I take walks often around the lake by my building. I don’t remember ever seeing a lake frozen over. Today I threw a rock out onto the ice to see if it would crack. It merely bounced a bit and then skidded out onto the hard surface. There are a number of these rocks. And in the photo below you can see footsteps where someone tested the ice with their own weight during last weeks snow. I hear I’ll see ice skaters soon.

Winter is magic sometimes.

1. I can write here more often! Since starting the new job, my only internet outlet has been the office, where — get this — I work. No time for the ol’ personal blog. I’m actually getting a warm fuzzy feeling knowing I’m going to be in this space more often.

2. I can read your blogs again. Hurray for getting to access my Google Reader which at this point has blog posts piled so deep I’ll be reading through the weekend.

3. I’m obviously spending Friday night alone. You know who I hung out with tonight? Joan from the online Help Center. Joan, who’s probably a dude named Akarsh sitting in a cube somewhere in Nepal. She got me set up with internet! And she called me ‘valued’. How sweet. Otherwise tonight is about me and this blog post, then bean burritos and “Alias”.

Here’s to a Friday night connected and to more blog posts to come!

I’ve done a lot of wandering around in these first couple of weeks in Minneapolis. I’ve done a lot of sitting in coffee shops, a lot of walking down unknown streets, a lot of wandering into record stores and old-stuff stores and book stores. I’ve done a lot of wondering at the fall leaves.Seriously, yesterday I just stopped and stared at the ground.

Beautiful. There are reds and yellows and greens, and the wind whips them up and lays them down in brushstrokes. Every boulevard offers fantastic colors.

Yesterday was a bizarrely warm autumn day, perfect for the Armenian church in St. Paul which held a fundraiser festival, cooking lamahjo, kebab, and other delicious Caucasian treats. They lined the space outside with picnic table and cooked up a feast. They set up their foyer as a cafe, shuffling jazzves over hot plates to pour coffee into those familiar tiny cups. An Armenian woman hovered ready for anyone whose coffee grounds had settled, whose fortune awaited a reading.

I did balk a bit when she tried to explain to me how to turn your cup for a coffee-grounds reading. A wave of tiny moments rolled over me, moments when Alvard or Gayane or Serine or so many wonderful tatiks (grandmothers) laughed while I looked into their coffee cups and read their fortunes myself. ‘None of these Armenians know,’ I thought. Many of them have never been to Armenia. Certainly none know how much I am missing it, how much I wish I could sit with my landdad and play a game of nardi, how much I wish I could grab the pinkies of my co-workers and dance the kochari.

One man at the edge of the church yard sat whittling wooden boxes. A woman asked him a question, and he said, “My english, not good. Wait?”

“Do you speak Armenian,” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes el em khosum hayeren,” I said. I also speak Armenian. And there it was, a glimmer I’d been waiting to see. A connection I had so hoped to make on this Autumn afternoon at the Armenian church.

“Du hay es?” he asked me. Are you Armenian? Sweeter words were never spoken. This man was from Yerevan. When I told him that I’d just come from there a few months ago, he laughed, asked me about the city. Another PCV with whom I served in Armenia was there as well, and the three of us talked about the country and settled into this corner of the church yard for a game of nardi. I sat with him for a couple hours, hours that felt like a breath of fresh air.

The man lives in Iowa, so I won’t see him soon. But how wonderful to have a small, autumn day, a brief Armenian afternoon.

You know, it’s hard to move to a new state. Very hard. New banks, new license plates, new cell phone service, new apartment, no furniture, no friends, no clue… about anything. Where is the nearest gas station? Where do I go to find toilet paper? Where did I leave my brain?

I had to get photos done for a new passport. The receptionist, right before she snapped the photo, told me that I need a haircut. A haircut?! Thank you for that nugget of wisdom which I will now carry around with me for the next ten years. Any advice on where to find a barber?

I have been staying with a couple people from work. This is humbling, moving to a new city, having your new landlord push back your move in date, having to ask your barely-not-strangers coworkers if you can sleep on their couches. A couple of them kindly welcomed me into their homes. One in particular let me stay for three nights. On the afternoon after the third we both left work, and seeing her walking to her apartment I called out a salutation, which included calling her BY THE WRONG NAME. I literally shouted a wrong name at her from across the parking lot. “Did you just call me ‘Angela’?” she said. Yes. Yes, I had.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of excitement to be had in all of this New-Place Adventure. I have already been to gallery openings and concerts. I have ideas on ideas on ideas about plays and city bike rides and winter wonderlandness that keep building.

Currently, however, my life feels absolutely clunky. I move forward on one task only to find I’ve forgotten another. I call a new friend a wrong name. I miss every exit, make every wrong turn. I’m just clunking around the city, a Texan in the great white north about to get lost in the first snow drift.

This morning the sun is shining over an amazing fall day, and after I make pancakes for my host I’m going to go explore this city and meet a friend that just happens to be visiting here from my hometown. I promise to share my new space with ARC here at the blog as soon as it’s created, and here’s a little bit I made for ARC two weeks ago to promote their our I Am A Star campaign.

*Disclaimer: I will be sounding pretty schmaltzy in most upcoming posts. I have arrived at my dream job, and while it is incredibly challenging, I am getting to be as creative as possible to share incredible things that are happening in developing communities all over the world. This job, for me, is way better than Christmas. Christmas is as schmaltzy as it gets, so I’m employing my schmaltzy license now. This logic works in my head.

