Observations | Peanut Carnival, Narnia, Driver 8...

MY APARTMENT – My philosophy: Ladies should want their men to watch football.

See, I’m a “relatively” big Chiefs fan. Last year, I went to 7 home games, driving 7 hours round trip from Lincoln to KC for a 3 hour game. My dad and I have traveled 9 hours in a car to watch them practice at training camp. Heck, my sister and I have won free tickets to a Nelly concert and skipped because the Chiefs had a game. A preseason game. That we’d be watching… on TV.

It’s only gotten more intense, too. Since I’ve been here, I’ve waken up at 3 a.m. to “watch” the game on ESPN’s Gameday Live, a glorified web page that reloads to give you score updates. I’ve made Dad instant message me every play over MSN so I can hear what’s going on. I’ve received care packages from home and literally tossed everything but the Chiefs game on VHS to the side for later; it was game time then.

So I think that sitting in front of a computer and listening to the game over KCFX.com is a totally cool way to keep in touch with my team. I hope my future wife sees how faithful I am to 53 grown men that run around a field in tights and connects that to how faithful I’ll be to her.

If not, it’s ok. I can always sell the other season ticket…

Three Observations:

1. I still hate/love freshmen. Apparently, there is an epidemic of toomuchsleepitis at Maxwell Academy. People are taking Sunday, a supposed “sleep-in” day, and snoozing for an extra hour. What are they thinking?
   
   Well, the powers that be decided that they’d had enough, so they developed the “Peanut Carnival.” Former and current Enterprise Academy people will remember this event named as “Junior Benefit.” Ironic, I can’t think of one person either of these two events benefits… I know it wasn’t me.
   
   As the freshman class sponsor, I woke up pretty early to spend 8 hours setting up our corner of the cafeteria. This had to be done efficiently and high-quality, because the actual carnival itself would last a mind-boggling 2 hours.Here’s what I accomplished all day: borrowed the Hartzell’s car, tried to pick up a TV from the elementary school, realized that we didn’t have a cord to plug the Playstation into the television, waited around to get that cord, finally got it, drove it up to the gym, unloaded it, set it up, got my couch from my apartment, got bugged for 3 hours about using my stuff for their booths (the couch, apparently, didn’t count), set up the food and ring-toss booths, help run one of the booths during the carnival, sold cookies for the last half hour (while my freshmen were having fun), counted the money made (Ks3,470, or about US$46), moved the TV back to the school, washed dishes, supervised (half) of the post-Peanut Carnival movie. So, not a lot for the day.
   
   
   Top 10 best parts of the night:
   10) Stealing cookies from the freshmen. Reminiscent of stealing candy from babies.
   9) The 12,643 times that Mariah Carey’s “Thank God I Found You” was dedicated from [generic boy’s name] to [generic girl’s name] and back.
   8) Sneaking out of supervising “The Hunt for Red October” to listen to the 2nd half of the Chiefs Game.
   7) Seeing that we didn’t lose money (as predicted) in the freshmen booths.
   6) Stealing free games of ring-toss from the freshmen. Reminiscent of stealing candy from babies.
   5) Wriggling out of being in the dunk tank (when I realized that it would be put outside, where the temperature had dipped to FREEZING)
   4) Hiding out in the apartment, not answering phones or knocking on doors over lunch. I needed some “me-time.”
   3) Stealing an orange soda from the freshmen. Reminiscent of stealing cookies from freshmen.
   2) Three words: Taco Bell Sauce. Can make any 30-shillings-worth-of-greasy-bread-cheese-and- eggs-called-a-sandwich bearable.
   1) Talking to Lameck (class president) and Ennie (class treasurer) and hearing them insist we give 10% of our earnings for the night as tithe for the following Sabbath. I love ‘em all.

1. “The Chronicles of Narnia” is gonna be way cool. I remember reading this book as a kid and being enchanted with the incredible visuals that C.S. Lewis painted in my mind.
   
   Now, to actually see it… whoa, this will be crazy cool. It comes out in the States December 9th. Here? Probably not for another 3 or 4 months. Can you say "Bootleg version"?
   
   As for the soundtrack, that just might be even better. With songs from Jars of Clay, Steven Curtis Chapman, Jeremy Camp, Bethany Dillon, Delerious?, Rebecca St. James, tobyMac, Nichole Nordeman, David Crowder Band, Kutless, and Chris Tomlin, it looks to be as good of a lineup I've evern seen. Awesome.
   


2. ¡Manejé hoy! Today, after a quick run into Rongai to pick up some passport pictures for me, I got the great opportunity to practice stick-shift driving on the road to the division. While I wouldn’t say that I did an exceptional job, I only killed the car 3 times (in a mile), so hey, it coulda been worse. Not too many people got hurt, so it was all right.

Sorry the last two points were short, but I wore myself out with the Peanut Carnival thing. Tommorow, afternoon off in Nairobi. I have to go by the airport and pick up… hey, I never put that in the blog.

BONUS OBSERVATION: I told you I was going to Egypt. Last Monday, I had a pretty rough day, formatting my computer (on purpose) and my external hard drive (not so on purpose). The only thing that seemed to be good was getting a phone call from my parents and bumping into Lauran Merginio, the Bible teacher. A few weeks earlier, when Roger and I were planning on doing Egypt, he asked if it he and his family could crash with us. I had no problem with hosting a few more people.

Flash forward a few weeks; Roger had all but told me he couldn’t go, I couldn’t find anyone else not doing anything for X-mas, and it looked like the only way I could go was on an overpriced tour with a group. Booo! Then, all of a sudden, Mr. Merginio asked if I was still planning on going, and long story short, tomorrow I run into Nairobi to pick up our tickets from Ethiopian Airlines. Thank God! Talk about an answer of prayer.

Now, just to plan everything...

Ok, now I think I’m done. Miss you all. Please keep emailing me – it’s the best part of my day. Bye!

-cw