Back In Illinois

Jason here...

It's nice to be back in Illinois again. Texas was a ton of fun, but it's good to be back in our own place. School has resumed and work never really took a break. We're still trying to get stuff straightened out from moving. Slowly but surely...

I've been enjoying having all of our kitchen gadgets and utensils available to us. I took some time yesterday do make some bread. My first round was making foccatia, which the bread maker kneaded for me. After transplanting the dough to pans, letting it double, making the topping and finally baking. You can see the result to the right. It was quite good, though a little heavy on the oil. For the second round, I made some French bread, but in standard bread maker loaf form. Sorry, no pictures.

Yesterday evening we got together with Joel and Natalie at their place. It was great to see them and reconnect a bit after being away for the summer. Joel and I broke out the PS2 and played some Guitar Hero (left). I'm not very good, but it's a bit addicting.

I'm going to be playing ultimate today. I've missed that over the summer too. It's a perfect day here for it, sunny, not too warm, not much wind.

Bible study is starting for me this week. I'm eager to get into that again too. It's always much harder to do study without a group I find. We're starting a new book, Acts.


We're going to break out the grill this evening and do some kabobs. We're trying a marinade recipe from our South African "Bakgat Braai" cookbook. Having our own grill that isn't a couple buildings away is another nice thing to come back to.

My B-day celebrations

My wonderful ice cream cake form Yarlings here in Illinois.
It is called Heath Crackle and is super yummy!

Me eating SALSA and other yummy Mexican food at a local place near our hotel where we stayed the last week that Jason worked .

and my NEW hair cut- it was way overdue!

Vacation

Here are some images from our wonderful week BEACH CAMPING at Mustang Island, which is near Corpus Christi, Texas.
I will write and post some more tomorrow- since I need to go do some more homework now :)

final car update

Hi all :)
Thanks again for all of your prayers and input.
We ended up getting a little bit of money for the Honda, since our insurance company gave us the the option of scrapping it or giving us the estimated external cost of damages minus our deductible. We decided to do the latter and cut down to one car from now on.
We are grateful to have this out of the way and will hopefully adjust well to sharing a car between us. (yea for sharing :)

More Car Accident/Insurance Updates

I have a sad/bad update on the car accident and insurance situation. We just found out that Allstate has denied our claim, because the other party has continued to give another story and the lady at Allstate said to us that they(Allstate) have to stand by their customers and would not listen to our side of the story.
We are going to enter a mediation process which we can counter them again, but this will take 3-8 months.
I am very disappointed and feel very cheated and frustrated that the other party has gone to such lengths to lie and be dishonest to avoid paying their deductible. I honestly don't understand why God let this happen this way, but I've been reading Psalm 37:1-9 and KNOW that HE is GOOD and has a plan-even when I don't understand it.
Please pray for Jason and I as we try to figure this out.
Thank you all for your continued prayers and support, we appreciate it very much.
For all of you in IL(and WI) we hope to see you again soon.

Prayer Request

As most of you know, Jason was in a car accident at the end of July.
Basically he got hit by another car, nobody was seriously injured(Praise God) but the other people involved are lying about what happened and trying to make it Jason's fault- which is completely false.

It's been a long time and the insurances are still trying to figure out what happened.
The Honda is drivable, but has a wonky wheel, doors that don't completely close and a missing side mirror.
We will be leaving on Saturday to drive back to IL, since school starts for both of us on Monday, 20 August.

Please pray for the truth to prevail and that we can soon get the Honda fixed and if we have to drive the broken Honda back to IL, for safety and protection on our trip back.

Thanks so much!
We love you all :)

cleaning, packing and moving again...

The last couple days I have been organizing, cleaning and packing.

Jason has been finishing up things for work(working very hard I must add)We are going to take a week and go beach camping at Mustang Island, near Corpus Christi with my parents.My upstairs neighbor Gaby(the wife of one of the interns) and I went out and took some pictures together before we leave tomorrow morning.They have been throwing out the old furniture in the apartments and it looks really funny just lying there in the middle of the parking lot- so I took a picture of it :)