Aloha

Aloha from Hawaii!! The weather has been hazy, but perfect temperature. Supposedly it is called "vog" (which is smog that is coming from the volcano on the main island). Some have called it Pele's breath, but whatever you call it, I think it is helping us to not get too fried in the sun. Here is a picture of us on Waikiki Beach on Tuesday. On Tuesday we pretty much hung out at Waikiki for most of the day. In the evening we went to a free hula show that had several different types of hula.

This morning we went to go take a hike up Diamond Head, but the trail to the top was closed for the month for repairs. So, we just walked around inside the crater for a little while. Next we headed out for Kailua Beach, which was voted to be one of the top 10 prettiest beaches in the world. When we first got there (and off and on throughout the day) the sun was shining and the water was an amazing color of turquoise! The pictures do not do it justice.

Yesterday a person on the beach gave us their two boogie boards because they were leaving so we had a great time boogie boarding. I had forgotten how much fun this is!! (Really, the kids did have the boards more than I did. I just posted the pictures where I am on the board!) The water is just a wonderful temperature.

Spelling Bee

Annsley participated in her first spelling bee. It was a group spelling bee for 5th and 6th graders and they were allowed to write the words down before they said it. Annsley worked very hard on her words. The best part is.....THEY WON!!!! I was so happy for them.


Here are the girls before the bee started. They were SOOOO nervous....and so was I!




Here are the girls during the spelling bee.

Here are the girls after getting their final word correct.

Here is the trophy:

She did NOT get her spelling genes from her mother!! There were several times when I was just sure they missed the word, and it was correct.

Grandpa Tick

Today would have been my Grandpa Tick's birthday. When I went to check my Facebook (this whole Facebook thing is new to me!) I noticed my cousin Edd, had posted a reference to the fact that he was thankful for his Grandpa. This spurred a little fury of posts Pam, Krina, Edd and me stating some of Grandpa's favorite one-liners. All day I have been smiling as I connect with a cousin in Arizona, a cousin in Minnesota and a cousin across town as we honor Grandpa Tick!

He had a great sense of humor and was known for his one-liners. One of my personal favorites was, "I stick up for you. When they said you weren't fit to eat with the pigs, I said you were!" We decided that it would have made him very happy to have been honored in this way-by us remembering some of his more famous jokes!

Happy Birthday, Grandpa! You are missed.

Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Our church is going to put on The Best Christmas Pageant Ever this year. I love that play, and so I was thrilled to hear that we were going to do it. Annsley wanted to audition, of course, but what surprised me was that Seth was open to doing it. He usually doesn't like to be in front of people (which is a pre-requisite for doing plays!). He told me he would try out "if I made him," but I could tell he kind of wanted me to make him. So I made him, and all three of us tried out.

I was nervous at the auditions. Not for myself, and not even for Annsley, but for Seth. You had to stand on the stage in front of everyone and cold read a scene. He did such a good job! Annsley and I were both so surprised at how well he did. He didn't seem at all nervous and spoke with inflection in his voice and confidence. I put down on my audition form that I wanted to have a small part because I really don't have time to do much more than that.

I got the part of one of the church ladies, Seth got the part of Elmer (the kid who usually plays Joseph) and Annsley got a roll that they created for her. The director said the part of Alice was between her and another girl and Annsley was just a little too young. So, the director is creating a side-kick for Alice. He describes Annsley's part as "mini-Alice" or the "vice Alice".

It sounds like they have some great ideas to update the play a bit and make it a little more current. They are going to have some of the monologues filmed and shown in the play. We are all excited for our first rehearsal on Friday night. We are going to rope Danny into doing sets or something so we can all do it together.

First Job

We have a neighbor who needed her baby watched for a couple of hours, and she asked Annsley to do it. It was great training because she came to our house and so I could give hints and help with the duties!

She fell asleep in Annsley's arms and Annsley experienced that feeling of not wanting to move and wake the baby up, but being very uncomfortable in the position! Very cute!!

First Day of School

This is ridiculously late, but I couldn't NOT post it. It is tradition. This was our first day of TEC classes.

At age 40....He still got it!!

Danny wanted me to record the fact that at age 40 he is still doing flips off the board. I refused to be recorded flipping anything in a bathing suit! :-)

This made me sad....

This made me sad. I was so looking forward to this day! But, there is always next week, eh?

What I've been doing

This summer I seem to have crossed some strange threshold. I have actually really enjoyed all the fruit and vegetable processing we have done. We got a fruit dehydrator for Christmas last year and we have put it to good use drying fruit and making fruit leather. Here is just a sample of what has been keeping me busy this last couple weeks.

We have canned peaches with Danny's mom, sister, Annsley, my nieces Kailyn and Claire. When all is said and done, I'm hoping to have close to 100 quarts of peaches!!

We bought 4 boxes of apricots for 40 cents a pound and we have been using the dehydrator to turn them into fruit leather. So far we have about 200 rolls (apricot, cherry and raspberry)

This year we made strawberry, boysenberry and blackberry jam from picking in our garden. We also made some apricot jam which didn't set very well and will probably be ice cream sauce!

We are picking carrots and zucchini like crazy from our garden. We have about 20 bags of shredded zucchini and about 10 bags of shredded carrots with more to come.

We picked over 60 bags of raspberries from our garden and we'll be eating these all winter!!

