I want these

Reebok EasyTone Shoes - supposedly they make you feel like you're walking on sand and make your muscles work harder which tones your calves, thighs, and butt.

I wonder if they really work?

What's happenin'?

A whole lot, but not much blog-worthy. Life has settled into it's normal "school-year" routine for us. Despite the fact that we don't have kids, the years seems to break up into semesters and summers for us. Our fall "semester" looks like this: Sunday is church of course, and our church has added an evening service (which we have yet to attend, but would like to soon). Monday brings a meeting at church (every other week) during the day for me, and Christmas choir practice (yes, I said CHOIR!) for me and BSF (Bible Study Fellowship) for Tyler in the evening. Tuesdays find me at church once again helping with childcare during the day, and it is $1 day at the local movie theater, so we are often found sitting in front of a screen on Tuesday nights (hey, you can barely RENT movies for $2 total, let alone see them in a theater!). Wednesdays are my days to work out and do things at home (clean, grocery shop, do laundry, etc.). Thursdays and Fridays I am at work all day. Saturdays vary in activities, but include diving, hanging with friends, RedBox movies, and home projects. Throw in some babysitting here and there, and some fun outings once in a while, and that is my life. Like I said, a lot going on, but none of it very blog-worthy.

I am already counting down the days til Christmas...54....even though we're not heading home this year. That is sad, but Christmas always makes me happy :)

Tonight we are meeting some friends for Ethiopian food. It has been too long! My tummy is growling in anticipation :)

Our computer, lovingly named "the Beast," died last week. So, we had to resurrect "Old Faithful" from almost 5 years ago. After a few days of waiting 2 minutes (grrrr!) for applications to open, we ordered a shiny, new quad-core computer. It will be here in 2 weeks. Let's hope we can keep our sanity for that long (remember the days when we thought Oregon Trail on DOS was super fast and cool?!)

I will be 27 in less than a month. That makes me feel old. On the up-side, whenever people ask how old I am and I tell them, they never believe me. I guess my name was very aptly chosen (you can google that one if you want more information).

We have officially taken a break from house-hunting. This made me sad as well, but through several circumstances, we both came to the conclusion that to keep pushing forward in this area, would be doing what WE wanted to do, not what God was telling us to do. So, we will be renting for at least another 6 months and see what happens from there. I must admit, it's been nice not being on the rollercoaster of "I love this house, I hope we get this house, this house is perfect for us, we didn't get the house AGAIN, *cry,* do we need to stop looking at houses, oh look at this house, I love this house...

There's some random tidbits about what's been happenin'. Maybe THIS time I will be better about keeping up with this thing :)

Just a few...

...things I love about Washington...

Snoqualmie Falls

Snow


The Ocean

Mt Rainier



The sea creatures

The kids

The sunsets

P.S.

This blanket is not for me ;) Sorry if I got your hopes up...

Sewing project!!

I finished my first (well, second, but the first was YEARS ago!) sewing project today! It's a little taggy blanket for a baby, about 14"X13". It turned out so cute (I think)!! It was a lot of fun, too. And my machine worked great. Good investment, I think...

Four years

That's how long Tyler and I have been married! Which means, we've actually been "together" for 8! That's a third of my life! But I have loved so much being with him and just knowing that he will be there always. I look forward to the next 60 years (or however long God gives us together). To celebrate our anniversary, we....watched a soccer game! Woohoo! Well, that's not completely true...we did watch a soccer game, and it was on our anniversary, but it was only because we had decided to celebrate this past weekend, instead of on a Tuesday. So, Saturday, we loaded up, drove about 2 hours up north, and went to Tulip Town. I have been wanting to get up there since we moved out here almost 3 years ago. Tyler graciously acquiesced, even though I'm sure it wasn't his first choice of things to do. :) So we spent about an hour wandering around the fields of beautiful flowers and taking pictures. Here's just a sampling:

My favorite (I think....it was really hard to pick!)

The "rainbow of tulips" (some colors had already bloomed and been cut off already)

I love the yellow ones!
The purple were so gorgeous too!
I love this picture, with the mountains in the background

Beautiful scenery out in the country.

Then we went to a little town called La Conner for lunch at a small cafe (delicious food!) and walked up and down the main street and into all the little shops. It was a great day!! Perfect weather, fun outing, and great company!

In other news, I got a sewing machine this weekend. I have been needing one for a while now, and finally we just decided to get one. I'm secretly a little excited to see what things I can make. :)

Tyler has also recently decided to become a Dive Con. This means he will be a "professional" diver. He will help certify students and have to have Liability Insurance in case something goes wrong. He's pretty excited about the opportunity, but more excited about the gear discounts!

One more thing...

