Having become a recent home-owner we needed to invest in a lawn mowing solution. I’ve used gas-powered ones all my life but that doesn’t seem to be the environmentally friendly solution anymore. I was a bit apprehensive about the manual reel lawn mowers but the opinions on the Canadian Tire website (and the 30 day money back guarantee) convinced me to give it a try. So, David and I went out and brought home a 18″ Yardworks reel mower.

It worked like a charm. Easy to push, very little noise, compact to store, no gas, no smell, no engine work, and no clippings, no fear of rocks breaking windows. The lowest setting didn’t cut it as low as I would like, but that’s OK. It also doesn’t cut to the edge like most other mowers do. But a weed-whacker will fix that. David can push it easily and he was happy to earn a few bucks. He can even mow with it under the trampoline!

We’ve been needing some packing tape and I almost bought some. But, as I was standing in the aisle holding the roll of tape I started to get a queezy feeling about packing tape, boxes, storage and… moving! I put the roll back on the shelf and walked away. I can live without packing tape for awhile longer.

It feels kinda like a family gathering at Christmas for us right now! We’ve moved into our ‘new’ house in Calgary and we’ve brought all of our earthly possessions along with us. Stuff from Nairobi, stuff from storage in Chilliwack, stuff we inherited from our rental house in Chilliwack, and other stuff we’ve picked up along the way. For the first time ever, we have all our things in one place. It makes life simple and logical, yet we’ve never been able to do it before.

It’s nice to finally unpack that pretty vase we got as a wedding present 15 years ago and put it on a shelf to enjoy. It’s also funny to see that I have 6 coax TV cables and I don’t need any of them anymore!

On a sad note, we want to give honourable mention to some long time friends who have helped us so much over the years. Through all of our moving back and forth across the oceans these boxes have served us well and stored our stuff without complaint. Unfortunately, the move to Calgary was too much for some of them. So we thought it best to retire these boxes, say our good-byes, and send them on to a better place… the recycling depot!

Look out Calgary… Here we come! Last week our realtor came over to add a nice little sticker to our FOR SALE sign on our front lawn. The sticker said “SOLD”! This is a big answer to prayer and a huge relief to us. Thank you, Lord! And thanks to you for praying with us about this.

Another bit of good news, WE BOUGHT OUR FIRST HOUSE!!! The deal was signed last Saturday. It’s in the south east part of Calgary in an area called Riverbend. It’s about 20km to the Wycliffe office and less than 3km from Val’s sister. We’re very excited and can hardly believe it.

Technically, it’s not our first house because we owned a house in Chilliwack and rented it out (we’re living in it right now). But that doesn’t really count because we didn’t choose it for a home.

Whoah! Over four months since our last post. I guess we’ve been pretty busy lately.

The past month and a half I’ve been working with two Sudanese men, Fajak and Acen, to prepare their New Testament for printing. At over 750 pages it’s not just a New Testament though. They decided to go an extra mile and included Genesis, half of Exodus and Ruth. Fajak has an amazing story of his involvement over the years and he also reads a bit for us. Read the rest »

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This post is a bit different than my usual ramblings. If you’re not a WordPress user, then you can ignore this post.

WordPress is great! But hey, things could always be better, right? There are plenty of sites out there that show how to change the default thumbnail size. But I want to eat my cake too. I want the thumbnails bigger and sharpened and a bit higher quality. Here’s how to do it. Read the rest »

Being Canadians, we’re no strangers to seeing a second language on most things at the grocery store. That’s how our kids learn so much French right? Here in Nairobi I find it interesting to see other languages on the stuff in our kitchen. Unfortunately I’m not able to pronounce any of these words. On one bag of taco chips the ingredients were listed in over a dozen languages!

On another note, it’s a good day for Kenyans. We’re thankful to the Lord that the opposing political parties have agreed and signed a mediation deal that ends a bitter stand-off. To read more see the articles in the Daily Nation or East African Standard. Thank you, too, for your prayers.

Each of our kids (except Emma) are learning some kind of instrument. David plays the trumpet in the elementary band at school. Kara plays the flute in beginner band. This is their first time plalying these instruments and they’re doing great. Jesse has been taking piano lessons this year with Val and is also doing very well. He started out loving it because it was so easy. But now it’s becoming a bit of a challenge for him. Val got him to play a duet for the camera. Enjoy!

Last Friday was “Crazy Hair Day” at school. The night before David and Kara (and Val!) were busy trying to whip up a wacky hair do. The food coloring made a mess of David’s pill and bed sheets, and his face! But they had fun.

There’s a new Java House at YaYa mall now. Another great reason to take Val out on a date.

On Friday last week our IT guys fired up the VSAT and we were finally able to surf the net on something that almost resembles what the rest of the world might describe as high-speed. Excitement was high as our thirst for connectivity was finally being quenched with our big, fat 1 megabit line. But being a bit sceptical I waited a few days to write this post to make sure I wouldn’t exaggerate or something. I’ve been measuring it (with speedtest) a few times a day and the speeds during office hours have been anywhere between 800kbs to 33kbps. No doubt some people (not me!) at our office are hogging the bandwidth and downloading gobs of stuff now that the pipe’s a lot thicker. Our IT guys are trying to figure out how to regulate the bandwidth usage with IPCop and make it more useful to us all.

All this costs us about $1200 per month. Yes, that’s right, PER MONTH! And that’s a pretty good bargain for this part of the world.