The funniest part of this whole thing is that I used to hate this whole process and somewhere along the line I have come to really enjoy it and take great pleasure in the whole thing!!! It feels so great to be stocked up for the winter.

Painting

For Annsley's 11th birthday we decided to redecorate her room with new bedding and paint. She chose the bedding and then we decided to get a little creative with the paint. And, when I say "we" I really mean that my friend Cathy designed it and my friend Amy and Cathy helped me choose the paint colors to match the bedding. Today was the big painting day. Last week we taped off the stripes and today was the big day. We got to painting, and when I say "we" I really mean Cathy. I did some rolling but she did the detail work. I was most useful cleaning brushes!! It turned out SO cute!!! Annsley just loves it. I'm very happy with how it looks. We still have to add a few things to the walls and some accessories, and when I say "we" I really mean my friends will tell me what to get and where to put it.

A must-read

I have just finished reading the book The Heavenly Man, which is the autobiography (written with Paul Hattaway) of Brother Yun.

It is interesting timing reading this story with the backdrop of the Olympics taking place in China. I watched the opening ceremonies and heard the talk about the new openness of China and then read about a man tortured and beaten for being a Christian less than TEN years ago!!

This book is an AMAZING testimony of God's work in the Chinese church through many believers such as Brother Yun. If you want a challenge to your faith and a chance to view God working miracle after miracle, I highly recommend this book!! It is a strong challenge to the Western church and a call to prayer for the believers in countries that are hostile to the gospel of Jesus.

Wordless Wednesday-Cousins at the Beach

The Most Romantic Anniversary

Seventeen years ago today we were married! We have some friends from out of town visiting us for the next couple of days, so our anniversary has not been a priority. We'll go out to dinner some other time, which is just fine by me. It just so happens that Becky (who is staying in their RV outside our house) was my maid of honor, so it is only fitting that she returns to Spokane to be here on July 6.

Today we did something that we did 17 years ago on the day *before* my wedding. We had a big barbecue/pool party in my parents' back yard. It was a perfect day, not too hot, but just right for swimming and sitting by the pool chatting. My parents were there. My sister-in-law, LaNae and kids were there (she went to high school with Becky). Later on my brother and family stopped by to swim. I felt like I was surrounded by people that I love. I watched Danny play with the kids in the pool and couldn't imagine any romantic dinner or get-away giving me more loving feelings than I had for him at that moment. I did NOT know seventeen years ago that he would be the amazing father that he is.

The funny thing is that there were no cards this year (we've been busy getting back from vacation, etc). We didn't even remember that it was our anniversary until about 10:00 this morning. Sure, I'm looking forward to going out to a nice dinner together soon, but today was perfect!

Day 13-14 Yellowstone

Well, we are home and officially done with vacation. We ended up logging 4300 miles of driving!! Whew!! I'll post a few highlights of Yellowstone.

There were some fun animals! Lots of bison walking right down the road!

A grizzly bear off the road!

An elk taking a little mid-afternoon snooze.

There were hikes up to look at waterfalls....

and hikes down (328 steps to be exact!) to waterfalls. (I liked going down better than up!)

There were amazing colors...

and an amazing lack of colors with mountains "smoking"!

There was the expected (Old Faithful)...

and the surprises....

Over and over on this trip I was reminded of God's amazing creativity and the beautiful world we live in!!

Day 12-Lotsa Driving

Well, really the only highlight of today (besides eating dinner and swimming at the hotel in Billings) was this....

This makes 41 states, and all the new states that we will collect this trip. We drove about 400 miles today, but it was a pleasant drive and actually went by quickly. Tomorrow we'll be in Yellowstone, and I don't think we will have internet connection until we get back. So, I'll update you on the Yellowstone adventures when we get back.

Day 11-The Badlands

Well, we started off the day with the exciting Wall Drug. We got the obligatory bumper sticker (even though we won't put it on our car.) The billboards were funny and it was about what you would expect it to be.

Next we continued east to The Badlands. We couldn't decided if they were pretty in an ugly way or ugly in a pretty way, but it was interesting to see.

We took a hike that originally said .25 miles round trip, but I think we went a little past that. This shows where we ended up (and we had already been hiking up a while)

Here was the view from the top.

Next we took a tour of one of the abandoned missile silos. We went down into the chamber where they waited to launch the nuclear missiles and learned about the process. I must confess I wasn't all that excited about this particular event, but it ended up being very interesting. The funniest part of the whole thing was that one of our tour guide's name was Egor Prokofiev and had a Russian accent. Turns out he is a student in Russia over here doing an internship.....or at least that is his story and he's sticking to it. Danny was pretty sure he was stealing government secrets, never mind that he wasn't even born during the cold war.

Then we headed to dinner and to the hotel for some swimming.

Day 10-Wind Cave and Mt Rushmore

This morning we went to Wind Cave National Monument. We took a tour of a great cave.

A part of this was also a buffalo range with an incredible amount of prairie dogs and pronghorn antelope. Here are a couple favorite pictures. It was beautiful country.

We had heard that if you bring carrots there was a herd of "begging burros" that would come up to your car, but we weren't quite prepared for this....

This afternoon I finally got to see Mt. Rushmore! I have been very excited to see this. It did not disappoint. Here is the classic entrance picture.

Tonight we all went swimming at the pool. A good day!