Recent Updates

There are a couple new ways to find me on the world wide web!

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Note: You can view my Twitter feed here on the blog, or at my Myspace or Facebook pages.

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Also, we just got high speed internet hooked up at home, so now we can get online with the Wii! So far, I've played Super Smash Bros Brawl a couple times, but I'm totally addicted to Mario Kart Wii online. Especially playing the ghost races. So if you want to find me on either of those, here are my friend ID's:

• Mario Kart Wii: 5241 2607 6453
• Super Smash Bros Brawl: 2062 9852 9185

So, find me and send me a message. Thanks for reading.

-Jeff-

UPDATE: I also have my Wii friend code, which is 1271 6672 5171 8936

Too much stuff going on!

Hey everyone, I know I haven't posted alot lately, but hopefully that will be changing in the next couple weeks and I'll get back into a Tuesday-Thursday schedule. I needed to take a break though and thought I'd throw out a few updates and thoughts that won't make up a whole blog by themselves:

• We have a new Senior Pastor coming in! I talked with him today for about a half an hour on the phone and he seems like a great guy. I can't wait to really sit down with him and hear about his vision for the church and the community. It's fun to have a new infusion of vision.
  
• That means, I don't have to be the Interim anymore! And Tuesday can't come soon enough! Then I get to go back to just being the youth pastor!
• When I met him he started asking me questions about our house and everything that happened here. It confused me how he knew so much about my life until he admitted to reading my blog.
• Tiff and I went up to her Grandma's house this last Sunday - Tuesday. Her Grandma had open heart surgery to replace one of the valves in her heart and needed someone to help for a couple days. I spent a lot of time with Tiff's grandpa who has Alzheimer's. It was really tough to deal with him, not because he was mean or frustrating, but because everytime he asked where we were going I wanted to cry. He is so confused and just not with it anymore. He's started getting the shakes too. I pray that God takes him home quickly.

Well, those are my thoughts for now, time to get back to work.

-Jeff-

Flood Recovery part 3: An Update

Well, we're still sleeping in our living room, but other than that things are going great! I wanted to write a quick update for everyone who's been following the blog, to let you know how things are going down here.

1. Construction: My Uncle and Grandpa came down here on Sunday and hung about 70% of the sheetrock, which means the rooms are close to being liveable again. We've been having a harder time getting the siding dried out, but I'm confidant that it will be okay by Saturday, when they are going to come finish things up.
2. More Blessings: I neglected to mention our windows when I was writing Neighbors helping Neighbors the other day that our bedroom windows need to be replaced. We were set to do the work and then things happened (you know how that goes) and it was never finished. Because of this one of the windows was only hanging by one nail, and was easily pulled to give John access to the house, so they could get all of our clothes and stuff out. What was once a source of frustration for us has become a point of blessing.
3. Stuff Stuff: A lot of our "stuff" was ruined by the flood. We filled two trailers full of it. Things like tents and lawn chairs were completely yucked up by the mud, and our weed wacker was ruined when water got in the engine. So a lot of that "Stuff" is gone, but the great thing is that it's all just stuff, and it can all be replaced.
4. The kids: They've each had interesting an different reactions to our living situation. Olivia (our 3 year old) has become very clingy. She always wants to be sitting on our laps, or be held, or even help out with chores. She just wants to be near us constantly, she has a hard time staying in her room or playing with her brother. Kadin (our over-analytic 5 year old) thought of something that neither of us had thought of. If we don't have a Christmas tree (due to space), how will Santa know where to leave the presents? Lucky for us, my parents know Santa personally and he's agreed to drop the presents off at their house this year, just to avoid any confusion. Living in such a small space with them can be overwhelming, so on Tuesday tiff's parents came down and picked them up, and they'll be up there until after Christmas.
   

Well, that's the quick update, I'll post more changes as they happen,

-Jeff-

I dug through the trash the other day.

Blog posts are supposed to have catchy titles in order to attract more readers, so how did I do? I did have to dig through the trash, but first a little backstory.

In the middle of August Tiffanney and I put our rental house on the market. Since then we've been making two housepayments (no, that's not why I dug through a trash can, we're still getting there, hold on a minute). FINALLY, October 29th we got an offer on the house!!! Yeah!!! We'd spent some time praying and fasting about the situation and felt like God would get us an offer by the end of October, which He did.

The next week I get word from my Senior Pastor that I need to preach on the 11th, only to find out later that he is interviewing at another church (I knew before I preached that Sunday). He comes back and tells us that he is leaving on December 9th.

We've been desiring a vacation for a while now, but making two housepayments makes it impossible to save any money. We decided that we would go on Dec 3rd thru the 8th, assuming the house had closed by then. It didn't. This left us with the hard decision of waiting until we had the money in hand and possibly not taking a vacation for several months (until the new pastor comes in) or putting it all on credit cards and trusting that it would close while we were gone (it didn't).

None of this led to me spilling trash all over the floor in the post office though. Here's the main culprit. On Tuesday afternoon we were running through Toon Town in Disneyland, trying to decide where we should eat after we went to visit Mickey Mouse. Standing on the steps of Mickey's house we got a phone call. It was our Childrens pastor. She said that guys from the National Guard were standing at our front door and were waiting for our permission to put up sand bags around our house. We froze, what could we do? Absolutely yes, please sandbag, but then what? How can we get home, and what will we find when we get there? We didn't make it to see Mickey the entire week.

To make a long story short, here's what the next few days looked like. We called around to find out about changing our plane tickets, but the waters didn't receed until Thurday, meaning that even if we had flown home we couldn't have gotten to our house. We had to trust the people in our church to help us out, and they came through for us in a BIG way. Even during the flood we had people over at our house giving us updates, and once the waters went down a little there was a crew over there moving furniture, building fires and trying to make sure that everything was contained.

