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…to my Irish former-flatmates: Dave and Stephen.  I raise my glass and drown my shamrock in memory of the great flat on Lonsdale Terrace and those with whom I resided there.

Yes, as we have just rolled over not one but two numbers on the calendar, I thought maybe we should take a look back at the past ten years to see where we’ve gone.  I mean, a lot has happened.  Ten years ago at midnight, I was standing on the hill above Twisp waiting for the lights to go out…oh, Y2K, you really threw us for a loop.

So here’s a list of the top ten best things (or at least interesting things) that happened in the past decade:

10.  I graduated from high school!  And college!  And grad school!

9.  Ran the London Marathon and broke the 2:40 barrier (also ran three other marathons this decade…shooting for ten in the next decade!)

8.  Played with a crazy monkey while living in Ecuador for a year, working at Covenant Bible College.  Also went spelunking with a one-legged man.  Also climbed a 19k+ ft mountain: Cotopaxi.

7.  Travelled all around Europe…from Norway to Greece and everywhere in between!

6.  More and more running…running in high school, running in college, running aftercollege…lots of good times, good races, good people…in the Mountains in Winthrop, on the beach in Santa Barbara, on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, through the streets of London, through the hills of Thailand, getting chased by dogs in Ecuador, getting stress fractures in the summers…is it sad that I spend so much time at this activity?  I don’t think so.  It’s provided some pretty incredible moments.

5.  Went to Thailand for a four months and loved it…lived in a tribal village, ate great food, had crazy adventures.

4.  Spent a year in Scotland doing my masters degree.  Hung out with some great folks, explored higher theology, got started in professional coffee making.

3.  Worked on a llama ranch in Colorado for the summer after college.  Also fought forest fires for a couple of summers…hence my alter ego: Fuego.

2.  Spent a year with the Canby Community learning to live well.

1.  Learned a lot about life, about God, about people, about myself.

Goals for the next decade: 1.  Get a Ph.D., 2.  Run sub-2:30 in a marathon, 3. Spend another year living overseas, 4. Live well.

I was talking to a friend here at the Canby House (I’m still in Portland for my Christmas Break) the other day and he was commenting on how 2009 was an eventful year.  I proceeded to think to myself, “Wow.  2009 was a pretty boring year for me!”  I mean, it’s not that nothing happened, but it really was kind of just a normal year (whereas the last several have been quite eventful).  Moving to Alaska was kind of the only big momentous thing.  So here’s a list of the top ten small but meaningful things that happened to me this year.

10.  The Canby House community garden project was a success!  Though I wasn’t there to reap many of the fruits of my labor, it was a great experiment that taught me a lot and allowed for

some great time and conversations with great people and plus it felt good just to spend a lot of time outside and getting dirty.

9.  Spent a day with Cousin Shannon hiking around Multnomah Falls and having lunch at McMenamins Edgefield.

8.  I spent a lot of good time with Cousin Jesse and Now-Cousin-In-Law Jen…two people who are great and who I hadn’t seen a lot within the past decade/hadn’t really gotten to know well at all.

7.  I won a marathon.  Granted there were only about 25 people in the race.  Granted my time was twenty-seven minutes slower (that’s one minute per mile) than my previous slowest time…but I WON!

6.  I traveled into the Alaskan Bush to the village of Shaktoolik…a very eye opening experience.

5.  I took on a job that I actually enjoy!  Let’s hear it for jobs with intellectual stimulation!

4.  I got to spend several days with my whole family in the Methow back in April.  I hadn’t seen my brother Ben’s family in almost two years and it had been three years since we had all been together.

3.  East of Eden entered my list of the best books ever written.

2.  When I was driving up to Alaska with my cousin Jesse, somewhere near the Alaska/Canada border at about 3am, we pulled over to the side of the road to look at the northern lights.  It was pretty cool.  But then it got even better when meteors were shooting across them.  Spectacular.

1.  Lots of good time spent with great people doing nothing particularly special but just enjoying wonderful fellowship.  Thanks everybody!

Hey friends,

It’s been a hard couple of days.  Sean McCabe, my friend, mentor, high school art teacher and coach passed away on Saturday after a short six-month battle with cancer.