I forgot to mention that Tyler and I are signed up for another diving class! We're going to take Stress and Rescue at the end of April, so we'll know better how to save each other (and other divers) should an emergency arise. I've heard from several people that this was their favorite class, so I'm looking forward to it. Neil is actually not teaching us this time around! But I know we'll get some good instruction regardless. Once we get that class under belts, along with 7 more dives (we'll gain a couple from the class, so it'll probably be more like 3-4 dives by the time we're finished), we'll be "Master Divers." At that point, if we decided to, we could go on and take the DiveCon course and be able to actually help get divers certified! I don't know that we'll take it to that level, but it's fun to think we've gained that much ground. :)

(Tyler relaxing on a porch swing at about 60 feet at Redondo)

Not much to report...

Not much is new around here, unless you count house-hunting. We actually had mutual acceptance on a house a few weeks ago and felt excited about it, but it got snatched away at the last minute. Now we're back to the drawing board...We'll see what happens from here. Honestly, I'm feeling rather hopeless about the whole situation. After the ups and downs of being in this holding pattern for more than 2 years, of finding a house that might work only to see the possibility vanish before our very eyes, I'm almost scare to get excited anymore. Maybe we're destined to be renters for a while longer...you all can pray for my attitude. Sometimes I get frustrated and feel like we're being too picky, but I also don't want to buy such a huge purchace only to end up having one or the other of us hate it a few years down the road.

Easter was so fun! We met together with some friends from church for a traditional ham and potatoes Easter dinner. :) I love how friends can feel like family when need be, especially on holidays when I'm missing my REAL family. It was a great day full of laughter and teasing with some serious moments thrown in, too.

Other than that, we're just enjoying life. My job is going well (oh yeah, I started a new job about a month ago). I'm working at Neil's dive shop in Kent part time on Thursdays and Fridays. It's a very laid-back job but it's been fun to get more connected in the dive community. I met a guy a few weeks ago, and he asked Tyler and I to join him and his girlfriend on his boat! It was so fun to be out on the water on such a beautiful day (it was sunny and 60 the day we went out with them). Yay for connections! :)

Cora's Legacy

Probably all of you know about my friends Joel and Jess and their little girl, Cora. Well, this week, in my little hometown, the newspaper called the Macs and wanted to write an article about Cora's Playground. The article ran yesterday and was so great!! You can read it here. Within a few hours of the story running, a news reporter called Jess and wanted to do a short clip for the 10pm news in Wichita. So, after some hesitation, Joel and Jess decided to go for it. It also turned out excellent!! Both of these opportunities have been great chances for the gospel to spread and the Macs have taken full advantage. They are so brave and strong. You can see the video here. The link to the video is in the upper-left hand corner. Enjoy, and please keep praying for this dear couple. You can read about their thoughts and experiences on their blog.

Ski trip

Well, before I write about the ski trip, I have to tell you all, I have officially experienced my first earthquake. Well, maybe it would be better to say that I have been in an earthquake, because I SLEPT THROUGH IT!!! Given the fact that it occured at 5:30am, I guess it's not too surprising that I was sleeping. But, I'm kinda excited that I can say I've been through an earthquake. You can read more about it here.

The ski trip is a semi-annual occurance. My parents have been skiing since before I was born, so the slopes are not foreign to me. This year, I chose to spend my time hanging out with my mom (who no longer skis) and make food for the guys instead of hit the slopes. We had fun having some mother-daughter time and the rest of the group had an excellent time sliding, skidding, and in general, falling, down the side of Copper Mountain. My dad is so comfortable on skis that he can ski backwards and video at the same time. He caught some great footage of jumps/crashes. Tyler had a couple good ones where he was very glad to have a helmet on.
We got to eat at Casa Bonita in Denver the first night which was excellent as always. Then we had three days of skiing/boarding, and left on Wednesday. It was a great trip and so fun to be with family. Zach and Elaine really missed out (really, guys, we did miss you, but I had to rub it in!).

Please pray

Hey everybody, I'm sure most of you readers out there have heard by now, but some friends of mine recently found out that their little 10 month old girl has stage 4 cancer. She had surgery late last week and is currently starting chemo. This next day or two will be very crucial in determining how things progress. Please pray hard and often for little Cora and her parents, Joel and Jessica. You can find their blog here: http://themcclenahans.blogspot.com/ and read the full story. I just can't even imagine what they're going through, but their faith is staying strong. Pray, pray, pray!!

