Late October to early November my friend and I were backpacking around southern Mexico and Guatemala. This turned out to be one of the most educational three and a half weeks of my life.

Click on this link ----> ETSY to visit my store where you will find listings of the purses and wallets I create out of trash and other recycled materials. Thanks for looking!

Flipping through the grocery store ads, I came across 'Texas Grapefruit four for $1" and got pretty excited due to my love of fruits of the citrus nature. Next to the photo was a photo of a recipe idea. The combination of Grapefruit, Arugla, and Avocado caught my attention so I looked up the weblink accompanying it. After collecting, combining, and consuming ingrediants I must share how beautiful this salad is! Mine wasn't quite as pretty as the one in the photo, but I'm sure it tasted just as fabulous! Hmmmm! Thank you Fred Meyers Recipes!

Recipe:

Ingredients:

• 2 Texas Red Grapefruits
• 2 Tablespoons Fresh Grapefruit Juice
• 1 Tablespoon Red Wine Vinegar
• 4 Tablespoons Olive Oil
• 1 Tablespoon Honey
• 1/4 Teaspoon Salt
• 1/4 Teaspoon Fresh Ground Black Pepper
• 5 Cups Arugula
• 1 Avocado, cubed

Instructions:

• Halve the grapefruits. With a sharp knife, slice between the membranes. Remove the segments from 1 1/2 of the grapefruits. Juice the remaining half and set aside.
• Whisk together grapefruit juice, red wine vinegar, olive oil, honey, salt and pepper. Place grapefruit segments in dressing. Let stand for 5 minutes.
• Lay out arugula on serving plates, top with avocado chunks and ladle on grapefruit dressing.

From Seattle Pacific University's Response Magazine:

     Like many Americans, Corporal Jake DeShazer wanted revenge. It was World War II and the Japanese had bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, decimating the U.S. Fleet and killing more than 2,400 Americans. A bombardier in the Army Air Corps, DeShazer volunteered for a top-secret mission, agreeing to fly with the legendary Doolittle Raiders in a surprise bombing attack over Japan. After successfully completing their mission, DeShazer and seven other airmen were forced to parachute over occupied China. They were captured by the Japanese.

Only half of DeShazer’s eight-man crew survived (three were executed, and one died of starvation). Rescued by American paratroopers at the end of the war, Jake enrolled at Seattle Pacific College and was in a classroom just two months after leaving his prison cell. He met Florence Matheny on the Seattle Pacific campus and fell in love. The two completed their studies, graduated, and six months later boarded a ship for Japan as Free Methodist missionaries. A million copies of his printed testimony, I Was a Prisoner of Japan, were distributed ahead of Jake’s arrival.

For the next 30 years, DeShazer preached God's grace in Japan, and thousands of Japanese became Christians as a result of his ministry. Among them were two of his former prison guards and Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, the leader of the Japanese squadron that bombed Pearl Harbor. In 1950, after reading I Was a Prisoner of Japan, Fuchida began reading the Bible and became a Christian. He then spent the rest of his life as a missionary in Asia and the United States.

When asked to think back on his time in a tiny cell, what affected DeShazer most was the inspiration he received from reading that Bible. “My heart was filled with joy,” he told listeners everywhere. “I wouldn’t have traded places with anyone.”
Mitsuo Fuchido and DeShazer became lifelong friends.

I am reading Henry James 'Portrait of a Lady' and I come across a quote I am immediatly drawn to. Partly because it fits into my life philosophy and partly  because I've heard it before. Only this time it was written more than one hundred years prior to the example in Chuck Palahniuk book, 'Diary.'

    " ..every human being has his shell, and you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us-and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things!  One's self- for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps- these things are all expressive."
                                                                    Henry James Portrait of a Lady 1881

    "....everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like Saint George and the Dragon or The Rape of the Sabine Women, but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. Even the reason why you chose this scene, it's you. You are every color and brushstroke....The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face...Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary. . . ."
                                                                       Chuck Palahniuk Diary 2003

James brings up the idea of how interconnected humanity is while Palahniuk is doomed to eternal nihilism. His characters always are stuck in a quagmire of self inflicted isolation from community.

