57, 644 people have signed up so far (14 just since i started writing this post).

3 days from now.

and, once again: if you live in (or near) atlanta, austin, chicago, denver, kansas city, l.a., nashville, new orleans, new york, orlando, phoenix, pittsburgh, san francisco, seattle, or washington d.c., i strongly encourage you to sign up and go to this event.

i haven’t posted anything else in the last few days because i want the posts about displace me to be what you see when you come here oh, that and the fact that i’ve got a lot of schoolwork to do, stuff to read, papers to write, by 4:30 this Friday afternoon.

but, fear not, after this weekend, i’ll make sure to write about something else (though i may blog about the event after the fact as well, as that will probably be more interesting than this post).

15 cities (across the u.s.).

49,512 people (to date).

8 days (from now).

in case you’re wondering about those numbers, or the new picture on the top right of the site (that will be there until the event is over), on april 28, 2007, 15 cities are hosting displace me, an invisible children event to help those displaced by the ongoing war in northern uganda.

if you live in (or near) atlanta, austin, chicago, denver, kansas city, l.a., nashville, new orleans, new york, orlando, phoenix, pittsburgh, san francisco, seattle, or washington d.c., i strongly encourage you to sign up and go to this event.

here’s the purpose, according to the displace me website:

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted thousands of children, subjected them to torture or sexual violence and forced them to fight in a violent guerilla army for 21 years—making it the longest running war in Africa. In hopes of providing protection from this rebel militia, the Ugandan government forcibly evicted its Northern citizens from their homes—giving them 48 hours to relocate into camps. Today, more than 1.5 million Northern Ugandans remain far from secure, suffering nearly 1,000 deaths per week due to inhumane living conditions in the camps.

Alcoholism, sexual abuse, HIV/AIDS, inadequate sanitation and lack of education have caused immeasurable damage to two generations and the near-total destruction of Acholi culture. Water is scarce and people are reliant on food to be delivered by foreign aid. If the food isn’t delivered, the people starve. This April, the already meager rations delivered by the World Food Program to the camps will be cut in half due to lack of funding—with school feeding programs and support for HIV/aids victims soon to follow. This will indisputably increase the number of deaths among those already suffering from severe malnutrition—mostly among women, children and the elderly. That is why the timing of this event, and your participation are so crucial.

“Displace Me” is the nationwide event giving Americans the chance to respond.

By traveling to one of our 15 camps and gathering together, the strength of our size will make a visible statement to our government and media that the citizens of the U.S. demand action in ending the war in Northern Uganda, in order to send the Acholi people suffering in the camps and the abducted children back home. The point is to travel; the point is to become displaced yourself.

my MiL is going to be in town at the end of the month for a couple of weeks. since we’re still new to seattle, i’m looking for ideas as to what there is to do around these parts. so if any of you locals (or folks who’ve been here) have any suggestions, i’d love to hear them.

i’m overloaded with school stuff these days and haven’t had the time to figure out what we can do while she’s here.

Jak’s brother’s going to be here as well for a few days, but i think we know enough stuff to fill in that time, it’s the longer visit i don’t know how to cover.

this weekend my mom took my dad to the hospital when he had trouble with his left side. he had a ct scan which showed some claudification, but didn’t stay long enough for an mri. so he had an mri done on wednesday which showed that he’s had two strokes.

they live in miami. Jak and i live in seattle.

he’s going in for surgery this afternoon (friday @ 1 eastern time), but we’re not arriving until saturday night.

there’s a real sense of impotence being so many thousands of miles away while my family goes through this, especially just over a month past my grandmother’s passing.

i’m thankful that we’ll be able to be there as of saturday, but this week that has passed in between his visit to the er and now, has been one of worry and frustration (hence the silence in this little corner of the blogosphere).

so for those who are people of prayer, i ask that you keep my family in your prayers in the coming days. i probably won’t be posting for at least another week and a half or so as i don’t expect to have the time or much to say for a while.

[updated 1.5.07]
my dad had his surgery today (a stent inserted into his right carotid artery which had been 90% blocked), and all went well. he should be out of the hospital and recovering at home tomorrow, just a few hours before we arrive.

a new year has just begun, so i thought i’d start it off with a rundown of the one that has just ended.

significant moments:
in may, after too many years in and out of college, i finally finished with a BA in psychology from boston college.
and in may, Jak graduated with his MDiv from gordon-conwell.
in the middle of the summer (after i’d finally finished college), i finally received a diagnosis for my adhd.
this summer we also took our first trip to maine, because we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave new england without having seen the famous maine coast.
in august, Jak and i drove our car and a truck with our two cats across the country for a week, as we moved from boston to seattle.
in september, Jak was accepted into the spiritual direction certificate program at mars hill grad school, and we both began our classes there.
and throughout the year, we forged and strengthened many wonderful friendships with some truly amazing people.
in november, my grandmother passed away and we attended her memorial service in panama.
so it was a year of grand celebrations and one of losses as well.

favorite books of 2006:
it’s hard to remember everything i’ve read this year, especially those things that came before i began this blog. so i’ll just list a few memorable books (with links to my previous comments about the ones i’ve posted about) off the top of my head, in no particular order.
1. christ the lord: out of egypt by Anne Rice
2. a generous orthodoxy: by Brian McLaren
3. velvet elvis: by Rob Bell
4. driven to distraction: by Ned Hallowell
5. becoming attached: by Robert Karen
6. scattered: by Gabor Mate
7. a bright red scream: by Marilee Strong
8. the pressure’s off: by Larry Crabb
9. through painted deserts: by Donald Miller
10. good omens: by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

i probably shouldn’t be doing this yet, as i’ve only lived in seattle for a month and a half, but here are my thoughts so far. but first, my disclaimer: i love boston.

