Organized Singapore: Better go to the bathroom now, it's gonna be a whole minute before you have a chance to go again...

Jungle Flight

In Thailand we joined some friends for a great time in the jungle!  We flew through the air on about 22 zip lines.  What a great time!

Suited up and ready to go!

Aaron flies through the air!

Joel is having fun!

Kris and Seth

Look Mom!  No hands!

Is that a monkey?

There goes Kris!

Jana free falls (just kidding) from 40 meters in the air (that part is true)

See what I mean?

Here we are with our friendly and very capable staff who kept us from hurting, hurling, or hurtling ourselves.  What a great day!

Puzzling Pictures

I have some awesome pictures that I have nothing to write about, but I just like 'em.  So I will occasionally post them, with little or no comment, as "Puzzling Pictures."  Here's my first one, a beef bbq restaurant, wanna eat there?  Maybe they didn't read the newspapers several years back...wonder if there is a chicken place called "FluBird"?

And Now for the Inside

We've had fun picking out furniture for our home. All the wooden furniture is from Teak wood and is actually imported from Java and sold in stores here.  We don't have curtains or pictures up yet, but here is what it looks like so far.

This is the first room when you come in the front door.  It is the "ruang tamu" or the guest sitting room.

The opposite end of the room is our dining room.  Aaron is facing Seth & Joel's room and his room is the door behind him on the other side of the dining table.  A bathroom and Kris' office is in the little hall the Aaron is headed for.

Our family room is just through the open doorway from the dining room.  We have books and curios (sp?) in the bookshelf now, and a TV on the wooden TV cabinet.  The door next to the sink goes into the kitchen.

Here it is from a different angle, taken from the kitchen door.  The room behind the couch is the homeschooling room and on the other side of that is the master bedroom.

Here is part of our front yard.  Newly planted grass, a very strangely shaped pine tree, and my new 3 color bougainvillea  plant!

And don't forget my awesome newly tiled kitchen!  Kris and I picked out these fun colors for the counters and back-splash.  It's kind of hard to see, but there is a border between the two that is white with lots of colors.  So all my dishes, pots and pans and even utensils are bright colors to match the border :)

This is the other side of the kitchen.  The stairs go up to a guest room with an amazing terrace the overlooks the neighborhood.  The window behind the fridge goes to my second kitchen!  Yep, a second one with a sink and more counter space!  I am loving it!

Here is Seth standing on the terrace outside the guest room.  Did I mention the guest room?  It needs guests, so come visit us!

Our New Home!

A month ago we arrived in our new city with 10 suitcases and our carry-ons.  We spent the next weeks searching for a house to rent, looking for furniture to buy and learning our way around this populous city.  The Lord graciously led us to this house!  It was not marked "for Rent" but it looked empty and we asked the neighbors about it.  We were able to find the owner and he agreed to rent it to us!  It has been empty for a few years but he recently had it renovated for a renter who backed out.  We feel so blessed because it is in a good neighborhood and has everything we need.  Thank You, Lord!

  Even though it was recently renovated, there was still lots of work to do.  Again, the Lord provided a hard working and honest man who has worked for several weeks to do all the things that were needed to make the house ready.  As I write this, he is finishing repairs in the kitchen!  

As we have traveled about town, we've seen and done some fun stuff.  Come take a mini-journey!

Here are piles of dried beans, corn, onions and other items for sale by weight at the grocery store.

Eating Padang food.  Famous for it's spicy-ness, but oh-so-yummy.  Plus, you get to eat with your hands.  What could be more fun?

Whoa!  Do you think I should buy this living room set?  It is spray painted gold!  This is one of the stores we went to.  I couldn't help taking a picture of this!

One day we played tourist and went to see the big soccer stadium with some friends.  Our city is getting ready to host the SEA Games in November.

Here's a fun little restaurant that we ate at. The boys had their own little "pondok" to eat in!

Want some squid?

How about a fried fish head?

The boys helped some volunteers prepare gift bags for an orphanage.

