First two weeks

So I know some of you have been curious about my first days at my new job. Well, it was a really slow start. I started last week Tuesday. I had about an hour of paperwork an hour of watching informational videos by myself, apparently this was my orientation. They sent me over to the landscaping building, but hardly anyone was there. All the landscapers went home because it was raining, so they sent me home too. Wednesday was a half day of taking down wire mesh from around tree trunks (winter protection from deer/rabbits), then we went home early because of rain. Thursday was a snow day, and Friday was my first full day. I blew leaves, edged, and pruned bushes at two different lake houses.

Saturday was a nice warm day so we went back to Kohler Andre State Park for a picnic and got our annual sticker. We will definitely be going back there to camp later this summer. They have two quiet woody campgrounds and two nice beaches. We took a walk through through the woods and smelled campfire smoke, it made us wish it was summer!

Monday through Thursday was pretty crazy. I was working at a huge house across the street from Lake Michigan. The owner was the daughter of the man who started Shlitz beer and the widow of the man who started Northwestern Mutual. Now here is the crazy part: we were hand thatching her whole yard! We were on our hands and knees pushing and pulling metal rakes through the grass to get out the dead grass from last year. Then we raked up the dead grass, went over it with a leaf blower, mowed it and then fertilized it. I was numb that whole week. The nice thing was that she gave each person a $20 tip and a box of cookies each day! The guys said that would be the only time I would have to do that and that it would be the hardest thing I would have to do, trial by fire I guess.

I will mainly be doing maintenance landscaping like blowing, raking, edging, pruning, mowing, stuff like that. I still don't know how I will be involved in native landscaping or organic gardening. I think I will find out more once planting starts picking up, or after my first 30 days when I get a review.

A side note on the fertilizer: Every once in awhile, we smell this really weird odor coming from downtown. It smells like a dirty rancid wet dog, but that doesn't begin to describe it, it's very unique to say the least. So the fertilizer we were using on the job was something called Milorganite. The guys explained that it is basically human poop from the Milwaukee municipal waste company. Mil(Milwaukee)-organ(organic)-ite is the final product of sewage that has been dried, baked and pelletized. Once the guys began spreading it on the lawn, I recognized that unique smell. That is what we have been smelling! No joke!

Friday we had a game night with the 20 somethings group from our church. It had been awhile since we had done anything with them, so it was good to get out and socialize. We played the dice game called Bunko. If you haven't played, it's a good way to mix people up and get them talking. We also played a Hilarious game of Catch Phrase.

Last night, we went out for a really nice dinner with all the tip money I got to celebrate my getting a job. It was the first time in ages that we went out to a restaurant. I had a great sirloin and coconut shrimp surf and turf, and Leah had a grilled tuna steak. And of course I had to get a Shlitz beer to honor the founder of the feast.

Spring Break

So Leah and I finally got a break from the monotonous gray that is Milwaukee in winter. I got a few days off for Leah's spring break, so we could head back to Holland and spend some time with family. We got home late Thursday night, so we could have an extra morning sleeping in at home. We spent most of Friday, Saturday and Tuesday helping my parents paint their living room and family room. They just got nice new hardwood floors and thought it would be a good idea to redecorate at the same time. Leah got to spend some of the time (while I was painting) shopping with her female fam. The rest of the weekend we enjoyed the great weather (sunny and 65 degrees) during the day, and enjoyed fires and movies at night.

We have also enjoyed the rest of Leah's spring break back here in Milwaukee. I had one thing on Wednesday, but nothing on Thursday, so we went up to Lake Winnebago for the day. We have been wanting to get up there for awhile, because we thought there would be some things to do (we were expecting something Traverse City-ish), but it was pretty sticky, as in "in the Sticks." We probably won't be going back there any time soon. On Friday, I was at a middle school about an hour away doing "mineral mania" 4 times in a row. It was fun and it gave me a pretty good idea of what it would be like to be a middle school science teacher, something that I am thinking of persuing later. That night, we went to one of the many local microbrews in town to celebrate what I will explain in the next paragraph.

I GOT A JOB! So the story begins last fall when I was looking for jobs. I found a list of native nurseries in the state on the Wisconsin DNR's website. I found one within driving distance and emailed them, asking if there was anything I could do, I even offered to volunteer. They said that I could check back in March, which I did. A few days after I sent them my resume, I got a call from Lied's, the company I contacted. They were wondering if I was interested in an interview, which of course I was. I went in the next week and it went very well. I learned a little more about the job I would be doing and they said that they would contact me soon. Last week I got a letter saying that I got the job!