Six months ago, he would have been the healthiest, strongest guy you could imagine.  It doesn’t make much sense to believe that he could be sick or that he could be gone.

Sean lived well.  He was the guy who loved and befriended everyone.  Everybody wanted to take art at Liberty Bell High School, because everybody wanted to be around Sean.  He always sought to make everybody feel included, to love the outsiders.  In everything that he did, he unashamedly lived out the call to love God and love his neighbor.  Sean’s life turned out to be shorter than anyone would have desired, but he lived it to the fullest.

Please keep Sean’s wife, Laura, in your prayers…along with their two little girls (8 and 5 years old).  They have a great community to support them in the Methow Valley, but it will of course be a difficult time ahead.

We will all miss you, Sean.

If you would like to check out Sean’s art, go here.  Art sales go to support his family.

(Photo by John Hanron, borrowed from http://www.seanmccabestudio.com/pages/contact.html)

I just got back to Soldotna this afternoon after spending five days with the fam up in Eagle River.  My cousin Jesse got married on Friday to his girlfriend of nine years, Jen.  It was a pretty cool time.  Those two are about the best matched couple I’ve ever seen.  And it was great because, even though Jesse looked a bit stunned, Jen was just having a blast with it all.  It was also a good week because I just got to hang out with cousins and aunts and uncles that I just don’t see enough these days.  We were also celebrating my grandparents 60th wedding anniversary.  And my grandmother’s 80th birthday.  So it’s been a big weekend.  It’s good to have family that I can really appreciate.  And I do.

I wasn’t actually awake for the event.  It happened somewhere around 3 am on Wednesday morning.  We’d been driving for the past 22 hours…ever since I crawled out of my sleeping bag at that rest area somewhere west of Prince George at 5 am, sunrise, and hopped in the car to get us going again.  The idea was that Jesse was going to drive until he got tired, then he’d pull over and we’d sleep and then I’d probably be up early again and get us going again…but Tuesday night, Jesse was just feeling awake.  So he kept driving.  And he was doing a good job.  He managed to not hit the group of elk that were in the middle of the road.  He missed the coyote too.  Hordes of insects fared not so well, but no one will put up a fuss over them.  We hadn’t seen any moose.  Or bears.  There was one cow that was wandering along the side of the road, but she stayed to the side and we passed without incident.  So why, fuzzy bunny?  Why did you feel the need to dart across the highway right as my sleek, V4 missile  of doom came rocketing down the road way up there in the remote regions of the Yukon Territory?  Why?

I never woke up to the incident.  But Jesse confessed to me later on.  Poor bunny.

Well, that’s my way of trying to make a rather uneventful trip sound a little more exciting.  Yep.  I am up here in Alaska now.  My cousin, Jesse, and I drove up.  I left Portland at 6am on Monday, picked

Jesse up in Olympia and started driving north.  Jesse kept us going until about midnight on Monday until we were a little ways west of Prince George.  We pulled over and slept a bit and when I woke up at 5, I got us going again (we made a good tag team).  We then ended up driving straight through to Eagle River…Jesse driving through the night, me taking over again at 5am…crossing the border into Alaska at about 4…getting there before noon on Wednesday.  Overall, it took us a grand total of 54 hours to complete a trip that was supposed to be 46 hours of drive time.  Pretty good.

A few highlights:

1. The Cassier Highway (highway 37 in BC) was beautiful.

2. Somewhere up in the Yukon at about 2am on Wednesday, we saw the northern lights shining and so we pulled over to get a better look.  There were no lights anywhere (you know, the Yukon is basically empty…).  So it was pretty cool.  And then it got even better when several meteors went streaking across the sky as accompaniment.

3. We only hit on rabbit and a couple of birds.  No moose.  No bear.  No elk.  No deer.  No caribou.  Not even that porcupine that I saw.

4. Alaska is kind of pretty.

5. My car rocks.  No breakdowns or blowouts or anything bad like that.  And on the positive side…I think I averaged about 34 mpg.

So here I am in Soldotna now.  Getting settled, preparing for classes, trying to figure out what life is going to be like for this next year.  That’s the scoop.