When it comes to cold, I am pretty darn stoic.
When it gets down in the 40s and we don’t have heaters here, I am widely admired for how I handle the temperature. I’ve found that yelling “I’m dying of the cold, and no one CARES” a dozen or so times a day does WONDERS for office morale. I’ve discovered that wearing a hoodie with the hood up under a winter coat is a wonderfully inviting image for impressionable young people...
RVA has interims, and we were asked to lead a group to Tanzania. We met with our group, and we asked them, “Why did you pick this group?” When every member admitted that it was there second choice, I thought that it was an auspicious beginning, but the honesty was a great start to an astonishing week.
We were going to be living among the Datooga tribe, a group that still lives in mud huts. They live in a national park,...
Some trips start poorly; this one started great. The day before I left, I received an email from Harvard saying they were going to accept one of our students from their waitlist. I called Shannon, and I could tell that she hadn’t heard the news. I encouraged her to look at her email, and to call me if she wanted to talk later. Five minutes later, perhaps the most hysterical phone call I ever received was a wonderful prelude to...
Continue ReadingOnce upon a time there was a prince and princess named Prince Thrash About and Princess Never Move Over. They were wonderful children, but like many children who had once been abandoned, they suffered from fairly frequent nightmares. When they called out in the night for the King or Queen to sleep with them, the King and Queen had problems.
With the Prince, he was always accommodating and would let the King or Queen stay with him. As soon as the...
We are having an identify crisis of sorts in our home.
Every Peifer male has gone through being called Bubba. It’s a Texas thing, and Ben really is a Bubba; just a big old sweet guy. Although most of us call him Bubba from time to time, that is how Katie always refers to him.
The problem is this: that is how Ben refers to KATIE. He calls her Bubba all the time. I’ve told him that if this continues, we would...
