Shooting up the town

Some of you may not know that I'm attempting to become a photographer. As frustrating as it can be to start a business in this economy, I've been having the feeling (well, really for most of my life), that I would not want to work for anyone else but myself. In an attempt to get there, I'll be launching the first part of my business, Rika Fotografia, in the beginning of 2011. So in preparation for that leap, I've been shooting local families, seniors, and friends for discounted rates to build my local portfolio. And holy cow! I haven't done that many family portraits before! It's a new and super fun challenge! So watch and listen for news of my mobile studio. Because, hey! I studied photography in college, dang it! It's about time I really used it! I'm not just one of those people who has a camera and newly discovered this art after taking lots of pictures of her dog and got inspired. Okay, I'm climbing off my soap box. (no offense to all you newly inspired photographers). Anywho, I've always loved shooting people most of all and hope to do it forever! Here's a preview of what's been happening-more to come!

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

From Portfolio

A Break!

This is the B&B we stayed at! It's over 100 years old.



All of us need a break every now and then. Especially the people who live in a highly social, intense environment, such as a boarding school. The last few weeks, we’ve all been a little more short with each other. The girls in my study hall have been messy and slacking off more and I’ve definitely snapped at a couple and banded food from our rec room where we study. The kids haven’t had as much energy lately, and walk around with these long, tired faces, desperate for a break of some kind. And now, we are sitting in this quiet dorm, waiting for the last couple of boys to leave, before we can all experience a little relief from each other and renewed energy.

Let me back up just a little, because I do realize it’s been ages since I’ve updated the blog, and hopefully this will offer you a bit of an explanation why. About a month ago, I was hired to work at the Boys & Girls Club of Windsor. (hurray! I got a job!) What a relief to have a reason to get dressed in the morning and get out of bed before 10 am! It doesn’t pay that hot, but hey, I get to work for a great cause, and it’s only 4 or 5 hours a day, leaving me time to work on my other projects. The work that I do there is mostly a kid-wrangler. We have 250+ 1st-8th graders and we do everything from tutoring them, to teaching activities, to entertainment, to mentoring. Actually, it’s pretty similar to our English Wilderness teaching jobs in Taiwan, only it’s half the day and we all speak the same language for the most part. I need to brush up on my Espanol!

About the time that I was hired, I also got a call to help launch the Healdsburg branch of Patch.com. For those of you who don’t know about Patch, it’s a hyperlocal approach to journalism, sort of like an online community newspaper. I was hired on as a freelance photographer and slowly started taking on more projects and am now a columnist! We launch Nov. 30, and I get paid to go to parties and events and take pictures!

I’ve also been helping the school with some articles and publication photography for the website as well as a future redesign of the marketing materials that they give out to prospective students. I’ve been trying to build my portfolio in order to launch my photo business by January 2011. (more of that later).

So wow, I have been so so busy! Aaron thinks I don’t know when to stop. Busy-ness is addictive and I love to say that magic word, “YES”, to all these great ideas that come my way. But I think I’m just about at my limit and I hope it starts to settle down a little. A few weeks ago, after a bit of rough patches in the dorm, Aaron and I decided to take a 24-hour vacation to the coast and we stayed at this Bed & Breakfast just yards away from the sea. It was so nice to be able to have no interruptions from people, and we had no cell service or WI-FI so we couldn’t be distracted by our iPhones. So peaceful. Now I hope this coming week off will bring a little more of that serenity. Because we want to give of ourselves to our kids here, but we need to be filled again to have the capacity to do that.

When I was fourteen.

At the moment, I’m hanging out in the Girl’s Dorm every evening during study hall. I get to be part of a Freshman Mentor Program that was started this year to help freshmen transition into high school, both scholastically and socially. It’s been a blast-with all the drama and serial dating that goes on, I’ve been challenged to go back in time and remember what it was like to be fourteen. I wrote this for those girls to show them, "See, I do know what it's like to go through all of this!", but their reactions to hearing the essay were priceless. They thought I made it all up.






I wasn’t very shy. I could talk to anyone at my small school, and I was pretty thrilled to be one of the oldest kids at school. I was extremely competitive in school subjects, and was determined to have the best grades in class. I was so driven in this feat that one day, I found out that I was no longer the fastest typist in keyboarding class so I would race the 2 other guys and try my hardest to become faster then them.

One day, in the middle of a typing race, with my eyes glued to the computer screen and my fingers clicking across the keyboard like water in a rainstorm, I felt something wet and slippery slide into my ear. A chubby, nasty boy named Kenneth had taken advantage of my concentration and given me a Wet Willy. Trying not to vomit in my mouth, I ran after him kicking and screaming. Kenneth wasn’t afraid to hit girls and I soon realized that I would probably get seriously injured if I were to fight back, so I ran to the bathroom to sanitize my ear canal.

