Hubka, You want to come over to our place? Every Thursday we have a women's Bible Study. I am sure that we could hook you up with one of these Methodist ladies. Some of them are single! (because their husbands have died of old age, but why get stuck on the details.) I am sure they would like to hang with the Steve man! Does Quiznos make a Sub smoothy? Just a thought.

No real news here. We are planning a missions trip with our youth ministry to Mexico in June, so that is exciting. Katie and I are also hoping to travel to Africa with a couple people from our church for another missions trip. Who would know that the Methodist people actually have hearts! Mybe it is just the Alliance rubbing off on them. Oh well... I love it here. PLEASE someone come visit us! It is awsome up here! We want to see people our own age. It would be even better if we could interact with them! I have sunken to the low level of watching Lagoona Beach to see people that are kinda our age. I am currently in a support group!

Come and visit us. We are fun people.... Really we are.... I can cook too!

Chris

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=2201014

Check this out. Here's our alma mater in the best of light. We're never in the news for good stuff.

Oh, and I just finished ten straight days of work, and I'm hoping that tomorrow will actually be a day off for me. Otherwise, I might not live to post again, so I love you all, and miss most of you very much. Maybe even Kurbis.

Way to go posters. October is turning out to be good. I have just one bit of information to relay with you all. I found out that my ability to father children is quite unmatchable since my wife and I have created yet another little monster that will join us in this world in the end of May. In case you cannot understand my attempt at a humorous post. My wife is pregnant again. This is somewhat of a surprise, but a good one. We will now have 3 kids under the age of 19 months. This is mathematically a bit faster then originally envisioned, but we are excited. We have confirmed that it is just one this time. Praise the Lord! Hubka, congrats on the promotion. I have never been a manager of anything so you are already a step beyond my wildest dreams. If anyone wants to support the feed-a-norton-child-fund. Please make check out to Gabriel Norton.

I figured I'd better get on here right away and say that I am now an assistant manager at my store. I know, the rest of you were assistant managers at bigger places when you were high schoolers, but this is a big jump for me. I've never really been anybody's boss. I'm not really a bossy type, am I? Maybe. Anyway, it was sorta funny because my boss pulled me aside today, and I thought I had screwed something up, but he tells me how pleased he is with how I work and that I will be one of the two assistant managers, and then he shakes my hand. Imagine a little mustashioed Vietnamese man shaking my hand back behind a Quizno's counter. I guess if you can't imagine it, I'll just tell you it was funny. This is really great since I was going to write a blog two nights ago about how awful of a time I had had, including work. Maybe I'll just augment this one with that story.
I guess it was just the night for everything to go wrong. I mean, it was Saturday night, and I ain't got nobody, and that's just a bad start. It was a strange sort of busy at work, and I was of course working with two seventeen-year-old girls, so that adds a whole other dimension to the scheme. Then I got a splinter. We have nothing in the store that has anything remotely connected to wood besides the green from everybody's money trees nowadays. It didn't seem to be wood, but it hurt like a girl breaking up with you in eighth grade because you held her hand and she was embarassed, if you can relate to that one. Then one of the seventeen-year-olds wanted to prove she was right about how we cut open dressing bottles, and the only way she was going to do that was to call up our boss who was in California visiting his daughter, so that's what she does. I didn't care, and was fine with things until that point. I just don't need a high school girl playing some strange power game with me because she has nothing else to do. It might freak her out now that I'm her boss, anyway, but who cares. So, I leave work at a low-point mood-wise, so I figure I can balm the wound with some beer. I go across the street to a grocery store. They don't carry the only beer I'm going to drink. So I drive to a natural foods store and wander to their beer case. There's one left. Phew, right? But the space for the beer is taken up by the same brand except pumpkin beer! Gross. So I've got two months without good beer ahead of me. That's unpleasant. Then I get to the checkout counter, and I notice I have only five of the six bottles in my cardboard container. The checkout girl says she'll only charge me for four bottles, but then starts talking about getting older (after looking at my ID) and how life sucks past 21. That's all I needed to hear. I went home and had a beer and felt sorry for myself... Hmmm, I'm stuck in these song lyrics. That's really the end of my story. Sorry for taking too much space up for the sake of Brad and Kurbis. Or, not for Brad and Kurbis, or whatever, you know what I mean. So, all that to say, today really makes up for it, especially since a girl named Laura wandered into the store again, and she's wonderfully cute and looks much beyond 18 but not yet to the 26-year-mark, and no ring on her finger, and I have nothing else around here to keep my attention except pumpkin beer, so write something yourself and prove me wrong. Even Kurbis can't ruin today with an angry diatribe. Bye all.

