Time Off

I've had some time off he sometimes I wonder what I did with myself or my son before I had my job.

We're leaving for Galveston on Sunday. The forcast calls for storms and rain the whole time we're down there. That makes me really sad.

My girlfriend recently blogged about how she's had to release a desire for the American Dream into God's hands. For a long time I've known that John's desire is for the opposite of the American Dream and I've had to deal with that. But I have so many friends and family in houses and some in brand new houses and it makes it so difficult to sit idly by and watch them enjoy that. I know that some day when we retire we might by a place to settle but before that, it's just not what life has in store for us.

On the other hand I'll be able to raise my children in countries other than their own, and I'll be able to take them places some children will never be able to see. They'll have a life stuffed full of cultures from around the world. My husband will be so happily serving his country while getting to see the world and his wife will love walking to the market to buy fresh vegetables for that day's dinner.

That sounds like a great life!

New Favorite Song

Few and Far Between

I realize that my blog updates have seriously gone downhill in frequency. Most of the people that read my blog get updated on the phone or through email. Maybe that's one of the reasons I don't do it much any more. Another reason might be that I used to blog in the morning and now I work in the morning.

Life has been good. Summer school at CFNI is over so this week is just clean up week. Michelle and I have done most of the work in our room, so I don't know how much we'll have to do this week. Malachi has to come with me and he wont have his class and I don't know how that's going to go. Pray for us.

A week from today we're going to sleep in and head off for Galveston. We're going to go to Houston first for a trip to a dumplings restaurant. Our favorite in Dallas is supposed to pale in comparison so we're excited.

We'll spend four days down there including some time at the beach and Moody Gardens and some historical sites. We're staying at The Tremont House in Galveston and it looks really nice.

Today at church I was a part of a cardboard testimony. If you don't know what that is, check out this video. WARNING you may cry.

good weekend

We've had a pretty good weekend so far. Friday was mostly a relax day with a haircut for Malachi that morning. Our friends had a party so when Malachi woke up from his nap we went over to their house and didn't get home until 12:30 yesterday afternoon. They let us have the extra bed in their house. It was nice to not have to wake Malachi up, take down his bed and drag him home in the middle of the night.

Yesterday after Malachi's nap we went to the Zoo to have pictures taken. It was supposed to be a family photo session, but I think most of the pictures were just of Malachi. I think we did get some good family shots though. We've never done this the three of us, so I'm excited.

This morning we're off to church and tonight three of the youth from our church are coming to our place for dinner because they're staying on campus for YFN (Youth for the Nations) and KFN (Kids for the Nations) the two summer camps going on right now. I know that two out of those three aren't getting home cooked meals so they're happy to come over. I promised them a nice home cooked meal, but I think I might get a pizza from Papa Murphy's. We'll see.

1 Cup Cold Water

All I need to make Jello is 1 cup boiling water and 1 cup cold water. The boiling water is no problem of course. The cold water seems to be an issue in a hot Texas summer though. The water was running for well over two minutes and all I got was tepid water.

I think it will be ok though because it seems to be jelling. I meant to add banana slices and I forgot. Sorry babe.

Thank you!

After reading this in the Girl Talk Blog (check side bar for link) I was so encouraged about my life.

Some days I wondered: if I do all I do, only to have it undone, am I really doing anything?

Today, as I pack up my home in June of 2008, I can see the answer more clearly than I did in February 1986. Each of my daughters is married to a wonderful, godly man, Chad will be a sophomore in high school this fall, and we’ll welcome our seventh grandchild at the end of August.

I realize that all of the mundane, repetitive days were actually full of significant, enduring work. A home was being built. A family was being knit together. Four souls were being shaped for eternity.

This home has spawned three more homes where the same tedious yet momentous work goes on day in and day out. And God willing, many more homes will one day be built, day by day, so “that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:9).

Thank you Mrs. Mahaney for those very, very encouraging words!

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- well, some…
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – My goal is to read it in French
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I'm proud to say I've read 21 on the list instead of the average six. Thank you to Brenda Gill who showed me this on her blog. Oh btw, I couldn't figure out a way to underline. I tried doing this first in Microsoft Word and it didn't copy over correctly. The Bible should be underlined as well as Chronicles of Narnia, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.