Father/Son Camping Trip

So, we finally tracked down our camera a few weeks ago and got it charged (it turns out Matthew had been taking it to school in his backpack - how it got in there is another question!).  We actually have several posts worth of pictures stored up, but I'll let Bobbie do those as they're about gatherings and friends and food, and that's her thing.

As for the men of the house, we've been up to more manly things.  Well, Matthew is excluded, because he was sick, but this week I took Steven out for an overnight camping trip while the weather was still nice.

 Above: waiting outside the kindergarten where I'd just picked up Steven for the taxi to come get us.  The story of the taxi became a saga when he didn't come get us then next morning as we'd agreed, but fortunately another car came by and agreed to haul us back into town.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 First we had to get out into the woods, next to the river, to set up our tent.  Steven was loving all of this, of course:

We brought delicious sausages (for me) and hot dogs (for Steven) for supper.  I like his expression below, sort of a "yes, I'll smile for the camera while I hold my hotdog stick, but I'm not sure how to do it without getting too close to the fire."

MMmmm!  Yummy.  And the view was nothing to sneeze at, either.  Mountains, river, trees just turning yellow - T-land must be one of the nicest places in the world in the fall.

After a session of throwing rocks into the river (above), always a favorite pastime, we gathered wood for the evening fire.

We had a great time.  I don't have that many pictures because mostly we were enjoying ourselves, but we played football one-on-one in the little grass field next to the campsite, and then I read "Little House on the Prarie" to him in the tent before we went to bed.  

I like the below picture (as we waited for the taxi that never came), just Steven staring off into the beauty of creation.

And that's it for this post, I guess.  As for daily life, we're back at the grind of language study and trying to get things set up for the new business we told you about a few weeks ago.  I'll let Bobbie show you all her new culinary creations and gatherings with friends and guests.  Keep an eye out for that in a week or so.  Until then, thanks for checking in and especially for thinking of us. 

Edit: Bonus cartoon that I'm adding as it made me laugh today 

Not Much to Show

This is just a very quick post to say that we don't have much to say.  And even less to show, really, since we haven't had our camera out for recent events.

Not to say that we haven't been doing things.  I took a trip a couple of days away to another city to talk to a company that we might be using as a source of equipment on our new business venture, and then came back with our friends and business partners.  We had an interesting journey with a truck breakdown and no tools to repair the radiator hose, but eventually found some help and succeeded in getting home.

Since then it's been a mixture of things, getting back into culture and language study along with progressing with the paperwork for the new business.  Oh, and night before last I went camping with some friends of a friend, which was a good time.

But we don't have pictures of any of that, so this is a short post just to say that we're still here, still alive, and we'll have to make sure we break out the camera this week to give you something interesting to look at next week.  Thanks for checking in.

The Swing of Things

So yeah, we've now been home long enough to get back into the swing of life so I thought I'd put up some pictures.  Actually a couple of weeks ago we both came down with some sort of serious illness that put us out of commission for a few days, but now we're back and better than ever.  OK, we might not be better than ever, but at least we've recovered.

Anyway, rather than posting pictures of us hunched over spreadsheets and language tables, I thought I'd put up some pictures of our Saturday.  The weather here is still nice, so we're trying to get in our last adventures outside before the cold sets in.  To that end, we took the boys outside to play football, then on the playground, and capped it off by going for dinner at the cafeteria downtown.

Whenever we go to this cafeteria we always split a chocolate ice cream sundae, which is sort of a reward for the boys if they've been obedient that day.  They had, so we all enjoyed the ice cream.

Other than that, the boys are back in kindergarten.  However, in order to keep them up to date with their English-language studies, we made a decision to keep each of them home one day per week (that is to say, Steven stays home on Tuesdays and Matthew on Wednesdays).  Bobbie does homeschooling with them to make sure they know the English alphabet as well as the Russian one and things like that.

Steven's doing well in his reading, and he wanted to make a video for his grandparents to see, so here it is:

But all of that is not the biggest news we have, really.  I guess all of you know that our goal here is to help the local people in any way possible, and we've been doing that on a small scale as we looked for a way to take it bigger in the most effective way we could.

Originally we had thought that starting with relief projects was the way to go, and that we would look at economic development in the future.  However, due to a variety of reasons we've decided to look in that direction a little earlier.  As we started to examine how we could really boost the local economy, one opportunity that stood out was starting a business to process locally-produced pine nuts.

Once you get them out of the pine cones, this is what the nuts look like in their shell

So, in short, that's what's happening.  Together with a business partner, we're opening a firm that will process and sell pine nuts.  Hopefully, you already love pine nuts, but if you don't - what's wrong with you?  They're yummy and healthy.  Recent studies even indicate that they act as an appetite suppressant, and there can't be that many things in the world that are healthy AND delicious.  The one downside is, of course, that they're expensive, at least in the West.  Here in T-land, though, you can just go into the woods and pick the cones off the ground. 

Once they're shelled and packaged, this is what they look like on your grocery shelf

That's the plan, basically.  Buy the nuts off the people who pick them, then process them (shelling, peeling, packing) and sell them.  So, to that end, we've been doing lots of research and writing a business plan.  Once we've secured financing, we hope to start shipping the nuts next fall, so if you know anyone who needs pine nuts have them get in touch with us! ;-)  Minimum order 1 ton, so hopefully they need a LOT of nuts.