Let me explain it a little more: I will be a landscape technician (one level up from entry) working on a fairly traditional residential landscaping crew. What is really exciting is that I will also be involved in many of the projects that involve native plants and green/organic gardening/landscaping. The idea is that by next year, the company wants an entirely "green" crew that I will be an integral part of. The other exciting part is that it is full time with benefits! This means that I will be learning how to snow plow next winter! I start April 6, weather permitting. It sounds like I can still do Mad Science birthday parties/super saturdays/special events on saturdays and weeknights.

Their website is: lieds.com if you want to check it out a little more. You can see that most of the stuff is hardscaping, but I will be doing more residential planting. I will keep posting on how everything is going.

Thanks for all of the prayers!

So I didn't get either of the jobs. I have a few other ideas, but I won't bore you with the details until I actually get one of them. Please pray for patience, because it's been pretty frustrating lately. "Mad Science" is picking up, so I am working about 6-8 gigs a week, as opposed to 3-4 this fall. In other news, we have been doing some fun things lately, which I will try to recall now.

Last Saturday we took advantage of another free day at one of our local attractions. The Milwaukee zoo! Free meaning $12 for parking. It was quite a bit of fun to get out of the apartment for an afternoon. We wanted to go earlier in the day, but I was at the office doing a 2 hour "Super Saturday" event for the first time.

The first building was the primate exhibit. Leah and I have never seen orangutans and gorillas before, so it was pretty cool to see their mannerisms and how huge they are. The other monkeys like at John Ball seemed so tiny after that. It was a sunny, but very cold and windy day, so we just kept going from building to building. When we came out of the aquarium building, this is what we saw:

Either the peacocks escaped or they just run feral. It was really cool to see them up close and against the white snow. On a side note, we decided not to take pictures of the animals in their cages because it would just look sad. A little part of both of us feels weird about looking at animals that are kept behind glass. We also went to the small mammal exhibit which had huge fruit bats that you could actually see up close and not tucked away in some dark corner. I think the coolest part for us both was the aviary. The first room was huge with a waterfall, stream and tons of birds flying and walking around. Sorry that this is another picture of Leah and some birds, it just turned out that way:
These little guys were just waddling around the bushes while the bigger birds were flying above us. The rest of that building was pretty cool too. there were smaller areas that just had vertical wires instead of glass between us and the birds, so you could hear all the little noises they were making. Here is a rhinoceros hornbill that we thought was pretty sweet (internet pic):


The next day we went to the 20 somethings church group super bowl party at someone's parents' house (very nice). Again, it was great to get away. Leah lucked out and got to use the hot tub, girls only. The game was great. I should have bet some serious $ because I predicted that saints would get an interception in the second half and win by 1 touchdown.

This weekend we (I) watched some of the Olympics (while Leah was studying). The last time I really watched any games was probably in high school. Best to watch in my opinion: Luge, aerial skiing, short track speed skating and downhill slalom. Saturday we went to Doctor's Park again. It was a calm sunny day and it was great to see the sun on Lake Michigan. For those of you who have been asking, yes there are ice bergs here too, but they are only 6-8 ft tall. And yes, I did get in trouble for bringing rocks home (I have to bring them back). Sunday we had a nice Valentine's dinner at home. Thanks to Joel and Julie we had shrimp tomato basil pasta with a $3 bottle of wine from Aldi. Leah also made red velvet cupcakes without the one whole bottle of red food coloring for dessert.

Interview

Thanks for all the emails/calls/posts about the interview! I think it went pretty well over all. The county parks job was more heavily weighted on volunteer coordination and non profit collaboration than I expected (which I have no experience in), so I'm not too hopeful about that one. I think I have a better shot at the DNR job, which was a lot more my thing: prescribed burning, invasive species removal, habitat restoration, seed collecting, plant propagating.... I will hear back in a week about the parks job and 2 weeks about the DNR job. So now its the waiting game. If neither work out, there is a position open at the zoo!

Sorry in advance, but this is going to be a nerdy post.

So a few nights ago, It just started to snow as I went to pick up Leah from her night class. The snowflakes were so huge, I could see hexagons on my car from 5 feet away. Some of them were 7 to 8 mm. across. Once we were back, I wanted to see if I could take some pictures. After awhile I got the hang of it and there were just a few that turned out really well (click on the pictures to make them bigger).


Nothing spectacular, but I thought they were pretty cool.