Did I mention that I was a tomboy? I think a lot of my competitive nature came from my internal drive to show the world that girls can do things as well, if not better, than boys. Up until this point, I had been right about this, but around this age, my guy friends began to change and biceps would appear out of nowhere. Where were my biceps?

I think that because I was so tomboyish, the boys unfortunately were not attracted to me. I definitely bore the brunt of a lot of jokes, probably because I asked for it with my smart attitude. I remember wondering, Why do no boys like me like that? And then I would come to the conclusion that maybe it’s because I didn’t really wear much makeup or have boobs yet. Yes, must be the boob thing.

When I was fourteen, I discovered the greatest invention on the planet; instant messaging. I remember carrying on six different conversations with six different people at once, all with the touch of a button on my computer screen. All I wanted to do was chat. I think I spent countless hours lost in meaningless conversations with friends.

The summer after I turned 14, I did have a little romance in my life. While no boys in my hometown were into me, I seemed to have some remnant of princess in me, which was recognized in a staff kid at my summer camp. I didn’t know he like me until the last day of camp, when he told me in a smudged, ragged letter that he hoped I’d had a fun time at camp and that he wanted to keep in touch with me. I remember how jealous it made the other girls in my cabin and it felt so good to finally be the girl that is sought after. This boy and I wrote letters to each other a couple times a month on regular white notebook paper and had a very awkward phone call every other month or so. His letters were very deep and caring, and yet I felt like I didn’t know him at all. I remember one phone call and hearing his voice that seemed deeper and more foreign then I had remembered, at then end of a long series of awkward silences and weird topics, he said, “I love you”, and then waited for me to say it too. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line. My mouth went dry and my hands turned numb as I tried to think of what to say. All that came out was, “Okay, bye!” and I hung up as fast as I could.

After a while, I grew bored with this fantasy fake relationship and wrote him an email that said that I thought we should see other people, because that’s what I’d heard teenagers say before. I felt bad that I didn’t really feel bad. I squeezed my eyes as hard as I could after I hit the “Send” button just to see if I could make one tear, just one tear, come out.

When I was fourteen, I really tried and tried to figure out who I was. I was tired of people telling me who I should be, and tired of being the same person I always was-a tomboy, perfectionist, competitive, and a little bit bratty. I was tired of trying to live up to my parents’ expectations of me yet I was too scared to actually do something rebellious. I was really self-obsessed and thought that everyone was always looking at me, and yet I was scared, so unbelievably scared to really “be myself”, whatever that means.

I do remember seeking God though it all, and feeling a peace among the onset teenage storm. I remember moments when nothing made sense and just praying for God to come near and take me through that hurricane of whatever it was at the time, whether it was after a fight with my parents, a bad heartbreak, or just because I was feeling very misunderstood.

And God prevailed. He spoke to me in a language that I could understand. In the midst of feeling so misunderstood, I felt Him listen. During times when I felt alone and helpless, underneath it all I sensed His presence. He told me to keep hanging on, that this was the beginning of something greater than I ever could hope to understand. And so I did.

That's Bam-Tastic!

Bam is the new unofficial school mascot.



Bam and his friend, Zoe.




Bam is trying to understand why the water moves in the river.




Bam's first look at our school.



Bam and his brother Danny, sweetly sleeping in our car.




Bam likes to sing along with us.




My Bam-burger!



I never knew I was a dog person. But now, at the age of 25, I've got my very own doggie (of course, to share with Aaron). We have been looking for some time, but I've had this major fear that I would forget to feed the animal, or lose him somewhere, or even-God forbid-become one of those people who leaves the dog in the car as he slowly overheats to death. So yes, I was scared that I would not be responsible enough to keep a big animal like a dog alive.

When I was a kid, my parents didn't let us get a dog. "You guys are not responsible enough, and I'm going to be the one picking up all the poop!!!", my mom always said. Did you parents ever say that, or were mine the only ones?

So a couple weeks ago Aaron and I went out on his birthday, "just to look", and we played with puppies and dogs all across Santa Rosa. I fell in love with a cutie little puppy at Petco, but we decided to keep going in case we found one better. Our next stop was a family who was getting rid of their 8-year-old American Bulldog, Bam Bam because they had four kids in the family and could not give Bam Bam the attention he needed, but they sure loved him. (maybe my mother's words do ring true.)

Bam ran right up to our car and it was almost love at first sight. Sure, he wasn't a puppy, but he had the energy of a young one but the obedience and self discipline of a well-seasoned companion. After getting his history and playing with him for a while, we knew that we were meant to be, and we took him right home with us.

