A Quick Catch-Up

I have been deficient in keeping this blog up to date. So here is an attempt at quickly remedy-ing that.

One of my dearest childhood friends got married and I got to witness the celebration.

CONGRATULATIONS BUKKY AND RUSSELL!

My friend and co-worker Joy had a baby.


And we went from really pretty this:


To still kind of pretty-in-a-much-colder-way this:



And that is it for now from rainy Victoria! (the snow all melted and we're back to our usual cloudy windy winter :)

It's Been a Long Long Time

So I suppose I should pick up this blog again. For the sake of my mother. Probably our last remaining reader, haha.

We had been in Chad. Chad has a way of draining you. It was a beautiful but painful experience. Bittersweet has been the best word to describe our time there. And maybe this is why it took so long to come back to writing. I have needed to have a pause, to break to let the sadness ease. I loved being a nurse there, there was so much need and so much thirst for God's love and I came alive sharing God and life. But there was also death. And lots of other pain. My heart went out to the people. Our time there came to an end but I know God will be leading us back to another place of need. At the moment, we need to be back here to raise money again to go where God leads next.

The adventures have continued since then and we are back on our beautiful island, planning and scheming for the future that is yet to be.

Since we've gotten back we have been sorting life stuff--the small but ridiculously complicated details that is required for Life In The Civilized World. Things were so much simpler in our hut-living days. So we are still in the process of getting back in the swing of things here. Jeremy is currently in a wrist cast for a long overdue wrist repair that he was blessed to have in April for FREE (thank you Canadian healthcare!) and has taken up sailing and making dehydrators and a host of other inventions (he never ceases to amaze me, the man is unstoppable, cast or no cast). He is also going on two major backpacking trips this summer.

I am in the Place-In-Between, more details on that later once I get all sorted out. I am working with some really sweet and many times confused group of elderly helping them go through this thing called Life. It's been...hilarious and tough and heart-touching and has caused me to think many thoughts about the cycle of life and the irony of how you can go back to being nearly a child when you're very old. I don't want to grow old.

Within the past few months we have: Moved back to the island. Gotten new jobs. Backpacked into the Carmanah wilderness. Road-tripped and camped along the way to Olds, Alberta for a family reunion hitting up Banff and the Schuswap. Gone berry picking. Tofino with Jeremy's Mom & Dad. Crewed on sailboat race. And got ourselves some 4x4 wheels because well...our adventuring has been without them and lately we have decided maybe if we go on crazy middle-of-nowhere logging roads, perhaps we should probably go 4x4ing on something other than a Honda Civic, trusty and adventurous though it be. The most intense time we thought this was on when we were on a 45 degree angled slope on large rocks and gravel, cliff on our right and were barely moving upwards, just pushing gravel out from under us but not moving much--we thought then, "Hmmm, maybe we shouldn't be on these roads without a 4x4." Well, we have one now.




There is more. But I need to go to bed. It's an early and long day tomorrow back at The Grind.

Going Green...and Red, and Yellow, and...

We have been holding our breaths as our orchids budded and I was really really hoping that they bloom before we left. And they did! And so beautiful they were. They were amazing. It seemed like they just burst, I have never seen an orchid with so many blooms. This was my Valentine orchid earlier this year when Jeremy gave it to me and look at it now.



As for tomatoes, it doesn't look like I'll need to buy any more before we leave since our green tomatoes finally decided to ripen by the time I got back from my visit with my parents. I thought they'd never ripen. After a short cool spell, the weather has decided to stay warm for us and that probably helped. I'm so excited about our tomatoes. I love tomatoes so I think I'm going a little nutty over our tomato patch. I love gardens. I'm going to so enjoy finally having a real garden when we go to Africa.


We had forgotten what kind of tomatoes these were until they turned yellow
Our red and yellow tomatoes

A cluster of our plum tomatoes


My basil plant is turning to a basil bush

Jeremy bought this hibiscus tree a little more than 2 months before we leave. Just for the hummers. He has a soft spot for those birds. He thought they might want some real flowers. They just bloomed two weeks ago, much to our joy because we wanted to see the flowers before we left. They are actually double hibiscuses and we wonder whether the hummers would still like to haunt them.
Jeremy fixed them up with their feeder in a mini-paradise. Our resident hummingbirds are in danger of getting spoiled. We're going to miss them.

