commenting troubles, 2

Earlier this year Jim bought a "new" (used) computer for us. When he got it up and running he informed me that while we would have Windows on the system he intended us to use Linux for the most part. I have been learning some of the Linux programs, and it is easy enough to use for the internet, but a couple of my programs do not have a Linux counterpart.
One problem I have found is the increased security in the web browser. Somehow I cannot sign in on any MSN blogs - including KJ, Linda, and Andy... That is why I haven't posted a comment in ages. Good thing we still have email.

Castoff cast

This morning Dot became normal again. (As normal as possible, I suppose!) She no longer has a cast on her arm, which is good, because it was getting quite stinky. At this moment both Dot and Jamie are in the tub, splashing water all over the bathroom. I am sure the mats will need to be wrung out. After six weeks of incomplete baths, Dot is now clean from head to toe. Hooray!

Both kids have been sporting a new look after our visit to the doctors office. Dot has an ace bandage on her arm, and Jamie has been trying out the castoff cast.

gingerbread

Dot has been looking forward to decorating for Christmas. Last night we put up the tree and greenery, and they look pretty good. Our tree is getting the hodge podge look that comes from having kids - there are more handmade ornaments every year. It makes for good memories, though.
Today we put together the gingerbread house. I broke from tradition, though, and did not use the mold that I usually use. This year I got a pattern online for a thatched cottage. We even used shredded wheat for the thatching! Dot is a little disappointed, though, as she has to wait to do the decorating. We will add snow and sprinkles when we do our cutout cookies - lots of frosting in one day!
In the meantime the kids will enjoy the leftover gingerbread. Both Jamie and Dot love gingerbread, so it never sticks around long at our house!

goodbye... hello!

Traditionally the day after Thanksgiving is spent in the mall, or some other retail outlet, shopping for Christmas presents. While there were some very good deals to be found if you were willing to brave the early morning cold and the crowds, we decided to skip the stores this year (AGAIN!). Instead we jammed ourselves into the truck and headed to the Honda dealer out in Ellicott City.
We test drove a 2006 Civic, comparing it to the Toyota Corolla we had test driven on Tuesday. Jim was happier with the Civic, so he sat down with the car dealer to start the paperwork. The kids and I spent time in the play area, where there was a lego table, a toy box filled with blocks, two pint sized tables, and a tv tuned to Nickelodeon. We spent a lot of time in the play area... it took quite awhile to get everything taken care of. Part of that was due to the truck being a trade-in. It was worth only $500, but it was a 1994, after all. Goodbye, faithful Ford Ranger...
Hello, new Honda Civic! The kids were tired and hungry by the time we headed out to the new car. To reward the kids we went to Burger King for lunch... but we didn't go through the drive through! No food or drink in the car for awhile...

vacations

Have you noticed that our vacations tend to be visits to Ohio? We love y'all so much that we spend our time off with you!
While we do love to visit family, we also want to do other things on vacation, too. We have discovered that we like to camp and hike. How can we put both together??? Thankfully there are lots of nice parks in Ohio, so we are thinking of going to Hocking Hills for our summer Ohio trip - we can camp (in a cabin, most likely) and hike, and we can invite the family down to visit. Perhaps the cousins can all make s'mores together... Dot and Jamie would love that!
Truthfully, this is still an idea that is just brewing. Lots of planning will have to go into this, but what else will we be doing during the long winter days? Dreaming of summer... checking things out online:

Ravenwood Castle, for those who wish they could've come with us to Great Britain (check out the gypsy wagons!). This looks interesting enough to visit on it's own!
Honey Fork Log Cabins and Top O' The Caves cabins for a rustic experience.

november rain

Today started out very nice for November. We ran a few errands and the kids took their coats off whenever they could get away with it. (Truthfully, I was more worried about them losing their coat than getting cold...) The sun went into hiding, though, and the clouds becames heavier. When we went out again after lunch it started to sprinkle... and now it is a cold, grey and rainy November day.

Our family didn't take many vacations - at least, not ones that most people would call "vacations." We probably couldn't afford them - after all, it costs a lot to feed and board a family of 7! I have warm memories of our trips to Hocking Hills in southern Ohio. It was so much fun to hike up and down all day, climbing rocks, slipping on wet fallen leaves, pretending to be Indians in Old Man's Cave, peering down into the Devil's Bathtub. One year we stayed in a cabin - it was almost camping! I remember a great big set of checkers, and a game played with tops? Better memories from the house we rented... it was small, but we fit in somehow. The hill (more of a slope, really, but seemed big to me at the time) was a great place to play some baseball, or roll forever!