About my interview on Tuesday- I found out that I will be interviewed for two jobs at the same time, the one I mentioned and one with Wisconsin DNR. It would be a similar job at a 4,000 acre recreation area and wildlife preserve about 45 min. south of town. We will just have to wait and see what happens.

We haven't done anything else blogworthy lately because Milwaukee is pretty boring in the winter (if you don't have extra spending money) as evidenced by my snowflake pictures. We are already looking forward to spring so we can do stuff outside. So just as a heads up, if you want us to keep posting, our blog might become a little boring. Hang in there until spring!

Hi All,

As many of you know, I've been looking for jobs for quite awhile now. I applied through Americorps for a stewardship assistant with the Milwaukee county park system. It would involve many things that I have done before, like invasive species removal, seed collecting, plant propagating, and general maintenance. The job also comes with some form of health insurance. It would start March 1 and go through August, full time. Today I got an email inviting me to come in for an interview. I'm not letting myself get excited, but it would be great if I got this job. It's on February 2 and I'm asking for prayers that all will go well.

We just came back from another relaxing weekend in Holland. The main reason we went home was because one of Leah's older cousins got married. The reception was at Boatwerks and had a 10 piece jazz band all night, very cool. We also got to hang out with Joel, Julie and Kyper. They were in town because Joel is in between rotations. We had a "business meeting" at JP's and talked about a project that we might get going soon. More about that later.

No pictures today, but we'll keep posting.
Aren

So. I guess it's been awhile. We kind of gave up on the whole blogging thing for a bit, mostly because our camera was broken and wouldn't turn on. I guess it just needed a little bit of time to itself, because we tried it again yesterday, and it works again! Yay!

Now to bring you all up to date on our lives (even though we've likely recently seen everyone the two people who read this). I made it through my first semester of grad school quite successfully and was all too ready for a break. Fortunately, Marquette has a month-long winter vacation, so I was able to totally forget about school for awhile. We spent a fabulous two weeks in Holland; some of the highlights included:

-Going sledding and playing in the snow with cousins
-Having Christmas morning with the whole Phillips family for the first time, and seeing our nephew Kyper's first Christmas
-Going snowshoeing on fresh snow at the nature center
-Spending New Year's Eve at the local retirement center. Without the old people. More fun than it sounds, I promise. There's a hot tub, pool (swimming) and pool (billiards), games, food and family.
-Going on a walk through the Allegan woods with my family
-Going to the beach and stealing signs (Aren and his brothers; I did not participate)
-Having a knitting and tea party (me and my friends; Aren did not participate)

After two weeks at home, Aren and I came back to Milwaukee so that I could work for my assistantship. It's been pretty nice for me to be here and not have homework to do all the time. After I got home from work, we had time to relax, get things done around the apartment, watch movies, etc. I finished our wedding album finally and Aren got his butterflies all labeled and put in a case, they look pretty cool:


Today, we went to the Mitchell Park Domes, a botanical garden near our apartment. We are always looking for cheap (and by that I mean free) entertainment, and today residents got in free, so we took advantage of that. It was a sunny day and the gardens are in glass domes, so it was very bright and summer-y feeling. Here are a few pictures:


(Stealth photography...Aren had no idea I was taking this one)


And that brings us up to right now. This may be the last you hear from me for the next few months, since I start back up tomorrow with classes. I guess it's all up to Aren for awhile, so complain to him if there aren't any new updates. Peace out.

I guess it's about time to post again. Not much exciting happens to us, so we have to post every 3 weeks to keep it interesting. We are doing a better job at taking pictures though.

Two weekends ago we were graced with the presence of my lovely in-laws (note: no sarcastic tone) and we had a great time! They came in the early afternoon on Saturday with a candle for Leah, candy for me and cheese curds and summer sausage. We also got curtains that my mom made for our bedroom. We decided to go to the bottling plant of Sprecher's root beer (ironically I'm drinking our last bottle as I write this). Sprecher's actually started as a brewery and still makes beer, but there is a reason they are known for their root variety. After a quick 10 minute tour of two rooms, we got to taste their beer first. They had a good russian imperial stout, but that was about it. I was very impressed with their soda (no "pop" here), probably because of my highly sophisticated pallate and my overly powerful sweet tooth. They had a vanilla cinnamon cola and a cranberry cherry something too. Side note: Stewart's Ginger Beer was discontinued in July of this summer, so if you see any, buy it all and sell it online for $10 a bottle after you give me some, seriously.

