Highlights of Summer 2008

Well this summer is beginning to draw to a close. some of the memories that will not long fade away are jen's gall bladder surgery- very hard on parentals!- but also unforgettable laughs from jen coming out of anathesia. then there was jen's incredible opportunity to live in london, thanks to her big bro and his wife.
It has also been the summer of learning to drive stick shift for jaj, however, we did not get as far along in the curriculum as mom wanted to. sigh. that was my biggest goal. rachel got glasses today and jared goes to the orthodontist today, so we are in the throes of adolescent changes everywhere.Rachel will also be entering public school for the very first time on the 25th. Bekah was ordering her t-shirt today that the seniors are all going to wear on their first day back. A banner year for all of us.
our d.c. trip was truly unforgettable and brought back many happy childhood memories.
This is the first summer in 15 years that I haven't been headed back for inservice next week - so a big change for me as well. Luckily I can live vicariously through my sharone's teacher blog!!!

Bekah avoids lightning strike

We had a bit of excitement last week. Bekah was spending the night at a friend's house on the second story and it got hit by lightning - about 6 feet from bekah and kelly!! It took out a lot of their electricity and messed up their plumbing and they as well as several of their neighbors are having lots of repairs. It only took out our modem. This morning in our front yard I noticed how one of our trees had a long strip down it where the bark had been stripped off and it looks like lightning may have done that. So I had to run inside and blog about it before I finished doing my yard cleanup work!
I also must mention our fun but short trip down to austin to see our beloved sharone, ross, and grandpets minnie and peyton. I was forced to play golf...on the PS-3!!! Jared and Rachel liked swimming in their pool and jared played in a basketball tournament. We loved going to SHAKES for ice cream!! and sharone and I had fun at the mall. she bought me some very comfortable reef flip flops for an early b-day present. we also got a new recipe for guacamole at HEB which I love. It is made with a Sweet Chile Lime sauce and cream cheese.
Today's blog is dedicated to Mawmaw.

to blogger ch

i know i'm a bad blogger, but i wanted to let ch know that i fixed my eldest son's blog address on my blog. also, i am still awaiting a blog about the a&m game you attended. our loud yellers were behind us again but thankfully left at half-time to eat bbq. this is the only thing they yell: come on fran!!! this is added to with various expletives. they also were threatening to mail back their aggie ring. i don't think they should have had one to begin with. their voices make your ears hurt more than the flyovers, of which we had two of by the way yesterday. you really get a free airshow with the price of your ticket which is really cool. MAJ, you would have liked the fact that they recognized the 1st student body president. it's really getting embarrassing that i still am crying during the a&m commercial they play about the greater good being a required course, reveille frolicing in the grass and people with their arms around each other whose backs spell out howdy. the man who does the voice over for it should be hired for brainwashing, because i see no way that listening to that commercial over and over wouldn't make any child want to go to a&m immediately! by the way, s.a. of baylor bears, can you email me your son's phone and email so i can give them to my baylor niece as an emergency friend contact.
(yes, writing to you personally on my blog lets me know if anyone is still checking it)

A Visit from a Londoner

Well, having a visitor from London definitely gives one a reason to blog... and a reason for RKJ to make buttermilk pies and RAJ to grill NY strips and marinated chicken. RAJ, RKJ and RKJ (yes there are two girls with those initials) teamed up to make for the first time ever... bacon wrapped jalapeno poppers on the grill. We had a fun time with our london visitor and her family. Then the next day it was off to the airport. She of course had to stop at wal-mart for a supply of products made in the U.S.A. - namely velveeta cheese and reese's peanut butter cups- the former being to have parties for americans and the latter to satiate Reese's deprived office mates. She also got to have her last U.S. meal for a while- at Rosa's cafe, compliments of my papa who was brought by nana. ABJ took some tortillas to her hubby-we haven't heard if they made it all the way across the ocean.

Guest Blogger...Lengthy Post!

