Man Time in the Mini Van

This blog should have been posted nearly a decade ago, ok more like 3 weeks ago...I just wanted to spend a little more quality time with my internies before I let you indulge...

There's something truly magical about riding 5 hours in a minivan with 3 grown men listening to them sing their little hearts out to Dave Matthews, The Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, The Police, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Today is a good day.

Rewind. Sunday afternoon after a short day at work, the interns and our leadership group headed out to the Oregon Coast, not to be confused with the beach, for a little bitty intern retreat. There was lots of quality time had with Jesus by the water, I wrote a letter to myself to be opened in a year, and we bickered and bantered over our mission statement and non-negotiables for our time at the canyon. Twas epic.

My main reason for writing this blog was to introduce you to my new interny friends. They're really great and you will love them. Eventually we're going to get tired of each other considering we live, work, and play together...but for now, we are blissed out.

Without further ado...meet Sonia Danae Malmquist, hailing from Neenah, Wisconsin. I know her middle name only because she doodles it on every scrap within her reach. She loves single french braids, mom butts, and taking pictures from the unfortunate angle. Every time I am in her presence, I can't help but giggle uncontrollably. She's witty, awkward, and makes everyone uncomfortable on purpose. She has a phenomenal voice and sings freely everywhere. She was also in show choir and gymnastics so sometimes she dances and splits for us. It's magical. She's pushing 5'1'' and is the first of The Little Women. We shall call her The Entertainer.

Then there's Ashley Whiteside straight out of metropolitan Georgia. She's lived in the south her whole life. She's been trying to master making sweet tea here in the Northwest and hasn't been too successful yet. She has these crazy blue green eyes and she also makes up a third of The Little Women. She's 5'1'' as well. And she loves to laugh. We shall call her The Giggler.

The remaining portion of The Little Women is Deanna Marie Driscoll. She's also just over five feet tall, but her energy speaks otherwise. She's feisty and spunky oh, and married. You'll meet her husband Darren in a bit. Deanna is from Bogota, Columbia and was adopted when she was around 2yrs old. She doesn't have a proper birth certificate so her adopted parents decided her birthday for her. She is a woman of many voices including that of a chain smoking old man, which is my personal favorite. Just the other day Deanna and I were cubbie buddies. We had to clean all the cubbies throughout all the camper rooms. We experienced a chemical high that should probably be prohibited but as it was part of our job we sucked it up and endured. After spraying the infamous "orange" on hundreds of cubbies to "dust" them, we were undoubtedly a little loopy. Deanna got low. I got high. I'm talking about the cubbies silly. By the end of it all we were making up words, hacking up lungs, and feeling just slightly light-headed. But it's all for the good of the kingdom huh?

So Deanna's husband Darren is pretty legit too I guess. He's already done the year long internship once but he loved it so much he just had to come back for round deuce...and he brought along a wife this time. Darren likes to play with grass and dirt and ride lawn mowers for hours and hours. He's a fifth of the crew that makes campy landscape look immaculate. He also hates having wet socks on. Hates it. Fun fact... I met Darren and Deanna when they met each other three and a half years ago at Malibu Club, a younglife property up in Canada. Makes me feel a little special...and it's magical to watch things come full circle and now I get to spend their first year of marriage with them :)

Then there's Kyle Kuiper from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's really into photography probably because he's really really good at it. He and Mr. Nick Graves, another intern, have a picture bizz together called AdventurousDesign. Kyle is also a piece of the landscape puzzle and likes to play in the grass. He has an extravagant movie collection that he let's us interns borrow from. It's almost like we he have our very own neighborhood Blockbuster. Oh and he also loves him some Mountain Dew. I witnessed a conversation of adoration between Kyle and Sonia about just how much they love Mountain Dew. Twas epic.