For supper, we walked downtown from our apartment to a place called "the safe house." It is a pretty cool spy themed resturaunt. You have to know where it is because it is a pretty plain brick building with a sign saying "international exports inc." Under that there is a description of what they do and within this, there are red letters that spell out "safe house." You enter a small room with a girl sitting at an old fasioned operator's switchboard. She asks if she can help you, and if you know the password. If you don't, you need to do some kind of funny dance, then a fireplace swings open and you're in! We went up to the host and saw tvs all over the place showing the small room with an old guy trying to do the hula hoop. We know the password now, so if you come with us, you won't have to embarrass yourself. After quite awhile, we got our table and ordered. We walked around doing a scavenger hunt on the menu and after another quite awhile, we got our food. I'll just say, next time we go, it will be for the atmosphere and drinks.

Sunday morning we went to church, and Leah's parents could see why we liked it. We went out to eat at a butterburger place which is known for just that and understandably so. The burgers are awesomely good, but awesomely bad for your health. We came back to the apartment and then walked to the end of our street, where the Pabst mansion is. The place was spectacular! you wouldn't believe the wood carvings, stained glass windows and furniture. And to think that there were houses like that up and down Wisconsin Ave. One mansion took up the front of an entire block! Now there are only three left, and the Pabst mansion is one of them.


Week nights are pretty boring, so this is how I practice for Mad Science and how Leah takes a study break:

This week I'll be practicing making slime and playing with Jenga. On Friday I got trained on the cotton candy machine and came home with a nice big bag for my lovely wife (there are obvious perks to this job). I'm not exactly bringing home the bacon, but pretty close. The day before Halloween, I will be doing a "spooktacular," which is basically what we usually do, but with a spooky twist. Like instead of melting packing peanuts with acetone, we melt maniquin heads, stuff like that.

Another week day study break was making our traditional (one other time when we were dating) fall cookies. It took three nights: one to make the dough, one to cut and bake the cookies and one to decorate them.

Last weekend we went out for drinks with a couple from church (and Calvin and high school). Mark it on your calender, Leah and Aren have a social life. We had a great time. It is nice to do something with another married couple.

That same weekend we really needed to get out and take a break, so we went for a little road trip. We went to a place kind of like crane's, but twice as crazy. Honey crisp apples were $1 each. The line for the hayride (after you stood in line to buy tickets) was longer than some lines I've been in for a roller coaster. We blew that popsicle stand in a hurry and headed down to Lake Geneva for their Octoberfest. The lake was beautiful:


Their polka band wasn't too shabby either:


On our way home, we stopped at a mom and pop roadside stand and bought our pumpkin (for $5 cheaper than at the crazy crane's place) and some gourds and apples. Our apartment looks nice and homey now.

If you haven't heard, we are planning on coming to Holland the Friday before Halloween! Let us know what you guys are up to (those of you who are in Holland) so we can see you!

Hey all,

So we are officially bad picture takers and bloggers, but you might have known that already. We have been trying to get out to do things on the weekend, but it is getting increasingly harder in proportion to Leah's homework. We have done some interesting things in the past few weeks which might be noteworthy.

After coming back with quite a few apples from cranes, we thought it was in the best interest of some of the apples that they should be coated in caramel. It was a fun thing to do on a cloudy friday night.


For the past three Sundays we have been going to Brookfield CRC. We really like it and feel at home there. Last week we went to their church picnic (a huge pot luck in the parking lot) and Leah ran into someone that she went to Calvin with, who also took speech path/went to Marquette. And this week we met a lot of people our age, including a friend from Holland Christian and her husband, and someone that was in Leah's physics class (and whose sister was my sister-in-law's co-worker) and her husband that was in my chem 103 class. I think we won dutch bingo that week. Hopefully now we'll have a social life.

A few weeks ago after church, we went to a county park west of Milwaukee called Naga-Waukee Park. It is a pretty huge park with a lot of nature trails, open space and trees. It's also on Nagawicka Lake, which was pretty cool. Here is a picture that I stole from their website.



We had a nice relaxing time eating our picnic lunch in the shade and walking the trails. Too bad it was 85 degrees and we didn't have our suits!

Now that I am officially trained and know what I'm actually doing, I can tell you that I have a job doing science demonstrations for elementary schools in the greater Milwaukee area. The company is called Mad Science (madscience.org); it's an international company based in Canada, but is quite extensive in the United States. Basically, we give free assemblies to schools and then the kids can sign up for an after school program, which the parents pay for (after much begging and pleading from said children). They also do birthday parties and anything that has a big group of kids.

