yesterday was bekah's birthday. happy birthday, dear friend! since i met bekah when i first moved to columbus, i have found a good friend - she's the kind of girl who makes it a point to keep in touch, and sends sweet emails and voice messages. she's also a social worker, and is planning to become a therapist. she's smart and funny, and always has a fashionable haircut. you rock, bekah!! today is nathalie's birthday. while bekah is one of my newer friends, nathalie is one of my oldest. i can go for weeks without talking to her, but always know she's my sister. she's truly one of the smartest women i know. we used to dream together of great careers and wonderful husbands. now she's a doctor who is going to change the world, and has one of the coolest marriages around. she's doing her residency in d.c., and has a passion for people who are looked over by the rest of society. she lives true to her convictions, and my life is better for knowing her. i love you, nathalie. in more mundane matters, i have the house to myself this weekend, with daniel having been in orlando on business since wednesday. i miss him! but he comes home tomorrow, and then we get to hang out with julianna, our potential housemate. we've always talked about wanting to have people live with us, and now may be the time. we don't really know juli, but she's from muncie and comes highly recommended. she's moving to columbus for a year to work with americorps. we haven't made a commitment on either end, but i have a feeling this could be the start of something good...

on thursday, i went to my cousin michael's funeral. he was 32 years old, and has had serious health problems all his life, but it was still unexpected. he had been feeling better lately, and was making plans to apply to law school. instead, he passed away in his sleep while napping on tuesday. my extended family is large, and i don't know everyone very well. but michael was my favorite cousin - close to my age, the one who tended to show up unexpectedly - like when he rang my parents' doorbell in pennsylvania at christmas last year because he just happened to be in town, even though his entire family was in indiana. in a large family, there can be a lot of conflict, but michael was the peacemaker, and made it a point to always talk to everyone, regardless of the current drama. our family loved michael. his funeral made it evident that everyone else loved him, too. i learned a lot about him at the service - his kindness, his endurance, his ambition. i'm not sure what else to say, so there it is for now...

happy belated martin luther king, jr. day! i had great ideas for posting something truly insightful and relevant yesterday. alas, i didn't have the day off of work, and got caught up in everyday living. when i was a junior at taylor, i took an intensive january class on the civil rights movement. we watched all eight hours of "eyes on the prize," complete with really great original footage and intense supplementary readings. that class was pivotal for me, and likley contributed to the fact that it's vital for me to live in a neighborhood that's racially and economically diverse. i'd like to see "eyes on the prize" again - maybe it would give me a kick in the pants. because, really, aside from choosing to live in our neighborhood, what am i doing to fight against racism and poverty? sadly, very little. speaking of our neighborhood, we have new friends! actually, daniel has an old friend who got married about six months before we did. now she and her husband live a few blocks down the street, and are attending our new church. they came over to hang out and play games on sunday evening, and let me just tell you that this feels like the beginning of a lifelong relationship. yay for neighbors who are also friends! our new church is also very exciting. we love, love, love our family at the landing place, but the change was necessary for a number of reasons. and it's been so good and hopeful. this is a place we're planning to stay, as long as we stay in columbus. that's a good feeling. in other news, i got seasons one and two of alias with christmas gift cards. now i have a secret fantasy life in which i'm not actually a pacifist, but a super-fit, multilingual spy. fun stuff! would anyone be willing to loan us season three? happy tuesday!

we're back from the carribean, and it's a new year. our vacation was incredible. but it's good to be home today. i had grand plans of writing posts every day and putting up lots of pictures, but (a) daniel left the memory card for the camera in his computer at home and (b) we forgot the cord to upload pictures to our laptop. so, we have about 10 pictures, and i was having too much fun relaxing to write regularly. besides, who wants to read seven posts about someone else's vacation? anyway, this is grey and misty, but if you look closely, you can see cuba. we were sailing around its coast for awhile, and it was one of the highlights for me emotionally. i would give almost anything to actually go there and stay for a short while. any ideas on how i can do that without getting thrown into jail? here's a view of the dock at ocho rios, jamaica. i took it mostly for the mountains. jamaica redeemed itself for us (after the honeymoon hurricane) with a pleasant town and a really great meal at "passage to india," a rooftop restaurant. i had forgotten that there is a large indian population in jamaica, and we ran into karan, our butler from bombay, at lunch. (yes, we had a butler. more on that later.) georgetown, grand cayman island, was our cleanest port. it's also the fifth largest financial center in the world, which was evident by the cost of living that appeared to be the same or slightly higher than the u.s. daniel and i had a great day here, though - we stumbled onto a fabric sale (nearly heaven for the creative genius husband), had great big curry plates for lunch at a place where there didn't seem to be any other tourists, and dreamed a little about buying a cute island home with a fenced-in yard complete with chickens. but all dreams of living on grand cayman competely disappeared as soon as we got to roatan, honduras. as daniel told a new friend on our ship, "some people are grand cayman people, and some are honduras people. we're honduras people." i've become convinced that the only way to really see an island when you only have a day is to rent a motor scooter and let yourself get a little lost, which is exactly what we did. we were going slow enough to see the jungle and wave at the kids along the road, but fast enough to go from one end of the island to another, and to get far enough up the hills to see beautiful houses nestled in the trees and to see the cutest little beach town ever, where you essentially walk out of your hostel room right onto the boat that takes you scuba diving. our other port was nassau, bahamas. it was actually our first port - lots of duty-free shopping, and i did jump into the fray to buy my first-ever (and probably last) designer purse rip-off. kate spade, thank you very much. time for a break. i'll give the lowdown on the ship and being a VIP in awhile... happy new year!!