BEDA - April 5th

Today is my mom's birthday! Woot! Happy **nd birthday! (Can you guess the number??)

Anywhoozle, Sunday...what a day. Wait, Saturday first.

Saturday...we spent alllll day at the beach, till the sunset, then came back home to the mission. Then we asked lovely Bonnie if we could go to the Nut House to "bake something" which turned into a massive, semi-epic-fail of a dinner(hamburgers and hash browns) and cookies.
Hamburgers = most successful food of the evening. Great burgers...just kinda plain without ANYTHING on them. Bun...burger...splash of ranch. That was it. Kinda missing something...I couldn't pick out what it was though.
Cookies = grainy, but still kinda good, almost success.
Hash browns = FTL. No words. They cooked...and cooked...and sucked. And failed. And stuck to the pan. And burnt. And failed more. And epically failed even more to correctly cook like hash browns are supposed to cooked. So yep. I've never seen food find the garbage can so fast. It's like salmon...they knew how to get home, even if they'd never been there. So that was our meal. Then we were listening to Jim Gaffigan's new sketch (amazing stuff) when our administrator walked in. 10:00pm. Giving his son a tour. Who gives tours at that hour??? That was awkward. Whatever. We took the cookies home and watched Jim Gaffigan's "Beyond the Pale" DVD. Again, epicness. And that about sums up our Saturday. Not a whole lot, really.

Sunday: This morning/afternoon, I was woken up by none other than Abby!! Well, technically it was Deborah who threw the book at my face, but she was bringing Abby to me. And what a surprise that was (Abby is our friend from Sacramento who used to live here. She left in December, but is back this week with her fam fam). Soooo worth waking up though. She brought me five 32oz Gatorade's, a box of Cadbury Eggs, a box of Goldfish, and a thing of REAL marshmallows. Nothing against Mexicans and their eating habits/manufacturing practices, but they've just got the whole marshmallow recipe screwed up. Flavor is off, texture is off. And a game of chubby bunny shouldn't be over after I put one marshmallow in my mouth. It's hard to play that game when they're the size of a small meteor. That was the highlight of my day. Then at 2, Kelcie got off work, and her, Deborah, and I walked into town to get boles(??). It's basically on Otter Pop on crack. It's like the size of a baseball bat, and made with real flavoring (or what I assume to be real flavoring...then again, anything can be real flavoring when you're comparing it to Otter Pops). And I thought I remember something interesting happening on the way home...but I sure can not remember right now. Besides all the random guys yelling strange things and whistling at us. Mostly me. I take it all in stride though, it's so flattering.
On the walk home from boles, we passed Hans as he drove by, which sparked a grand ole story I forgot to share awhile back. So, a little back story, Hans is this elderly(60s? Late 60s?) man who works out at Rancho de Christo. The ranch is the mission's men's rehab center. It's about half an hour away, and they have something like 10-15 men there recovering from drugs, drinking, all that stuff. Just a place they can go to find help, reach God, and recover their lives. Hans and his wife live in SoCal somewhere...not exactly sure, but I'd assume near LA, San Diego, or somewhere in between. They spend a couple weeks here, couple weeks there, back and forth. His wife is the violin teacher here at the mission. They've been involved here for years, doing this and that. He's helping (maybe leading??) the construction of the rehab center. So, anywho, this guy Hans was speaking in Sala the other day, and he shared this story of a miracle at the rehab center. I don't know the exact time period of this story, but it was at least fairly recently, like this year. He was down here, working at ranch, and trying to figure out how to get a roof on their church. Apparently at this time, there was no roof. So he got an estimate. got a roofer to come out to the ranch, and provide the estimate for him. He took that estimate back home with him to SoCal that weekend, got up in front of his church, wrote the estimate down on a piece of paper, and held it up in front of the congregation. He held it high and said, "This is how much it would cost to put a roof on the ranch's church building in Mexico."
The very next day he got a call from a guy in Canada. Thousands of miles from SoCal.
He said, "Is this Hans?"
"Yes, this is Hans."
"Hi, you don't know me, and I don't know you, but I live in Canada, and I have this check sitting here. God told me to call you and give you this check. Is there any way you can use it?"
"Yes, there is. How much is the check?"
"$15,000."

That estimate he held up on his paper at church?
$15,000.

I beg you to try and tell me that's not a miracle.