And now for a break from rice.  Crispy chicken, awesome!  Whoa, better not fill up on that big 'ole stack of fries!

Every day we discover something new, different, funny, sometimes hard or weird, but always very interesting!

A Closer Look...

We are in our new town!  Woohoo!  What’s next?  Find a house!  What does that mean?  Well, believe it or not, we actually used Century 21 that just opened a branch here!  We looked at a few options with the agent.  Mostly, however, we just drove around neighborhoods looking for houses that looked empty!  Sometimes there is a “for rent” sign but not always.  Sometimes there is a number on the “for rent” sign, but not always.  Sometimes you just knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if the empty looking house is for rent.  Our first and second day we looked at or looked in about 25-30 houses!  No joke!  Most were too big, too small, wrong location, run down, water damaged etc.  But we did find some possibilities.  We are in the middle of negotiating with the landlord of a potential house (one of those that had no sign, just looked empty).  We had to wait a few days to let him check on some renovations.  What do you do while you wait?  Well, thankfully we have some friends already living here.  Yesterday we went to the zoo, the mall, and ended the day with Pizza Hut delivery.  That sounds like a normal summer day in America, right?  Well, read the “closer look” and see if you still agree!

A Closer Look

We went to the zoo!   Can you call it that?  It was a park in a pretty forest.  One part was a zoo, one was carnival type rides, there were picnic areas around, and a pond with paddle boats.  As for the zoo, I am not sure who came to see who.  Us foreigners looked at the animals and the national people looked at us (and took lots of pictures of us)!  The animals in the zoo were crocodiles (with a rickety “baby gate” to keep the onlookers protected!), sun bears, a cassowarie (did you know it can kill it’s prey with one kick of it’s foot?), a bored looking oranghutan (did you know that is an Indonesian word meaning “man of the forest?), some other monkeys including gibbons, eagles and hawks and a vulture, pigeons (who were being visited by identical wild pigeons who tried to get their attention from outside the cage!), a chicken (but perhaps he was just waiting to be fed to Mr. Crocodile), a snake, hamsters (in a zoo?),  guinea pigs, 3 cous cous (not to be confused with the Moroccan food) and some other birds.  The “zoo keeper” was this guy who smoked (puffing smoke into the animal cages, great) and kept agitating the animals to get them to “perform” for us.  So we had to keep moving to the next cage so that he’d leave the poor animals alone.   After being photographed more than the animals themselves (at one point, the troup master of a large group of girl scouts had to call them off with his megaphone to get them to quit posing for pictures with some from our group), we left and went to the mall. 

The kids had KFC but the adults opted for Japanese Fastfood across the hall.  I gave Aaron money to get them something to eat (come to think of it, I haven’t gotten my change back from him...).  Then one of the moms took all the kids back to their house while 4 of us ladies went to the grocery store.  We went to the seafood section and decided those animals had better living conditions than the zoo animals, even if their life span was shorter!  There was a huge aquarium of long, icky squirmy balut (eels, a delicacy here), there were other aquariums of live fish.  There was a bin full of huge crabs.  What would you do if you saw a bin of huge crabs in your grocery store?  Well, you’d probably do exactly what we did!  Whip out your camera and take pictures of yourselves holding them up by the strings that held their claws shut, of course!  We named that section of the store the petting zoo.  It was much more pleasant than the real one!  

Back at the house where the kids were, Joel found two hammocks that, when not hung, look like long nylon ropes.  They have hoops on each end.  And there was a second level in the house that had railing at the top.  Well, what do you do when you have a rope with a hoop on the end and a second-level rail?  Well, hang the rope down and swing on it of course.  And since there are two of them, why not have two rope swings?  Joel’s not the only one who thought it was a good idea.  By the end of the evening, most of us had tried it out .

