Plea For Mail

Hey howdy hey, folks!

I'm back for the last time. Tomorrow I report to the Missionary Training Center in sunny Provo, Utah, and then in a few weeks it will be off to New York! As such, I'd like mail. I am refusing to email during the course of my mission. Regular stamp mail is slower, more expensive, and thus more satisfying to send and receive. Please send me some.

You can write me at the MTC until just before Thanksgiving:

Sister Madison Rhea VanDenBerghe

New York Rochester Mission

Provo Missionary Training Center

2005 N 900 E

Provo, UT 84604

And after that I can always be reached by way of the mission office:

Sister Madison Rhea VanDenBerghe

New York Rochester Mission

100 Perinton Hills Office Prk Ste 120

Fairport, NY 14450-3603

If you want a reply, please include your return address and I promise I will do what I can to write back.

Thank you all for reading, even when I forget to post and when the updates are lame. I'll see you in about 18 months. Keep it real.

HA. HA.

As a major fan of the juvenile but hilarious website icanhascheezburger.com, I uploaded a couple of pictures of the family pets to be captioned. Some were more banal than hilarious, but a couple gems did turn out:

Ickle Verdy in the chicken flowerpot! This picture is just the cutest thing ever.

Most of the comments on the chicken flowerpot picture were dumb, but this little snippet of conversation I found quite amusing:

Harry v

really, no-one notices the incredibly bad taste for having a chicken like that at all?
I really have to point it out?

Reply
Zoid
September 30, 2009 at 1:46 pm
It just looks like a chicken planter. What’s so bad taste about it?

Mom and I had a laugh at the people attacking (and defending) her choice of gardening equipment...

And last but definitely not least, my personal favorite, about which I will not say much because the picture itself says it all:

21, Huh? Weird.

I am 21 years old. I am a real-life adult these days, which is giving my mom a wiggins lately. She posted to her blog this über-cute picture of me on my first birthday. Come on, look at that face! I was too cute for school, that's for sure.

My splendiferous friends Megan, Krista, and Gloria threw me a birthday party on Saturday which was, in two word, teh cool. We spent an hour goofing about IKEA and eating delicious Swedish meatballs in the upstairs restaurant.

They had interesting pet beds... looked more like road kill, to be honest.

This one of Gloria in front of a print turned out really cool.

Flowerdy fez ftw!

After IKEA we headed back to my house for pumpkin pie and presents. I got quite a haul, including a t-shirt, painting, and my very own custom-made plushie doll. Well, everything was custom-made, so the doll was on theme.

Karate Kid much? It's tradition for one of our presents to include fancy ribbons which may double as hair ornamentation, and since my 'do isn't exactly conducive to hair ribbons, I went with the kamikaze headband look.

Boy, don't I have the best friends ever? THANK YOU, GUYS! I had a great time. Excellent pie, Megs. ^_^

And a couple more old pictures before I sign off, because in addition to the best friends ever, I also have the best parents ever.

Old Pictures From Vacation

This post is an assortment of pictures taken over the past couple of months. I don't exactly have much to blog about these days, so this is what you get.

This is Brinley and some of our cousins eating delicious jiao ze (potstickers or dumplings) in Chinatown. Being in Chinatown really made me nostalgic. I kept accidentally saying things in Chinese to the shopkeepers.

This was part of an exhibit at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. The exhibit was all about going to the moon and being an astronaut, but this was my favorite - teeny tiny robots!!!! Aren't they CUTE?!?

That day in Philadelphia our family split up: Dad and Mom took Morgan and Thomas to Betsy Ross's house and a couple of historic sites while Nathaniel, Brinley, and I went to the Franklin Institute. The reason we went there? This.

Actually, I didn't know that I would have the chance to sit in Captain Kirk's chair until we got there. But isn't that COOl? The day we arrived in Philadelphia we were driving around in our rental car and out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the Enterprise, which turned out to be an advertisement for this exhibition. Immediately I announced that I would be going there no matter what it took, so thankfully the parents relented and the three of us got to go see it. Needless to say, I had an absolute fantastic time there.

We actually weren't supposed to take pictures, and the museum workers kept pretty close watch on us patrons, but I did manage to sneak the one above and this one here. I took this picture mostly to show Morgan and Nicole because this knife looks exactly like the one Mayor Wilkins gives to Faith in the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In Honor of .!'?,:;"

Yes, folks, today is National Punctuation Day. Who knew there was a holiday dedicated to one of the topics nearest and dearest to my heart? *smirks* I did.

Today's post consists mostly of links to related websites:

The Apostrophe Protection Society, mentioned in the delightful book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss.