Now I’m moving across the country. Last night my mother made a pie consisting mostly of cream cheese and condensed milk, and while it is my favorite pie in the world, that is no excuse for eating multiple slices in a row. I’m fairly certain that Minnesota will provide me with the four necessary ingredients for said pie should I require it, so no Peace Corps excuse this time. No, this is stress binging. Moving is stressful, and while for the last two months I’ve been faithfully going to the gym, currently I am most active when confronted with Tex-Mex.

I spent the early part of this week starting my job at the American Refugee Committee while also looking for apartments. I had about 36 hours to see as many apartments as possible. I met a lot of really interesting characters. I stood on floors I was sure were going to move from under my feet, and I learned to date a building by its smell. In apartment hunting you’ll see more ugly than pretty, and after finally deciding on one great place, I went to claim it with my application only to find that I’d been beat to the desk thirty minutes earlier. I did settle on a great apartment in a neighborhood I’m happy to live in, but the push-pull of that apartment-hunting ride still has me feeling queasy.

The other fire still burning is my broken car. The head gaskets are warped, and the machine shop they sit in won’t give me a straight answer as to when they’ll be finished. I’m supposed to drive to Minneapolis in two days. My mechanic took my little car baby apart, and now pieces of its head are somewhere far from its body, held hostage by someone I can only guess is grinning in a greasy chair, stroking his cat and twisting his own whiskers.

In happier news, my job is already amazing. Monday, my first day at work in the Twin Cities, showed me a great time. That first-days-of-fall feeling was in the air. The sun was shining, and I spent the entire afternoon walking around the city and talking to strangers. I met great people who are going to be part of my first piece for ARC (I’ll share it here soon!). I was walking around the park, sunny day, friendly strangers, talking, filming, noticing, creating, and I thought, ‘OHMYGOD, THIS IS MY JOB.’ That’s a good feeling to have on day one, amirite?

Second positive is that great feeling Minneapolis gave me. I realized that I’ve never actually resided in a place whose population was greater than 120,000 people. And this big city gave me that urge, the one that compels you to sing, “Moving on up!” Which I did. While stuck in traffic. Because it was traffic on a beautiful street in a the biggest city I’ve ever lived in. I am currently filled with some joy about all of this, so despite the apartment-hunting spins and the uncertain transportation, I am still tapping my feet and smiling like I won the lottery. It feels like I kinda did.

Since I found out, I still have rushes of excitement. I’ll reach out and grab the arm of my sister/dad/mom/stranger-at-Wal-Mart, and let the realization wash over me, saying, “I got the job!”

So what’s THE job? On Monday I start work at the American Refugee Committee as their Roving Correspondent. For the last 30 years ARC has been providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and other displaced communities around the world. They currently work in places like Uganda, Thailand, and Haiti, and as one of the only international aid organizations functioning within the country’s borders, they are providing critical assistance to communities in Somalia.

Next week I’ll start writing and shooting photos and video for web content and other publications. You can currently see a lot of what ARC does on their website, and you can follow ARC on twitter and facebook. You’ll see there ARC’s emphasis on partnership with local communities both with the displaced communities they serve and with the donor and volunteer communities that are reaching out to help. You’ll see a lot of communities that desperately need communities like yours and mine to reach out. You’ll see a lot of inspiring work done by a lot of inspiring people.

I get to be a part of that. I’ll be traveling out to the places where ARC works in the world, documenting what I experience and learning as much as I can from the people I meet. And I’ll be flying back to Minneapolis and from there meeting American communities that are as much a part of this work as anyone else. I’ll be putting it all into writing, photos and video.

My job is to witness this incredible stuff done by brave, (extra)ordinary people, and then I get to tell the world about it.

My job. Connect to people all over the world. Write/shoot/blog/tweet about it. What a dream. WHAT A DREAM!!!

I feel like jumping up and screaming, “EVERYBODY! I LOVE YOU! OH MY GOODNESS!” Of course, sometimes I get so excited I can’t formulate words.

I’ll let you know as soon as I can where you can see my work online. And meanwhile (and always), I’m still here, still working out how to be alive and talking to you about it here on the ol’ blog.

I put them together in my first weeks back home. With a few photos, some microscope slides and my mom’s necklace odds & ends, I made a way to wear my Peace Corps experience on my neck. Each of these has a back side with a different picture, and I flip them over throughout the day.

From bottom left, clockwise: The first in the corner is a picture of my house on an icy day. The girl walking is my Belgian friend An, an European Volunteer Service compadre who served in Armenia with me. Above is a landscape of Armenia at dusk, a picture I took the night before I flew back to Texas. To the right of that are feet on the Vardablur gym floor (you might recognize the pic from my blog header!). Below is the Stepanavan central square in winter. And in the bottom right is a view of my tiny training village, Teghenik.

How excited am I to be wearing scenes from my second home? TOO EXCITED.

(For instruction on how to solder a project like this, check this video. And you can order microscope slides over here!)

I’ve been living in my home town these last couple of months post Peace Corps, and I still can’t get enough her creative spirit, nor the kitchen chats, floats in the pool, estate sale sweeps, and Big Brother marathons with that wonderful woman.

Today is her birthday, and a year ago on this day the two of us were dancing with our friends in Stepanavan, Armenia, munching khorovats and toasting to peace, friendship and some incredible cake.

I remember when I saw her walk through the gates at the Yerevan airport, beginning her trip through Armenia. I hadn’t seen her in 17 months. I remember grabbing her hand while we searched for a taxi home, and the familiarity of that clasp brought a rush of all that I miss when I don’t get to see her everyday. She’s my mom, a true friend, an immeasurable gift.

To her I say: Happy Birthday, Mom, you wonderful old building and loan!