Author: Staci

Staci blogs about travel at TheVoyageer.com.

To the Nations

Over the past three weeks I have opened the heavy doors in the back of my mind and dusted off my web design boots. I haven’t worked on web sites since, oh, probably 2005 and boy am I rusty!  Anyway, back then I was totally an elitist and only designed sites in HTML and CSS. I am so humbled now that I have a hard time remembering things that used to come second nature to me. So I’m using the WYSIWYG site builder that comes with our web package.

That said, as part of my internship with the Missions director at my church, I have pieced together little by little a missions section for our church website. Every week I add new pages and new links to it and I’m actually becoming rather pleased with it. The first week was a struggle but now when I work on it every couple days I keep getting inspired and adding new things.

The main page is found here at Gateway Missions. We have a team going to Haiti (that I was on at one point until I realized I couldn’t realistically miss that much school) so I made a team HQ page here. Today I made this unimpressive little number–not so exciting on its own but I am enjoying adding more and more layers to this growing section of the site.

That, and I get to put some knowledge from my International Studies classes to work! Yay for real-life application of school idas!

Sweet and Sour… Everything

My beginner’s luck had to run out sometime, and the second half of my eggplant was not destined to be as successful as the first. The overall outcome of this meal was just “okay.”

Correction: the eggplant turned out okay, but the general disposition of the dish as a whole was not as expected. Anyway, I made sweet and sour eggplant! and chicken. It was looking a little weak so I added chicken. And half a can of pineapple. Which was the best addition in my opinion.

eggplant, bell pepper, chicken, and pineapple
eggplant, bell pepper, chicken, and pineapple

I think the sauce is where I went wrong. I would be willing to try again and add MUCH more sugar to the sauce. I was following a recipe though, and since I’d never tried making such a concoction before I didn’t deviate from it. My old roommate said something once about using ketchup to make a sweet and sour sauce? Maybe  I’ll give that a try next time!

Also someday I hope to own a rice cooker. A real one. A Japanese brand.

Ready for my Closeup

Today I was but an accessory in my friend’s photography project: the first in her series of “modern classics,” in which she finds inspiration from classic stories and paintings (she is an Art History major) and changes them up in a way that would be appropriate for today. Today we tackled the Judgment of Paris, and did our own version of something like this (focus on the figures to the right):

No, we were not nude.
Kind of wish we got to wear these 1600s dresses.

I got to play modern Athena, complete with fake assault rifle (that’s what you get for being goddess of war I guess). She’s working on photoshopping the pics as I type this and I should have my mitts on one to show you all in the next few days.

I was happy to be photographed (I’m so vain, I certainly think this song is about me–catch the Carly Simon reference?) and happy to do this favor for my friend. I had a great time with the other models too!