July Update

Hey Friends!

Well this July has flown by! The best part was an AWESOME vacation with our friends to St Thomas! We spent LOTS of time at the beach and snorkeling. It was so relaxing. St Thomas was gorgeous, definitely reminded us of God's phenomenal artistic abilities.

Enjoy a few pics....

This was the pool at the wonderful place we stayed (thanks friends!!)

One day we ventured over to St John and hiked down to a gorgeous deserted beach. It was fun! We didn't take an "after" picture of our feet though.

This was at Magen's Bay. We checked out a lot of other cool beaches too.

This was our first night there. This is the beach at the place we stayed. :)

This was our view out the window. :)

My brother had his b-day while we were gone and he passed his comps too! He gets to continue on with his PhD program. :)

Emily (b's sister) and I hosted a wedding shower for some great friends at church. It was fun to just hang out with them and celebrate their upcoming wedding. :)

I made some cupcakes:

Emily really did most of the work. She did a great job!

Then I had a project due for work, but it wasn't as stressful as deadlines usually are! I thank God for that. I think I'm really learning to trust Him more and worry less. :) Hopefully I can keep learning that.

We also got to celebrate our friends Jason and Lindsey's wedding this month. Their wedding was beautiful and the reception was lots of fun! I forgot a camera though...

It was also fun to see friends from Tech that we hadn't seen in a while.

Next on the agenda is a trip to KY to see my sister and do another 5k. :) Hopefully we'll do more than one post next month. :)

Busy life...

Oh the busy life we live. How hard this makes it to be consistent and much less remember to post, even just once a week.

Right now work for me has been pretty busy, a good busy as I feel challenged and that I am doing good work and I can tell my boss and team appreciate the work I am doing.

Along with work we are busy preparing for our trips. Vacation first then our next Hope2Africa mission trip. We are blessed with the chance to return to Cape Town and continue loving on African youth who live is such terrible conditions. We are also enjoying being the team leaders for this trip for our church. Lindsey is doing a wonderful job leading and I am enjoying supporting her. We have a great team and I am excited what God will do through us. Praying that we will be filled with His Holy Spirit and ready to be poured out to the youth. Also praying that our team will put away our own expectations and our own fears/pride and just allow God to use us in whatever way will bring Him the most glory and help develop these future leaders all the more to continue to be men and women of God in their community.

We attended Lindsey's work Summer picnic last weekend. A fun lunch complete with face painting, open mic, slip 'n slide for the kiddos, and good burgers and dogs. It was fun to see some of the people that Lindsey works with every day and get a chance to catch up with the ones I actually know.

We also just hosted our H2A team for a team dinner at our house. I made marinated chuck roast, bacon au gratin potatoes, green beans, salad for an army and french bread. It was a lot of fun around the table. I enjoyed the fellowshipping and as our H2A youth coined the term, swallowshipping. It was fun, even though we did miss some of the team that couldn't make it.

Hoping to see my family on Saturday, but will for sure see Lindsey's sunday afternoon and monday for the 4th. Also Lindsey will be working at the Atlantic Station celebration on Sat that our church volunteers at. Anyway still lots of other things going on as well, but I think I hit all the big ones. We will try to get some pictures up soon.

Oh if you want details on how to support us in prayer or otherwise for our trip to Cape Town, send us a note and we can get you the info.

US Military Fitness Test (for Lindsey)

I've decided to use the military fitness testing as my workout for this summer. It all started with some guys in the office making a little wager with each other using this military fitness test as a guideline. A coworker of mine and I almost joined them until we realized that they are probably spending between $40-$80 just to participate in the wager.

So I decided to just do it on my own. Basically I gave myself a "baseline" test last week. The test included how many push-ups (boy push-ups), sit-ups (all the way up so my elbows touch my knees) and pull-ups I could do along with how fast I could run 2 miles.

Then there were these charts online of "scores" for how many reps you could do (here's the charts I used and the guys at work are using). So I gave myself a score after my baseline test.

