Quoth The Raven

After a little more than 2 weeks, life at the "compound" has settled into a fairly comfortable rhythm.  Every day is more or less the same:  breakfast at 7am, class from 8am until noon when we break for lunch, then more class from 1pm until 3 or 4pm, followed by the early bird special:  dinner at 5pm.  (And no, you can't just show up a little later for dinner - all the food is gone by 5:45.)  Some days are a little different: on Tuesday we spent the afternoon getting shots, and today the afternoon was occupied with financial appointments.  But mostly we look forward to the weekends, when our boredom and restlessness drives us to crazy places like the Edgar Allen Poe Museum.  

The museum, by the way, is a bit lame, but under the circumstances $5 was a small price to pay for a couple hours of diversion.  It was sufficiently creepy however - a fitting tribute to the author and poet.  You can see how horrified we were in the photo above.....with the exception of one of us, who appears to have missed the memo ;)  I'll you figure out which one that is.....

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Sleeping in the corner of the roof

I've always wondered why the 23rd verse was thrown in to the description of a virtuous woman in Proverbs 31: "her husband is respected at the city gates when he sits among the elders of the land." Sandwiched among a list of other things she does, it seemed like this phrase was out of place.....isn't that respect something the husband has to learn? How could the woman control whether people respect her husband? And, regardless of whether they do or don't, it certainly shouldn't be counted as one of her characteristics.

Through the example of my wife, I think I'm starting to realize why the writer included that characteristic. For instance, since I've been married, other people or groups have started looking to me more and more for leadership; no matter how hard I try to avoid being noticed in the crowd or how little knowledge I may have about the subject, somehow I'm found out. I realized that part of the reason (a big part...like 93.6%) is because L* has already set an example of following my leadership in other things, and she never makes disparaging or negative comments about me to others. It's easy for people to follow my leadership because she has - through her actions - gotten them used to seeing me as a leader. In a way, she leads them in following.

Conversely, I have several friends who are brilliant and gifted, but are never seen as leaders because thier spouses frequently challenge their leadership and publicly air their "dirty laundry." Although many of these friends are better qualified than me, the very actions of their spouses describe them as somone who is not worth following. Maybe that's why the book of Proverbs also says a whopping FIVE times that "it's better to sleep in the corner of a housetop than in a house with a contentious woman." Thank God for my wife, because I like my bed!

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Letters From Camp

We arrived in Richmond, VA on Monday evening for training, and have already sat through our first couple of sessions.  Actually, we're technically in the town of Rockville, but we've yet to see any buildings other than houses & farms.  That makes the training center we stay at for the next 2 months really conspicuous - in fact it looks freakishly like the "Others" compound on the TV show LOST (hmm.....).  They told us when we arrived that they've actually had people from the area call the police to investigate "the cult in the backyard", and we definitely were called out in the local Wal-Mart by a girl who claimed she could always "tell the people who are staying at the center."  Hilarious.

But beyond the "campy" atmosphere, it looks like it will be a great place to stay.  We live in a quad of 5 apartments with others who will be moving to the same country we'll go to in October, and - although we don't have to cook a single meal if we don't want to - our apartment has its own kitchenette and breakfast nook.  We even pushed our beds together to create a suedo-king sized bed :)

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