"Jon, I think this music is a little too French for this early in the morning."
-A barista at a Starbucks. I like to imagine Jon is the kind of guy that doesn't use an 'h' in his name, but I guess that it wouldn't be his fault if one got in there.

I am in this weird limbo I have never been in before, which is that of having two jobs, and having a third pending. I feel like I am cheating on my real life boss, while I wait for the third deal to become official. My mouth keeps wanting to betray me with things like "I AM OUT OF HERE" or "wait I might actually miss baking" or "CALM DOWN", but I keep forcing it shut and working hard anyways. Hopefully the status changes from pending to funded soon, because this in between is making a fool of me.

My body is tired from that time yesterday that I went backpacking, and the rest of the times I have been working too many hours on my feet, but I am persevering. Things are happy in the sleepiness. In two weekends I will be back in the Midwest. My best friend has moved up to Salt Lake City, which gives me freedom to do silly things, like eat waffles in the night or smoke Primetimes on a porch. I am enjoying sound, and drinking coffee again, and spending more time in the mountains. The bruises on my legs tell me that I had a good weekend, despite the aches. Football is also back, which means that my Sundays are more relaxing than they have been in months, oddly.

On a sidenote. I timidly gave one of the regulars at the bakery a copy of one of my stories, in exchange for a lovely book he thought that I should read. He told me it brought him to tears and to keep writing, and that was an encouraging push that I probably needed. It feels good to create more than SEO content again.

God is gracious. God is kind. God gives me the hard and the easy mixed together and that is a lovely thing.

"I thought for a moment of the world outside my house, and then I didn't have anymore thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep."-Raymond Carver

I feel this is a pretty accurate description of my nights for the past week. So. Much. Tired.

It's a busy season.
Days only working one job: 13/30 (good odds for once)
Days since I washed my hair: 4
Days since I've been in the mountains: too many
Days since I could properly put together a sentence: 0.

today i stepped into the kinross airport to see my cousins off before their long day of travel, and i started to tear up because i know that i am leaving this place next week too.

it hurts my heart to think about my life not taking place in the midwest. everything here smells good and it is home, more than any other place than i can think of, even my lovely salt lake. 
i don't want to leave, despite my arteries getting clogged. 
despite the mosquitoes, besides wal-mart being nearly the only store in town.
never mind the siberian winter, i could make it.

this past week has been too nice for words. 
salt lake feels like a burden that is hanging over my head. a deadline, maybe.

there are a lot of good things to come back to, friends to love, a church to serve, mountains to climb.
i love all of these things, and God has planted my flag in salt lake for a reason, but it is so hard to come back every year. this year i don't even have school looming over my head, so it just feels strange, to come back and continue my dead-end job. but i will keep moving. keep pursuing, and saying sad prayers, and trusting that God is using my small, day-to-day to benefit his Kingdom. and there is rest in that.

this time next week i will be sobbing silently in an airport in the middle of nowhere, but God has given me a lovely temporary home.  i am so blessed by my time in my small corner of what i imagine Heaven will look like.

summer has been a great blur of work and heat and "oh wait, it's already almost july" moments. i traded fun writing for SEO content writing, but that is tiring, so i am going to take some time off of getting paid to ramble, and ramble on my own terms.


there was that time i fell back in love with the mountains. i suppose i never lost any of the love i had for them, i just kind of forgot about it. between october and may it is virtually impossible for my little mazda to make it up the canyons, so the mountain love affair is put away. by the time may comes around, my heart is a little mushier, due to long months of comfort food and no exercise, so i have to work it back into hiking shape. i am there though. i have many new miles of dirt on my danner's to prove it. i want to go backpacking for a few nights, but getting time off of work for non-michigan related adventures simply isn't going to happen for me. michigan tempted me into taking a chunk out of my savings account again this summer. here's to another four-hour stint in the detroit airport.

