Greetings from Idaho

We arrived safely in Idaho yesterday afternoon. We will be here until New Year's Eve. I have been so neglectful of this blog though I thought I could update while I am here even though the majority of my readers have me in person now. Maybe the cyber me is cooler. Do you love the cyber me or the real me? Where does the real me end and the cyber me begin? Or is it the other way around? Is there a cyber me or did I just make it up to sound cool? While I have your attention I'll take this opportunity to whine and complain. I don't do it often but I think I should be able to do so once in awhile. It's my blog after all. So Jonathan was finally done with school on Thursday night. I had work off Saturday, Sunday and Monday so I had lots of fun things planned for us to do alone together before we went to Idaho to be surrounded by crazy people. But Saturday morning I woke up with a cold probably given to me by Jonathan. We still managed to have some fun and play our fantasy board game, Runebound, for hours and hours. Sunday Jonathan and I still felt sick so we ended up sleeping most of the day. After I woke up from my nap I made a sandwich with some leftover rotisserie chicken and ate it. Then I got a really bad stomach ache and it didn't go away until 2 am after I had thrown up all of the sandwich (it took two times to get it all out). Note to self: DON'T EAT WEEK OLD CHICKEN. Naturally, on Monday I was pretty worn out and still sick from the cold and had an uneasy stomach. But we had to get everything ready for our trip. It took us all day long to clean the house and get packed because I was so tired. Jonathan had to grade tests as well. Yep he gave a killer final exam; the average grade was 76%, which he thinks is way too high. His first semester of teaching is now over. Anyway we didn't get to have any fun on Monday either. Tuesday we woke up at 4 am to catch our flight on time. I think I am finally over the cold but my nose is driving me crazy because it is itching so bad and the skin on it is raw from blowing it so much. Okay that's it. No more whining. That was probably the most boring paragraph I've ever written. Thanks for reading!!!

Here is my poor sick mother-in-law. She can hardly talk she is so sick.

This is my sister in law Jennie with her beloved dog Merlin. Jennie is a rare breed of Nelson since the Nelson tradition is to despise all dogs. I don't know why this text is linked but it's annoying.

This is my brother-in-law James who is graciously letting me use his awesome Macbook to type this. Laptops are fun! 

My Favorite Christmas Treat

Sugar Coooooookies!!!

Note: they must be thick and soft with lots of yummy frosting. None of those thin crunchy cookies for me!

Cookies in the decorating process

Annika seeing what she was missing during her nap.

Mandy debating between feeding Joseph and decorating more cookies

The finished product

Kay-Gee

I love these folks, I really do. After two years of living in St. Louis, Misery, I finally feel like we truly belong somewhere...

With our Kingdom Group

(Mandy- you don't have a copyright on this photo do you?)

p.s. nine more posts until the 100th Post Contest, details to come

God, the Lord of All (including electronics)

So last week I turned on the digital camera and the LCD screen was all white. That's it, just a white screen. I didn't drop the camera or anything, it just happened all the sudden. It still took photos, but you couldn't see them. What's the point of a digital camera if you can't see the pictures you take? Of course I felt pretty devastated. I don't take pictures much myself of course, but it has gotten to be Jonathan's livelihood, and we aren't in any position to buy a new digital camera either. I prayed and asked God that the camera would get fixed somehow- God is the God of electronics even, right?
Anyway, I started to think that if we asked for money for Christmas maybe we could afford to buy a new one, so I looked up digital cameras on Amazon and there are all over 150$, which is just too much. Then, I think maybe it can be fixed somehow, even though I have no idea how. I go to google and type in "digital camera LCD screen broken", click on one of the sites and it takes me to some "Fixya" website that has a listing of electronic products. I look up our exact camera, and guess what- several other people have had the same problem. The solutions given are rather weird and I'm not sure what they mean, but they all say something like- "hit the Cybershot logo on the camera." I think to myself, okay whatever, and hit the logo on the camera, turn it on, and viola! the screen now works. I can hardly believe my eyes.

God answers even the smallest prayers and can fix everything from our hearts to our digital cameras.

Exciting things I did while away from Blog world

• got my first catering job (I made 120 ginger cookies for a friend's club meeting and got paid for it. This made me very happy)


• learned two crochet stitches


• went to two public library locations 10 times in one week and checked out fifty books (I now owe over three dollars in library fines)


• made and decorated a cake from scratch


• started decorating for Christmas


• kicked, cried, and screamed (stress does this to a person)
  
• got airline tickets to Idaho for Christmas using mother's credit card.


• Wrote papers and lesson plans, final exams, art projects, and on and on and on....


• That's all I can think of right now. My life is so boring. Yet you keep on reading...

Why it stinks to live more than a day's drive away

• You miss your great grandma's 100th birthday.
• You miss your great grandma's funeral.