On Saturday, I went up to Oshkosh with 3 other mad scientists to the Midwest regional boyscout jamboree. Imagine 7,000 boy scouts and dads camping in tents on the most massive lawn imaginable, and then throw in some random attractions like paintball, guitar hero, and Mad Science, to name a few. It turned out to be pretty fun. I got to play with dry ice for 7 hours and got paid for it!

This week I start teaching the after school programs. So far I have observed and assisted other people doing it, but haven't done it myself without anyone else there. But I think if I can handle Honduran kids, I'll be fine.

On a side note, have you ever had Haagen-Dazs Mayan Chocolate ice cream? It's our favorite, nothing else comes close. I like it because it tastes like a frozen version of my mom's hot cocoa when I was a kid. So I found a piece-of-cake recipe on the internet to make Mayan chocolate fudge. It turned out pretty good!

Mayan Fudge

1 12 oz. bag of semi sweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
3/4 cup nuts of any kind (very optional)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (calls for 1/2 tsp, but it was pretty spicy)

Line 8X8 pan with wax paper
Mix chips and milk together, nuke for 1 min, stir, nuke for another min.
Mix spices and very optional nuts in thoroughly (if it starts cooling, nuke 30 sec.)
Pour into pan, chill in fridge for 30 min.

and this is what you'll get (I opted for no nuts)


We are thinking that we will come to Holland sometime in October, but we don't know when yet. Hopefully we'll see some of you soon! Next time we'll try to post some pictures of us instead of food.

It's been one week...

This picture was taken on my very first day of grad school by my proud husband. Don't I look excited? I'm a week into classes now, and so far, it's been going pretty well. I am at least somewhat interested in all of my classes, and the work hasn't been too overwhelming so far. I haven't started seeing clients for clinic though, and I'm thinking I'll probably be a lot busier once that all starts. I'm kind of excited for it to start though: I'll be working with kids for the first time, and one of them is a Spanish speaker, so that will challenging but fun.

In other news, we had a very wonderful labor day weekend. We realized that yesterday was my only school day off until Thanksgiving, so we decided to go home to Michigan while we had the chance. I didn't have a lot of work, and the weather was very summer-y, so I was able to forget I was in school for a little bit; it was a nice break! We went to Crane's and picked apples, had a camp-out with my cousins and did lots of other happy things. Yay for 3 day weekends!

And on a completely unrelated note, does anyone else see a swastika in my frozen yogurt?

I think we might need to find a new grocery store...I'm not so sure about the one we bought this at!

A few things we've done so far

So now that Leah is officially in grad school, it looks like I will be doing a bit more of the blogging. This one might be boring because there aren't any pictures and I might talk too much about plants and rocks, but I wanted to tell you more about what we have been up to.

The first few days here were pretty boring because we had a ton of not-so-fun stuff to get done, like finish moving in, getting parking passes etc. Once that was done, we wanted to get out and explore, so can you guess what the first thing we did was? We went to see Lake Michigan! There is a fairly nice beach about a 5 min drive from our apartment, but nothing like at home. We decided to drive up the coast so I could show Leah some cool houses that her parents and I saw when we visited some time ago (she was on campus at the time). We made it to Doctor's park, but by this time the sun had set behind the trees, yes the trees, not Lake Michigan, so we turned back. We'll check it out again later.

The next day, I believe it was Wednesday, we packed a picnic and headed up to Kholer-Andre state park about 45 min north of Milwaukee. We went straight to the beach, but it was so cold that we put our jeans and sweatshirts on and took a nap (at least I did). There were some cool plants like blue dune wild rye and sea rocket that can't grow along the east side of Lake Michigan because it is too windy and wavy. We drove around the campground, which was pretty nice, and found a nature center on the beach (only in Wisconsin) that had a trail through their "dunes" which were only about 30 feet high. It was cool though.

Since there was a good chunk of the day left, we hit another state park on our way back. We liked it so much that we bought an annual sticker; we figure that when we have spare time, we will want to get away from the city.

Thursday and Friday Leah had orientation part of the day so on Saturday we got away again and went to the Boerner Botanical Gardens southwest of Milwaukee. We were expecting something like Meijer gardens, but it was mostly outside. We enjoyed it anyway. There was a huge rose garden and a cool herbal medicine garden. Our fingers reeked on the way home because we touched and smelled everything like pineapple sage, lime geranium, peppermint, basil, lavender, bay laurel, and eucalyptus!

