OE Thus Far

It has been 4 short days since I arrived back at the beautiful Hume Lake to start my job for the fall as on Outdoor Education Instructor. I was given the class of Entomology. For those of you who do not know what that is it the the Study of Insects, basically. I meet my partner and his name is Chief. He majored in outdoor Education and so he knows alot about our topic. So I have been hitting the books and studying any and everything about insects and catching them for the past three days. Let me tell you that these past few days have been anything less than boring. We have been getting up early and working on putting our material together, putting our classrooms together, and becoming experts on our topics. I have 3 roommates! One of them is from Mississippi and has the neatest accent ever. Her name is Boots and she is the youngest on our staff at 17. Then there is Poppy who is a teacher and she has a heart to convey the information as correctly and uniquley to the students. Then my bunkmate would be Kove. She just ha sthis fun and crazy spirit which I just love and feed off of. So needless to say our room has been less then boring, dance parties, late night chats, and pictures galore! The staff in general has been pretty amazing. A lot of us came off of summer staff together and so we have previous relationships so it is nice to know people in this new and crazy environment. It has been extra neat fo rme to have Boone and Koda here with me, I work with both of them at Wagon Train over the summer. It's just nice to have people here who know me and that i can openly and honestly talk with and confide in with out having to rebuild that relationship with others. But I'm looking forward to building those types of relationship with the girls on this staff. Speaking of building relationships. We had a team building activity the other day. I will always and forever refer to it as the day of the hike! We woke up at 5 am, ok first off I went to bed with the stars and woke up with the stars, and left for our destination at around 5:45 am. Getting up early is something that I don't do to often nor do I do well with getting up early, just ask any one who knows me. After an hour drive we headed off on our hike at 7 am. Pk, my boss, was kind enought to explain each third of the hike to us so we wouldn't have any surprises. we started at 8,000 ft and ended at 10, 375 ft. This was by far one of the hardest hike that I had ever done. I was tired, out of breath, my legs burned, my hip and knee hurt ,but in the end when I reached the top and steped onto the peak and looked out I was stunned by God's beauty. This was the highest I had every been hiking. By this time it was 8:45am and the sun was in just the right place and the sun hit the surrounding mountains in such a way that they sparkled. As Pk read from Matthew 6 about worry, I was thinking about how God has created all this and knew all thsi was here. I had NO idea that any of this existed but my God did. These mountains were so tall and so large but God yet still cares enough to love me and know me. So why in the world would I worry that I am not going to learn all my information before the students come or little things like that. God's got it. Needless to say it was totally worth waking up at 5am to see my God in a completely different way and enjoy the things that he has given me.

We ended the hike with pancakes at the top of this peak and a group photo. We headed back down and we we reached the vans we all crawled inside and fell asleep! It was one of the best days ever. Even today I am still really sore and I feel like I am 95 years old but I would do it again!