Maybe we didn't go at the best time of year - the leaves were past their peak, and most of them were on the ground already. It was getting cold, and often rained. Somehow that didn't matter. We were away from home, on a grand adventure, enjoying the great outdoors. What an amazing playground God made there in southern Ohio! Someday I hope to take my kids there to camp and hike, to give them a chance to imagine, to wonder at the beauty. Perhaps next year...

Start your engines

Okay, this morning when we walked into Wal*Mart I noticed a sign hanging from the ceiling - 6 Saturdays until Christmas! YIKES! Time to get a move on!

Not that things aren't busy enough around here, but now it is time to buy the supplies and crank out the homemade cookies. Yum! This year we will be making about 7 different kids of cookies and a gingerbread house. Sprinkles will be everywhere! Buckeyes are always on the list, as are cutout cookies. (What is the holida season without decorating kids with frosting? I mean, kids decorating with frosting...) One of Grandma's recipes will be showing up this year - Thumbprint cookies (updated to include chocolate chips under the morello cherry jam). Of course, what is Christmas without date pinwheels?

While our to-do list includes cards, cookies and present, it also includes shopping for a car... finally. Jim is getting a little anxious as the weather gets cooler. Will the truck make it through another winter snow? It seems like we have considered most every type of vehicle out there... but now we are leaning towards a sedan - small and economical, but enough room to haul the whole family if needed. Top picks? Camry, Corolla, Accord, Civic, Mazda3... Sedans seem to all look somewhat alike, and since it will be "Jim's car" I don't really care which one we buy. When it comes to be my turn I will have more to say...

commenting troubles

Due to the 'overwhelming support' from the spam community, you will have to do extra work just to comment on my many wonderful posts. Sorry! It's just a few more letters to type...

GB, part 4: V&A

Thursday had been quite the success, and we felt like we had seen everything we wanted to while in London. So, on Friday we headed out to the Victoria and Albert museum. Happily for Jim, it was free. We spent a few hours wandering through the displays, mostly giving everything a quick look. If we had looked at everything in detail we would be there still! Being the nice guy he is Jim didn't put up a fuss when I wanted to go through the special exhibit on fashion, which was centered on a collection of clothing from Queen Mary of the Netherlands (Victoria's granddaughter). We walked through the European collection, and paid special attention to the Tudor, the Georgian, and to the Victorian periods. They have a lot of amazing items there! Things I had read about, things I had seen in history books were there on display. (Imagine owning something that old, or being able to touch it and take care of it!) Things were starting to blur together again, and our feet were really tired, so we sat for awhile to rest. Eventually we started off again, and looked at a lot of ironwork - beautiful, but you can appreciate only so many window grills. After that we headed down to the cast courts - plaster casts of all sorts of different items - Michelangelo's David or Trajan's column, for example. It is a wonderful room to walk into, where you can be overwhelmed by so much history and beauty. However, by this time we were getting hungry, and a little tired, so we left the museum and headed back toward our hotel. I stopped in a tea shop to buy some rose tea and amaretto tea (and green tea for mom), and then we walked up to Harrod's. I probably couldn't afford much in the department store itself, but the food courts were irresitible. We ended up buying a few scones and a bacon-and-cheese baguette. Yum. Slowly we waked back to the hotel, and just rested for a few hours. Later, just before dinner, we went to the two local charity shops, but didn't find anything we wanted. We ate in a pub for dinner - they had a restaurant in the basement which had very good fish and chips - made to order!
Saturday morning we headed out for our very long trip home. After way too many hours sitting in trains and planes, we arrived in DC, where Mom, Dad and the kids welcomed us home. We were exhausted - it was the middle of the night for us! We let the kids open the Christmas crackers (I knew that would be the perfect souvenir for them!), look over the leftover coins, and then finally put them to bed - so we could collapse! What a trip!

GB, part 3: Big Ben, etc.