Apostraphe Abuse and The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, blogs with real photographical evidence of punctuational travesties.

And finally, here is a funny video dealing with punctuation:

Random Thoughts From 25-35 Year Olds

A link on a friend's Facebook brought me to this blog, from which I have copied my favorite random thoughts:

I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I'll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone's laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I'm still the only one who really, really gets it.

Nothing bites more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.

Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you're going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like
check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you're crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the "people you may know" feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?

Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.

There is a great need for sarcasm font.

I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?

I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!

Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using 'as in' examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss's last name to an attorney and said "Yes that's G as in... (10 second lapse)... ummm... Goonies"

While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it... thanks to Mario Kart.

MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
(That one was for you, Mom!)

Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I'm from, this shouldn't be a problem....

Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.

There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.

I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

When I meet a new girl, I'm terrified of mentioning something she hasn't already told me but that I have learned from some light internet stalking.

Why is a school zone 20 mph? That seems like the optimal cruising speed for pedophiles...

Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

Even if I knew your social security number, I wouldn't know what do to with it.

My 4-year-old son asked me in the car the other day "Dad, what would happen if you ran over a ninja?" How in the world do I respond to that?

As a student driver, I was more worried about someone running into me. As an adult driver, my stomach churns at the sight of the "student driver" sign on the back of a Chevy sedan.

Before I go clothes shopping, I have to make sure that nothing in the outfit I am wearing was purchased at any of the stores I plan to visit, because I am worried one worker might recognize the t-shirt I bought three years ago.

Graphic T-Shirt Friday

A couple of months back I decided to start my own tradition, a sort of weekly holiday, if you will. I call it Graphic T-Shirt Friday, or simply T-Shirt Friday (see, I had to add the "graphic" on there to be more specific). Today I'm wearing a shirt with Obi-Wan Kenobi on the front and the quote "That business on Cato Neomoidia doesn't count" on the back. I have quite a collection. Most feature characters and lines from my favorite movies and television shows, but I do have a couple of Rush shirts and this, my latest find:

My good friend Abby sent me a link to a website that had a list of "101 T-Shirts for Scientists, Science Geeks, and Nerds!" which has turned out to be a veritable cornucopia of excellent potential T-Shirt Friday attendees. Among my favorites are (the two Star Wars shirts are from another site):

And the most hilarious one, given the irony when taken in context with my recent surgery:

It got me thinking. When I come home from my mission and graduate school and land a job as a science teacher, I want to continue the tradition of rockin' t-shirts on Fridays. That is, I will if the school will let me... Heck, I'd stick with the science theme if they felt it was more academic. Either way, I'm going to be the cool science teacher.

Arrrrrrrm

A couple of weeks ago I went to the doctor for a pre-mission physical, and had a mole biopsied. I didn't think anything of it until we got back from our family vacation and had no less than six or seven messages from the doctor's office on the answering machine. I went in promptly the next day and found out that I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma (<--click link for information). My doctor referred me to a surgical oncologist who specializes in melanoma and I was scheduled for surgery to have what is called a wide excision. This means a football-shaped hunk of flesh would be cut out of my arm (the dimensions of excision being five inches long and a little more than one inch wide) and the remaining... ah, arm... would be sewn back together. Way cool.

Luckily for me, the melanoma was caught early enough that it hadn't penetrated very far into my skin. If caught early, melanoma is quite treatable. If not... well, I (and my family) am just glad it was.

In any case, it is all taken care of, and from now on I just need to be extra cautious regarding sun exposure, especially for the next two years.

I don't have a picture of my arm before surgery (yet. can you email it, Maryanne?), but here's one of me opening the mission call, and you can see the little dark spot on my arm where the biopsy was done.

Post-surgery bandages. Holy cow this wad of gauze was huge. I had to keep it on for two days, which meant I was forced to wear only stretchy t-shirts and was given pity looks from ladies at Costco. Check out my pajamas! I made 'em last week. I'll have to do a post of all the sewing I have been doing lately; it's quite extensive.

There, I finally got the bandages off. Some of the gauze stuck to the superglue they used instead of stitches.

This one is a good angle to illustrate the divot they left in my arm. Pretty wild, eh?

Because they removed such a wide piece of my arm, the skin that was stuck back together is now really tight. I don't have much room for movement yet, but it's supposed to fill in underneath and stretch back out over time. For now, I'm happy with my little shark bite.

Mission Call, Belated

Yeah, yeah, I got it a week ago and pretty much all of you know where I'm going already, but here's the obligatory post about it.