Nick Graves, newlywed and handy man, hails from Indiana and has also done the internship before but came back to do it again with a wife. He likes to fix stuff around camp, hence the job title of maintenance man. Nick just had a birthday and as an intern community we threw him a surprise birthday extravaganza involving terriyaki chicken and a despicable game of dodgeball. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth as people were pelted with countless spongey balls. It was ruthless and let's just say I was pitifully sore the next morning. Oh back to Nick...he's a photo/video guru. Very wise. Very talented.

Miss Stacy Graves is from Chico, California...my lone California native. But she's spent the last four years of her life in New York sooo sometimes I forget she's actually a Golden Stater just like me. Stacy plays the piano and sings and is just too beautiful and too talented. She and Nick got married three days before moving to camp. What?! And

their initials are SAG and NAG. Happy couple. :) Stacy is the Sassy intern. Meaning that she works in the Sarsaparilla, which is our very own sweet shop. Side note, I don't like the word sarsaparilla, mainly because it doesn't sound at all the way it looks, and that's just bothersome. Her maiden name is Book so we're destined to be friends.

Daniel Warncke. 21 yr old from Orlando, Florida. Orlando, not to ever be confused with or compared to Miami. Daniel once told me that when he walks down the street in Miami, he wants to light everyone on fire. Wow. I would say that he doesn't much care for Miami. Daniel claims that everyone at home calls him Mad Dawg and he thinks it's absurd that the name hasn't caught on here in the canyon. Keep in mind, Daniel is tall and slender, incredibly goofy, carefree, and constantly smiling. What about that description screams Mad Dawg? Hence the reason he is known only as Daniel or Dan here in this new world of ours. Dan's in landscape and absolutely loves it, although he's gotten a bit beat up by some of the lawn mowers. Apparently they have personalities of their own, to go with the names they've been given. There's Al, and Doris, and Walker, and the Godfather, and I don't remember the others. Oh and Daniel loves Taco Bell. Loves it.

Josh Ranew. He's from a town in Alabama that apparently is pretty much Georgia so he pretends he's from Georgia, but just has Alabama license plates. What?! Josh is what you'd call a kidder. He kids. A lot. He runs. He eats healthy. He likes to play soccer. And he drinks a Pepsi a day. He's very tidy. We know this because he borrows our vacuum cleaner daily. And he wins the award for the fastest bathroom cleaner. He cleans two in the time it takes me to clean one. What?!

Last but certainly not least is Miss Krista. We joke about how we're the same person. But it almost can't be considered a joke anymore. She's tall. She's active. She's adventurous. She's teaching me how to crochet. I'm teaching her how to run a marathon. We love sweets together. We love puzzles together. We love peanut butter and pickle sandwiches together. We hike together. We run together. We bike together. We read out loud together and we digest life together. So I've never been much of a question asker. Mainly out of fear. Fear of what people will think of me, fear of inadequacy. I should know everything, right? There should be no room for questions in this infallible brain of mine, right? Sense the sarcasm. Every time I have a question, I convince myself that it's not a good one and that I shouldn't ask it. For some reason when I'm with Krista, my questions just pop out. And she doesn't always have answers but we talk my questions out and we've had some of the richest conversations due to questions. Sometimes simple, sometimes complex.

Kids ask 125 probing questions a day. Adults ask 6. Somewhere along the lines of life we lose our curiosity. Or we just develop an inquisitive impediment. The father I nannied for these past two years would, every day without fail, encourage his kids to ask questions and be curious as we would walk out the door to head to school. I would encourage you to do the same. Not to your children, but to yourselves. Be curious. Ask questions. I'm not a fan of the expression, "there's no such thing as a stupid question." There are certainly stupid questions. Just google stupid questions and you will find some great examples. But the thing is, you can't let the fear of asking a stupid question impede you. I know. I've let it for far too long. So now you know a little bit more about my intern community, and a little bit more about what I'm learning. Jesus' disciples asked some pretty stupid questions. But they weren't afraid. They asked and because they asked, we are able to know some pretty fantastic nuggets of knowledge from Mr. Jesus Christ Himself.

So go ask a question. Just for the sake of knowing.