Now for the pizza.  Pizza Hut delivers!  Our friend ordered 6 large cheese pizzas with pepperoni.  As a side note:  Pizza Hut does not have “Pepperoni Pizza,” but you can order “Cheese Pizza” and ask for pepperoni as an addition.  Same thing you say?  Well, if you ask for Pepperoni pizza they will tell you they don’t have it.  So don’t forget to just order cheese pizza and ask for pepperoni as an addition.  The lady even repeated this order to make sure she had it right.  But apparently she did not write it down and she forgot what the order was when she told the cook.  So half an hour later we got 6 large “potato and pepperoni” pizzas.  And for the pizza sauce on the “potato (large chunks) and pepperoni” pizza...generous amounts of Thousand Island dressing.  It was more like potato salad on a pizza crust.  I don’t even like Thousand Island dressing on salad.  Let’s just say the pizza was NOT a hit!  When we bowed to pray, the guy who was praying had trouble finding the right words to say to thank the Lord for 6 disgusting pizzas!!  But as he prayed, a friend of theirs showed up at the door with Indonesian food that she had cooked and brought over!  We’re saved!  Actually, we did eat some of the pizza.  It was stuffed crust, so at least the crust was yummy J

And that was our day!  But I didn’t even mention the crazy parking attendant, the roach that crawled under one ladies’ long dress (and the cat that followed the roach and caught it) or the fish spa at the mall.  

One Scoop or Two?

Just this morning I got a FB message from a friend whose husband is traveling for the first time in their young marriage.  She encouraged me by saying she remembers how I used to have to "hold up the fort" in Africa when we had three young boys and my hubby was traveling.

Immediately two scenes come to mind, and both involve three little boys, a broken generator, and Kris on a long trip.  Our boys were young, the littlest one still nursing, and Kris had to travel out of the country.  In our dusty little home in the desert, when Kris "got to" travel outside the country, I always fought jealousy...and things always went wrong.  On this particular trip, the generator broke.

We had a generator for the frequent power outages.  At 120 degrees, once the electricity went out, it was only a matter of seconds before we were sweating and tearfully praying for the power to return.  In the mean time we'd crank up our old half-working generator.  Sometimes it worked. On this particular day it did not.

So the first scene that pops into my head is me sitting on the bed trying to nurse my baby.  It is hot as you-know-what and I am dripping sweat.  The last thing I want is a warm little baby body up next to me and I can't understand why my baby would want to drink milk at a time like this.  Logic, of course, flies out the window when one is hot!  I can't help but imagine his little baby belly full of curdled milk.

The second scene that comes to mind is later that day.  I can't get the generator to start and am about to go out of my mind with the heat and three little heat-struck younguns.  I call the generator company in town and use my very best Arabic to tell them the problem.  The man tells me that since I had a friend look at the generator before calling them, the warranty is void.  WHAT?  I explain that my friend didn't touch anything on the generator but he maintains that the warranty is now no good.

"You had some one else look at it, that is the problem," he says to me in Arabic.  And here is proof that our deepest feelings can only be expressed in our heart language:  because I burst out in English, loud English, angry English.  I am pretty sure the loud and angry part translate pretty well even if the words do not.

"THAT'S not the problem!" I say, my voice escalating, "You know what the problem is?  The problem is my HUSBAND is gone and I am HOT!!!!  And I have three little boys and THEY are HOT.  WE NEED THE GENERATOR TO WORK!!!"

Those of you who know me can see the humor in all of this, as I have never yelled at a single soul.  But that day, I found my limit!  So here is my limit:  120 degree heat, husband gone, a preschooler, a toddler, a nursing baby, no ceiling fan, and news that my warranty is void.  That's my limit y'all, now you know.

As bad as I felt about the yelling episode, it did get the results I wanted.  The man paused for a second and then replied in Arabic, "We will come right over."

They honored the warranty and fixed the generator.  We got some air circulating in the house.  I did not hurt anyone, we all survived!  I felt a mixture of accomplishment that I'd figured out a way to fix the problem and guilt that I'd resorted to yelling at someone to do so.

So what do we learn from that?  I guess I learned my limit. That generator man learned not to mess with foreign ladies who are suffering from the heat!  And maybe we can all just learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.  I started, now it's your turn!  Laugh at the crazy things you've done when you reached YOUR limit!