My Most Recent Attempt at Creativity

I love trying new ideas out of magazines. First it was the wheat grass and now it is the pumpkin address. I thought it turned out pretty good. The idea is to put Christmas lights inside the carved out pumpkin. We tried that... but our pumpkins are too thick to be able to see the light. I love Fall!!

Tomorrow Night

Dan asked me to his High School dance tomorrow night. I am so excited!

We're actually just going to be chaperones... but I still think it's pretty fun that we get to go to a High School dance together.

Our Neighborhood

I know I promised Dan would be the next to write... but he's taking his usual afternoon nap... so I thought I would sit down a write. I have about five minutes before my cornbread comes out of the oven (there's just nothing like smelling your mom's cornbread in the kitchen several thousand miles from home).
We are heading out to Bible Study in about an hour. Our church has small groups that you are assigned to geographically. That way you can really focus on meeting the same people in your community. We love it because we can walk since the leaders live just two blocks from us! Being so close to everything reminds me so much of Chico! We share a car... which can be a pain sometimes... but it forces me to walk to the 1/2 mile work every day (with our cats George and Eddie who have started following me about half the way there).
There is also a small park two blocks away that has bands playing once a month. You can actually see the Arch from this park... since we live on one of the higher parts of the very flat city of St. Louis. We're going to walk down for a couple minutes tonight to hear the last group of the summer play... unfortunatley it really does still feel like summer here.
Anyways... I was in the kitchen cooking and I could hear the band playing just now... so I thought I would just mention how great it is to be living in such a great part of St. Louis!

Dan really will be the next to write!

September

We have been unbelievably busy lately. I keep telling Dan that we need to try and keep our blog updated... even if it's only a sentence. We have actually had family in town on and off for the last month... either that or we have been out of town. My sister Cari and her husband Scott spent two weeks with us at the beginning of the month. It was great! It was their first time out to St. Louis and we made sure they saw as much of it as possible. St. Louis can't really compare to San Francisco or Seattle... but there are still some neat areas here. This our famous arch picture that we take of anyone who comes to visit. You have to lay down on the ground so you can get the entire arch in the picture. Scott and Cari are now in New Orleans helping organize teams to help with the hurricane clean up. They process hundreds of work orders and then send out surveyors and teams to different locations. They'll be heading back to St. Louis in a couple weeks to pick up their dog Ranger here at our house before they start the long trek back West.

My Dad and Mom were with us for about a week after that. My Dad always finds out about great little day trips whenever they come out. A week ago Saturday we went to an apple farm in Illinois.

We road a "tractor train" out into an apple orchard and picked a couple bags of apples. It was great! After that we visited the arch...

and then took a river boat ride on the great... dirty... Mississippi...

It was definitely not the prettiest boat ride I have ever taken... but it did have some interesting views... a sunken barge for example.

Dan has been super busy with school. He loves teaching... but it does have its challenges. He has had two lockdowns in the month that he has been teaching (one of which I found out about on the morning news!!). We would have never thought at this time last year that he would be teaching at an inner city school here in St. Louis... but it's great to see how the Lord moves you in new directions! We miss California tons... but love St. Louis at the same time.

Well... that's it for the month of September. I promise to make Dan write next time!!

What Not to Buy

I have to start out by saying that I love guacamole. Everytime our Bible Study has dinner together we bring it. Today we stopped by Trader Joe's on our way home to pick up some avocados (we have Bible Study tonight). I had just bought some there two days ago so I didn't think they would be hard to find. I circled the produce section two times and didn't see them. I was a little frustrated until one of the Trader Joe's employee's pointed out some huge green guava looking fruit. They were Slim-Ados. Don't ever buy them! It made my guacamole making go by a lot faster... since they were HUGE... but they taste horrible! On the sticker is says they have 50% less fat. How do you grow produce with less fat? I'm sure there is some scientific answer... but I don't care. The Trader Joe's guy said we could take them back if we didn't like them... but that's a little hard now since there is a huge bowl of Slim-Mole sitting in our refrigerator!!

Dan the Man

We created this site so we would be better about communicating... it hasn't work so well!! We are really going to try and be better about writing. This summer has been busy! Haiti was amazing. It was so eye opening to be in a different country... one that compares in no way to the US. It was hard to come back to paved roads and air conditioning... what an adjustment after only a week away. To somewhat explain how poor of a country Haiti is I have to tell you that the President of their country was on our flight in from Miami. I have never seen so many guns (once we landed) in one place in my life. I had serious thoughts about not getting off the plane! Seriously though... it was amazing to see how the Lord works in different places. We had a chance to do VBS with about 100 kids. It was so great to listen to them recite memory verses that they had learned throughout the year. They were so happy! I was so blessed to be able to go with Dan and experience just a tiny piece of what it might have been like for him to spend three years on the mission field in the Philippines.