I'm going on a mission! To Rochester, New York! Funny thing is, the day after I turned all my papers in, I left with my family to none other than Rochester for a family trip (for some pictures from our vacation, you can head on over to my mom's blog: she hasn't done a whole lot about it, but there are some pictures from Palmyra). Yup. Little did I know that I'd be back there come November, complete with name tag and beige nylons.

Which is partially a lie - I will never wear beige nylons.

I digress. The point is, I'm serving a mission and I couldn't be happier about it. Rochester is beautiful and there is so much Church history there. It's pretty much the best mission ever, and I'm not even out yet.

That's a good sign, I think.

Caving In

Call me whatever you want, but I'm caving in to the inane but popular "Guess Where I'm Going On My Misson!" game. I had wanted to avoid this, but alas, my inner fortitude isn't as fortified as I thought.

I'll be nice and let everybody guess a couple of places each. Leave a comment with your guesses and if you get it right, I'll give you a high five or something.

Quick Aside

Many of you may be aware that I have been preparing to go on a mission. Good news! I submitted my mission papers a little more than a week ago, and they are currently being processed. For those who aren't familiar with the process, I'll briefly explain, using myself as the example.

When I first seriously thought about serving a mission (I say seriously because it's been a lifelong dream), I met with my bishop. We talked about my plans and why I wanted to serve, and then he set up an account on the missionary candidate website. In the past, the missionary papers were filled out on actual paper and submitted in the mail. The entire process took months to complete, but now most of it is done online, which streamlines and speeds up everything.

I filled out the forms online, filling out basic personal information like date of birth and things like that. Then came more specific questions like "do you speak a second language" and "have you lived in a foreign country" (I'm paraphrasing, obviously). Then come a set of medical forms and other related information. The Church has to know if you have any serious medical conditions because if you have some debilitating disease and you get called to Papua New Guinea or something and there aren't adequate medical facilities to take care of you, things would get hairy. They like to keep people like that in the United States or other developed countries where they can be looked after properly. Luckily for me, I'm right as rain, so I'm crossing my fingers for an overseas call.

After all these forms are filled out, I saw my doctor and dentist and they each filled out evaluations, validating what I mentioned on the medical forms. Then I went back to my bishop and turned in those evaluations and the rest of the online forms. When that is complete, the bishop writes his recommendations and turns all of that into the stake president. I met with him a week ago, and after that meeting, he in turn writes his thoughts on my papers. He then submits them to the mission headquarters, where they are evaluated by a committee that assigns each candidate individually to a mission.

Once your papers are submitted to the mission office, it usually takes about two or three weeks to get your official call in the mail. I'm thinking mine will come next week - I'll keep you posted. Wish me luck!

Black Belt Test

Last week I tested for the my black belt. I wasn't as nervous before as I have been for other tests, which turned out to be a huge plus because nerves are consistently my downfall. Luckily, this time I was able to keep it under better control and I didn't forget one of my forms. Whew! I felt like this was my strongest test yet, and I hope I passed. When we get back from our trip I will find out.

Reading up on form definitions before the test begins.

Mr. Tatton, my teacher (middle), let me test early because I would be going out of town with the fam. Mssrs. Smith and Patterson, black belts at my school, were nice enough to stick around after class and judge.

Doing my forms. I did five in all: Do San, Yong Gom, Hwa Rang, Hyun Sil, and my testing pattern, Choong Moo. This was the part I was most worried about, as I tend to be inconsistent in this area. I kept my cool and only made a couple big mistakes, so that was good.

Sparring, everybody's favorite part of martial arts! Actually, I hated sparring until this year. It's a confidence issue, really. I didn't do as well against these guys as I have in the past, but I didn't fudge it completely. I hope.

Heh. This picture is one of my favorites - I totally ate it.

Haha! And now I'm completely wide open to Mr. Smith's twist kick. Ok, I'm not as big of an idiot as these pictures attest.

Now I get drilled on pattern definitions. Apparently somebody said something funny. It was probably me.

I lied - this is actually the best part of testing. I love breaking boards. There's nothing like the feel of snapping pine to boost your self-confidence. It's a terrific feeling when you get it right the first time, and dreadfully painful if you mess up. Trust me.

For my breaks I chose a right palm strike and left axe kick. Mom took a bunch of pictures in rapid succession and got some really cool shots. I think Dad got some video, so I'll have to upload that later.

I nailed my breaks! At least I know I got 100 percent on that part of my test.

Yeah, yeah, I know this post is kinda lame, being nothing but pictures of me and all, but I was just so excited that my family actually came to this test and got pictures. Thanks to Krista and Nicole for coming to watch, too. You guys rock!