another cool thing: i am planning on going to europe for a mission trip in 2014. this is scary to me for so many reasons. my heart has been to go to a place like honduras, because i feel very comfortable being quiet and getting dirty. it is very easy for me to go somewhere and serve with physical labor. sharing the gospel with a group of hard-hearted europeans, on the other hand, is not what i had in mind for myself. doors have always closed for me and latin america, but so many things are working for me to go to europe. i am terrified and still not sure if God will lead me all of the way there, but he knows what he is doing. i can only sit and marvel as things happen.

a few more things. mewithoutyou put on yet another great live show in salt lake city. my bakery is a whirlwind of drama and owner breakdowns and so many cupcakes. wedding season has not been too bad to me this year. i took a brief trip to california. brief is long enough for california, but it was good to spend time with my family. i met a sweet man who is in recovery at the rescue mission tonight and i just can't get him off of my mind. his heart to serve those who were serving him blew my mind. things are happy in salt lake city.

My car was perfectly clean until that moment when I left the windows cracked and all of the little leaves from the tree decided to slide their way in. I don't even know how they did it, but the floor and the seats are covered with tiny little leaf dots.

But besides my pointless car story. I am wondering if it is possible to have the country ingrained in your heart when you are from the city. I don't know if it's something I've carried for my whole life unknowingly, or if it's due to my recently renewed relationship with Michigan, but my heart is yearning for a life away from the city. I had a moment getting off of the interstate in Provo the other night, where I was surrounded by prairie grass, and Neko Case was sad-singing, where my heart felt like it was going to burst. I love Utah, so much. I love my church family and the work God is doing here. I love the mountains and the cute little blue houses and the fact that you just can't get lost. But, sometimes I have this incredibly frustrating emotion that makes me want to drop everything and run back to a place that I didn't even come from. How this get inside of me? I wish I could understand it.

I suppose I can find those places in Utah. Days spent wandering various canyon meadows, or nights watching the stars from the fields. But I can't and won't forget my times in the middle. Thanks for the reminder, Neko.


"weave between the seasons, under bridges and the valley, 'til the winds out on the prairie whip the tears from my eyes."

"The good thing about cheese is that it covers a multitude of sins."
-cooking wisdom from my Midwestern grandmother


I'm *officially* graduating on Friday, which means nothing to me except that my parents convinced some family to come into town. So that part's cool. When your family is spread out over all of the West (Midwest included), it gets hard to see each other. My parents and I have various church things, and my cousins have tennis lessons and college visits. We live in different worlds, but I can show them my 'good for right now' Salt Lake City, which I adore.

Good for right now. Maybe not good for later. God and time will tell. Right now I am enjoying the springtime and finally exploring my neighborhood without all of the snowy parts. There is a lot more to explore here than there was in the suburbs. The thing is, though, is that I am outnumbered by the hippies. They are everywhere, with their veganism, and their drum circles, and dreadlocks. There is no sense of Midwestern common sense. So many of these people look like characters that Fred Armisen has dreamed up. I guess they go home to their real families, and probably have to eat blandly healthy foods (without cheese, imagine that), so I suppose I shouldn't complain about them. They have their own problems to deal with, too...problems like which organic soy organic dairy-free milk is the best.

I am more cynical than I realize from day to day, but I am grateful that God can work on the worst of our hearts.

I think I took a break from exercise because I took a break from books. It was only fair. Except my body forgot what it was like to run and do push-ups and feel good again, so I am too pumped to sleep for my early morning job. My little upstairs bedroom is already summer-hot and I am wondering when that happened. It's nice to sleep with the windows open, except people are actually out late in Salt Lake. My neighbors chant and laugh and drink Fat Tire (how, I don't know) noisily out my window. I can see the Wells Fargo building out the same window, and it always reminds me of the time Nick tricked me into going and taking photos there for him. Salt Lake is good and nice, but I just wish I could replace Wells Fargo for the forest in my grandma's Michigan backyard. I still have dreams about that house and I am so happy to go back. I'm so happy to have family in town for my graduation so I can show them what life is like in not-so-dull Utah.

Enough rambling.
Sailor Jerry's and Dr. Pepper.
Goodnight Moon, goodnight Utah.