New England & Baltimore Family Reunion

We are off "going to the ends of world" (or so you'd think listening to my mom who has also lived "in the ends of the world"). She's almost sure we're going to get ourselves killed over there so she really wanted to see us "one last time." The original plan was to have my parents come here to visit our beautiful island, but unfortunately, my dad couldn't get away from his job--auditing going on. So...next best scenario was me going there. Jeremy could only get one free ticket with his mileage and he didn't have any vacation time...so it was just me. My poor parents. They came all the way here from Africa to be closer to their children and then their daughter and son-and-law decide to go to Africa. You just can't understand kids these days. :D

Of course it's their fault. They made Africa "home" so why do you think I want to go back to (as one MK friend puts it) "the motherland?"

I missed Jeremy terribly (it was the first time we were separated since we were married), but still had a blast, especially at the Baltimore Family Reunion when my brother came to spend the weekend and we met my mom's youngest sister after several years and her husband and 2-month old for the first time. Also there were 2 of my second cousins and their families/fiance. It was so much fun. Typical Filipino gathering: lots of food and family. I also got to see two really good friends of mine: Elena and her husband Mark (who I met in Florida) in DC and May (fellow Maxwellite-yay!) on our way through New York.

Wanna see the numerous pictures I took of the trip? Click away!

It's Official: We're Going On Another Adventure

And this is going to be a major one. In fact, I am almost scared stiff due to my lack of medical experience and because I know that there will be times I will be overwhelmed. But we are doing this because this is what we have been called to do and dreamed of doing since before we met each other. We are so excited and so happy to be doing this. There has been times of serious prayer--"God, is this really what You want? Can we really go now?" This has more to do with willing hearts than packed brains--we are asking God to use our hands and fill our heads with wisdom as we go forward in this journey of faith and being truly used by Him. We have our tickets, our funds came in, and today we got our passports back stamped with our visas. This is it. We really are going. I started a new blog about this mission experience and put it under "Our Blogs" at the sidebar but we'll still be using this one for the more personal stories. So come walk with us into The Chad Chapter.

Blog Updates

Quick note: Due to the extreme craziness of my life at present, I am way behind in posting the Philippine pics. To prevent myself from getting WAY behind, I'm just going to continue posting current explorings and catch up with the Philippine pics later and will let you know as I put them up.

The Fraffle Misadventure

It was one of those days. I couldn't figure out what we were going to have for breakfast. Usually, we'd have green smoothies but we had to put our blender off on workman's comp after we injured it two nights ago. The frozen banana made it at just the right angle to break something. We've used it for 2 years now and it's been faithfully making green smoothies for us daily for almost a year now and is no Vitamix, so I guess it's understandable. Jeremy is still planning to operate on it but needs some special tools.

So anyway. I did not want waffles, or pancakes, or French toast, or tapsilog (traditional Filipino breakfast of fried rice, tapa, and egg). Jeremy was no help because he never has cravings and doesn't make any food decisions. So I do what I usually do when I can't decide. I compromise..meet halfway. I decided I was going to be BRILLIANT and make fraffles! It's not French toast, it's not waffles--it's Fraffles! I thought for sure I was going to win some genius award. Annie, Annie....whenever will you learn?

So I threw my vegan French toast mix together, soaked some bread in it, heated the waffle iron, and tossed it in. And squeezed it shut. I didn't trust my dependable waffle iron to tell me when it would be ready, so I opened it before it turned green. And so I ended up having French toast/waffle bits stuck to both ends of the iron and had to spend the next 15 minutes scraping fraffles off my iron. Great. Jeremy got served a bunch of Fraffle pieces.
He loves me. Wife of strange ideas. You can tell because he ate them anyway and said they were good. This man has had blended wooden spoons in his tomato sauce, eggshells in his banana bread, and more wooden bits in other dishes that required blending and has still decided to stick by my side. If that's not love and faithfulness...

You'd think I'd quit after that. But no, Annie is stubborn, so she decides to do it AGAIN. I had to make the perfect Fraffle dish, people.

Fortunately, I was successful. And since by this point I had run out of the soymilk mixture, I decided this was as far as I go. I am not going to risk it again. I am going to post the Vegan French Toast recipe on my foodblog. And post only the pretty picture. And then I was going to go fry myself some rice.

Fraffles. Don't do it.

Hot Stone Massage at Iron Mine Bay

I tried to tell him people paid lots of money for what I was doing for him free of charge. He didn't buy it.

Granted, I did not have professional training. But hey, how hard can it be? Hot stone on muscle. The more the merrier, right?

It was Extreme Spa

a bone-chilling swim refreshing dip for the cold treatment, followed by the hot treatment: lying on warm rocks out on nature,

beautiful tranquil view, the music of the gentle waves,

and your wife lovingly throwing strategically placing hot rocks on your back...
If only he saw it that way...

We had a beautiful afternoon though :) Lying on the warm pebbles was bliss and Jeremy had a long nap.