Hey everybody, daughter here. I recently had the opportunity to go on a "Wilderness Trek" in Colorado with a sister church's youth group. Best week of my life! And I just wanted to share some pictures/words. Drove all day Saturday (9 hours?) to get to Trinidad, CO. I got to eat lunch at Chickfila in the mall in Abilene and it was awesome. We ate dinner that night at a place called BlackJacks that had some awesome mashed potatoes then stayed the night in a hotel, woke up early, went on a quick Starbucks run, held our own church service on a few picnic benches outside a Safeway, then headed off to Salida (stopped at amicas amazing brick oven pizza place for lunch)then arrived at base camp (about a 3 hour bus ride from trinidad) --where we loaded our meals, gear, and packs we would need for our 5 days of hiking and camping in the wilderness. We met with and got to know our 4 guides who would be leading us on the trail. We sang songs and had a welcome dinner with another church group who would be hiking a different mountain that same week. We practiced pitching our tents then stayed the night in them. The Sonic across the street was tempting, but off limits! From base camp the next morning we drove about another hour and a half or so to our rappelling site. After rapelling, we drove to the beginning of the trail. It was here we were introduced to "The Burden" a pretty heavy brick that was to be carried with us everywhere as a symbol of our struggles. Here's the catch: "The Burden" wasn't allowed in anyone's backpack, but instead must be carried by hand. We filled up our nalgenes with water from the river and added the 4 drops of chlorine to clean it. One of the kids with us got sick before we even started hiking, so one of our adult sponsors, who happens to be a mountain man maniac, (which is important later)drove him to the airport to be flown home. The rest of us started the 3 to 5 mile hike to low camp. I carried "The Burden" most of this hike. We were kind of running behind schedule. I don't remember what we ate the first night? Or if we even had a campfire? I'm sure we did. Our night at low camp is so vague in my memory. Wait. We talked about rapelling and trust and had a devo. And we ate"mac n dac". Macaroni with canned ham. Hmm. Pitched our tents. Told knock knock jokes. Now that I remember. And Goodnight!
Monday Pictures. (Rapelling Day)
We got to experience the thrill of rappelling off the cliff shown here:We wore harnesses, helmets, and gloves modeled here: Here I go! No fear

Prayer was a really important part of this week.
And then came Tuesday. Oh wow! Tuesday. Hm..Woke up and began the all day 15 to 20 mile hike to high camp. This was extremely challenging: physically and mentally, but we all sang songs to distract our minds and everyone was helping everyone out: awesome bonding time! The Burden was passed around to just about everyone over the long day. We stopped for lunch on the way(vienna sausages ew) and it started raining/hailing/snowing a little bit on us. It soon quit. We had been hiking for a few minutes after our lunch break when we realized we had left the Burden! A few went back to retrieve it. It was a close one. When we were about 200 yards from our destination (this was unknown to us at the time) our guides instructed us to take off our packs and place them in a circle. Then we played a musical chairs kind of game with our packs and everyone ended up with a different pack to carry as a way to kind of experience what burdens other trekkers had been putting up with all hike long. Some were heavier than others; some were lighter; some didn't fit quite so well...everyone's pack was a struggle to the person who was carrying it though. Reaching high camp was so exciting. We pitched our tents and napped/rested until dinner time. What did we eat at dinner? The meals are all such a blur to me. I think it was rice and something else added to it. I just forget what we added to it. It wasn't very tasty. I remember that much! Campfire devo. Bedtime.
TUESDAY PICTURES(Hiking Day)
This is the 80 lb. pack that I hiked with. We became very close.

Crew #2 preparing dinner

Singing and whatnot.

Wednesday we got to sleep in!! (yes..6 am was considered sleeping in!) The guides cooked us a special treat for breakfast:fried spam && reeses pieces pancakes! The pancakes were dee-lish..my fried spam ended up under a tree somewhere after one and a half bites. Shh, don't tell on me! After breakfast my friend Elizabeth and I attempted to wash our hair in the river. The water was ridiculously freezing cold. We were in the middle of shampoo/conditioning when the group started yelling at us to hurry up and come get instructions for the rest of the day. So we poured as many water bottles as we could (while we were screaming because it was so cold) to rinse it out. We found out later that we both had not gotten all the shampoo/conditioner out so our hair looked even worse than before we had washed it. We didn't try that again the rest of the week :) We walked back up to high camp with wet hair and gloves on (to warm our freezing hands) to learn that we would be spending the next 3 hours by ourselves. Well actually not alone. With God! In silence and solitude kind of thing. It was hard to not be distracted by bugs..and the fact that I didn't have a jacket on and was going into convulsions from being so cold and having wet hair didn't seem to help them. But it was so neat to just sit in awe of His creation and let Him speak to my heart. It didn't even seem like 3 hours had gone by when they said now it's lunch time. Again, I don't recall what we ate? Then it was free time! Most everyone used this time to bathe. Elizabeth and I decided against the cold river water and instead resorted to cleanliness via baby wipes. Worked very well. A few friends and I headed back across the river to a big grassy knoll called "The French Peak" I think..and just hung out for most of the afternoon while everyone else stayed at high camp and played cards. It was a super relaxing day. Oh! and remember mountain man maniac who had to take the sick kid home? well he just hiked his little self up to high camp all in one day without stopping. cool beans. Dinner..Devo..Sleep! We went to bed extra early to get ready for Summit Day!