Sunday we were all excied to go to church because we found a CRC church in a nearby suburb, but I wasn't feeling great, so we'll have to wait until next week.

So now we are in our routine of Leah going to class and me looking for jobs and cooking and cleaning. Here is a little something I whipped up tonight:

Aren's creamy olive bacon delight

2 servings rigatoni (however much that is)
1 clove garlic minced
2 Tbsp pine nuts
10 black olives
10 green olives with pimentos
4 cooked strips of bacon chopped
1/2 Tbsp butter
1Tbsp flour
1/2 cup half and half
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup grated romano cheese

While pasta is cooking, in a small pan heat up a bit of olive oil and saute garlic for about a minute on medium heat. Add pine nuts and cook another minute or until a little brown. Add butter and when melted, add flour and stir. Add cream, milk, olives and bacon, reduce until creamy. Turn off heat, add cheese and stir. Drain pasta, put in bowls and spoon sauce over. Enjoy!

Be it ever so humble...

Aaaand, we're back! After a wonderful but not quite blogging worthy six months in Michigan, we decided to start blogging again now that we are in Milwaukee and far from a lot of our friends and family! We moved exactly a week ago, and we just finally got internet in our apartment yesterday, so we're celebrating by treating you to a tour of our new apartment. It's a bit small after living in a large family home, but it's cozy that way, and we are pretty happy with it. So, on to the pictures:
Our living room. When you walk into the apartment, this is the space to your left, and the dining area is to the right (it's really all one big room). You can't see it in this picture, but we actually have a pretty nice view (when you look past the chicken wire covering the window; we're on the first floor). There's an empty lot next door with some trees, so we see quite a bit of green from here. Our plants and my violets have a nice home on the big windowsill.


Here are a couple of views of our dining area. Just enough space for the two of us...I'm not sure what we'll do when people come over, but we'll figure something out, because we want people to visit us! We have some kitchen overflow in this space, too, since the kitchen is pretty tiny.

Speaking of which, here it is. Not a whole lot more than that to say about this room.


Here's a nice view of our bathroom...not a lot to say about this one, either, except that it had no counters or storage, but we found a shelving unit from Ikea that fit perfectly into the space. We were pretty excited.

And finally, here is our bedroom. I guess that concludes our apartment tour. Now that you've seen it here, you are all invited to come and see it in person...we have a sleeper couch!

Hey everyone,
We just wanted to officially let everyone know that, after a lot of thinking, praying and going back and forth, we have decided that it is time for us to come home. There are a lot of reasons for this decision, I won´t go into all of them now, but ever since we made the decision, we have been feeling good about it and we truly think that this is what we needed to do. We gave the school 3 weeks to find replacements, and as of now, we know that they have a replacement for the 2nd graders, although we´re not sure if there is one for the 5th graders yet. This Friday will be our last day at the school. We´re flying home on the 13th of February, and we will be living with Aren´s parents for a little while until we find jobs and an apartment.

We appreciate your continued prayers for us as we make this transition and for the school, that they may find teachers who are right for them.

Leah and Aren

We're back!

Hey everyone,

Just a short post to let you all know we made it. The trip here went really well and we made it from Leah's door to our door in a record 16 hours! Adjusting back has actually been a little easier than we expected; it was really hard to leave, but now that we're back, it feels like we never left. We've just been settling in, cleaning and relaxing. Our house definitely feels more homey now than it did when we first came, thanks to the pictures, rugs and blow-up furniture (thanks, Joel and Julie!) we brought back.

Well, we'll update again once school starts and we have more to write about. Miss you all!

Hello all,
We’ve had a few friendly reminders lately that we haven’t been doing a very good job of blogging or of replying to emails, so I’ll try to make up for it today. If you’ve sent us an email lately and haven’t gotten a reply, we are working on it and will be sending you an email soon!

Life here has been very up and down lately, but at least there have been ups! Some of the good things that have happened lately: We finally got an oven! We’re very excited to have homemade bread, cookies, pizza, etc. We got to use it a few times this week, but unfortunately a stray dog came into the kitchen and ate the huge loaf of bread that I made, so we are waiting for this Saturday to go to town and get more flour so that we can have bread! Another positive is that we should be getting our porch screened in soon (they told us it would happen on Tuesday, so maybe sometime this week). This will be really nice because our house will be a little more connected, we will be able to use our porch at night without having tons of moths crowding around our lights and we will be able to leave our many doors open without having dogs, bugs, people, etc. coming in!

