Weather Update

Well, we still have no power in our house. Rumor in the neighborhood is that it could be up to 14 days until our electricity is restored. We are still being taken care of by lots of kind people in our church.

There is supposed to be some warm weather this weekend (a high of 35--woohoo), so hopefully some things will begin to thaw. Dad is bringing us a kerosine heater tomorrow so we can heat our house at least enough to keep the pipes from freezing. He is also bringing his chain saw to help us remove some of the debris from our yard and from on top of our house. It will be nice to get this all done before the "Blizzard-Like Conditions" that are supposed to be coming our way on Monday and Tuesday.

My dad is also being gracious enough to take Asher back home with him. He hasn't adjusted very well to moving from house to house. So, he will go stay with his girlfriend Roxy in TN for a few days!

If there's anyone out there reading this blog that knows of a church in FLORIDA looking for a children's minister...give them my number!!! Just kidding :)

Winter Wonderland or Winter Disaster?

Well, it is days like these that I seriously miss my Tennessee home. Monday night we got several inches of Snow. Tuesday night several inches of ice were topped onto that. Wednesday morning several more inches of snow were topped onto that. Oh did I mention that we haven't had power since Wednesday morning at about 9:00?

So, needless to say, it's been a crazy couple of days. Above are some pictures of our house and the trees that are falling in our front yard. Things have been quite a mess.

Hopefully we will have power soon. For now we have some wonderful friends who are letting us sleep and shower at their house. They even let Asher come spend the night!

The Experience

Well, it has been awhile since our last blog post. To catch you up...we had a very thankful Thanksgiving, a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. There. :)

As you probably noticed, the title of this post is "The Experience." Well, last weekend, Jared's brother Jason and his wife Rachel came in town for a visit and to say the least, it was an EXPERIENCE!

They arrived Friday night. We said quick hellos and then all went to bed to get ready for the big day we were going to have on Saturday. You see, Jason celebrated his 28th birthday on Saturday and we had big plans for him.

We all got up pretty early on Saturday...morning pictures, not our best! What's on Jared's shirt?

Jason and Rachel take much better morning pictures than us!After a healthy breakfast of Cinnamin rolls, Jason opened his presents......and Asher helped!After doddling around for awhile, we all got showers and got ready to go...much better! We drove to Cincinnati and arrived on the outskirts of town just in time for lunch in Skyline. (For those of you Tennesseans who read the blog: Skyline is a chili place known for its coneys and chili with spaghetti noodles in it. Yuck!) But, eating at Skyline was all a part of the Experience!

This is the Cincinnati skyline as we were coming into town...pretty blue skies for Jason's birthday!After driving through Cincinnati, we went on to Westchester, OH to the IKEA store. Jared had sold some stuff on Craigslist so we could buy a new desk and Jason and Rachel were looking for some bookshelves. If you have never been to IKEA, you must go! It is such a neat experience. It takes a good 2 hours too look at everything in the store and it is all very trendy, but inexpensive furniture and accessories. I highly recommend going to check it out sometime. Now, let me give you some background information. All week long Rachel had been telling Jason that we had a surprise for him for his birthday. He knew we were going to IKEA, but he didn't know what the surprise was. So, for lack of a better descriptive word, Rachel told him that we were taking him to an "Experience." So, when we came out of IKEA and realized our furniture boxes were a little bigger than we had planned, we were in trouble. You see, we thought we'd be able to fit our furniture in the cab of the truck while we were at the Experience. But, the boxes were so big they barely fit in the back of Jason's truck. So, we kind of went into panic mode. Just as we were about to have to drive 2 hours back to Louisville to drop off our furniture and turn around to come back to Cincinnati for the experience, I remembered that a girl I work with in KY was from Cincinnati. So, I called Tina up and she came to the rescue. She called her mom and dad and asked if we could leave our furniture there until we could come back for it. HOW RANDOM IS THAT???? Well, it was all part of the experience!

So, on the way to Tina's parents' we stopped by a Bob Evans to get a Thank you gift card for being so kind! This is me excitedly leaping from the restaurant out of happiness for not having to drive back to Louisville.

So, after driving about 30 minutes, we finally made it to Tina's parents' where we unloaded our stuff on their back porch. Here are Jared and Jason being troopers in the midst of the hilarity of our situation.
So, we basically, loaded our furniture into the truck at IKEA, unloaded it at these random people's house, only to have to come back 3 hours later, load it back into our truck, take it back to Louisville and unload it again. Whew...that's a lot of work. But, the good news is that thanks to our brief detour we got to see...

a statue of a giant preying mantis in someone's front yard...

and a statue we have come to affectionately call "Touch Down Jesus." By the time this was all done, it was time for dinner. So, we went to P.F. Chang's, Jason's favorite restaurant. If you can't tell, we are a little pooped.

After dinner it was time...for the experience! At this point, Jason still had no clue where we were going. Although, he did guess as many random things as he could possibly think of. So, we all piled in the car and started our drive to Northern Kentucky University, just on the other side of Cincinnati.

We were already parked and on the way into the colisseum when Jason finally figured out what the Experience actually was! It's hard to catch laughter in a still shot, but Rachel did her best. So, you are wondering, what was the experience was...

The MONSTER TRUCK NATIONAL TOUR!!!!
Happy Birthday Jason!