The Lord is Gracious and Merciful

...slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

And he gave me another wonderful week with my wonderful boyfriend. As predicted, Spanish on Tues was painfully slow, it did however eventually end. Raeleen took me to the airport and a slightly amusing story ensued.

When we got there, Tad was still waiting for his bag, so Raeleen suggested I go in and find him and surprise him. Great idea, except that neither of us had noticed we were at the drop off section, not pick up. I was greeted with ticket counters upon entering the terminal. I called Tad and was told "ok, do us a favor, stay right where you are, I'm coming to find you." I did as I was told and several minutes later received a phone call "Are you upstairs, or down?" "Down" "No, you're upstairs." "what? no I'm not, I can see escalators going up-" At this moment I was glomped behind by a very attractive young man. Long story short, I was a level above where he was. Luckily he was smart enough to figure that out.

We had dinner in the caf with a large group of Hart people and then hung out in the lower lobby with Justine for a couple hours. Then it was time for our funk-tastic all hall. Seriously, Hart is amazing. People were dressed up like out of the 70's and it was a totally lower campus all hall. Dancing, drinking, an gambling...kinda, haha. Mel and Beardo were our fabulous "bar tenders." Shirley Temples, Sprite with margarita mix, and Sprite with rainbow sherbet. It was basically a casino night: bingo, craps, black jack, and poker (with chips, not money). And the dancing...well, some of it was choreographed, no comment on the rest. ;)

Highlights from the evening include Tad getting "drunk" off a Shirley Temple, Justine teaching me how to par-ty, "hey, stop spooning me in the lobby!", and Ryan Low singing play that funky music white boy.

Wednesday brought the opening session for Missions Conference. "Fragrance of a New Covenant" was the theme for this year. Tad, Becky, and I sat in the gym for the opening session with the parade of nations and George Verwer (our graduation speaker this year) pouring a bottle of water over his head, frying a mic. I absolutely love Missions. We switched to Crowell for the afternoon session with Marilyn Laszlo (amazing!) and checked out the mission organization booths. After dinner Tad and I took advantage of there being open hours; he napped and I worked on homework. We finished off the evening by raiding the International House of Drinks and hanging out in Eagles.

Thursday we went to a really cool seminar on missions at home in America and enjoyed the ethnic lunch on Metzger. We timed it just right to get through global awareness. This year's rooms were Uganda, Honduras, Iran, China, and Burma. Poor Valencia got very frightened in Burma because of the army kidnapping people.

The afternoon speaker was Grant Porter, an Aussie who has been working on the field in the Middle East. I slipped out a little early from the ession to get ready and go to my interview at Chapman. It went really well, and I'm rather excited to hear back from them now. The sad part was that they were running 45 minutes behind schedule, so I missed Marylin's second session. I also missed the capand gown buying time in the bookstore, but Tad was amazing enough to get mine for me, before I called to ask him to do that.

Friday morning Tad wasn't feeling well, so I went with Justine to Marilyn's final session. I really enjoyed her. I bought her book and had her sign it for me. I ended up collecting 4 books over the course of the week. After George Verwer's first session I bought "Amazing Faith" which tells little bios about a lot of different people, including George Verwer. Tad and I got "Revolution in World Missions" free from the Mission for Asia table in the missions booths. They gave out free copies of "The Skeptic's Guide to the World AIDS Crisis." And of course Marilyn's book "Mission Possible" about her work with the people in Papua New Guinea.

After lunch Tad and I got ready and met up with my friend Dave and went to meet his girlfriend (now fiance) Amy at the CSUN technology conference at the Marriott in LA. Us two couples went our separate ways to check out the exhibit halls. I found a couple of things I was veyr interested in: a *good* portable CCTV and a portable zoomtext-like program on a flashdrive. I shall look into both of these things further. The exhibits closed at 5, and at that time we went to Amy's room at the Marriott to feed our doggies. Amy has a yellow lab guide dog named Donna. Donna and Valencia were overjoyed to get to have some play time.

Once the pups had eaten, it was time for the people to. Dave drove us to Hermosa Beach where we walked the pier. It was overcast, but still beautiful. I will never get over how amazingly gorgeous the ocean is. One of Dave's friends from back home in Wisconsin, A.J. met us for dinner at a seafood place called "Sangria." Amy and I discovered that the couples had ordered the same things. Amy and I both got shrimp scampi and Tad and Dave both got chicken picante.

Anyway, so Dave's friend A.J. does a comedy magic sketch at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach (the club where Jay Leno presents his weekly sketches) and offered to get us in for free to the show that night. We certainly couldn't have said no to that! We had a little while to wait after dinner and move our group to get gelato. It was very tasty! The show was really enjoyable. I was very happy that all but one of the comedians had very clean routine's. After the show we got our picture taken with Larry Miller, the headliner, dropped Amy off at her hotel, and returned to Biola.

Saturday and Sunday were a little dull, as they were spent catching up on all the homework I hadn't been doing. Sunday we did get to church at Redeemer and had lunch at Panera with Kathleen. And (to my inevitable sadness) Tad flew home yesterday.

So yes, a very, very fun week. I'll post pictures in another entry, as this one is plenty long enough already :o)