We got home on Saturday just after Sunset, and were greeted by piles of clothes in our living room and all of our furniture in our dining room. In all there was about 8 inches of water in the bottom of our house and only our family room and master bedroom were affected. I will detail the clean up process and our interactions with insurance companies, FEMA and Home Depot in other blogs ('cause this one's getting too long), but right now I know you want to know about rubbish.

Before we leave our house for a few days, we always try and make sure everything is clean and that any food that might spoil is taken care of. We also typically eat a lot of the food in our house, knowing that when we get back we'll be grocery shopping anyways. So we returned home not just to piles of clothes, but we had no food and our vacation had been payed for with credit cards, so we had no money to buy food. Add to that the fact that the house still hasn't closed and we need to make Decembers house payment still and I think it's safe to say we were a little stressed out. We called a friend who works with the mission and got some groceries from him, and tried to go to the store to pick up some newspapers for firestarters. First we stopped at the post office and I saw that we got those little circular ads in the mail. I thought to myself, if I got one everyone must have, and everyone throws them away, so I jumped into the garbage can and pulled out all the newspaper I could find. I only stopped when I stuck my hand on top of a moldy banana peel. I was so proud of myself for thinking of this that it didn't even occur to me that it was people's trash until that point.

I'm not used to asking for help from people. Usually I'm going out of my way to help others out. To be in the position where I need help is most humbling. Thanks to everyone who's helped during this time, you've all blessed me so much. Please remember to keep praying for the flood victims here in Washington, we can all use it.

In closing I just want to say that while the majority of this post was probably a little depressing to read, we're doing well and we can see God's hand in everything that's happened all along the way. I just needed to vent and this is one way that I can do that.

-Jeff-

So much to catch up on

Where has the time gone? It seems like just yesterday we were coming back from Summer camp, and now we're looking towards Youth Conference. There have been several things that have happened, but nothing as life altering as deciding to homeschool Kadin¹. Right now we're taking it a year at a time, but I know this is the right move this year. In about three weeks he's gone from knowing letter sounds to recognizing whole words without sounding them out. He cruises through his easy reading books and in about an hour can read a 25-30 page book (15-30 words per page). He's doing really well and really seems to be enjoying his newfound abilities and confidence.

Football season started this last week and, of course, I'm involved in fantasy football. It makes football so much more interesting because I'm looking at games all over the country, instead of just caring about the Seahawks. Here is a link to the league I'm in². My team is Coast to the first³. My starting lineup looks like this:

QB- Tom Brady
WR- Chad Johnson
WR- Javon Walker
RB- Larry Johnson
RB- Maurice Jones-Drew
WR/TE- Wes Welker
WR/RB- Jerious Norwood
K- David Akers
DEF- Denver


Now that's a studly line-up⁴! I've got consistant producers at almost every position, plus a couple of guys who could really break out and have big years. The only thing I'm kicking myself for is picking Johnson over Joseph Addai. I'll let you know how the season progresses.

And speaking of football, the 'Hawks played three quarters of really good football (so what if it was against the 'Bucs). Bill Simmons from ESPN Page 2 picked them to play the Pats in the Superbowl, and you know what? I'd be okay with that. I think the 'Hawks are the best team in the NFC right now, and I don't care what the "experts" think. I guess we'll find out in week 3 if they're among the elite or not (they play the Bengals). BTW, I just finished this season in Madden 2008 and they just missed the playoffs, going 9-7 (the Rams were 15-1 and lost to the Broncos in the Superbowl). Not that it means anything at all.

Well, that's enough rambling for now, tune in next time when I talk about the Super jet!
-Jeff-

1- One of my big fears as a parent is that I'm not smart enough to teach him what it means to be a good man. Now I've compounded that fear by assuming the responsibility for his education. Before I could always point at the school and complain about their faults, now all the fingers are pointing straight at me. This should be it's own blog post.

2- Kadin named it league-o, because it sounds like lego. This reminds me of when my sister bought my niece a gerbil, and Kadin told her to name it Abra-hamster. He's very clever about things like that, which brings me back to point #1.

3- He also named the team, which is good, but I keep getting "Don't you mean coast to the worst" comments from my league.

4- This team will be very good, but we lost by 8 in week one. This week we should get on track, although Johnson will be playing the Bears defense, which isn't a good matchup for anyone (see Tomlinson, LaDanian)

Picking up the loose ends

As I was looking up some links for my last post I realized that the Mexi-blog #10 is still sitting as an unfinished draft. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this on my trip to Indianapolis this week, because Tiffanney will be sitting right next to me for 9 and a half hours (it's not really, but with the time change and a two hour layover in Denver we leave Washington at 8:30pm and get to Indy at 6:00am. I contrast, we leave Indy at 8:30pm and get home at 11:30pm. The time change messes everything up) while we travel and eventually we'll run out of things to talk about. This blog was intended to sum up everything that happened in Mexico and give some testimonies of the incredible things that God did.

I'll try and post some thoughts on General Council, so if you're not lucky enough to be able to attend, check in here for the latest news. Also there are at least two other blogs leading up to General Council that I've enjoyed reading, Future AG and AG Leadership Change. Check out both of those sites for information leading up to the conference.

Lastly, Tiff and I are looking to sell our rental house up in Stanwood, and we've got a lot of work to do in order to get it ready for sale. I'll let you know how it turns out, it promises to be tons of work and tons of reward once it sells.

-Jeff-