Since I am the king of stupid posts, I thought I would give an update on Kate and I. We are still living on the lake in Menahga, although the church just put our house up for sale. We are excited to be working with the churches! They are both growing and one is in the SLOW process of building a new church (the reason our place is for sale.)

Since we will be needing a place to live, we are looking for land to build a home of our own. This is an exciting adventure. But it is also very scarry! We are also in a Finacial Taining Class right now, Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University. I highly suggest it to EVERYONE. It should be a requirement before graduating from Crown! I am so serious!

We are also planning a missions trip to Mexico in June. This is going to be a grea time for our youth ministry. We are excited about it! We will spend one week at an orphanage, Hubka wanna come?

We are staying SO BUSY, it seems like we haven't seen our friends from Crown for such a long time. We miss you guys and the Twin Cities so much. If you are EVER in the Park Rapids area, look us up! We would love to give you a free place to stay and some good free food. (this fat man can cook!)

I saw Bubna's and Wakefield at Open Door on Sunday. I had our youth group down for Dare2Share (the most amazing conference I have ever been to). Ephram Smith was preaching at Open Door and he was great! I miss that place too!

That is enough crap for now. Better start preparing my message for Sunday. By the way, Kate got a new job as an administrative assitant at Community Action an is now chum chum with the senator and state rep. Its going to her head, I am gonna be honest! Just kidding.


Chris Folkestad

So, as I promised, here I am to rectify my absence from the blog. Before I lose any of you due to a lengthy blog, I feel I should explain my absence in two ways. First, I am working probably less hours than any one of you by nearly half (in Lynnea's case, probably 1/8), but I am still actually working a lot. I have worked every day since last Sunday, and I will work today, meaning I haven't had a day off in over a week, and since I started working, I've only had an actual weekend once. My boss seems to be very happy with me, though we've put off assistant manager training for another week just so I can get used to a few more things in the store. I've really enjoyed work, though, but I'm just saying I'm busier that way than I'm used to. Second, I've had Kurbis's comment running through my head, the one where he told me that he couldn't ever get through one of my blogs, and so that's the sort of thing that'll get any longwinded person down for a bit. But enough excuses, because I know mine are crap and so are yours, so get on here and blog. Gabe says so.
Early this week, prior to the normal lunch rush, I was ringing up a middle-aged couple with some sandwiches and soup, nothing in particular out of the ordinary. The woman proceeded to say that they were a bit out of sorts because they had driven all the way from Montana, and so I got excited since it was my home for a year (I am a vagabond of sorts with Wyoming plates, a Montana driver's license, and a Washington address). I asked where they were from. Great Falls she said, and I told her I was in Missoula the past year going to school. She said her daughter was finishing her last year of undergrad at UM. I don't know if I was dumb enough to ask what they were doing all the way out near Portland, or maybe she just decided to tell me. "We're out here to bury our son. He died last week in Iraq." I think I mumbled out an I'm sorry, but I just sat there for a few seconds. If they hadn't already paid for their meal, I would have got it for them. I just didn't know what to do. I was so out of it that I forgot their soup. That was a messed up sort of day.
I guess another less serious story is to explain last night and why I won't return to the young adult group I'm been going to with this church since I showed up here. Man, that's a jumbled sentence. We went to this "concert" at a trendy church downtown, and it was possibly the low-point of my four months here. It was unbearably loud, and the only song I recognized from the band that was supposedly playing 80s covers was Carry on my Wayward Son, which happens to be from the 70s. It was also crowded, but most people were sitting around coffee tables, and the average age in the room was 35. I was crammed in a corner up against a wall, trying not the think about the fact that I spend five hours a day on my feet, causing some trouble with my ankle, and here I was in my off hours standing at some awful concert. In between bands, I sat down with the young adult group I was there with, but most of them wandered off except for one guy, a student from Germany who is leaving on Wednesday. He's the only person that had a conversation with me the entire night. Then our group leader challenged me to a game of checkers, a board game I consider more base than football (Folkestad, you know what that means), but I had nothing else to do and I was bored out of my mind. He took only three of my pieces the entire game. He happens to be a high school football coach. We don't so much connect. The worst part is, he's the only one at this thing that talks to me other than the guy from Stuttgaart. I'm not going back to this thing, not that we go to stupid concerts every week, but I've been going since July and can't claim a single friend from the group. I'm tired of trying.
So, enough depressing stories from Steve. I'm actually doing very well, minus these two stories. My boss keeps telling me I'm doing great, my coworkers seem to like me (probably to butter me up so I'll buy them beer sometime, blasted high schoolers), and I've had some productive artistic attempts in my spare time. And my loan consolidation just went through. Maybe I'm not a masterful screwup. But let's not get our hopes up. That wasn't too long, was it? Next time I'll have to tell some stories about my Vietnamese boss. He's interesting. Somebody else get on here and let's get back on this thing.