Here is why Bam is awesome:

He doesn't jump on people
He plays well with others
He's not slobbery
He's well trained and has no bad puppy habits
He's protective, but really sweet to all the students
He's incredibly patient with little kids who try to climb on him, pull his ears, and try to crinkle his tail
He loves our hiking trails and river and motivates me to get out and get some exercise
He's a conscientious pooper-goes in well-hidden spots in the woods
He loves to be with either Aaron or me and stays right by our side all day long (he has a little nest under Aaron's desk)

And my favorite reason why Bam is awesome? When we come home, even if we've been gone for a few minutes, he acts as if he hasn't seen us in years and missed us more than his little heart can handle. He wriggles around our legs and lets out these asthmatic yelps of glee as he does all he can to not lick us from head to toe, and makes us feel like the most loved people on earth.

Anyway, because I have not had a dog before, I did not expect all this wonderfulness to come from just an animal. And while I used to judge and snicker at those crazy dog people, I totally get why they want to snuggle with their dog, or walk around the house talking to him, or even put a cute sweater on him in the winter. Aaron laughs at me now and calls me a dog person. But he's wrong-I'm a Bam person. Aw, I love my doggie!

The Tomato Fury

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

For those of you who have been following my facebook updates, you know that we received a 5 gallon bucket full of red Roma tomatoes from a student's mom who has a small farm. As she brought them into my house, I stared at her aghast, wondering what I would do with 200+ tomatoes! She said (very nonchalantly), "Oh just can them or make a sauce out of them", and then she left. So I was left alone with this monstrosity and immediately sought help from my FB friends who gave great suggestions, such as salsa, spaghetti sauce, bruschetta, putting em in a blow up pool and squishing them, making ketchup (!?), and more. It was a bit overwhelming, to be honest, especially since I have never every done any canning.

But I began to research it anyway and was even more intimidated by all these science-y rules about canning that have to do with acidity, temperature, making sure the cans seal right, and it seemed to be really really complicated. Instead of relying on my own understanding of a scroll bar on the internet, I decided to consult our campus's resident real life Google lady (she knows everything), Mrs. Benson and see what she suggested. She pointed me to her next door neighbors, who were retired and happened to have canned some pears that very morning.

Mr. and Mrs. M. were more than happy to push me in the right direction of canning and even hooked me up with MORE vegetables from their gorgeous and overflowing garden. They gave me a canning bath and the cans to do it. Mrs. M. even gave me a copy of a vintage looking canning instruction sheet then walked me through the entire process. Then she confessed that she didn't actually like to can, because it's so time consuming and stressful.

It had been a good 3 days since I'd received the tomatoes and I was a little worried about their wellbeing and decided to commit to this process before I had a big pile of rotting tomatoes.

I decided to make one batch of spaghetti sauce, then one batch of salsa (inspired by Aaron's parents this summer). I don't think anyone really warned me of how much of a pain it is to prepare and de-skin tomatoes! I wrestled with those stupid things for 4 HOURS before I got the skin off. I felt like a crazy person and had to get out of the house, and gave up around midnight.

The next morning, I began to boil and mash up some of the tomatoes for the sauce. After adding all the other ingredients and cooking for a while, I tasted the sauce and it tasted like nothing but tomatoes. Panicked, I called my college roommate Ansley (who is a renowned for her cooking), and she suggested adding sugar to take the bite out. In my worry, I also started dumping other herbs that I happened to have in my cupboard and the sauce ended up tasting a little bit Indian due to the cumin. Oopsies. I canned it anyway and think I'll just make sure to add fresh vegetables when I open it again since it's so saucy.

The salsa actually worked out a lot better, although I think I added a little too much sugar and it tastes slightly sweet. I finished in the early afternoon of that day, with a grand total of 9 hours spend cooking and canning, and 14 jars of stuff to show for it. After that, I hoped and prayed that I'd never have to do it again. I kind of think I did it, just to say i could do it. Women of the 50's just didn't get the credit they deserved!

(i don't really think I'm gonna make it as a housewife, if canning makes me feel like throwing a pot full of tomatoes across the kitchen)

In the end, I used some reserved tomatoes to make that bruschetta and pico de gallo and ended up feeding 2 meals to dorm kids, and they liked it. I do much better with fresh food than cooked food that requires patience and hard work.

Starting Over can be AWESOME!

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

From The Rikon Expedition

I know I gloated a lot in the last post. And I'm going to try to be more informational this time, rather than "look at all the good deals we got!" But seriously, we are so blessed. I've always loved change, and this move has been so easy and beautiful. Our apartment is the perfect size for us, and I have a big open kitchen. After doing laundry in the boys dorm for a few weeks, I almost had a nervous breakdown (boys laundry room=anarchy/chaos!), and the wonderful principal delivered a washer and dryer to us and that just made my day.

