Halfways and Recoveries

Friday nights are always a funny experience for me. For the first many weeks of this semester, they were just the official kickoff to the weekend; I don't have classes on Fridays, so Thursday nights were always the beginning of my weekend. Now that the retreats are in full swing however, there are now certain Fridays that are a bit more demanding than others. This past Friday night was spent in a flurry of excitement and vivacity. For normal people, this would be going out, or even here that would mean at least being with people. For me, it meant a Modern Family marathon on my computer by myself while eating crackers and in bed by 11. 

Yep. Living large over here.

I wish I could chalk it up to having long, intense days or not feeling well or being a missionary and while all of these are true, I must admit that this kind of behavior is not new at all for me. We just had a 3 day weekend and the truth is I needed it badly. There's so much work to be done! I have no idea what I'm trying to say. I guess the best I can do is that this whole day has been one big Monday. I literally almost fell asleep on my oatmeal this morning and it's been all aboard the struggle bus ever since. As wonderful as a weekend full of low key planning, email answering, and movie watching was, it also made me never want to come back and work. Oops. Kind of backfired there, didn't it?

I promise I'm not a total loser, though. All the boys went camping with one of our priests from Sunday morning to Monday afternoon which meant that time was spent as girl time. Movies, taking a little bus ride to Cayo for ice cream, doing our nails, more movies, oh and Elisabeth mending our fence because our stupid dog keeps getting out. Monday was also lovely, especially since I got to sleep in. That's right, folks, I was wasting the day away and waking up all the way at...8 am. Compared to the 6:30 am my body naturally wakes up at now though, that really was very late. But I think the best part about Monday was celebrating Jack's birthday. We just love our birthdays here! He had a homemade vanilla cake with...wait for it...peanut butter icing. I just wanted to eat the icing! Naturally, cake eating was promptly followed by watching Pocahontas (I may or may not have influenced that decision) and let me tell you, movies are much funnier when you decide which characters match up to the people in the room. I think that's the extent of my super exhilarating weekend. Some people would hate "wasting" a 3 day weekend like that and we briefly discussed making it a travel weekend, but honestly it was so great to stay back and just get things taken care of.

In other news, Sunday marked the halfway point for the semester! Saturday was 2 months since I got here and Monday was 2 months until I leave for Christmas. No, it doesn't feel like we should be halfway done. Yes, I'm ready to enjoy some of the American things I've missed the most e.g. ordering pizza, AC, not sweating 30 seconds after getting out of the shower, peanut butter that doesn't cost a fortune, chocolate chips, etc. It will be quite strange to be away from Benque even for those 3 weeks, but it'll be even stranger to be away from our volunteer community. When you spend almost all of your time with a select group of people, it's just very funny remembering that there was a time when you weren't all together for everything. Well, we still have 2 months, so maybe we'll be sick of each other by then. Fingers crossed!

Thank you once again for even the smallest prayer! And thank you for praying for the 4th Form boys this past Friday, it was a long and great day. We've got our 3rd Form boys retreat this Friday, so please remember all 48 of them this week.

And happy feast day of St. Teresa of Avila!

Also, 2 of my favorite bands released new albums today which equals pure joy for me. This is the song I've been listening on repeat literally all day. You're welcome!

St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.

Totus Tuus, Maria.