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!)

Nice Kitty...

"There is nothing like living in a place where you can be eaten in your own backyard."

This is a picture of a mountain lion that our friends Mitch and Kaatje came across on a horse ride last week. Their dog scared it and chased it up a tree. It has been hanging around the ranch this summer/fall, but we haven't had any problems with it so far. We just try not to be out walking around after dark. It was somewhat comforting to know that it was scared by the dog.

Not much going on...

Every time I post on here, I think how I need to get better about posting more often. I tell myself that I will do it every week or so. Then next thing I know its been a month again and I still haven't posted. I guess I just can't come up with anything interesting to post about. So this time, I don't really have much exciting that's been going on. Unlike our summer, filled with adventures, our fall has been pretty routine. We have been extremely busy at school and we just can't seem to figure out what we can do differently. I guess that's what being a teacher is all about.
John is teaching a new elective this year- Geography. We decided it was something our kids were really lacking in, so he agreed to teach it. Its a lot of work. He has to spend a lot of extra time planning and grading, but I think he enjoys the class. Its fun to actually be able to teach a whole class every once in a while. I am teaching computers again as my elective. The older kids class is not fun at all. I really don't enjoy it. The younger kids class is a new curriculum I picked out last year, and it is going really well.
We are really excited about getting to visit Indiana this month. We haven't been there since August 2007, and we are ready to see everyone and just have a little bit of a vacation from school. (I know- its only the 6th week of school, but you can always use vacation from school.) We're making all of our plans of what we are going to do while we are there and we are just really excited.

And just for fun, here is picture from the Bison Range last week. Its a little fuzzy because our camera only takes good pictures in good lighting.

Pack Trip

This year we got to go on a backpacking trip with the kids from the ranch again. This is something they try to do every year, but it usually gets postponed because of fire danger, and then it snows and the fire danger goes away, but its too cold to camp in the mountains. This was a good summer because we had a good amount of rainfall and the fire danger was never very high. We had great weather the whole week, which we were very thankful for.
We hiked about 4 1/2 miles into this beautiful mountain lake right on the border of Montana and Idaho. There is a pretty nice campsite that people have just put together up there. We had a great campfire area and some people had built a long table between some trees. We went the first half of the week with some other staff and about half of the girls. The boys were at another lake about 30 minutes down the trail with other staff. Then, on Wednesday, we hiked those kids out, and the other half hiked in and stayed until Saturday. So, we were in the woods without showers for 7 days. Thank goodness for wet wipes.
Actually, one night I got the idea that I should wash my hair in the lake because I was feeling pretty gross. One of the girls had shampoo with her- who knows why- and Kaatje and I went down to the lake and I laid on this raft we found down there. While John was coming to bring me hot water, yelling and making tons of noise the whole time, two big bull moose came down and started drinking from the lake right next to the campsite. It was incredible to watch them. Montana moose aren't nearly as big as other moose, but they seemed huge. We thought it was really funny that John was making so much noise making fun of me for washing my hair, and the moose didn't really seem to even notice us.
We also did a lot of hiking around the area while we were up there, which was awesome. We hiked up and over the ridge behind the lake and went across the top and then down into this other lake where we caught lots of cutthroat trout. We also found an abandoned mine shaft above the lake and were able to go down inside about 30 feet where you could see it had collapsed.

John hiked with his backpack AND carried his guitar in the whole way, just so that we could sing songs around the campfire and have devotions every night. The guys at the boys camp said they could hear us singing at night and were pretty jealous. The kids all had a great time. We couldn't have asked for a better week, and it counted as field trip days for school! What could be better?