School has been going pretty well, although it definitely has its ups and downs, too. They finally found a music teacher last week, so we have two more free periods a week than we did before! We’ve had some people asking us to tell a little more about what our everyday life is like at school and home, so I’ll run through it for you. I am now teaching just the second-graders, no middle schoolers. I teach my kids math, reading, phonics, language/English, penmanship and spelling. Aren teaches his 5th graders three subjects (language, reading and science) and teaches 6th 7th and 8th grade science. We teach on average about 6 40 minute periods a day and have around 3 periods off for planning etc. One really nice thing about our house is that it is only a 2 minute walk away from school, so we can come home during our free periods to plan, catch up on housework, etc. After school, we usually have to catch up on dishes or laundry or cleaning or something, and we spend quite a bit of time cooking most nights since we make almost everything from scratch. Before we got the new oven, we ate a lot of rice and pasta dishes, but now we have a lot more that we can do for dinner. In our free time, we read a lot and watch DVDs. Aren has also been into collecting butterflies, as you can see from his last post. We’ve also been doing some decorating in our house to try to make things homier.

We only go down to town once a week (Saturdays) because we have to walk about 4 miles down the mountain to get there, and then we have to pay to take a “mototaxi” (a little 3 wheeled golf cart type thing) back up again. When we are in town, we usually have to make at least 5 stops: the market for produce, several different small “minisuper” markets to get other food and things, a restaurant to eat lunch and use the wireless internet, the laundromat if we have laundry to pick up (we’ve been doing it all here lately, though, because the weather has been good), etc. There are no mega stores like Target or Meijer here. Instead, there are tons of little stores that are often unlabelled and have random things, so you just have to explore or ask until you learn what is sold where, and then you have to go to each place to get all the different things you need.

On Sunday, we usually try to have some downtime, and we also try to get ahead on our chores for the week (washing, baking, etc.). We haven’t been going to a church here because they are all a long walk away and we are usually very tired on Sundays after such a full week, and because the predominant evangelical theology here is “health and wealth” (if you believe in God, he will bless you with material riches and good health). I found last time I was in Honduras that going to church made me really cynical, so we haven’t been too motivated to try to find a church here. It has been good to be confronted with this kind of Christianity in the sense that it really makes us think about and talk about our own beliefs and thoughts often. We miss our churches at home a lot and are looking forward to going to both at Christmas time. We are very encouraged knowing how many people are thinking of us and praying for us while we are here; it’s really been helping us get through some of the rougher times.

So that pretty much sums up our everyday lives right now. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments and we will answer them. That might motivate us to write a little more often, too, if we have questions to answer!

Hey all,
Sorry it has been so long, it is hard to get to town do our shopping and errands and catch a mototaxi by 4:00, so sometimes our blog suffers (more often than not). A lot has happenend in the last month, including a much needed vacation with my parents to Tela, on the north coast. They rented a truck and spent Wednesday and Thursday night in Gracias, and got to see our house and school (my dad saw me teach the 6th graders about planets). Friday afternoon we quickly packed up and headed to Tela! It was a crazy ride, but by 11:00 we got to our hotel where all rooms have a view of the ocean! The next day we went to a botanical garden, 2nd biggest in the world, and got to see cool plants, trees, birds and insects.
We went to the beach after that, which was amazing! Then my parents treated us to a lobster dinner (it's really cheap there). Sunday we went to a Garifuna village. Garifuna people are descended from shipwrecked slaves and they have a very distinct culture, language and food. We spent the whole day there playing dominoes with the locals, eating fried fish and collecting shells and sand dollars. Monday was rainy so we explored the town a bit and then Leah and I finished our thank you notes from the wedding, so my parents could take them home and mail them. Tuesday was a whole day of traveling by a pick up, taxi, 2 buses and a mototaxi. On Wednesday, it was really hard to go back to school!

Last weekend I got to talk to by brothers for a while and it occured to me that I haven't said anything about catching butterflies on here. There are a ton of butterflies here in both number and type, so I got to thinking how I could catch them. I went around our yard and found some things I could make a net with. I found some stiff black tubing, fishing line, a piece of stiff but flexible plastic (that you take off a 5 gallon bucket of paint to open it) and a plastic shopping bag. I attachd the plastic bag to a loop of the long piece of plastic. I tied fishing line to the end of the loop and put it through the black tubing, then tied a wooden handle to the end, tadaa! a draw-string butterfly net! Here is some proof that it works wonderfully.