Now I'm working out to improve my run time, and increase my reps of the other exercises. I have 90 days (so do the guys at work), before I will "test" myself again to see how I improved.

Here's my baseline results:

Push-ups: 6 (equals 25 pts for me)

Sit-ups: 21 (equals 34 pts for me)

Pull-ups: 0 (equals 0 pts for me)

Run: 21:35 minutes (equals 10 pts for me)

Baseline Score: 69 out of a possible 400

*Oh, I should mention that the pull-ups are something the Marines add in. They aren't included in the link above. The guys at work basically made up their own scoring for pull-ups.

Now I'm working out and running to try and improve my score. I don't think I'll reach 400 points ever, nevertheless in 90 days, but I want to at least be able to "pass" by the army standards.

Passing means I need a score of 60 in each category and a minimum score of 180 (excluding pull-ups). That means, at a minimum, I need to be able to do:

Push-ups: 17

Sit-ups: 45

Pull-ups: 5 (my own personal goal)

Run: 20:30 minutes

I think it's all very possible. I actually want to be able to do the run in under 20 minutes. Well i want to exceed all of these "passing" scores. We will see! I'll update in mid-August. :)

Has anyone else ever tried this type of workout?

Lindsey, PE

I know Lindsey will likely write more later, but last night we found out wonderful news, she passed her PE exam and is now (save completing some paperwork) a professional engineer.  We are both so very thankful to God for His blessing in this and that this was all in His hands.  I am so very proud of her for all the hard work she has put in to get to this point, and that she has stayed faithful to where God has placed her.  Very exciting.
Short and sweet post, but wanted to get the news out on the blog.

Exercise

Today was the first day I braved the cooler morning temps to start riding my bike back into work.  I did pretty good, although I didn't push myself.  Thankful that no one tried to run me over with their car today.  I have been working out a bunch lately.  Any of the readers who have seen me recently might have noticed, as most people have lately, I probably have lost close to 25 lbs.  Still not in the shape I want to be in, now the weight isn't really an issue, but just where it is located.  Now I am more focused on building muscles and trimming fat, so really more redistribution of the weight I have.  Been pretty happy with the results so far.  Our upcoming vacation is definitely a great motivation as I want to be ready to be on the beach and feel comfortable, which I think I will now.  But yeah life is still pretty busy lots to do at work and at home and the many other volunteer things we do with church and KLife.  I will try to take photos as Sunday will be the last small group for the semester with my sixth grade guys.  I am making pancakes in honor of the IHOP men we are trying to be, men of integrity, honor, obedience and perseverance.  Other than that not too much exciting has been going on, but there will be more posts to come I am sure.

Cheesecake cupcakes, birthday and hair do's

This weekend was very fun! It started Friday night with Chick-fil-a at Klife, including a bounce house for the kids, so that was fun. I love Chick-fil-a, and Brian and I hadn't had any CFA in a while, so I was happy.

Then I went home and made cheesecake cupcakes for Anna's birthday! She said she liked chocolate cheesecake, so I kind of made up a recipe. I made 6 chocolate, 6-8 regular, 2 swirled, and 2 chocolate chip cheesecake cupcakes.

Brian and I woke up Saturday and cleaned up around the house and did some much needed laundry.

Then around noon I styled hair for a friend from church's sister for prom. She wanted a low, side bun that was kind of messy. It was fun to do hair again. I'll put a picture up on facebook or on our picture page with my other hair pictures.

When I got home, I wanted to play with my hair, so I gave myself a fun little side bun too, buta little neater with a braid.

We celebrated Anna's b-day on Saturday night and the cheesecake cupcakes were a hit and we had a great time with friends.

We'll have to post again later with our Mother's day events. :)

Secret Confession

Once, in Mexico, I sang in the worship band for the student ministry El Pozo (through Globalscope), thanks to my friend Whitney's encouragement. Not only was it singing in front of people, but it was singing in Spanish. At the time, I knew almost no Spanish. But it was so much fun! I don't have a rock star voice, but that's my secret confession: I wish I did have an amazing set of pipes and could sing

I don't want to be a famous singer or anything, I just want to belt out great songs and it sound awesome. Actually, if I'm in the car by myself, I'll still belt out the awesome songs, but I don't really know that it sounds awesome.

just wanted to share...