Here is what we do here:

Aaron is the Assistant Boys' Dean and he works very long hours, but the work is so easy! Sure, they have their moments of discipline or stern talks, or man-herding, but for the most part it seems like he sits in his office and talks to guys. It's actually so much fun that I've been going in there and hanging out with the guys too. And when I say "hanging out", I really mean laughing at them because they are so funny and ridiculous most of the time. Aaron works about 4 days a week but the days are really long (9am-1am), and then he's off every other weekend. He has 2 other deans that he works with (quite the cushy situation), and they're both so cool. The head dean has a wife about our ages and they have an adorable baby boy. The other dean is Danny, who's practically family to us, and we dragged him out here with us from Tennessee. He's a mega-talented animation major (graduating '12) and the boys just love him.

Let's see...I'm trying to write what I do...my official role so far is a Freshman Mentor/Tutor. Our school is starting a program this year to help the freshmen transition into high school and I get to be with the freshmen girls every night for study hall. (Danny is with the guys). We make sure they're on task with their homework and teach them study skills on the way. We also hold them accountable for their grades and attendance and also meet with them regularly to see how their high school experience is going. It's a lot of fun-better than reality tv-except now i'm realizing that the drama is SO high and I just feel bad for girls sometimes and their lack of tact when it comes to gossip.

Other than that, I'm regularly applying to jobs and doing everything I can to find some sort of regular work. It's tough! I've sent out about 74 resumes and am now getting to be a little cynical at craigslist posts and have decided that they're mostly scams. I've heard back briefly from a couple companies but haven't been invited to interview yet. I'm too far from San Francisco for the more numerous non-profit and communication jobs, and I really feel like a tiny fish in a huge school of applicants. Sometimes I try to mentally attach "PLEASE MEET ME! THEN YOU'LL KNOW I'M PERFECT FOR YOUR JOB!", to my emails to people, but I refrain from actually doing that. It's frustrating, but at the same time, it's opened up time for me to get to know people, students, other faculty members, and has forced me to think about and prioritize what it is I actually want to do for a career.

(which is why I haven't yet settled for a restaurant serving job...yet).

Anyway, again, we're happy to be here and are so grateful to the people who have helped us transition here.

Onward to the Golden State-

SO,

I haven't written anything in a long time, pretty much since before we even left Taiwan which was several weeks ago. In the past 4 weeks, this is what's happened:

-flew to Maryland
-massive road trip across the country, first time driving a Uhaul truck, while pulling Aaron's Jeep
-drove through Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee (stopped to see friends, go to church), Kentucky, Indiana (stopped to see Aaron's family), Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah (said hello to cousins there), Nevada, and FINALLY! CALIFORNIA!

Aaron flew out from Indiana to start his job and spend some time with the staff before school started, so that left me to drive our junk. Luckily, I was joined by my very caring brother Jacob, and Aaron's brothers-in-law (Josh and Jonathan), whose parents both work at our new school. Wow!

It turns out that I was inhibited to fulfill my grand plans of picking up free furniture on the way out to California for two reasons. One is that my new iPhone didn't have much data on the plan, and two, the stuff that we did find was just not awesome enough for us to haul. However, oh man, did we score with some of the treasures we eventually filled up our new apartment with.

As soon as we arrived at our school with a moving truck, one of the teachers came by to see if we wanted a kingsized mattress and boxspring. Yes please!, we said!

Then another teacher asked if we needed a table and chairs. Absolutely, we said! And then I honed in on my craigslist investigation skills and rounded us up a nice big kingsized bed ($125) and some an antique handmade bedroom furniture set that is in perfect condition ($200). My mom contributed an iron and a toaster oven to the mix as well as some thrift store kitchen stuff, and the old dean left his couch and living room chairs for us, and we now had an almost furnished house!

To stock our kitchen, we decided to bank on our leftover wedding gift cards, which were perfect to have when we came back, and we bought silverware from Target, and some really sturdy yet graceful cookware from Crate and Barrel. I'm still excited about my cookware. I'm going to make some fried rice for all the Asian kids this week.

(btw, i just want to insert here that i was never a big fan of gift cards, but in the midst of planning for a wedding last year, we had no idea what to register for and now that we have time to really think and research the things for our house, we can be a lot wiser about what we do get. just a thought-what do you think? so thank you for those that got us gift cards!)

On the way down to the San Francisco Airport to pick up a student last Friday, we made a detour to Ikea to get some dishes, a knife magnet thingie, and a couple houseplants, which I will probably kill in no time.

We almost feel like grownups!

The last item that was donated to our new life here is a car that used to belong to my grandfather (i call him Bompa) that makes us feel like royalty. It drives like a dream and even has heated seats and one of those projector lights that tells you your speed on the windshield. How did we get so lucky? I have no idea. Someone is taking care of us, and the only thing we can do is say thanks and live lives of love to those around us. It really is like that cheesy movie with Helen Hunt-what was it called? Pass It On? Oh-Pay it Forward-that's it. So we are going to try our best to live up to the generosity that others have done to us, and are just so thankful to be here...