1. boston has the T, which as much as bostonians complain about it, the T (and the buses) is a great transportation system that can get you virtually anywhere.

2. boston has fall. well, so does seattle. but nothing is as beautiful as fall in new england. the trees here look like they’re making a pathetic attempt at fall, and it’s just sad.

3. boston has the red sox. i’m not a sports fan, but if you’ve lived in boston, you’ve just gotta love the sox.

4. things feel closer in boston. maybe that’s because of the T and because of the neighborhood that we’re in here in seattle, but i loved feeling that i could walk to shops and restaurants and all sorts of places so easily.

5. boston has history. everywhere you go, there’s a story to be heard. i’m sure there’s some here though, but i just haven’t had a chance to find it yet.

6. boston has snow. seattle really just gets rain. sure, rain doesn’t have to be shoveled, but it’s also not as pretty as snow is when it first falls.

7. boston has pizza. it’s not that seattle doesn’t, but they just don’t seem to know how to make edible pizza here. okay, we found a decent place this week. but the last two times we had pizza, i couldn’t even finish a slice (and if you’ve seen me eat, you know that it takes a lot for me to not be able to eat something – unless it’s meat).

8. seattle has mars hill grad school, and i wouldn’t go anywhere else.

9. though seattle has a reputation for coffee, i think the starbucks trend that birthed the coffeehouse revolution has affected most of the country, including boston. plus i’d still take a cup of dunkin’s coffee over starbucks any day. but, there are plenty of independent coffee shops here.

10. seattle has better grocery stores. although we did eventually find a few decent stores in boston, they were all awful in comparison to what we’d been spoiled with in miami (oh, how we miss publix!).

11. seattle has cheaper rent. enough said, right?

12. seattle has a troll. yes, a troll. it lives under a bridge (because isn’t that where trolls live?), and it is super cool (or wicked cool as would be said in boston). we got a chance to go see this troll this weekend, and i can assure you that it’s really there.

13. both cities have some really cool people. so i’m glad about that.

14. seattle’s atmosphere (in an ethos sort of way) is more chill. so i guess that suits me better. though i never really felt affected by the supposed attitude of boston.

well, i guess that’s really it for right now as far as my thoughts on boston vs. seattle. i think once i’ve had a chance to see more stuff, and learn my way around better, my opinions may shift. so these are really just preliminary thoughts.

i know, i know, i haven’t posted in over a month. the thing is, with packing up boxes, loading up a truck, driving over 3000 miles across the country, then unloading a tuck, unpacking boxes, and starting classes, it gets kinda tough to find time to do things like this. that’s especially true when you don’t have internet access for the first couple of weeks, and then when you do, you don’t have your computer available. . .

but now, i have access (high speed, no less!) and a nifty new computer thanks to my MiL.

i have managed in the past month to not finish any book that i can think of, even the ones i’d already started before we moved, so i can’t post about books. and, actually, i don’t have a ton of time for posting right now, so i won’t even say anything about school, or tv shows, or movies, or our trip across the country, or any of the other things i thought i could post about.

so if you want to know what’s going on, you’ll have to wait for future posts, which i promise won’t be as long in coming as this one was.

i’m sure i’ve read some stuff recently, and i’ll hopefully get around to posting about those books in the next day or so, but i’ve been too busy with everything else to bother with blogging much.

Jak and i had planned to move to Seattle next year, but a whole bunch of things happened in april and may that made me reconsider that plan. so in may, i asked him about the possibility of our moving there this summer instead of next. of course, since i have impeccable timing, he was in the midst of finals. he pretty much just stared at me, then he said we’d talk about it once he’d finished up school and graduated.

to make the story short, we decided to see if we could do it. of course, that means he has to relocate for work, we needed to break our lease, i needed to find an apartment out there, and, most importantly, we had to come up with a few thousand dollars that we didn’t have so we could pay for moving expenses.

in a very short period of time, we were able to get the money, straighten things out with his job, and talk to our landlady about our current lease. we couldn’t afford to be paying two rents at once, so we were kind of stuck until we knew if this place would be rented. i finally got tired of waiting, and figured that this was a great enough place that it would be rented. so on a weds night a few weeks back, we bought airline tix for me to go apartment hunting in seattle. the next day our apartment was rented out.

i spent a week in seattle looking for an apartment. i called at least 80 numbers, talked to maybe 20 people, and only saw 3 apartments. the first one smelled of weed and mildew. . . the second one, well, the landlord had been smoking too much weed, and i never heard back from him. so i went with the third one. of course, i saw that one on the day i was leaving, with just enough time to fill out the paperwork, grab my bags, pick up my friend whose car i’d borrowed, and get to the airport. perfect timing.

essentially, things couldn’t be working out more perfectly than they are.

i’d love to spend a whole post here talking in detail about the absolutely amazing people i met in seattle and what an awesome time i had. . . but since we’re leaving here on friday, i still have a ton of packing to do, and should get to it.