So Cute...

Bad News/Good News

We had an interesting day last week. We had been looking into getting a new vehicle and had found one in Kalispell that we wanted to go look at. On Thursday we finally convinced ourselves to go look at it, so we took some friends after school and went up to check it out. On the way there, we saw tons of deer standing around in fields and some crossing the road behind us. All of a sudden, there was a deer coming straight at us, and John swerved a little, but still hit it. It was pretty small, so it didn't do as much damage as it could have. The deer got up and ran away, but I'm pretty sure it still died.

Anyway, we continued to Kalispell and ended up buying the new car we were looking at. Its a 2006 Nissan Xterra. We're pretty excited about it. And now we have something to drive while the car gets fixed. We're already talking about some of the places we want to go now that we have a vehicle that we can drive places our car can't go. There are so many hiking trails in the mountains that are hard to get to. Even getting home when it is snowy is a challenge in our car, so we're glad to finally have 4 wheel drive.

Youth Group Ski Trip

John and I help out with the youth group for our church, which basically is for the houseparents kids from the ranch, the ministers kids, and a few foreign exchange students who live with a member of our church. We thought it would be fun to take them skiing this winter, since many of them had never gone. They had a blast! Almost all of them caught on right away and were doing several blue runs by the end of the day. There were only a couple who didn't really get it, but they still had a good time. It also gave John and I the chance to work on teaching people how to ski... That was a challenge!

Big Mountain Skiing

Today we finally got to go skiing for the first time this season. With the lack of snow the first part of winter, followed by the sub-zero temperatures when we finally did get snow, then all of the Christmas stuff going on, and John being sick, we hadn't been able to get out to ski until today. We were afraid it was going to be really foggy, and it was at the base, but as we rode the lift up it just got clearer and clearer and it was bright and sunny at the summit. You could look out and see the mountains sticking up out of the fog below. It was beautiful.

Its 2009 Already?

The last 2 months just flew by. I can't believe Christmas is over and its already the middle of January. It does seem that the first week of school after Christmas lasted forever though!

We had a really good Christmas this year. We had school until noon on December 23rd, so we couldn't leave until the 24th. We were supposed to leave Missoula at 2 pm but the flight was delayed and we didn't leave until 7 pm. That meant we were stuck in the Missoula airport (a friend had dropped us off at 2- we thought the flight was only delayed 2 hours) for 5 hours. If you've ever been to the Missoula airport, you know its not a great place to be stuck. After trying to decide if we wanted to get a cab and go to eat somewhere in town, we decided we would just wait at the airport and eat at the restaurant there. The sign said it would be open until 6, so around 5:15 we went down and it was closed early for Christmas Eve! We got into Minneapolis around 11, went to a hotel, and left for the airport again the next morning to finally make it to Indianapolis. Then on our return flight, we got to Minneapolis on time, only to find out our flight to Missoula had been cancelled! We ended up flying to Kalispell, which is a longer drive back to the ranch, but still got us home earlier than if we had waited for the next flight to Missoula. We were glad to be home finally.

While we were in Indiana, we got to spend time with both of our families. We drove all over the place but it was worth it to get to see everyone. We went out for dinner with our friends Lynsey and Derek on New year's Eve, and then drove up to my sister's in Greencastle. We ended up being in the car driving back to my parent's house at midnight, but we both decided we must be getting old because we didn't really care about not seeing the ball drop. I guess we haven't done that for awhile though because since we've lived here we've been at the church's party on New Year's Eve and we don't watch it there either.

We got a new camera for Christmas from my parents. We are pretty excited about it and can't wait to get out and get some great pictures. We've already taken quite a few, we just haven't had anything really exciting to take pictures of. We planned to go skiing this weekend, but John had a cold so we decided to wait until next weekend to go.

Weekend in Spokane

Last weekend we had the chance to get away to Spokane. We went to a Jon McLaughlin concert which was awesome. He is crazy on the piano! If you don't know his music you should check out his myspace- www.myspace.com/jonmclaughlin He is a guy we've been big fans of since IWU when we saw him perform at FNL and then saw him at a coffee place in Muncie and then again in Indy. It's exciting to see him get more and more popular. We got to talk to him after the concert and told him we were from Indiana (he's from Anderson) and that we'd seen him before. It turns out his mom works at IWU now. How funny! So after that we spent the rest of the weekend shopping and relaxing. We bought new stuff for decorating our apartment. We went to the Melting Pot. The bananas foster fondue was delicious, as was the rest of the meal. It was great to just be able to get away and spend the weekend together away from all of the school stuff we've been doing.

Harvest Party and a Trip Home

Wednesday night, John and I had the opportunity to put together a Harvest Party for the kids from the ranch and the church. We had a great time. We weren't really sure how well it would go, but everyone really enjoyed themselves. The tradition for the Harvest Party here is to have people dress up in costumes and do a skit of some sort, which has just sort of fizzled out over the past few years. This year, no one did any skits, but we did have some fun activities going on. We bought about 25 pumpkins after Halloween at our grocery store for only about $1 each and we had a pumpkin carving area. We also had some fun games up in the gym, like a football toss, tug-of-war, pumpkin bowling, a variation of bobbing for apples where we hung the apples on a string and the kids had to eat them without using their hands, and of course knockout (the basketball game) because it is a favorite of the kids. We were pretty happy with the way things went. Several people told us that it was the best Harvest Party they had been to here, which made us feel pretty good. So we got our first taste of party planning and hope to do it again next year! We were pretty busy helping out with pumpkin carving so we didn't get a chance to take pictures of all of the fun that was going on upstairs.
Also, last week we got to go home for vacation in Indiana. It was a great week. We had a lot of fun visiting family and friends. It was especially nice to be there in the fall when the leaves were beautiful in Bloomington. We spent the first part of the week at John's parents' and had a good time down there relaxing and visiting. We got to visit Bryan and Becky and meet their adorable little girl, who I amazingly didn't take any pictures of. Thursday Lynsey and Derek and Annabel (another beautiful baby I ended up without pictures of) came down from Marion and Sarah and Katie and Melissa all met us for dinner at a Thai restaurant in Bloomington. Friday, we went to McCormick's Creek with Shawn and Amber and my mom and dad. We hiked around, and found out that Ace, Amber and Shawn's dog is afraid of heights and does NOT like to hike down hills. We had a fun time that day and then that night Lacy and Steve came over and we played Wii! That can certainly provide hours of entertainment. We also went to the Great Pumpkin Launch in Bloomington on Saturday before leaving for the airport and saw some pretty cool pumpkin launchers throw some pumpkins over 200 yards! I didn't take very many pictures while we were there, but I did manage to steal some from others on facebook and other blogs. (Thanks Mom, Lynsey, Shawn, and Katie!)