There were only four posts in the entire month of September. Where has Hubka gone? I am not sure who even reads this thing anymore (Brad I know you do, but you just post on your own fancy blogger page) but it could use some TLC. (When I use those letters I usually break out into "Don't go chasing waterfalls"This may not make sense to most, but it was a great song) Anyway I truly posted just to get 3 in the month of October. Steve you could make four.

Does anybody else feel that life is going by at an ungodly, frantic pace and you are just trying to hang on? That has sure been the case for me lately. I have come across a timely book that is dealing with that issue. It is called "Margins" by Richard Swanson. I have heard of the book for a while, but have never read it. I have not gotten very far, but it has already taken a very interesting look into "progress" and the ramifications it has had on society. His thesis is that our cultures progress has been driven by 2 environments. The Physical and the Cognitive. We have pressed forward to achieve more knowledge, wealth, and physical health. He is proposing that in our made rush for progress we have lost the sight of 3 other environments in the Social, Emotional, and Spiritual. This has lead to an impersonal society in which we think that every problem can be solved by a logical and scientific solution. What this implies is we are losing the focus on relationships and how Social, Emotional, and Spiritual problems rarely can be solved through science. It is a pretty interesting read that helps define a lot of why there is a constant feeling of being busy. Boring to most, but fascinating to me.

I have to tell you about a frustration that has been on my chest. Chris F. And myself recently took a journey to a little place called BW3's. This is a wonderful place where the wings flow like wine. At this wonderful place there resides a wonderful game. The game of Golden Tee. This wonderful game became less wonderful to me in its 2005 version because it has brought the price of 18 holes up to $4. This is the work of the evil one in our midst. Who can be expected to pay an extra dollar without any notice. What if you bring $3 to the wonderful place to play the wonderful game? And as you arrive there you are greeted with the not so wonderful surprise that you took a trip for nothing. This would be very disappointing. The makers of the wonderful game have tried to remedy that by allowing your credit cards to insert into said wonderful game and thus eliminate the need for cash. I however am one who prefers to use cash to play wonderful games and have been truly offended by the price gouging that has taken place. Am I offended enough to stop playing such a wonderful game? Yeah right...Golden Tee rocks!

Chris it will always be our past time!

I don’t know if everyone else is in the same boat as I am: I want to post, but I really don’t have anything of interest to say. So I sporadically check to see if others have posted, feel a slight disappointment that no one has, then a disappointment in myself for not posting either, and continue on with my day. But today (in an effort to avoid my literary theory homework) I will break that cycle! So let’s see, life in Lynnea land…Teaching at Crown is fine. I had my six-week evaluation and haven’t been fired yet, so that’s good. The rest of my life is basically consumed with trying to finish my Master’s program by the spring. My classes this semester are really fascinating; I’m taking a Spiritual Autobiography class (we are reading Annie Dillard, St. Augustine, Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, etc) and an African American Literary Theory class (we thus far are reading mostly authors who think that all white people should be killed or kill themselves). So with graduation looming again (part of me feels like we graduated from Crown at least ten years ago, and part of me feels like I was just here, thinking about life after graduation), it’s time to decide what the next step will be. A Ph.D. is looking less and less appealing (unless I go back to Oxford) and I am thinking that I may actually take some time off of school for a while. Maybe I’ll keep teaching at Crown, maybe I’ll teach overseas, maybe I’ll quit this whole academic life thing and not teach at all. Who knows? I’ve got some time to decide, I guess. But it is exciting to think about options. So that’s me. For those who care about the rest of the Erixon siblings: Bryan moved to Colorado and is working on a M.F.A. in Creative Writing at University of Colorado at Boulder. Krista cut off fourteen inches of her hair and is now a dark brunette. And she went to the U2 concert a couple of weeks ago and it changed her life. Okay, that covers us all. Hopefully after this relatively unexciting update on my life, others of you will feel led to add your own updates whether you have anything interesting to say or not. Otherwise I will just have to keep posting my own lame updates about school and classes and nobody wants that…