A New Adventure

Well, God sold the boat tonight. I've got 3500 cash sitting next to me right now. I wanna explain that God part. As I was sitting down to look for a ski boat online...cause that was the plan all along. Sell the boat and get a new one. Well, when James came back inside he had a look on his face and said we needed to have a family meeting. Well he dropped a bomb shell in my lap. He said that he'd been praying and God has really laid adoption on his heart. That was not new news, but what shocked me was when he said he didn't want to get another boat and that he wanted to sell the truck as well. Instant tears filled my eyes, but I gotta admit I couldn't quite figure out if it was cause I was sad tht we were selling our only toys or because of the way I could feel God at work in this situation, I think it was for both reasons. Wow. I never thought James would agree to sell the truck and not get another boat or truck. Well, off we go toward the unknown. God is good.

friends, overnighters, and copiers

We had a fun weekend around here. On Friday I got some much needed hang out time with 3 of my friends from Lincoln. We met at Medici's in Normal for dinner and then came back home to play Euchre. I miss haning out with friends like that. There aren't too many people we can just let lose with and have fun with around here with James being the preacher and all. For some reason most people don't think we're real people who sin and have our own issues...even if they know it in their heads they don't act like they know it. I wish they wouldn't feel funny around us...hopefully all in good time. Then there's the rest of the people who think we're in a totally different generational age range who think we don't want to go out with them cause we're young so they never ask us to do anything. ugghhh! Who would have thought friendships in ministry would be so difficult. blah. oh well, enough about that.

We had Marranda come over and spend the night with us on Saturday and go to church with us yesterday. We had so much fun with her, she didn't act weird and she slept all night long without any problems. She was also a very well behaved little girl. Perhaps she remembers that there are rules in this house. Everyone at church was so glad to see her. She's talking very well and growing very fast. She will be getting tubes in her ears in a couple of weeks. Hopefully that will help her speech even more. We hope to be able to have her over more often now that we know everything will go alright. We were pretty nervous about how she would sleep when she stayed over. Yeah for fun cuddly Marranda.

After a long weekend we finally got the newsletter out this morning. The lightbulb in the copier broke halfway through printing them this morning, so we had to use a crazy copier that was in the basement. It got done and all is well, but the copier that broke is 15 years old and they don't service it anymore. The guy told us that it would cost $2-300 to fix it if they could find a replacement bulb. James said no and went and got his drill. The copier is now disassembled and the bulb is removed. James found a replacement bulb online for $40. We'll see if it works. Hopefully its just that simple. Leave it to my husband to take apart the top of the copier... oh well, we got the truck fixed, now we've moved on to the copier. Fun times on a Monday morning at Wapella Christian Church. Now my handyman is asleep in his lazy-boy. We sure act like old folks much of the time...and we're not even old. Sometimes it's just sad. ;-)

Seminary, Trucks, and Retreats

Well, not much is new with us. I've got one more chapter to complete for my thesis and it will be done, except for a final go through after my professors read and critique it. It feels good to have it almost behind me. I registered for two seminary classes for next fall. One is an internet class and the other is greek. I'm not to thrilled about either, oh well, what am I gonna do... James has to go through orientation before he can register, but he's planning on taking greek with me. Hopefully that'll be a good thing.

Last week we gave the truck a tune-up...and when I say we, I mean we. Here's a couple of pictures. I may be smiling in this picture, but neither of us were smiling much as we worked on the truck. This was the first time I've ever crawled under a truck or under the hood of a truck to actually do anything productive. I had to crawl under cause James couldn't get to what he needed to in order to remove the old spark plugs. I have now decided that I never ever want to be a mechanic, but I did enjoy helping James with the truck. We like to fix things together. He did a good job at holding his temper. He tends to get really angry when he's trying to fix something and it's not working right. I don't like it when he does that and would have quit and gone inside and that's no fun either. So I'm glad we avoided that and I'm glad the truck still runs.