Christmas Update

I have been lax in my "duty" of updating the blog since we left for Christmas. As most of you know, our holiday turned out a bit differently than we'd planned because of the snow storm here in Seattle. We were scheduled to leave on Sunday the 21st at 3pm. We got to the airport around 1:30pm and saw a HUGE line for Frontier. We, however, got in the "fast lane," as we had checked in online and just had to drop off our bags. As we stood in line, we kept hearing rumblings of all flights for Frontier being cancelled...turns out, after waiting about an hour, the rumblings were true. So, we called our dear friend Nick back to the airport to get us, stayed on hold with the Frontier reservations desk for about 30 minutes, and got a refund for our tickets because the soonest available flight that wasn't completely booked was not until the Friday AFTER Christmas. At this point, I was about in tears, thinking I wasn't going to see our families and we were going to have to spend Christmas alone, etc, etc, etc...then I had an epiphany...why can't we drive? Those 4 words spurred us into action and we quickly packed the car, made sure we had our chains and winter weather gear (just in case, of course), and took off down the interstate. Oh, what an adventure! For the first 1000 miles (about 1/2 way to KS), our average speed was 30MPH due to the snow/ice/slush. When we crossed the border into WY, we stopped at a gas station and decided, after much deliberation and depressed silences, that we needed to turn around. That decision made, Tyler went into the station to get some wiper fluid while I sat in the car and cried, trying to muster up the gumph to call our families and tell them the news. I had my finger on the "talk" button when Tyler came out and poked his head in the car and said "Let's just keep going. We've come this far, if we turn around now, we'll have driven 48 hours for nothing." Needless to say, I was overjoyed, but wanted to make sure he really thought it was the best plan, not that he was giving in to his emotional/overtired wife (we drove straight through, napping while the other was driving, so we'd been on the road for 24 hours, only stopping for bathroom/food). He said from that point on, we weren't going to worry about making good time, we'd get there when we'd get there. So, we kept going! And lo and behold, about 40 miles later, the roads cleared and we actually made it up to 75MPH :) We did stop that night for 3 hours at a rest stop, then drove the rest of the way from WY to KS. Snow was along the road all the way from WY to Newton, but we weren't really affected by it. We arrived in Newton at 5pm Tuesday night, which gave us a grand total of 45 hours of travel time. Whew!

At this point, all we want is a shower, which my family was kind enough to provide! Then the festivities began! Boy, did they begin! Because of our delayed arrival, we all had to cram 8 days worth of activites into 5. Just a sampling of these were: game night at the Adams, hot dog roast at the Giles, Christmas with the Giles, Christmas with the Bakers, Christmas with the Smiths, Christmas with the Russells, lunch with friends, Guitar Hero/Rock Band sessions, lunch with the Russells, and church with the Bakers. We also ended up at the hospital for almost a full day trying to get Tyler's cold taken care of, which was unplanned (he ended up with a sinus infection and got put on antibiotics). Then after all the action in Newton, it was time to say goodbye and head to Branson, MO to spend a few days at Tyler's parents house...I hate goodbyes!! But, we had a great time in Branson. We spent an evening at Silver Dollar City, watched a couple of movies and many episodes of the Office, and shopped, shopped, shopped.

Then, on Thursday, the 1st, we headed out, destination: home. This time around, we decided to stop for each night at a hotel and actually sleep! What a concept! :) We also decided to see some of the sights along the way to help make driving worthwhile. The first day of driving, we made it to Mitchell, SD. We stayed the night there, and spent most of the next day sightseeing. We stopped at Wall Drug (some old drug store; it was pretty boring), Mt. Rushmore (really, really cool!), and Crazy Horse (from a distance...but still pretty cool). We debated about stopping at Devil's Tower and decided we might as well, but it was already dark, so we spent the night in a little town called Hulett, WY. We got up the next morning and made it to Devil's Tower by around 7am. We were the only ones there, as it had snowed during the night. That was a pretty cool sight also. And kinda weird to be completely alone at a national monument (not even rangers were there that early, although we did pass one on the way out). At that point, our sightseeing day(s) were over and we made the final push for home. We decided to not stop Saturday night so we could get home sooner. The drive got worse through Idaho and then into Washington, but we finally made it home, safe and sound, at 3am Sunday morning (after a quick stop at Walmart for some food supplies). We drove a total of over 4,000 and our total travel time was around 90 hours!! It was a huge adventure, and I don't think we really knew what we were getting ourselves into, but it made fun memories. I think both Tyler and I would say it was completely worth it, and we're both so glad we didn't turn around that night in WY. As an added bonus, we ended up saving a couple hundred bucks by driving instead of flying! :) In conclusion to this monstrous post, we had an excellent time seeing all our friends and family, and throughly enjoyed our time together driving down the interstate. :)

I have posted pictures of our trip on Facebook that you can access here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2240335&l=6e3fd&id=17026677

You don't need to be a member of facebook to see them, just click the link and it'll take you right to them.

Also, a quick side-note, I cut my hair this week so I'll post a picture for those of you who don't have facebook for that too.