The proofs arrived from the printer for our three latest books. I’ve spent the last six or seven hours proofreading, which at this stage involves exciting things like checking pagination and headers, and also skimming every page for errors that I really hope I won’t find, because they are expensive to fix. I need to skim faster; it’s getting late and sleep is calling.
What with all the working and all the lying around sick, I never even blogged about going to the Japan festival, my experience checking out the kenjutsu school (and another karate school earlier this summer), or my current woeful lack of reading material. Hope to get to that soon. In the meantime: how are you doing? Talk amongst yourselves. 
Right … so I got sick while my mom and sister were in town last weekend, which was super disappointing as you can imagine. I have spent the entirety of this week in bed. It takes too much effort to hold a book up and turn the pages, so I have been watching movies and catching up on a bunch of TV shows online—So You Think You Can Dance, Sanctuary, Dollhouse, some web series like The Guild and The Crew, and lastly the pilot for Stargate: Universe, which was execrably, intolerably, inexcusably bad; in fact the Gumby Ninja called me an hour ago so we could mercilessly mock it together and bemoan the fate of the franchise. All that was way too much TV, even for me. But what can I say; when one is recovering from torturous sinus infection 2.0 (version 1.0 was earlier this month) and subsisting almost entirely on ginger ale and Asian chocolate-covered pretzels, one’s capacity for intellectual or theological input is severely diminished. Don’t judge me. Well, you can judge me about the pretzels. So … many …
I’m going kind of crazy and am looking forward to being well soon. Must get out of the house and do something productive! (We will not count today’s excursion around the block in which I examined some weeds and got tired far too quickly.) But being in bed this long with that much TV has fried my brain a little. Where should I venture out? What should I do? Do I even have friends any more?
I’ve been busy the last few weeks with tons of work, but this weekend is shaping up to be awesome. My friend Holden had a birthday party on Friday at a rollerskating rink. How cool is that?! I haven’t skated since I was like ten but it came back to me quickly. Not that I’m a super-experienced skater, but I didn’t fall down, get run over, or have an epileptic fit from the lights, so that was good. Afterward we went to see Where the Wild Things Are, which I loved. (Usually I pick apart every movie we see, but this one was different.) I thought it was a moving meditation on what it’s like to be a child. All in all, a great time, spent with some awesome people celebrating one of my dearest friends.
After helping kidnap a pajama-clad Holden for a day-after-her-birthday celebratory breakfast, I have spent the afternoon in a cleaning frenzy, because MY MOM AND SISTER ARE COMING TO VISIT ME IN ONE HOUR YAY! They won’t be here too long but I’m looking forward to hanging out with them and introducing W. to the prayer room. They will be staying in my apartment. Which reminds me, I should probably go buy some groceries so I can feed them while they are here.
Hello peoples, the brain has decided to function (though the sinuses have not) and therefore I get to blog at you today.
IHOP–KC recently had its ten-year anniversary, which was great—ten years of 24/7 schedule worship and prayer. We had a big blowout celebration over the last week, during which we all listened to the stories behind how this thing got started, watched some videos (kudos to the Media Department), and then had a giant picnic on Sunday.
So. I’ve been here 3.5 years out of 10. Which is not really a lot, but (1) around here people tend to view years as being approximately four times as long as they actually are, kind of like dog years, and (2) things at IHOP–KC change faster than the obscurest mechanics of World of Warcraft (i.e., weekly. Though here there are fewer complaints about getting nerfed after a patch). Anyway, once you’ve been here over two years, you tend to get people saying to you, “Wow, this place must seem so different to you now / IHOP must have changed sooo much / Are you like an Anna or something?”
To which I respond, “Yes and no. Definitely no to the last, because I do not have a cot behind the stage.”
Sure, there have been major changes, many of them necessary. The cameras in the prayer room took a long time to get comfortable with. I remember when it was easy to get an entire row of seats to yourself, before the remodel and the ushers and the partitions. We used to “war in the Spirit” during intercession sets. We sat in those anti-sleeping torture devices orange plastic chairs during church. All-staff meetings were held in the prayer room. I used to get the A/V room in back all to myself when I recorded for the Limited Edition.
Things have gotten bigger, too. The school’s branched out. There are new properties and new departments, and there are always new people.
But at the core everything’s the same: a bunch of people in a room praying to an invisible G-d, believing He loves to answer our prayers for unsaved souls and for justice. And outside of that room, we’re trying to live a life worthy of His calling at work, at home, on outreaches and in the mission field. So no, things haven’t changed—not the things that matter.
My internship, three and a half years ago
This post was going to be funnier than it turned out. But as I wrote it I felt the sober awesomeness of ten years (and I mean “awesome” in the “full of awe” sense) hit me. I’m not meant to be at IHOP–KC forever, nor am I meant to be an intercessory missionary for the rest of my life. Being stuck here with a bunch of people who are is often frustrating and confusing. Yet I’m so honored I’ve gotten to be a part of a house of prayer for this long. My life would’ve been very different without the experience of the last few years. I might never have known about the global prayer movement, or about the thrill of interceding single-mindedly with hundreds of people every week, or about the transcendent experience that is IHOP cafeteria food.