After we walked through Westminster (and visited the gift shop - where we almost bought a kitchen "Chopin board" for Joel, ha!) we set off down the street towards Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. We couldn't go in, but we walked around the outside and took a few pictures. Another amazing building!
Next up, Trafalgar Square, just a few blocks down the road. The kids would have loved it! Big lion statues, fountains, lots and lots of steps... there were kids climbing everywhere. We decided against the National Gallery, and went off through the Admirality Arch down to Buckingham Palace. Once again, another place we did not go inside, and it wasn't the time for the changing of the guard, so we didn't spend much time there. We walked around the outside, though, on our way to Hyde park. We didn't spend long there, just enough time to sit awile and rest a bit once we had crossed "Rotten Row." We hopped on the tube (the all day pass is a really good deal!) and headed off to the Tower of London and St. Paul's Cathedral. The Tower is very expensive to get into, and it wasn't really that high on our list, so we just took a few pictures outside, and of London Bridge, and then headed to the Cathedral.
St. Paul's is another really old church. It is bigger than Westminster - brighter and more open inside. The history of St Paul's starts in 604, when a wooden "cathedral" was built on the site. Obviously it was rebuilt (many times!), the latest designed by Wren and completed in 1710. They did have to do some restoration and rebuilding after WWII, when it was a target during the Blitz. It is beautiful! Our favorite, and most tiring - part of the tour was the Whispering gallery in the dome. The elevator was out, so we walked up way too many stairs to get there. It was worth the climb, though, as we looked out over the railing down onto the cathedral floor. Wow! WOW! Eventually we walked back down, and finished the tour.
At that point we were pretty much done for the day, ready to get some food and put our feet up. We hopped on the tube again and headed back to the grocery store and hotel.

Great Britain, part 2: Westminster

Once Jim's conference was done we checked out of the amazing hotel and headed up to London. Every time we got on a train we remarked that our kids would love to be there with us... but they weren't old enough to deal with all the walking we would be doing. Sorry, kids, maybe next time!

Anyway, we got into London that afternoon and went to our hotel -we had booked it through a travel agent, and prepaid, so we didn't expect any trouble. Oh well, things don't always turn out so easy, do they? Somewhere along the line a travel agent stopped using our name to book the room, and used a generic name ("Smith"). Eventually they figured things out and sent us to our room... We went through the maze (this was an old georgian? rowhouse turned into a hotel - fire doors everywhere, back stairs, front stairs, etc.) and opened room 8. How depresisng! It looked like they had built four walls around a double bed and called it a room! I almost cried... until we noticed that there was someone else's stuff in there. Jim went to check it out, and found that we were supposed to be in room 18, not room 8. A desk clerk error, quickly repaired, and we found ourselves in a much larger room (although not as large - or as nice - as our room in Brighton). The view outside our window? A bunch of mattresses covered in plastic, and the wall of the house next door. Lovely.
We did a little walking around that afternoon, mostly to find a map of London and dinner for that night. We ended up buying most of our dinners at the local grocery store - cheaper than eating out, and still getting to try cultural foods (we really enjoyed the sausage rolls!). In the evening we looked over the map, watched for the local weather forcast, and decided what we wanted to see the next day.
Thursday was supposed to be gorgeous, and it was. Sunshine and 70's, perfect for being out and about. We headed out after breakfast on our walk to Westminster Abbey. Surprisingly it didn't take long - it seems further on the map... We paid our fee and went in to find an amazing church. The architecture changes your attitude and demeanor. It is so overwhelming - so large, so intricate, so beautiful! You could see how it put forth the idea of the glory of God. Of course, it put forth the glory of man, too, with all the big memorials and graves. They were interesting, too, though, seeing how much history is in that one place. (Funny thing - Jim didn't know that the graves were inside the church. He imagined it like most churches - with the graveyard outside.) In our country it is hard to find old places that are kept up so well. It was hard to comprehend how old this really was! Most of what is there now was built in the 1200's! However, there were monks at that spot in the 900's. While we walked around trying to digest that thought, Jim added on the thought of places with even older buildings - like Rome, Greece and Egypt. Imagine!
Jim's favorite grave in the church? The Plumber's grave, in one of the cloisters. Just think, serve your church well, and you might get to be walked on for centuries. (Oddly enough, someone else found this grave to be amusing, too, and took a picture. I don't know the rest of the content of the site...)
Another interesting thought - they have a small gift shop and snack shop in one of the cloisters... right on top of some of the graves. Important people??? Not anymore!

Thanksgiving article

One of our homeschool links send a monthly "epistula" to us. This month they focused on Thanksgiving, with Marlin Detweiler writing not only about the history of the holiday, but also about his families memories. My favorite line:

These memories are not just warm, fuzzy thoughts of friends and family. They are not just sappy Thomas Kincade pictures in our minds. They are visible, clear demonstrations of the covenant faithfulness of the God we worship.
(Italics mine.)

Veritas, the aforementioned link, has another good article posted on their site. Are you afraid of the Big, Bad Book?

how is it possible?

We have just caught up on all the blogs, and wow! there was a lot out there... I was surprised to find that my family is getting tangled up with our past. Somehow Kevin Mungons, the music minister from our old church in Iowa, has shown up on Mike and Joel's blogs...