Life as a tourist...

One of the advantages of having your parents come visit you in a city they've never been to: they want to do all the fun touristy stuff you haven't had the chance to do yet! (And, while our somewhat humble YAV stipends are actually plenty to live on so long as you're intelligent about it, it was still nice to be taken care of for a few days.) So if you haven't figured it out by now, the lovely Margo and Dave Wehrung were here this past week, and we sure packed in the Nashville experiences. Here's the list...with pictures!

Tuesday night:

• firstly Mom and Dad got to experience the excitement that is PSF on Tuesday nights. :)
• Live music at the Bluebird Cafe (we saw Marshall Chapman and Will Kimbrough...neither of which I had heard of before, but both of which were great!) 

Wednesday:

• Lunch at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, complete with live music, "world famous" barbecue (the menu said so...), and maybe a fermented beverage or two. 
• Some wandering around the Bicentennial Mall, admiring the capitol building and the nifty map of Tennessee that's in the ground (turns out I know more about Nashville than I thought...I could actually tell my parents what things were!). This was in lieu of a more exciting activity that was supposed to happen but fell through...but it was nice, anyway!
• Chihuly at Cheekwood = some of Dale Chihuly's awesome glasswork on display outside in this botanical garden...we walked around during the day and saw it in the light, then saw it again once it got dark! 
• Deeeelicious dinner at the Germantown Cafe.

Thursday:

• tour of the Ryman Auditorium, which has a bunch of really cool history that I didn't know until now! Still kind of bitter I'm not seeing the Avett Brothers play there this weekend, but one day...one day I'll see them live!
• tour of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. I'd been around the outside several times, seeing as the park is right across the street from my office, but it turns out there's an art gallery or two inside, and a giant statue of Athena. I mean, who doesn't need a lifesize replica of the Parthenon in their city? Totally normal, right?
• Annnnd then Mom and Dad came to TOT with me.

And that, my friends, is probably the busiest 2.5 days I've had since I moved here. I don't know, maybe not, but it's definitely in the running. Here's the photographic evidence for those who are interested...

Lunch at Tootsie's

Bicentennial Mall

Chihuly

Mom and Dad

Being good tourists at the Ryman

Athena's nobody to be messed with...

So there ya have it, my past week. I didn't realize how much I'd missed having close friends/family around, so it was a good few days. Hiking with PSF today, and some Halloween festivities later...then playing handbells in church tomorrow morning. Life in Music City continues!

Love,

Allison.

Homecoming...or one of them, at least.

Hello once again, dear friends!

This past weekend was homecoming at Furman, so Madame Blueberry and I headed down to Greenville, SC. It was a strange thing, though, to be in such familiar territory in such an unfamiliar context. Gone are the days of being around for and participating in the week-long competition between sororities and fraternities, and the days leading up to it looking forward to seeing those older friends that had already graduated. Instead, I am now for better or worse one of the "older friends," and homecoming week has become something more like homecoming 36 hours. Strange it was, but a good strange. Thanks to a lovely certain Delta Gamma little sister of mine (and her roomies of course), I had a futon to sleep on for the weekend...and delicious nachos to snack on at night. :) And I mean, it didn't hurt that DG and Beta Theta Pi (the fraternity we were paired with) won that homecoming competition I just mentioned.

I'll admit that I'm not the best at keeping in touch with people from far away, but the fact that I could still go back for a short weekend and that people were so interested in what I was doing, or so willing to tell me about whatever they're doing...it's a special thing, I think. In a way it was kind of like we never left. Not to mention the entertainment of reminiscing about various events of the last four years. So, to any Furman folks who may happen to be reading this...thanks for being lovely, friends. :)

The reason I titled this post the way I did: I started actually thinking about the word "homecoming." Home. Coming. Coming home. I've been blessed with multiple homes, each of which I hold close to my heart, for different reasons. There's Davidson...home home, and a place in which I'll forever be comfortable and content. But Furman is home, too. Camp is home. Nashville isn't, yet, but I think there's a good chance Music City'll make the cut by the end of this whole YAV deal. I'm so so thankful for all of these places that have people I love, and it's pretty wonderful to feel at home (whatever that phrase means, exactly) in all of them. So, this post talks about one of them.

Mom and Dad are in town this week and we've been doing all sortsa touristy/fun things. Be on the lookout for another post in a few days after they're gone...with pictures, too!

Love,
Allison.

Fun Fact

Hey friends! 
So, as I learned at church on Sunday, 2PC is a More Light congregation, which means they officially support More Light Presbyterians (which in turn supports "the full participation of LGBT Christians in the life and ministry of the Presbyterian Church"). Now, personally I think this is pretty awesome, and the fact that a group like MLP exists makes me like the good ol' PC(USA) even more than I already did. I'm fully aware of the fact that not everybody agrees with that, and that maybe some people will be pretty uncomfortable when they read this. But it's just something that I think is cool and wanted to share.


Off to Furman for homecoming this weekend, and I'm quite excited to see everyone! :)


Until next time...
Love,
Allison.

Peace and Playgrounds

Hey friends! 

All sorts of things have been happening lately (including a lovely weekend with some very dear camp friends), but I'm just going to write about a couple here...in all likelihood this'll still probably turn out to be a lengthy post. It won't hurt my feelings if you just want to skim...


