Hello November!

Happy November! Here in Elgin we brought in the new month with a house full of friends and family! One of the BVS House traditions is to have a Halloween Party and invite people from the offices and from church and so we threw in a handful of our friends to that bunch! For our party we had a music theme and all of us girls picked different music genres to dress up as. I represented 'classical music' so I was a maestro for the evening. I wore a black dress suit complete with a bow tie and a conductors baton. My hair was done up in a crazy up-do for the night, which let me tell you was a painful process! I hardly ever do anything with my hair...it's either up, or it's down.

Other music genres represented were jazz, musicals, punk rock, rap, and disco. We asked our guests to come dressed as something musical and they sure did step up to the challenge! One of our friends came dressed as a microphone! It was amazing! It was a fun night of laughter, LOTS of food and tons of fun to say the least!

We had four friends who came into town for the weekend, mostly for the party, but also just to come and visit! On Saturday most of the housemates went into Chicago to see the musical Wicked (which was fitting because two of them dressed up as characters from Wicked for Halloween!) and had a great outing to the city. I on the other hand chose to stay at home and relax with my friend Amber and we had a fun day of our own watching movies, playing Frisbee and babysitting. Well, I guess maybe it wasn't relaxing, but it sure was fun!

As the weekend went on, it became more apparent to me just how tired I was. I worked to find a few minutes here and there to go down to my room and to just sit and 'be,' which was a good thing for me to do. To put it plain and simple: I was peopled out. It's hard work traveling from place to place and always putting on a happy face and being social all the time. Even in the homes that I was put up in while traveling, that takes work too! And then to come back to a house full of people to entertain, as happy as I was that they were all there, it was still exhausting! But I wouldn't trade it for the world!

After all the traveling I've done these past two months it is really nice to be back in the office for longer than a few days. This is my first full week in the BVS office since I started here back in September! How crazy is that!? It is also a bit overwhelming since I'm not used to being in the office...I'm not quite sure what to do with myself!

I realized something interesting this morning. I went over to talk to Dana as I do most days (yes, believe it or not, we do get work done) and she was working on a worship service and was a bit stuck on what to do with it. So I asked her what she had so far and as she was telling me my mind started to fill with ideas that she might be able to use. My realization is that I really enjoy doing that kind of creative thinking. But then again I also just love working with Dana! We both think in different ways, but it's great because together we can come up with some pretty great stuff!

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how I really would like to get in touch again with my degree in Environmental Science. And wouldn't you know an opportunity has come my way! I met this guy, Ryan, while playing Frisbee here and he works for the Audubon Society. Typically I don't see my Frisbee friends outside of our weekly disc times but yesterday Ryan was here in the offices because he is going to give ideas and suggestions to our grounds manager about bringing in some native vegetation on our property. So Ryan and I got to talking a bit and he was telling me about some up coming opportunities to help re-seed some areas around here to go back to the natural prairie habitat that used to cover this area entirely. So I think I'm gonna try to do some of that volunteer work on Saturdays when I'm able to and I'm really excited about that!