WEDNESDAY PICTURES (Solo Day)

Crossing the River Into The Grassy Knoll a.k.a. French Peak

The view from where I spent my Solo Time
Thursday was also challenging. We woke up SUPER, SUPER early. (Before 4 a.m.) Drank some hot chocolate and began our trek to the summit of Mt. Rinker! I will let the pictures speak for themselves. It was a hard hard hike and it was so awarding to reach our destination. The hike down was difficult as well. At one point we got to slide down a huge patch of snow. Fun times. =) About half way to high camp someone said, "hey who has the burden?" WE LEFT IT AT THE SUMMIT!! ahh. silly us. We were MISERABLE when we got back to high camp. (Much later in the afternoon). We probably hiked for 10 hours! Mosquitos were swarming, we had to wait 30 minutes to drink our water, everyone was just exhausted and worn out and kind of cranky. We napped and woke up in chippier moods, played a game of signs until dinner and campfire. I think we ate rice and beans? Or ramen noodles? One of the two. Night night!

THURSDAY PICTURES (SUMMIT DAY!)

The same hands that created all of this...they created you and I.

ah. i can't do it anymore. friday we woke up early hiked back to the bus drove back to salida ate lunch at amicas again went swimming at the natural hot springs pool took showers(real ones!) went back to base camp had a little banquet meal and final devotional turned all our stuff back in (they gave us a new "burden brick" and we all signed it)then drove the 3 hours back to trindad where we stayed the night at our hotels. woke up the next morninggg. (took another real shower..mm!)drove in bus. lunch at subway in amarillo. got home saturday around 7. happy birthday rachel. the end.

(picture from final devo on friday night. thats all she wrote folks.) I ALMOST FORGOT..the theme for the week was RENOVATE US www.wildernesstrek.org if you want to know more! i hope i get to go again next year. i really would encourage you to jump on the chance to take one of these trips if given the opportunity. okay. bye now.

summertime...

summertime and the livin is easy.... it's time to discuss my top 4 fav summer foods: #1 being a tomato out of someone's garden with salt and pepper. #2 would have to be my new discovery: zucchini fried in butter with brown sugar and nutmeg. #3 being fresh peach cobbler right out of oven and #4 is corn on the cob with lots of butter, salt and pepper. I just finished eating #2.

eleventh b-day for rkj

Does anyone remember what they did for their eleventh b-day party. I'm hoping rkj'scelebration yesterday will live long in her memory. (Nobody is around today that can show me how to add a pic to my blog so that will have to wait until a later time). If repetitiveness enhances your memory, then I think she'll remember yesterday forever. Because there were only 2000 people at six flags yesterday b/c of rain, as opposed to the normal 7000 weekday crowd, you could ride things over and over without standing in line again. I managed to get cured of my love of the log ride by riding it ad nauseum. No matter how many times we rode it though, rkj never did get the guts to be at the front of the log so that is where i sat each time i rode it and i rode it too many times to count. i felt like good friends with the people who were running it by the time we left. i was almost getting to know them on a middle and last name basis.
And then there was the sponge bob ride. I only could handle it twice and i lost count (5 maybe) of how many times daughter and friend rode it. If you haven't been on it, it is a 4-D video and you wear special glasses. It looks like sponge bob is coming out at you and is a couple of inches from your face. (this works even if you are sitting in the middle of the auditorium or to the side) I was very amazed. The best part for me was watching rkj flinch everytime at the sponge bob coming for her face!!
I loved the looney tunes boat ride (yosemite sam) b/c it is the closest thing I can get to my all-time favorite ride at disney- it's a small world. i was younger than rkj when i rode it and it made quite a thrilling impression on me - the kind that brings back warm fuzzy feelings.
rkj as well as her friend were quite taken with all the looney toon characters walking around as well as a magician that did a private show for them.
jaj is off for day 3 of golf tournament. day 2 was rained out. tonite his caddy (dad) and he are supposed to eat dinner with dad's old college roommate whose son is in first place of tournament after day 1, and is in the oldest guys group, so his name was mentioned on the wichita news mon. nite. should be a fun day for dad and son. jaj had some heavy decision making to do this morning. i tried to be supportive of his decision to wear his black cap as opposed to blue or white even though he already wore it on monday. remember those days when that was the biggest decision of the day????
well, rj challenged our ss class to read the WHOLE new testament in ONE WEEK. seeing how this is wed. already i may have to attempt to read all the gospels 2day to get caught up! So along with going to the dentist today, sounds like a full schedule! At least no log riding today.