The sermon at PSF this past Tuesday was about peace. About sharing it, and about receiving it, with and from the most unlikely of people. We heard about how most people nowadays (myself included) worry too much about "stranger danger" to really consider sharing the peace of Christ (or whatever sort of peace you believe in) with people that are different from us. As unfortunate as it is, we live in a world where sometimes you really do have to worry about strangers...there are just some really mean people out there. But I'm hoping that this year I can challenge myself to go out on a limb and share a different kind of peace. Or if it's the same kind, maybe share it in a new way. Passing the Peace is common practice in a lot of churches (at least the ones I've been to), but as with a lot of things we say in church, I think it sort of becomes a reflex. "Peace be with you...and also with you." That's not to say it's not meaningful, but once we say something enough, I think we tend to stop really thinking about what it means. The beginning of passing the peace during PSF worship is a little different...in a really great way. Before the standard hand shaking (or ideally, if you ask me, hugging), whoever happens to be the liturgist that night says: "Not an easy peace, not an insignificant peace, not a half-hearted peace, but the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you." I don't mean by saying all this that the regular kind of peace we pass is bad. But if the peace of Christ isn't easy or half-hearted, why should sharing it with other people be? So...I don't know. Just something to think about.


I've spent the past few days on PSF's fall break "trip" doing flood relief work here in Nashville. The first two days we worked on houses through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, and the third day we cleaned out a (mostly) dry river/creek bed. If you don't really know anything about the flood that happened this past May (I didn't, really, until I came here) and you're interested, here's a Youtube video somebody made. On the first day we (the four students and four PSF staffers that were there) arrived at a house with an empty dumpster and huge piles of stuff in the backyard. We left at the end of the day with a full dumpster and significantly fewer piles. :) Seriously...there was some legit strategy going on to pack that dumpster. The entire first level of this house had to be gutted because of the water damage, so the piles we cleaned up consisted of everything from soggy drywall and wood to a sink, carpet, and broken tiles. We even came across two black widows in a dresser we had to take apart...yes, the sledgehammer I used to kill one might've been a wee bit excessive, but hey, the sledgehammer was already in my hand. One of the students did the other one in with a shoe. Day two's house was being rebuilt by Habitat for Humanity, which in the Nashville area has added rebuilding/flood relief to their usual building-houses-from-the-ground-up agenda. We PSFers worked on several different parts of the house, but I spent the day painting baseboards and pieces of door frame. Six hours of the same white paint got a little tedious, but it was still great to be able to help get a house that much closer to being livable again. Day three was my favorite...maybe the hardest, work-wise, but the best nonetheless. We cleaned debris out of a (mostly) dry river bed. Now this was some serious debris. Like...there was someone's wooden porch in a tree. (Also in trees: a gas can, and a couple hoses.) I think I might now be somewhat of an expert in using a crowbar to pry apart pieces of decks/porches. It was crazy though, some of the stuff we found. I mean I'd heard that the flood was really bad, but finding a little girl's shoe, a pink Crayola marker, a stuffed monkey caked in dry mud and practically squished flat...I can't imagine just having life as I know it washed right away. It was pretty surreal to listen to the chainsaw cutting the washed up playground into pieces small enough for us to carry away. And to think of all the new things that have happened to me since May, compared to the fact that there are still so many people here just trying to get back to life as it was. 


Well, congrats if you made it through that whole post...until next time, friends.
Love,
Allison.

Weekend Happenings

Hey friends!

Some fun stuff happened this weekend, so I thought I might share them with those of you who are interested enough to be reading this blog...nothing too intense in this post, just some weekend happenings. :)

So there's this First Friday service at Christ Church Cathedral downtown that happens every (you guessed it...) first Friday of the month. It's an Episcopal church that puts on this monthly service for the community. In place of a sermon, each month there's a different...expression of faith, I guess you could call it. We YAVs have gone both first Fridays we've been in town, and it's been really great. The free wine and snazzy cheese hors d'oeuvres that happen afterwards may or may not be extra motivation to go, but it really has been a cool experience. The first time we went it was Labor Day weekend, and the "sermon" was a local group performing songs from the musical Working, about different professions. This past Friday there was some liturgical dance goin' on while a woman read something having to do with creation. I can't remember what exactly the reading was adapted from, but it wasn't biblical...just kind of having to do with a vague spirituality and the interconnectedness of things. I liked it. There was also a lady that, throughout the service, was working on a chalk drawing at the front of the sanctuary. It's the kind of worship service that's just different enough to be refreshing, but not so unfamiliar that you're made uncomfortable by it. That's not to say that getting out of your worship/religious comfort zone is always a bad thing, but you get the idea. I also like that all of us can go together. I've really loved being at 2PC, but worshiping with all seven YAVs is pretty lovely too.

Saturday was such a lovely day. Started off hiking at Radnor Lake with Vic and a new friend, Kenna. It was far from a super intense trail, but it was wonderful to spend more time outside in the fall weather. (And hey, the trail went uphill some!) We saw a few deer chillin' out right off of the trail, and later some wild turkeys (one was eating a snake...cool stuff). Here are a couple pictures of the lake...

After hiking and some chill time in the Shed (as in Toolshed/my house), I went with Mary Kate and her friend that was visiting to a cultural festival in Centennial Park. Las Paletas (seriously, best popsicles you'll ever have) had a stand, and I decided to try out the hibiscus flavor. Kiiind of worried it'd be like eating a flower, I decided to try nonetheless. It was kind of odd, but good! And I mean hey, how many times do you get the opportunity to try a hibiscus popsicle?

Post-park-wandering, it was back to the Shed for a while, then we YAVs headed downtown towards Broadway, where we found a trailer park themed bar, and, including at the karaoke place where we ended up, about 2039842 bachelorette parties. Quite the entertaining night, and quite the excellent weekend.

Love,
Allison.