My life is booked.

After a fairly normal and slightly boring winter as I get into spring, it seems there are no free days left on the calendar. Why? Well, it seems that when people come to look at our house, they come in batches. We had a lady surprise us yesterday when she called and said, I'm two minutes away, what's your address? I'm coming to see the house!

Thankfully the house was fairly clean, so we only had to semi-frantically clean instead of full-out-panic frantically clean. A couple(unmarried, no children) is coming to see the house tomorrow. They say they really love it(from the pictures) but I'm thinking once they see it, they'll realize it's not their type. Our house is a old family house that lacks some of the comforts that many Americans are used to, like heating and air conditioning.

Besides that, a cold is going around and Jen and I are on the campaign trail again. This week is also the beginning of a really exciting volunteer job for Jen and I, that I will have to tell you about later.

New Friends

So the sixteen foreign students came to our town last week, and all lived to tell the tale. No one got left behind, or run over by machines at CVA, or eaten alive by chickens at the farm, or died of eating cafeteria food at the school, or were mortally offended by their host families. Whew. I was so nervous all day Wednesday that I got a headache, but once the students arrived I just had to go with the flow. Thursday was interesting. Our day started at the PUBLIC SCHOOL, which I had only been in a handful of times, and only once for academic reasons(I took the PSAT there). The students were divided up and given tours of the school, stopping every now and then to talk to students in class, and then we sat in on different classes. Unfortunately, the class I sat in on was the Algebra class for seniors. I've been out of high school three years now and I have forgotten most of the Saxon Algebra I learned, so I didn't get much out of that experience. We had lunch at the SCHOOL CAFETERIA, which was also a first for me.

After lunch we drove ON A SCHOOL BUS to the new Central Valley Ag building outside of town. It is an amazing, state-of-the-art facility that would be worth touring on a more in-depth level, and that's something coming from me because I'm not all that interested in farming. But by that point the girls were getting tired and bored and all the students stopped so often to take pictures that it took some effort to get everyone from point A to point B. Especially since I am not a very naturally authoritative person, and especially with my peers.

Next we visited a small farm, and by that point both guys and girls were tired and bored, and from there we went to main street, which I probably should have just skipped since in the end we were late at the meeting place.

It was a stretching experience, and I won't be volunteering to do it again anytime soon! It was stressful to find host families, it was stressful to be totally in charge of sixteen college students(really nice kids, it wasn't their fault) for almost two days, and it was kind of(maybe) a little stressful to have Dad as a boss(After the first two weeks of calling people about hosting and getting only refusals, the pressure started building)??

People in town know I was home schooled, and they know I am living at home and not going to college, so there are stereotypes to fight and I wanted to prove my responsibility and maturity. Even though people may think I look 12 or 16 (Come on, people, do I really look like I'm 12? Please!), I really am 21. Anyway, I probably didn't prove anything besides I can get stressed easily, I'm not used to a school setting, and I can't effectively herd college students, but I hope to some people I was a witness for Christianity. That would be a better goal than proving my age.

Word of the Day

inanition \in-uh-NISH-uhn\, noun:

1. The condition or quality of being empty.
2. Exhaustion, as from lack of nourishment.
3. Lack of vitality or spirit.

Americans can be very selfish

I feel like I've called half the town this past week to find host families for a group of students coming to visit. 16 college-age students from Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates are coming to stay in our small town for two days to learn about rural Nebraska living, and I volunteered to organize their time here. I knew of enough people interested in hosting that I thought it wouldn't be hard to find eight host families to take two students for only two nights... but it turns out all our usual hosts were busy! And then I got stressed out and started desperately calling everyone I knew of that wasn't a wierdo, and still all I got were refusals, and most of them were for the wrong reasons. I'm sorry to say I got kind of annoyed with that. Why aren't Americans more hospitable? If you are a Christian, it should not be a strange or weirdly inappropriate thing to invite people into your home, to serve them, to make new friends. It is perfectly ok to have your children give up their beds for a night or two so guests can be comfortable. It would be appropriate to cancel your card party or come home early from work to minister to these young Muslims from another country. How many Nebraskans get the chance to meet a man from Oman, or a young lady from the UAE? What a chance to witness this will be, for those who are selfless enough to accept it.

So there's my rant for the week. I still have to find one more host family, really fast, because one of the families got sick. And that IS a good reason not to have guests!

A Patriot and a Lady

Eliza Lucas Pinckney:
This well-educated, capable, and courageous lady took over responsibility for her father's three South Carolina plantations while he was away fighting a war and her mother's health was in decline. A widow when the Revolutionary war began, both her sons fought for Independence.
What a lady!

And what a dress:

The three-piece, gold, silk damask Colonial dress dating from 1750-1780 is made from silk cultivated from silk worms that Eliza Pinckney raised on her South Carolina plantation. She commissioned the dress during a trip to England in the mid-1700s, and it has undergone one or more alterations since it was originally created.

Eliza's story is inspiring and really interesting, and I am hoping to read more about her in the future. I hate using inter-library loan, but in some cases there's no other way to find the books you're looking for.

Take Action

I just signed up to be a 10-and-2 representative for Parental Rights:

ParentalRights.org exists to protect children by empowering parents through the passage of the Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and by defeating U.S. ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Join the Fight!

A Step Backward

From "Campaign for Working Families":
"President Obama announced today that he will repeal Bush Administration restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. While many in the media and on the political Left will hail today’s announcement as “a step forward for science,” it is in reality a step backward.

Stem cell research is widely supported by the public and much of it is tremendously promising. However, virtually all of the advances that have been reported in the media have been the result of research involving adult stem cells and cells obtained from umbilical cords, not embryonic cells. Moreover, embryonic cells have proven to be unpredictable and difficult to control, often growing into tumors.

An embryonic cell is the earliest stage of human life. All the DNA necessary for a human being to develop is fully present in an embryonic cell. These cells are frequently derived from fertility clinics, and the “research” requires the human life present to be destroyed – a process fraught with tremendous moral and ethical considerations.

Adult stem cells can be derived from numerous sources, none of which requires the creation and subsequent destruction of human life. It also has the additional benefit in many cases of coming directly from the patient, thereby dramatically lowering or eliminating the chances of rejection by the body.

In fact, the progress with adult stem cell research has been so promising that last week, Dr. Bernadine Healy, a former director of the National Institutes of Health wrote a column persuasively arguing that embryonic stem cell research is unnecessary. Click here to read her column.

Beyond the ethical considerations are concerns of efficiency. To be clear, President Bush did not ban embryonic stem cell research – he only imposed restrictions on the use of taxpayer money for the creation of new stem cell lines, which involves cloning.

But it has been going on with private funding and even a handful of states have opted to use state money to fund it, so far no to avail. If the pharmaceutical industry thought embryonic stem cells were the key to massive profits, it would be heavily invested in this research. But it isn’t, and that speaks volumes about its efficacy."

FQD

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? It is feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. ...[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."

--A Pennsylvanian, The Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 February 1788

And my current reading list:

I forgot to put David McCullough's "John Adams" in the pile, but it might be awhile before I get to that anyway. I'm planning on watching the HBO TV adaptation of the book either while I'm reading it, or right after I've read it.