Our big news of the summer is (no we are not pregnant... which we get asked at least 3 times a week!) that Dan got a teaching job!! What a huge answer to prayer. He will be teaching High School English in a school in the city... only 7 miles from our house. We were talking tonight about how amazing it is to live in somewhat of a big city and to be so close to everything. We live .4 miles from my work and church! I love to be able to walk to work in the morning!! Anyways, Dan will be teaching one period of World Lit. and four period of African American Lit. School started the day before he was hired, so he won't actually be in the classroom until school has been in session for about two weeks.

We are heading down to Atlanta this weekend (my first time to the south) to visit some good friends from Seminary. Should be lots of fun. We'll write again soon!!

Q-Tips

Has anyone ever noticed that on a box of q-tips there is a warning stating, do not insert in ear? Only in America can an iconic brand of cotton swabs on a stick state on the box that they should not be used in the very way that thay have been marketed upon for decades. So i cannot wait to see "do not insert into mouth" on hot pockets.

Nick

hello family and friends. We've returned from Haiti and actually didnt want to come back. It was great for us to walk in a different pair of shoes for awhile. Our internet has been down, it seems that there is a trade embargo against the import of DSL modems in the St Louis area, something about Fidel and DSL tobacco seeds.
We also came back to some tragic news, one of the young men from my youth group in Seattle, Nick Bloem, was killed in Iraq last Wednesday when Alyssa and I were in Haiti. He was a marine and a day past twenty. Please pray for the Bloem family and friends in this time. Alyssa and I are heading out to Seattle on Friday for the funeral. It is at times difficult to understand the affects of sin in this world, but Nick knew Christ who overcame sin and death. So we trust the Father even though our hearts break at the same time for Nick and the Bloem family.

Jorbs

Hey friends. Just wanted to let you all know that you can be praying and pulling strings for me as I am seeking a teaching job for High School English here in Missouri. I am currently in a temporary certification program that is contingent upon me getting job first, after which I begin to take education class at 9 invites a year for three years, after which I'd be 10 units away from a masters of education. That's a really bad sentence. Any ways all is well out here and we are two weeks from heading out to Haiti and in the mean time its hard to be in the uncertainty realm of job hunting with such an unconventional resume. I was really hoping that I would have a job before heading out to Haiti but we will see what the Lord has for us. Well just a short blog as I need to go grind out a stump, turn in an application package, pick up a log pile, deposit a check, and fill out a questionnaire for my Pastor's DMin project and hopefully waste some more time before I start all of that (are there any new movie trailers on apple.com/QuickTime/trailers?)

Wheat Grass

A week or so ago I wrote about trying to grow wheat grass. It really works... and now I have to admit that I am obsessed. I have planted it in 8 different containers in our house and today am going to try planting it outside. Plants grow amazingly fast here with the humidity.

Scott and Cari

I am so excited... my little sister Cari and her husband Scott are taking a road trip... and St. Louis will be one of their stops! This is a picture of Scott and Cari with my Dad that shows all the cool stuff we miss out on in Chico.
Anyways, anytime we do anything fun, I add it to my list of stuff to do when they get here. For example, we went to The Muny on Thursday night. The Muny is a huge outdoor theater. We saw "Annie Get Your Gun." It was great because once it got dark, you could see fire flies everywhere. One of the great things Dan and I discovered about St. Louis is all the free stuff to do. The Muny saves several rows of seats at the very back that are free... all you have to do is get there early.
So... I just thought I would write about how excited I am to see them next month. They will be driving out in my Mom and Dad's old orange VW van with their dog Ranger. I thought I would post some pictures because I just figured out how actually upload images into my post. Pretty cool!

Real Simple

So... a bunch of girlfriends out here subscribe to this magazine called Real Simple (Dan wants to create a sister magazine titled "Totally Complicated." I found that pretty amusing). I glanced through it a few times over the last year and didn't really think much of it until someone loaned me about five copies. I have been hooked ever since! I love a section that talks about new uses for old household items (for example: lighting candles with a piece of un-used spaghetti... it really works!). Anyways... a recent article (out of another magazine called Cottage Living) explains how to grow wheat grass in small containers for decoration. It looks so cool. On Sunday I made Dan drive around St. Louis to find the perfect wheat grass seeds (what a great husband!) and today I planted them. I'll have to post a picture if they really grow. My Dad and two sisters (Erica and Cari) are really the ones with the green thumbs in the family... so we'll have to see how it goes.

Some friends gave us tickets to a musical tonight. I am really excited since it is done outside in a huge theater. Fortunately tonight is one of the cooler nights in St. Louis out of the past two weeks. It gets unbelievably hot here! I guess it is more the humidity that I have a hard time dealing with. It feels like you're breathing in flour... not really... but it's still pretty bad.