I folded them up in paper envelopes and put them in my freezer until I can do something with them when I get home. If anyone has tips on how to keep them and mount them, please let me know! I have been finding the species on neotropicalbutterflies.com if you want to help me identify them (the thing in the middle is a toenail clippers to hold the wings down so I could take a picture).

Yesterday was Halloween, which we celebrated by carving an overgrown acorn squash, lighting "harvest scented" candles and putting around the leaves and candy that Leah's parents sent.

Thanks for all of your prayers and encouragement, it's very much needed and we really appreciate it!

The School

We don't have a lot of battery on our computer and we forgot to bring the cord down, but we'll post a few pictures of the school:

Here's a view of a few of the school buildings. There are 4 in all and each has 3 classrooms in it.

This is the courtyard/playground, with mount Celaque in the background.

Here are a couple of shots of Leah's second grade classroom.

Here is Aren's 5th grade classroom.

And here is Aren demonstrating the iron bars trapping students into all of the classrooms.

Alright, battery's almost gone...just want to let you all know we're doing well, we keep getting more and more used to being here. Let us know how you all are!

Home Sweet Home

It has been brought to our attention that we haven't been posting much on here lately, and that we still haven't put up many pictures of where we are living and working yet. So we'll start with the house today, and stay tuned for pictures of school coming next week (on our next visit to town).

We are living in a house about four miles up the base of the Celaque mountain. Our house is about a 5 minute walk to the school, which is very convenient in the morning and during our free periods. There's not really much else besides the school, our house and two others in the area, though, so other important things (buying groceries, getting to a place that has internet access, etc.) are less convenient. We'll be making the 4 mile walk down to Gracias about once a week to do all of those things.

Our house used to just be two rooms, but it has recently been "renovated" and now has a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and a spare room. When we moved in, we just had a bed, a table with two chairs, and some storage shelves in the kitchen (there's absolutely NO built-in storage anywhere in the house). We've been gradually collecting things and they've been working on the house, too, so it's starting to feel a little bit homey now, although there's still a little ways to go. Right now, we get a little wet when it rains hard and we have a lot of dirt and leaves blow through the clay tiles on our roof and on to our bed. Sometime this week, they are supposed to do something to our roof to hopefully make it a little more sealed, so that will be really nice.

Alright, now for the tour:

Here's Leah showing off the front porch. The door way to the left is to the spare room, the middle door leads to the bathroom and bedroom, and the door on the right is to the kitchen. So we have not one but three front doors!

Here's Leah again eating some comida tipica at the kitchen/dining room table, which is actually on the front porch. Notice the nice view of Lake Michigan outside our "window"...the school had an artist do some murals in the library and bathrooms, and she had some extra time, so she came to our house and did some murals there, too! We asked her to paint Lake MI, showed her a couple of pictures, and here's what she came up with:

Pretty cool, huh? It's definitely one of our favorite things about the house.

Alright, while we're outside, we might as well take a look at our "washing machine":
Leah just can't wait to get in there and scrub! Actually, we soak our laundry in detergent overnight, and we usually don't have to do much scrubbing at all. It's still a bit more labor intensive than using a machine though, and takes a lot of time!

Moving onto the first room...

Here's Aren having fun in the spare room, as you can see from his face, it's a pretty exciting place. This is where we keep our odds and ends and hang our laundry to dry. Eventually, this will be our walk-in closet, when we get around to unpacking our suitcases...
Here's our beautiful bathroom. This picture is taken from our bedroom. It's a good thing we're married, cause there isn't exactly a lot of privacy... no door between the toilet and the bathroom or between the bathroom and the bedroom. It works though, and we even have a hot shower thanks to our electroducha.
Moving on to the bedroom...here's our bed and mosquito net that we were given after a few nights of termites raining down on us. It's been relatively bug-free lately, though, thanks to the net and some liberal insecticide sprayage.

Behind our bed, there's another mural that the artist painted for us. This was her own design, which she came up with after finding out that we are newlyweds:

And last but not least, we'll show you around our kitchen. We went shopping in Santa Rosa (a bigger town about 1 1/2 hrs away) earlier this week, so it's much better stocked than it was before that:
On this side of the kitchen, you can see our storage shelves, kitchen sink (complete with dirty dishes), our fridge, and our cherry paintings.
Here's the other side, with our 2-burner propane stove and water dispenser on top of a desk we stole from the school.

Alright, that completes the tour of our house. We leave you with this inspiring message: