My First Turkey & Meet Diego

Our first Thanksgiving on our own. We cooked a 5.5 lb. turkey breast for both of us and it turned out perfect!! (Thanks Dad for the instructions!)


After a morning of cooking and waiting for the turkey to finish, we sat down at 1pm to turkey, gravy (made by José), mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, bread, and complete with sparkling white grape juice. Yum! We had a great day!


Meet Diego!! 100% Miniature Pinscher. We got him yesterday! Now 11 wks old, he was born a week after we moved to Ohio. He's smart and will be a lot of fun. (We're already house training like crazy and so far, we're 2 days accident free!)

Snow Season

We had the great blessing of having Rosita, José's mom, with us these last two weeks. One thing she was really hoping to see was SNOW, and LOTS of it! While we kept the heat cranked up to 75, we got all kinds of snow, little tiny ice balls, mini flakes, huge fluffy flakes, wet, dry and everything in between.
José and Rosita got to build their first snowman (José has seen snow before but not in this quantity and has been getting used to leaving with 15-20 minutes to spare so he can shovel out the driveway, sidewalk, and scrape off the car!) Since it's going to be cold, I'd rather see snow! I'm realizing that it's not smart to "run" to the mailbox, winter coat, scarf, gloves, and then flip-flops and socks. The snow is cold and deep. No quick sprints to the car either, my new wardrobe is evolving: 2 pair of boots just for being outside, as many sweaters as I can find, a new total of 5 winter coats for different occasions..........

Painting, Snow, and Goodbye to Sofía

Painting the bedroom- We LOVE the color!


Our first official snow, October 30. 2 inches in 2 hours. It melted very quickly. (Thankfully).




We said goodbye to Sofía on November 6th. She was very sick and we had to put her down. We will miss her, she was a great little dog.

Missions Impact Weekend & Prayer Conference

Here's what we've been up to this past week.

Last week (Tues-Sunday) was Missions Impact Weekend, and we were able to have some missionaries going to Japan be with us for various activities and services at church. One of those activities was an ultimate frisbee & hot dog cookout.

Monday (yesterday) and today, José and I went to the Central Distict (with the CMA) 's prayer retreat. Here's a picture of us on Lake Erie (YES, it borders Canada). It was beautiful on Monday, but cold and windy on Tuesday (though still beautiful)!

A Great-Lakes Region Celebration

We've been hearing about a holiday coming up on Saturday (tomorrow). It seems to be similar to "Friendship Day" which is celebrated in Paraguay, Costa Rica, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. Here's what I found:

Sweetest Day 2008

When: Third Saturday in October

Now here is a day dedicated just for your sweetie. It exists as an opportunity for you to recognize that sweet and special someone. It doesn’t matter who that person is, or what their relation to you. They just have to be "sweet" in order to get a little recognition.

Herbert Birch Kingston, a Cleveland, Ohio philanthropist and candy company employee started Sweetest Day. He wanted to bring happiness to orphans, shut-ins and under-privileged. His intent was to show these people that they were not forgotten. In 1922, he started this holiday by giving candy and small gifts. He often used movie stars to distribute the gifts.

The popularity of this holiday quickly spread. Today, is celebrated with loved ones and friends.

The Colors of Fall in Northeastern Ohio

Well, after an entire week (last week) using the heat, this week we've had a heat wave, and it's been nice to enjoy the changing leaves in short-sleeved shirts. Here's a little of what we've been seeing:
Looking North from our Kitchen Window.



From the Porch looking toward the South.

Sofía always enjoying being outside!



Ohio does pretty well with leaf-changing. We do miss the mountains, but are especially glad to have some changing leaves up here in the north/mid-west.

Pondering paint colors

Well, as winter approaches (it is already fall in full-swing up here in Ohio), we're trying to figure out which colors will make us feel warm and happy during the 5-6 months of grey skies and cold.

For the kitchen we're going with a yellow (it was blue--see previous pictures if you want to visualize it).


For the entrance way, hallway& living room, a neutral/light yellow tone so that we can continue to change the decor without being stuck.

And for our room, a grey-blue shade that's dark-ish (we are also going to add dark curtains conducive to sleeping as we live right beside a main road and our bedroom is closest to the road).

For the office/guest room/everything else room (and traditionally it has been the children's room) a brighter, fun, yellow and tangerine striped look. We'll see how this turns out. Hopefully not like a circus, but more like a fun, modern, but peaceful and warm place to hang out and read or exercise.

We're still trying to think of creative options for the bathroom, it has a wallpaper type backsplash all around the bottom half of the walls, so we need to try and combine with that or paint over it... Any suggestions would be fun to hear. We'll send pictures room by room. Though it may be a while before we finish things up.

A Dead Raccoon.

Well, this morning, Sofía, our cute little 7 pound min-pin, found a dead raccoon. Since she was on her leash, she didn't get close to it, THANKFULLY! But we were left to figure out what to do with a dead raccoon. We have wonderful landlords, whom we love, and the guy who keeps up the place (ours included)--we love him too!. We gave Jack a call this morning. I found his response really funny-- I told him we had a dead raccoon, what should we do, and he said " That's great! I put out some poison in the barn!" Anyway, it was taken care of before I could get my camera (I'm telling you, he's great!), but it was pretty funny and we were relieved.

I'll be doing more posts more frequently. Life just got full all of the sudden, but I will do blurbs on different activities we're involved in, and include pictures when possible. Thanks for reading.

IKE in Ohio!!?! What??

Well, thanks to those of you who have been praying. Yesterday around 4pm, the "fun" began. We were watching the Weather Channel and saw that there were strong winds headed our way (north eastern Ohio) which were the aftermath of Ike. Yes, in Ohio. What we also learned is that thankfully there was a hot air system in place which prevented the aftermath from causing tornadoes throughout the mid-west (as opposed to cold air). It was eerily hot the last few days and incredibly humid but not rainy yesterday. We heard the wind getting crazier and crazier outside and began to see branches fly off of the trees around our house. Being from the south, we went outside to enjoy the power of the storm (sounds crazy, but there's something very awe-inspiring watching a big storm like that). While we were collecting a few of the small branches from willow trees by our house, a large branch cracked on a bigger tree right beside our house (just 5 ft. from our kitchen window). Then the wind kicked up and blew our WOODEN patio furniture around, so we rushed inside. We prayed and anxiously waited while we could actually feel our house tremble a little. Around midnight, we went back out to see the damage, the wind had died down for about 30 minutes. While many branches on the ground, trees stripped, there was no damage to our house, car, the fence, or our landlords property. Thank the Lord! There were more downed branches this morning as we woke up, though nothing touching the houses or cars. Today is really nice weather and we've taken the opportunity not only to clean up the mess, but to start getting the shrubbery around the house cleaned up a little.

Cleaning out the junk!

Well it's not actually spring, but heading fast towards fall, with a chill in the morning air. But, we are nonetheless doing major cleaning. We're getting rid of junk, the stuff we've kept around, but haven't dealt with in a while. It seems to be a theme in our lives these days, dig out the junk, deal with it, and live in a free-er cleaner way. It's actually very refreshing, after all the effort in cleaning out. Here are a few pictures of our junk, the trash for the dumpster, and stuff for a yard sale.



This is the trash, it's gone! And the black tote, empty and in the basement!

Here's the stuff, usable, however we don't want it in our storage! It will feel nice to get rid of it.