Jen Russum

Community

Community

Since moving to Arizona, Micah and I have been blessed by living in our community. And I mean really living IN our community. Being friends with people who live in our neighborhood. Working within five miles of our house. Going to church within two miles of house. It's been amazing. Let me just paint a picture for you briefly. Last year Micah lived in Lake Stevens with a friend. I lived in Seattle with four awesome girls whom I love with all my heart. I had a thirty minute drive to school down a road with a 40 MPH speed limit and forty stoplights. I was always late to work. We were engaged. We used to meet at the Everett Mall food court on Wednesday nights to plan our wedding. They had a very limited restaurant selection. We usually ended up splitting a piece of Sbarro pizza. It was greasy and gross. After three weeks of that, we gave up planning our wedding together. Somehow it got planned and it was awesome. I took care of the details and consulted Micah on the big stuff. We also started attending Mars Hill Church, which was amazing, but a horribly long commute from Lake Stevens on a Sunday night. Sometimes I would stay in Lake Stevens for the whole weekend to hang out with Micah (because Lake Stevens to Seattle is practically a long distance relationship), and Micah and I would drive down to church together. Then drive back. Then I would drive BACK down to Seattle in my own car at 9pm at night. Sometimes we would drive to church separately. Either way, it sucked. We also joined a community group that met in Mill Creek, which was kind of a halfway meeting point for us. However, we both had a 25 minute drive home alone after our weekly Tuesday meetings and then all our friends from our community group (who are awesome!) lived in Mill Creek, 25 minutes away from each of us. We spent a year not really living in our community at all. We were always driving. Always needing to be somewhere else that was at least a half an hour away from where we were. So when we moved to Arizona, we REALLY wanted to live, work and play in our actual community. We didn't want long commutes to work and we especially wanted to live close to our church. However, when we moved here we had no idea where we were going, what it would be like, or where we should live. All we knew was the address of Micah's work and the location of ASU. We looked on Google maps and marked the spot right in the middle of these two locations, and decided that as long as it wasn't the absolute, fear-for-your-life ghetto, we would live as close to this midpoint as possible. Thankfully the midpoint was South Scottsdale and we LOVE our lives. I won't even tell you all the things we live close to. Okay, maybe I'll tell you a few... In ten minutes or less, I can be at ASU, Micah's (now old) workplace, Target, Sprinkles, Scottsdale Fashionsquare (complete with Anthro, Banana, Urban, Nordstrom, Crate and Barrel etc. etc.), In and Out, SMASHBURGER (okay, Smash is more like 15 minutes, but I HAD to add it to the list), the historic Old Town district, museums, galleries, multiple movie theaters, and a greenbelt (with 14 miles of running trails, sand volleyball, basketball, frisbee golf, etc. etc.). But most importantly we live seven minutes away from our church and about the same distance from our pastor's house where we meet for Missional Community every Wednesday. We could not be more abundantly blessed. So now our life is vastly different than last year. It looks more like this... Now I can drive to our Missional Community with Micah's partially eaten cake in my lap. I decided that although he could eat the whole cake himself (and has in the past), he probably shouldn't. So I took it to our Missional Community to share. There is no way I would have been able to straddle a cake dome for my whole 25 minute ride up to Mill Creek last year. But two miles? I can handle it... I can also pack my dinner in my purse if I don't have time to eat before Missional Community. I know it will still be warm when I get there, because it's only a five minute drive! And Lisa, my pastor's lovely wife, will gladly lend me a fork. (And, yes, this dinner is Hamburger Helper, and, yes, I did get it for 88 cents on sale, and, no, I am not ashamed. It was actually a pleasant little flashback to childhood dinners in 1989. But I might wait a year until I eat it again... Don't want to overdo it!) ... Read more

Getting the hang of it???

Getting the hang of it???

This week was the first time I felt like I might be getting the hang of this whole grad school thing. Sure, my table still looks like this.... This is actually updated from the last picture, and I'm pretty sure it's gotten worse! And my house in general is a little messier than I like it to be. And I haven't tried any new recipes since my mom left town a couple of weeks ago. And I did only get three hours of sleep the night before my first grad school presentation on Wednesday. But I left that presentation feeling hopeful. My presentation went well. I got great feedback. My teacher told me I got an A on it. And my professor and I had a great conversation about my research interests after class. In preparing for the presentation, I had to dig up an old paper from undergrad that I used for my writing sample for my grad school applications. I can't believe I even got accepted to any grad school!!! I mean how gracious that they would accept me based on my measly writing sample. For example, I have learned over the past six months that a typical bibliography for a standard 10-20 page research paper should be one to two pages long. That means you would read anywhere from 10-20 books and articles to gain background for your paper. My writing sample had like five sources on its bibliography and one of them was something I grabbed off the internet simply to add a quote to my introduction. Pitiful. I have also learned about the word "stakes" since starting grad school... meaning what are the "stakes" of this project? Or basically what is the point of writing this paper? While many would point out that the stakes are never really that important when you are writing a paper about literature (it's not going to change the world - although the literature itself when it was written back in the day might have actually changed the world or at least affected a certain city, state, or culture), there still has to be a reason you are writing what you are writing. How does it add to current research in your field and how is it new and different than what other people have already written? I feel like I nailed that part of my presentation this week and it felt good! So slowly but surely I am feeling more at home at grad school and where God has called me and feeling more excited about this five to six year endeavor that I began back in July. And it wasn't really until yesterday when I felt like things were going well that I realized how aloof I have been feeling for the past eight months. Not knowing many other students in my program well. Not knowing what to say during my grad classes but feeling pressured to say something. Not knowing how to go about researching for and writing my papers. Not really sure of I want to research and devote my whole teaching/writing career to. But yesterday, I felt those things changing slowly. I feel like I am making friends in my program and my office. I am really enjoying knowing students and teachers well on both the literature and rhetoric/composition side of things. I like the things I am studying and feel like the work I am doing has some kind of value. AND did you notice I even blogged five times this week?!?! In the words of the Kruse siblings and all my friends in Texas, BOOYAH GRANDMA!!! And in the words of my dear friend, Anne Warner. BAM!!! Have a great weekend everyone! ... Read more

Married Life

Married Life

Sometimes your husband decides to make a cake (from a box) at 11 o'clock at night, and he leaves the cupboard where the baking pans are kept looking like this... You forgive him and frost his cake for him while he is at work the next day... But you leave a note on the counter that says this (but you also leave one of his favorite candies next to it to remind him you love him, in case the cake didn't say it clearly enough)... When you're done frosting the cake, you get into your car to go to class and realize that even though you get cranky (almost) every morning when your husband's alarm clock goes off (no, I am not providing a picture of my 6:30am crabbiness), he still comes home from work and takes your car without you knowing and washes and vacuums it out for you for no reason at all. And now your floor mats look all pretty like this... And this is married life. A little give and take. A lot of grace. *I apologize for the use of the indefinite "you" in this posting, but if you're married you probably know what I am talking about and could substitute other funny pictures for the ones above. ... Read more