Seeing double :)

We have a visitor. He arrived yesterday and will be staying for about a week or longer.

It's one of Lucy's younger brothers and they look a lot alike. I'll post a picture sometime soon.

With the hotter, and more humid, weather suddenly arriving they are both shedding like crazy. They both had baths yesterday which intensifies the loss of hair :)

"J" loves being out in our back yard and so double white blurs keep the local wildlife population hopping.

Youth Pioneer Trek

So everyone is off safely to tackle the trek. The picture was taken outside our Bishop's house. Thanks Tori for sending it to us all :)

We had a storm run through the area about an hour or so after they left so hopefully it will not be too soggy of an experience for them.

Addendum. The trek went well. Lots of hard work pulling and pushing the carts and other activities. Slept under tarps because of the rain.

Mixing ingredients

Well I can tell I'm not an author. John got an extension on his book because it was not done and then there was some minor issues about payments etc. We had fun watching some of the book projects in action, in particular the robot doing a drawing :)

The kids have been on a baking kick this past week and have been coming up with some good stuff. We nicknamed Kris' chocolate cookie recipe "ice cream cookies" because they looked like textured balls of ice-cream when they were done. We put together a somewhat messy tortilla mixture last night but it tasted great. Our kitchen sinks have been full of baking dishes etc all week as we no sooner get everything cleaned up but something else was getting tried out. The only "disaster" was my crab salad, which usually turns out fine but for some reason did not work so well this time round.

Most of the clothing for the trek is now done. My eyes have been having issues for a while so I could only do a small amount each day. As is always the case, the day I went to the doctor the pressure lifted. I'm on antibiotics for a couple of different things. Once everything clears up we are going to track my migraines again and see if my medicine needs changed.

We've been having a lot of fun looking at different places to go on our trip to Britain. We now have Wales worked out and are really looking forward to going there. Looks like we may be in Scotland the same time as our cousins from New Zealand.

At church the ladies are doing "Higher University". It's entirely optional but we had a meeting about it all today to sign off goals for those that needed it. I'm the Social Studies dean :) It also looks like I'm a whole lot further along with this activity than I realised. Just have to do some more theology and I'll be finished. It helps having kids working on a lot of the same things with the youth program.

Preparing for this that and the other

John has been feverishly working away on his book. Today is the deadline. Some of the appendix need doing but on the whole it's done. We did not see much of him over the past few days as he did some of the writing at work after hours and over the weekend.

The after work meeting at Juliet's work was to set goals for the coming year based on the recent work place assessment. She thinks that some of the changes will be good.

I set Nik the task of researching East Anglia to see what he could come up with for us to visit. He had a surprisingly good time (he thought) and made a decent list of places to visit. He's interested in nature stuff so this should be fun.

Juliet did some research for places to visit in Wales and Ireland. However after thinking about it we are kind of going off the idea of Ireland this time round. We shall see how we feel closer to the time.

The pioneer trek is next week and we have been busy putting clothes together. We found some items at the thrift store that we were able to adapt i.e. two men's shirts, a dress to make into a skirt. We also made a bonnet and apron. Still have a few more items to make but I reckon if we tackle one or two items per day they should all get done in time.

Elisabeth comes home at the end of next week so we're looking forward to that. It's also her birthday this month so we shall have to think of something nice to do.