I'll be home for Christmas!

This week has flown by! I can hardly believe that it is November 16! How could this be? Could it really be just a month from the Christmas holiday already? We are going to be traveling to the East for Christmas break. Hence the title of this entry! We will be doing presentations at our home church and will be visiting with another church that has been supporting us. Abby & Kelcy will get to see their friends. Abby already wants to see if she can spend the night with Eva. Abby has been talking a lot about her “old” friends in Kentucky and her family. How much she misses them and how much fun she is going to have when she sees them.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Mr. Bill is back in the office today! We also have a new Navajo lady who is watching Kelcy and Noah for me in the morning. She arrived right on time! The kids liked her and played with her well. It was a hectic kind of day, adjusting to having two people in the office with me. Not that it is a burden by any means, but it is different. I had been alone mostly all day with the kids for about seven weeks, so it was different, like I said.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Today is the day that our nation sets aside to honor our veterans, the men and women who have served our country in the armed services. I will add my personal thanks to that of many others by saying “Thank you!” for keeping our country safe and making it a place where freedom still rings. In honor of Veterans Day, the school was closed today. We spent the day as a family at home, resting and playing together. The mission also got a new washing machine, that is located in our trailer! Thank you Community Christian Church! The old washing machine seemed to wash fine, but each time the washer hit the spin cycle, one of us would go and sit on the washer so that it would not “walk” out into the hallway and keep it from making loud banging noises. Jerry had tried a couple of times to see if the washing machine needed adjustment from the bottom to make it level and it would be a little better for a while. But now, thanks to a designated gift from our home church, there is a new washing machine here! We can wash clothes without having to constantly monitor the cycles and having to interrupt whatever else we are doing to sit on the washing machine. Yeah! We are very grateful.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Today, we are taking the 5th through the 8th grades on a field trip to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. There are seven children in these grades and they all were signed up to go. Six of the students stayed after school. I got to hit around some volleyball with two of the ladies. I had a lot of fun even there. At 4:30PM, we all loaded up and went to Captain Tony’s Pizza and had supper. It was an Italian buffet with spaghetti and pizza and cheese sticks and salad. It was very good. The kids all had a good time. Next, we drove the 45 minutes to Flagstaff to the Observatory. It is set upon a mountainside just west of the downtown of Flagstaff. As we drove up the mountain, we could see the lights of the city of Flagstaff below us. It was a lovely sight. It was unusual, I must admit. I hadn’t been out at night or seen city lights of that magnitude in quite awhile. We had scheduled a private program and viewing with the 24” telescope they have there. The program about the planet Mars was very educational and the kids asked some good questions, showing they were really paying attention. We all had a great time at the hands-on exhibit hall. There was a puzzle that involved putting the planets in their proper order in distance from the Sun. After this, we went to another exhibit hall and looked at three dimensional pictures of Mars with 3D glasses. It was really neat to see the craters, one as long as the United States land mass and the volcano called Olympus Mons in the three dimensional format. Even Abby and Kelcy enjoyed it. Next was the big event, looking through the 24” telescope at the moon and perhaps other heavenly bodies. Unfortunately, God had other plans. The wind was too strong to open the largest telescope and the night was cloudy, so the very reason for our evening visit not realized. We did get to see the moon through the 16 inch telescope and that was neat. The kids all had a good time and I think they will remember the visit to the Observatory for a long time. It certainly made a memory for me.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Kelcy and I went into town to run errands for work and do the weekly shopping. We went to the bank, the post office, the library, to get gas in the van and to the grocery store. It was a busy day.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

I enjoyed the service at Red Sands Christian Church. We had another wonderful lesson about thankfulness and gratefulness. I always enjoy having my life put into the proper perspective. I had four students in my Sunday school class and that went really well.

I just wanted to let you all know that all of the staff here are having a personal impact on the students and members of this community. I realize it doesn't look like that by reading this blog. These personal meetings and evangelism will never be reported here. I think that someone would be afraid to talk to me if they thought I might talk about their life situation on this blog. So, please understand there is a lot of individual evangelism that goes unreported here because of confidentiality.