This event was the culmination of my time at Seattle Pacific University. It turned into an un-required senior project.  It started out when I took a political science class called 'International Peace and World Order,' which helped me realize how interconnected fashion is with globalization, social issues, and cultural identity. Part of the class was to create a project that related to the subject of the class. I decided to put together a fashion show to illustrate this concept. It took many months of brainstorming, collaboration, and research to the get the project going. Our final idea for the event was to show the roles, both positive and negative, that fashion plays in our lives through a show consisting of borrowed costumes, original student designs, music, and a video presentation. We showcased four collections: “Fashion as Military Power and Oppression,” “Fashion as Environment,” “Fashion as Cultural and Religious,” and “Fashion as Social Justice.” We titled the show ‘Gas Masks, Stilettos, and Designer Jeans: A Story of Fashion and Our Lives.’ I discovered that to hold an event on campus, it’s necessary to have campus support. After initial rejection from the Fashion department to sponsor the show, I finally sold the idea to the head of the department, under the condition that it would be completely student-driven and a fundraiser for local nonprofit agencies. Through an opportunity to be a part of “Project Red Dress,” (Seattle's version of Project Runway), I made connections with Seattle's industry association, the Fashion Group International (FGI). I took the fashion show idea and plan for implementation to a meeting with the board of FGI, and they decided to sponsor us for $2,000. This was a large enough sum to cover all the costs of the event. This meant we could donate all of the proceeds from the entry fees, raffles, and a percentage from vendor sales to our chosen charities, YWCA's Dress for Success and the Queen Anne Helpline. With a team of 12 dedicated students, the help of campus clubs Fashion Group and Sophia, the show turned out a great success and we raised $1,400 for charity. The whole thing was a difficult task to pull together. I questioned my sanity on multiple occasions as to why I took this on, with a full class schedule, working, and being in the Air Force Reserves, but I had an overwhelming sense that this was something I needed to do. The results were completely worth it.

"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs:
          to question,explore, experiment, experience,
           walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn,
                     dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak,
                    write, read, draw,
                   provoke, emote, scream,
                 sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand,
         look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound,
                                                   walk back, walk forward,
                                        circle, hide, and seek.
 To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers."
 
                            -Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist and author (b. 1955)

I adopted two rats on April 19th. I named her Carpathia. Sarah named hers Matilda. I come home on April 25th, and hear a plethora of little peepy noises coming from rat cage direction. I dug through the newspaper scraps that made up the rat nest to discover lots of tiny wiggly pink peanuts! I am a grandma! Carpathia was knocked up when I got her and I didn't even know it. She had 15 little babies. Seven days later they are beginning to tell of what colour they will be:






Rats are born with skin covering their eyes and ears. By week two this skin covering disappears. By six weeks you need to separate the girls from the boys because by eight weeks they are able to reproduce. They grow up so quickly! Anyone want a rat baby?

 


NORTH KOREA

I got the opportunity to take a tour to the DMZ (De-militarized Zone). This is a 2.5 mile wide space that divides the North (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) with the South (Republic of Korea). This space spans the entire 155 mile border from coast to coast and has since the armistice that stopped the Korean War in 1953. This no-man's land has fences and guard stations to make sure that that way. I heard talk that if ever the two countries reunify, then this could be turned into a large national park since its been preserved for the last 50 years. There is one place on the DMZ where the two countries touch. The JSA (Joint Security Area) is a heavily guarded area, where the border between the two countries is just a concrete line on the ground. This area is manned on the southern side by the United Nations, The U.S. Army, and the South Korean Military, and the North Koreans carefully guard there half of this area. There are buildings overlapping the border, designed for the two countries to have talks. But these never happen. At one time soliders from both sides could intermingle throughout the entire JSA, but there were a few incidents that changed this. One involed North Korean soliders attacking and killing an American with an axe. So now, they each stay on their respective sides and stare at each other. An eery
experience. Along the border on the southern side, there are various tourist areas that promote peace and hope for reunification. On the tour, we visited a few of these places as well as the JSA. These first photos are at a few of these tourist spots.









At the Joint Security Area:





If you look carefully, the North Korean soldier is looking at us with binoculars. Apparently, no North Korean citizens are allowed to come to their half of the JSA, but they have Chinese tourists sometimes that come. I can just imagine it. Them standing over there taking photos of us, standing right here taking photos of them, and the North and South still not talking. While I was in Korea, an American symphony played in Pyeongyang, the capital of North Korea, which was a pretty big deal. There is hope yet!


 
The North and the South are each allowed to have one village in the DMZ. This is a photo of the North's village. It is full of three and four story buildings, many of them never finished, which were built to give the illusion of a prosperous country. Occasionally farmers can be seen farming around the village but that is it. the flag pole is 160 meters tall, built shortly after the South Korean DMZ village built a 100 meter tall pole. There used to be speakers and signs located in Propaganda village blaring propaganda along the lines of "the North rules, the sough sucks." But they were made to remove these. There are quite a few tours visible from where I was standing that are designed to block radio or whatever other types of waves from transmitting into the North. Essentially to cut their people off from any source of information from the outside world.