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Tuesday, July 29

The C.R. Report and More

We're back! We arrived back at home from Costa Rica on Saturday after a long day of traveling and practically no sleep.
Our trip was eventful, successful, and for me, a good time of growing!

During our time there, we mostly got to help out the missionary families who are currently living there. Two couples are working on building projects, so four of our days were spent on construction projects with them.
Ronnie and Tammy, originally from Honduras, are working on finishing their house by adding another story and painting the roof and stuff. So for their house I did things like primer the kitchen, primer the outside walls, paint countless tiles of zinc (metal flats for the roof), and paint diesel onto some wooden beams (the diesel keeps the termites away). The guys did manly things like making a driveway, pouring concrete to make front steps, measuring and cutting wood to make a stairway into the second story, etc. It was a lot of fun! And of course they had a tiny puppy named Buster that was often the center of attention.

The other couple, Barrett and Amy, are currently in the moving process. They too are planning to build a house smack dab in the middle of the jungle, but in order to build, they need to clear out an area to lay the foundation and go from there. So we went in and cleared a bunch of trees (machetes are so useful) and made three HUGE piles to later be burned. Sure enough, we came back a couple days later with every intention of burning the piles and maintaining them throughout the day. It was awesome - after a lot of hard work in starting the fires, they got burning really nicely and from what we hear, the piles are now gone! That may not seem amazing, but the entire time, we were praying that God would keep the rain away, and He did! Until after lunch, when it started to rain pretty steadily, but at that point the fires were unstoppable and we were not deterred. :-) God is so good!

We also got to go white water rafting on our free day on the Pacuare River, and to our surprise, we found out that Class 4 rapids really are fun...even though they're not Class 5. We rafted through a couple beautiful valleys and got to see a lot of untainted and uncivilized territory!! Woot!

Anyways, I could continue but I don't have any pictures for you just yet. I'm at work breaking the receptionist, which means I have nothing to do, but I haven't gone through the pictures to find the good ones!
More to come, I'm sure....but as a side note, today I felt my first epic earthquake! It was ridiculously awesome. A lady here at work is from Illinois and was freaking out, asking if we needed to evacuate. We didn't, of course, but it was the weirdest thing to feel our entire building shake. So far no aftershocks, though...that I know of.

Billy and I saw The Dark Knight last night...crazy. Here are my thoughts in a nutshell:
it was really long, slow in some parts, two-face is nasty, the joker is the creepiest and weirdest character i've ever seen, heath ledger went out with a bang, the batmobile self-destrcuted and popped out a bat-cycle? didn't like the actress who played rachel, but sad that she died, and so fast too. i was also really confused when the guy came back to life...

Tuesday, July 8

Misnomer Alert




Food for thought: There are over 180 California Pizza Kitchen restaurants, located in 27 states and 5 foreign countries.
I wonder if the first one was actually in California.

Wednesday, July 2

Take A Break










So on Monday I went out on the town with Batstone and Bailey...we toured Fashion Island, took a bunch of pictures with Bailey's sweet new camera, went to CPK (which...is it really only in California?), visited the pet store, etc.




Here are a few photographic highlights of our adventurous day:







Picture 1 shows the beginning of our extravaganza - homemade shave ice with special plastic elephant cups.







Picture 2 shows the most innocent looking puppy
poodle I've ever seen. Unfortunately for him, I'm not much of a poodle fan, else I might have bought him myself.














Picture 3 shows a hot new trend in the realm of toymakers nationwide, and especially in Southern California. To the right you see an attractice, colorful toy that has numerous buttons to push. For example, each of the animals is a button, and when you press it, a man's voice tells you what animal you're touching. Same with the numbers on the bottom.


But this toy has a special feature that attracts multiple audiences: it is bilingual.




Picture 4 gives you an idea of a cookie-in-a-jar recipe gone wrong. Those wonderful cookie dough ingredient jars are not always so trustworthy. Well seasoned bakers like Carrie would know that flour goes in last....but how do you put the flour in last if it's the top ingredient in the jar? Nevertheless, we enjoyed a gooey, texture-y mixture of cookie dough with vanilla ice cream.