Shelling nuts by hand to determine what percentage of the weight is shells and what percentage is kernels

That's about it, really.  It should be enough for you, no?  Thanks, as always, for thinking about us.  Questions, offers to help out in some way (does anyone know graphic design/website design and want to volunteer your services? or, even better, does anyone know anyone looking for a business to invest in?), whatever, they're all welcome.

Since We've Been Home

So the Wandering Family is done wandering for a bit, and now that we're at home things have settled down a bit.  Well, not exactly "settled," I guess, as there's plenty of excitement with some new things starting up, but nothing like the travels of the past few months.

What have we been up to?  Well, first of all, we were jet lagged for a couple of days after our arrival, meaning that I got a chance to take a picture of the dawn with the sun rising over the mountains.  Not a sight I see that often, I'll admit, but it was beautiful (see above).

Then it was my birthday, so we had a few friends over and Bobbie made me a delicious fruit pizza.

In home school news, the boys are learning about plants, so Bobbie decided to get them some seeds and plant them so they could watch them grow.  If they survive (the boys LOVE watering them, so they might get overwatered if we don't watch carefully) it should be fun.

This weekend, our friends A and S invited us to go to the lake with them.  We've normally gone to the salt lake, but right next to it there's another lake with much lower salt content that, in my opinion, is much nicer.  We decided to go there and have shashlik (you can see the fire in the grill on the right getting the coals ready).

Of course, after our Italian adventures, our boys are now water experts (ha!), so we went for a swim.  Matthew first investigated the pouring properties of his watering can ...

... then he decided to lead an aquatic assault on the sand castle his Daddy and brother were building ...

... and then Steven decided that looked like more fun than building it, so he joined in ...

... and with two attackers Daddy was overwhelmed and the sandcastle succumbed to the assaulting waves.

A good time was had by all.

And that's about it.  Thanks for thinking about us and checking in; be back next week for more exciting news.  Hopefully.

As a bonus, as this was such a short post with few pictures, I leave you this, one of the few "image macros" I've ever seen that actually made me laugh:

Il Amore in Italia

WOW!  What a vacation!  

Most of you already know about the surprise trip Jesse took us on to Italy.  If you haven't seen it yet go to our last blog post and see the video where Jesse reveals to me that we were in Italy for a week.  Needless to say, I was shocked.  Now, most wives would have probably picked up on some hint of a surprise vacation being planned for them but nope, not me.  Mainly because I have learned long ago to keep my hands out of any planning when it comes to traveling.  

Jesse knows what he is doing and I've never seen anyone who can plan trips cheaper than him (that is a compliment).  So, when he told me that we were leaving Germany on a cheap airline flying to Croatia, and then to Moscow, I said "OK" and left it at that.  Of course, once we got there and he told all about the planning for months, things that were said to me started to make sense.  Even my twin sister knew and didn't tell me (way to go keeping that secret, girl).

Though we didn't have much money to spend, Jesse found a campsite where we could stay for a week that was on the beach and had pools and other things to do for the boys.  The place was beautiful and almost perfect ("almost" because it was REALLY hot).  We got there, set up our tent, slept, and woke up the next day and right away went swimming. 

The boys loved it.  It was so much fun to see them enjoying themselves and learning to be in the water.  Jesse was determined to teach Steven to swim.  He was getting better and better each time and was pretty close to being a swimmer by the end of the week.  Matthew was just happy hanging out in the water or floating down the lazy river with me (my favorite thing) or playing on the nearby beach. 

Of course, it being so hot and since we were the whitest people there, we made sure we had strong sunscreen on.  But we don't think it was waterproof since we were suffering some really nasty burns the next day.  So, we donned our shirts and bought expensive ($14!) sunscreen that seemed to work the rest of the time.  

It didn't make any difference to the boys, though. They would run into the water and play and play and play.

Steven loved the water slides but Matthew, not so much (he's like me).  But, it was so nice to be able to spend time together as a family without any interruptions.  We try to do that when we are here in T-land but when you have friends there, they will just show up and spend hours with you.  It's wonderful to have that with the people here but it makes it difficult to get good, quality family time by ourselves.

After a few days of going to the pool in the mornings, eat lunch, take a nap, go to the pool again, eat supper, go to the kids program, then bed time, we decided to take a break and catch a bus to head to one of the towns near the campsite.

It was so Italian!  All the streets were lined with bicycles, flowers, and were really clean.  I finally stopped taking pictures because all the streets looked the same (that is to say, really beautiful).

We also were able to enjoy authentic Italian food thanks to my sister, who gave us a gift just for that reason.  That meant we were able to enjoy some of the national dishes like spaghetti and pizza while we were there.  I had told Jesse a while back that if we went back to Italy that I would want to go and be able to eat as much pasta as I wanted without worrying about the cost (that was before I had any idea of this trip).  And, we were able to do just that, so thanks, Kellie!

Every night the campsite had a kids program where they could do silly dances and things like that.  Steven really loved it.

Above: The best meal I've ever eaten (pasta with fresh mussels).  Below: Matthew seems to like gelato (Italian ice cream).

So, a week went by and then we left.  It really was a great time.

Thank you Jesse for all that you do for me!  This trip was the best trip I have ever been on.  I'm so lucky to call you my husband.  Thank you for marrying me and showing the love of Him everyday.  I love you more now than the day we got married 10 years ago.  Happy Anniversary to you too!