I'm ba-ack!

Ok – so we are still a very long way from Kansas… I am sitting here at home in the dark because we have no power right now. It has been out for about two hours, and this is the second outage of the day. Last night I was up on Mount Dajti where the leaders of our youth ministry were having a planning retreat. We stayed at this great motel called “King Park” that is very quaint, has a real rustic feel to it, and includes a small fountain filled with trout and 3 live eagles! Everything was going pretty well and we were wrapping up our session at about 10:20 PM when one of the staff came and told us that in 10 minutes the lights would go out! We asked if it would go out for the whole hotel or just for the meeting room we were in (not actually a meeting room, but actually a part of the restaurant that was not in use). He informed us that it was the whole hotel! So we hastily packed things up, asked for some candles and went to our rooms.

Now, just to illustrate that we may have actually come “through the looking glass”, I had forgotten hat this night was the same night that I was to make a Skype call back to the US to talk on speakerphone with a group that is planning to come over short-term this summer. Somewhat hastily, Cindy and I decided that we could do a conference call with Skype – she could stay at home and use our internet connection to call both me (on my cell phone) and the church. All was well until the power went out at the house! Apparently they tripped a breaker of some sort at the house – one which is not IN our apartment but is in a locked box in the lobby of the apartment. Since I was on top of a mountain about an hour’s drive away, I could do nothing to help, but they were able to go to a friend’s house and get things set up in time. SO – I was up on the mountain, driving along the brow looking for a place where I could get a good signal on my cell phone, Cindy and the kids were down in the city trying to get into the friend’s house (they were up with me at the retreat…) and the church had no idea! Finally we were able to get connected and we did a three way conference call around the world using a cell phone, a computer, and a speakerphone! Is that cool or what?!

Speaking of the apartment – we have moved and are now in a much nicer, much larger place on the 4th floor of a 10 floor building. We really like the new place. Maybe I can get some pictures on this blog thing too.

I have to tell you sometime about some of the things that have been happening here in the last month. December was absolutely full so I did not blog but I kept saying to myself, “I have got to write this up for my blog!” Now I just have to remember all of those things…