hard to do that every year for the rest of my life. To stress about harvest. To pour on the hours in hopes of a high pay-off.
Although, everyone says if you say that you end up married to one.... So maybe I take it back.

This is all crazy. Sometimes I think about the fact that there are nine people officially living here. And others that come and go. Was there really one year that I lived in my own house with just myself?
Ever since Katimavik I have no desire to go back to living on my own. Hostel dorms never bother me. I had four girls in my two bedroom house at one time, and now it's back to my families, plus. It's somehow right. I think we're supposed to live as with others.
My parents always talked about community. I don't think this is what they had in mind. I think they imagined a functioning little neighborhood where everyone shared the work of running the self-sustainable lifestyle.
Still. This is it right here. A group of people. Working together. Playing together. Fighting together. Living together.
Community. No?

So. Barefoot in summer. What a sweet time of year to come back. I think back to the years when barefoot in summer meant running through the backyard, driving a civic with my shoes off, stalking the aisles and feeling the cool tiles beneath my toes.
Then there was the year it meant kicking my sandals off on the way to my job at the hospital. Walking a small town path to a pretty big lake. Climbing onto the top of my metal bunk and praying for the girls beneath me.
Last year it was peeling my efficient runners off after a shift at the cafe. Volleyball sand between my toes. Running outside to drench myself under my hose.
This year I've gone in reverse. There's not even a little hatchback. No shopping for my own groceries. I'm climbing around in orchards hoping to make minimum, and coming home to my Mom's cooking. It's joking with my brothers, and giggling with my cousins. Nights climbing through the back door of our bus, and listening to Taylor Swift as I fall asleep.
It's my summer to be home. Oh, and to catch rides or my bike to the lake, river, and volleyball courts.

Over a year.
Well over a year.
After trying quite possibly 72 different combinations, and accidentally setting up a new account, I have remembered how to sign into my once beloved blog.
Twitter set me off. Reading old posts made me want to write new ones. It's unfortunate, really, that I gave it up for so long.
I know nobody reads it anymore. I know I don't have the time to dedicate that I did when I was seventeen. I know facebook likes to dominate my online time. But I'll see what I can do.

I can't believe how I never post here anymore. Of course, I just really don't get on the computer this much.
I want to put time into a post again. I want to think of what I want to say and how I want to say it. Instead, I'm in the library watching the time tick, and thinking, "I'd better get going."

How long will it take before I quit looking for orange circles and green bars on every big white van I see?

Well, I better get in a post for August before it's over, although don't expect it to be anything special. I'm hitting the library on my lunch break to catch up with a few days computer.
A week from tonight at eleven I'll be bording a chartered bus to take me home. Time is ticking down, and I think we're all pretty eager. And very busy! Unless I'm thinking about it I think the time will go really fast. The next two nights are just shut-down and final prez, though. The thing about doing final prez on powerpoint is that only one person can work on it at a time. I think we're being overly ambitious maybe, since we're wanting it to run fifteen minutes. Even though all the songs we chose are worthy...I think we might have to cut it down to just one. And then the timing will take a while. Meanwhile, some of us are still learning to use it and trying to churn out slides.
What am I really not looking forward to? Job searching. Especially since there isn't anywhere in my hometown that is absolutely screaming for me to apply. However, this program has given me some pretty good tools, including a killer resume. Well, as killer and the local JobConnect could coach me into making with my rather unimpressive credentials. I'm pretty well set-up to apply for physical stuff. Other then that, experiance isn't super bon.
And, well, that's pretty much it. The big thing in my life right now is the winding down of this program. Closing it up. Looking on to the rest of life.
Oh, and by the way, according to true colours, I'm orange followed by blue with a close green. No surprizes there :).

For the first time in a very long time I feel almost like I've had a normal weekend.
My life has not been normal for quite a while now. I've been tested, pushed, and challenged like crazy within the last couple weeks. As most of you know I lost my best friend and only fellow Christian in the the group. Then there's all the other crap that's gone along with it. God gave me strength through it, and I believe I was able to seek him this whole time. I also got to visit with Megan and my cousin Abby since they came to see me about a week after this transpired (not that it's necessarily over, my friends). I've been incredibly blessed through the support I've had back home. Megan, in particular, has been a huge source of encouragement. I miss her like crazy and it was so good to get a brief touch with where I come from.
Take that out of the picture and I've been part of a program that aims to teach kids to be adults, in a often childlike way. Coming into the program as an adult has proved hard. Not that it hasn't taught me things. Although I can truly say that not a lot of it has been through the program outcomes themselves. It forces us to live in large group, and somehow make it work. We live with people, fight with people, work with people, and meanwhile, sometimes, we touch these people. Or they teach us. We run from place to place learning to recycle, fill in protocols, and make sure our alarm clocks are always set (something I was good at already).
In the last month and a half this program has manifested itself for us in a place called Marathon. A typical, definite small town sitting on lake Superior, with it's marvelous beaches, loads of trails, and abundance of wildflowers. We've been kept busy, almost beyond reason. Especially at first. We're in the paper and people have made use of the fact that if they have a reasonable cause we will come and work for them, on top of the full time jobs we fill.
Then there's the fact that we're here over summer. It somehow makes me re-evaluate to know that in my own small town they're hanging out at the river, camping on the beach, sitting on the top of mountains, eating fresh cherries, and that plans are as set as they get for our yearly family get-togethers. Which I've certainly never missed.
I don't know what I'm doing after this. I don't know why I'm doing this. And I know I've got a little while left yet, as much as I know that time will fly. Things will never be the same. But there's still lots of room for things to be good.
So, I'm billeting. For the first weekend in way to long I've been able to live a little more spontaneously. It's been exactly what it's meant to be so far, a break. I've biked around, down jungle-like trails, without a helmet too (gasp! Final in security). I went swimming in an incredibly cold lake (without a lifeguard) to escape incredibly muggy, if not that warm, weather. I biked down to Extra to try the mento/diet Coke experiment. And all of this wasn't planned, plotted, and discussed at a housemeeting. I certainly didn't fill out any protocols. I spent a whole morning journaling, stayed in church till it was finished, and ate buttertarts for breakfast. So much for wanting to go do stuff on billeting. Thanks for the chance to do nothing.

This blog has become more of an update tool. This is where I am now. This is what I'm doing. This is how I like it. I remember hearing once the irony of blogs. You blog because you don't have a life. Once you get a life to start writing about, you stop. Still, I think I-don't-have-a-life posts are better. At least for anyone with any sort of writing skills. They have time to notice interesting little things to ponder in words. And then the time to sit there and work on it until they get it right. Basically, they have time to be creative.
Everyone has gone out tonight. It's officially English class night. So that's where the francophones are. The anglophones have gone to soccer coaching, and then they're going to a bike auction. I'm housemanager and, hence, had to clean up supper. So I'm sitting here listening to whatever music I like (including singing phantom and dancing), and taking time to "update" my blog. Yet, I'm not going to tell you where I am, what I'm doing, or how I like it.
But I'm still not going to be creative.