James and I are both looking foward to summer. James found a place that hosts retreats for ministers and their wives for free up in Cedarly, WI. Check it out here. There will be 5 other ministry couples there at the same time. It lasts 5 days and they provide meals and everything. They take care of everything. It's going to be a lot of fun to get away and not have to worry about anything. We have another retreat to go to in August, but that will be more like a vacation than a retreat. James really wanted to get away after graduation before summer really gets going. It's going to be another full summer, but a really good summer.

Sheep

Skye and her mom raise sheep and right now the sheep are having babies. Skye and I had our first overnight last night and we had to go out to the barn to give the sheep water. When we went into one of the pens we found two little surprises waiting for us. The mother sheep had just given birth to two lambs within the last hour. As a courtesy I cut out the gross stuff for you. :) It was pretty cool. I'd never seen a lamb before, let alone two less than an hour old. I wish I had some profound spiritual analogy for you, but all my profoundness is being used up in my thesis... It's coming along... almost done with chapter four. I'm on page 30 and still typing... I'm hopeful that it will be done tomorrow.

Bathrooms and Timeshares

I've been working on my thesis this morning, but thought I'd take a break to introduce you to our new bathroom floor. I know you're probably not as excited about it as I am, but I don't care. It's pretty stinkin awesome. After a year and a half we finally have a bathroom we'll let people use when they come over. When we first moved in the bathroom in the parsonage had a painted black floor. Over the past couple of years the paint has chipped and has been impossible to clean. Well, this week it finally got replaced. Yeah for clean looking bathrooms. Here is a before and after shot.

On another note, James thought it would be fun to drag me to a timeshare presentation yesterday morning. He said he was getting even for me making him go to a pots and pans presentation for a free vacation (that we never actually took) before we got married. This was the same deal, we had to go listen and take a tour and get hammered with all kinds of numbers, half of which made no sense, all so we could get a free trip to Orlando, $40 cash and some goofy gas voucher thing. We drove 3 hours round trip for this thing. He claimed he was doing it to get more sermon illustrations out of it....we better have kids soon, just so he'll have sermon illustrations besides me and the stupid stuff we do together...anyway. We used to forty bucks to get gas, lunch, and for me to go to Flat Top last night with Kassi, so it wasn't a total loss. The lady who gave us the tour was goofy. She didn't normally do it and I think she was nervous or something cause she said over and over... "i know, right" in a stereotypical "blondish" sort of way. Poor girl was preaching about that resort in vain. What was funniest was when she was trying to tell us what we'd spend in 20 years vacationing in hotels. We told her that we normally try and spend 500-700/year on hotel type vacations and somehow that ended up being $140,000.00 over the course of 20 years... No idea where she got that number. Cracked me up. By the time we were done wheeling and dealing we had them down from a 3000 down payment and 450/month to 500 down and 100/month for some ghetto deal and then we left. It was kind of fun to see how much they were willing to deal.

Oh well, if we had extra $$ right now it would go into the savings account and not into a timeshare. What crazy things preachers will do when they want to get out of the office.

So goes life in Wapella.

the man cave

James has taken to calling our little section of the basement his "Man Cave." Here's a picture of the "man cave"...you can see why its in quotes and I'm being sarcastic. It's about as far away from a "man cave" as a man can get. At least its not pink and purple. But there is laundry and a broken washer that we don't know what to do with and a rack full of "stuff." So it goes. He is trying to make railing for the boat and since it's cold outside he has moved to the basement. I'm not sure what's going on down there. I just know I better stay out of the way. I don't care what he does as long as it doesn't look ghetto. He wants to try and sell the boat so that we can get a fish and ski. I don't know how well that will go over, but it's his project for the spring, so in the words of my mother I say "hey, you go man." Mom usually says "hey, you go girl" when i've got something to do. The older I get the more I sould like my mom, but that's not a bad thing.

By the way, I'm done with half of chapter 4 of my thesis. It helps that I've been thinking about chapters 4 and 5 throughout this process. They should go by without losing too many brain cells.

It's been a couple days since I wrote the draft of this blog. We've got the boat done and listed on ebay, the tradin post, and craigslist. We'll see what happens.