Maybe I could’ve lived without that last one. But anyway. Adding the good times and the frustrating ones in a highly scientific process, I would rate my time here a 3.5 out of 10. 1 being the highest, naturally. And despite all the people who’ve questioned my reasons for being here (if not my sanity and/or salvation) in the past, and may even jump on this post, I’m glad the L-rd brought me here for a season.
Busy editor is busy. And now sick. After over a week of being chained to my computer, nobly enduring lower back pain and throbbing headaches at the end of every day, I now have a sore throat and an ominous feeling in my sinuses.
Personally I would like nothing more than to zone out and watch the Deep Space 9 season I got from the library . (I may not be a hard-core Trekkie any more, but I’ve always wanted to see DS9.) Alas, I have too much work to do. So I will leave you with this video:
I finally made it back to Kansas City on Thursday—a week and a half late, but with my new car. I spent three hours detailing it this weekend; it was a salvage car, so it was pretty dirty. I still need to vacuum the interior, touch up a few spots, and get the A/C fixed, but I’ve been enjoying tooling around KC in it. I have named the car Maximus—Max for short, naturally.
Right now Max and Bessie (my old car) are sitting together in my apartment’s parking lot. It’s odd having two cars, even temporarily. I feel like one of those people who strolls out to the garage in unspeakably expensive clothes, fiddles with a $2,000 handbag, and murmurs, “Let’s see, shall I take the Lamborghini today or the Ferrarri? Perhaps the Audi, as its aura of understated wealth suits my mood.”
(Only, you know, my cars are a little rustier than theirs.)
I don’t even want to think about going to the DMV. After all the troubles I had with paperwork on the Minnesota end, who knows what Missouri holds in store for me? You can bet I’ll be praying in tongues under my breath whenever I muster up the courage to go make Max official.
I have also jumped back into the world of work. I’ve left the Marketing department and transferred back to Forerunner Publishing (we changed the name; a good thing, as people always thought I worked in the Forerunner Bookstore instead of Forerunner Books) and have been editing like a crazy person. And when I say “like a crazy person,” I mean “like a crazy person who is physically fused to her keyboard and uses the Chicago Manual of Style as a pillow to absorb its knowledge by osmosis at night so she doesn’t have to stop editing to look up when compound modifiers take a hyphen.”
(The answer: usually before the noun. But it depends.)
So I am officially back. My girls and I went out for Starbucks and cooked a spaghetti dinner yesterday, and I am hoping to set up some dates with other friends in between the editing craziness. I had a wonderful summer vacation (except for the car debacle, but at least it ended well). The fall’s going to be insane and awesome at the same time. Looking forward to it.
Vacation, good:
I had a pretty awesome camping trip with the Koppys. We stayed at the Crags campground in the Colorado State Forest for a couple of days. (I nearly froze to death the first night; we drove to the nearest Wal-Mart–100 miles away–the next day so I could buy another sleeping bag.)
Driving up to the Crags:
My favorite picture:
We did some great hikes and great scenic drives, but after a while got tired of being so freaking cold all the time. We moved to a campground at a lower elevation and experienced the joys of camping near other people’s ill-behaved children for a few days. The Koppys dropped me off at the Denver airport and I flew to Minneapolis.
The next day, my family and I drove up to the North Shore, staying at a small campground a few hours north of Duluth. It rained almost the entire time and was quite chilly. We still had fun, but after consulting a gloomy forecast, we ended up going home two days early.
Hiking at Sugarloaf Cove:
Lake Superior
Car, bad:
As soon as we got home, my dad and I talked to Vladimir, the guy who was supposed to be fixing up the car we’d just bought through him. The car wasn’t ready yet. I figured, no problem, I’m leaving on the 30th and Vlad will have another week to finish it. Then I can drive home to Kansas City in my new (used) car. Shiny!
Fast-forward a week later. I’m still here. The paperwork has taken a tortuous and somewhat shady turn, what with Vladimir giving the title to us and then us finding out he didn’t actually sign it, he bought the car through a dealer friend; and realizing that since the plates had expired I’d need to get a temporary permit for the car, which I can’t get without the title signed over to me; and then there was the part where Vlad had to send the title to New York for some reason; and the back-and-forth with various people at work, getting permission to remain in Minnesota; and now it’s Labor Day weekend, and even though the New York people are sending the title by express mail, the service center that issues temporary permits will probably be closed by the time it gets here, and I will have to stay through Labor Day until the center reopens, and I have been living out of a suitcase for a month.
At least I get more time with my family, and the weather is nice. I’m enjoying that.