Do you have a secret confession?

Brian's Birthday

I have the best wife in the world.  No you can't argue with me over it, she simply takes the cake, yes intended since it was my Birthday weekend. Lindsey just was super sweet to me and I had one of the best birthdays I can remember.  A beautiful relaxing Saturday with my family. Me and Dad, yep beards are totally in now.

It started with some Wii with the family, while waiting for some of the others to be done with work/studying etc. This is me after playing probably the strangest game on Wii Fit Plus, that involves being a flying chicken and flapping your arms...  I was the only one who played it, and it was for everyone else to laugh apparently.  I still had fun, cause it was funny.

We also played Carcassone. This was the beginning:

I think they let me win, although I won because I luckily got the very last tile and it played perfectly for me. This is the board after we finished.

It was loads of fun.  We also played some Sorry Sliders, a few of us went for a walk to enjoy outside.
Once everyone got to the house, we were ready to go to dinner, to Ted's Montana Grill we went. This is the whole family, yes several them aren't technically related but they are family to us. :)

Dad and Eldest Daughter, aka Super Nurse:

Lil Sis aka Artist Extraordinare and Lil Sis' boyfriend/ our roommate

Having some fun with the complimentary reading glasses they brought to Dad before the food gets there:

This is me and my Kitchen Sink.  Oh so good.  I mean how can you go wrong with grilled mushrooms and onions, bacon, ham, cheese, fried egg all atop a B E A utiful bison patty. yummy.  Oh and you can see I had the broccoli instead of the fries, gotta be a little healthy. :)

A little healthy because I knew what was coming next.  Free Cookie and Ice cream dessert!  Pictured here is a snickerdoodle with vanilla ice cream

Then we went home and had real dessert.  My awesome wife, remember me telling about her?  She made from scratch a totally delicious Oreo Cheesecake for my BDay.  Here it is in the oven:

About to cut into the goodness.

After that we still had some daylight so we played a little KanJam, which you should all know about now.

Lindsey planned all of it and took such good care of me.  She really made it such a wonderful day and I totally enjoyed it.  She is awesome and has mad cheesecake making skills.

Easter in the Park

So this is a week late, well more by now, but wanted to share and actually show pictures of our Easter. We had a busy weekend for Easter, because Saturday we volunteered at Hop in the Park, which was Atlantic Station's Easter event.  There were all kinds of things going on, lots for kiddos to do.
They could make bunny masks:

Side walk chalk!

The ever popular bounce castle thing:

Ballons!

All sorts of games, complete with sugary prizes.  Parents I know you appreciated us hopping them up on sugar. (Pun intended)

Popcorn!

Bubbles! Bubbles and more Bubbles!

How many jelly beans are in here?  

(also our invites for our outdoor Easter service the next day)

We also for the first time in our 3 year partnership with Atlantic Station were able to both wear our church logo and actually talk to people about our church and what we are there for.

This is Karen and Connie. Connie is our director of mobilization and did a great job organizing everything for our event.

So you may be asking yourself, well what did you two do?
Lu was a face painter for approximately 4 hours.  Here she is hard at work.

I was sweating and working hard. Working hard? as a volunteer?  Yep.  This was me for the first hour or so.
Ready for my close up with and kiddos or puppies that wanted their picture made.  This was the humane society's booth and thankfully I only had to help out for a little while. :)  It was pretty fun though cause I was making crazy faces and you couldn't even tell.


All in all it was a lot of fun.  We had a blast and we sure were blessed the next day to see the fruits of our labor as we had around 370 people show up (kids included) to our Easter service outside in the park. It was a great day of celebration and the word was preached, several hearing for the first time.  My favorite thing about our outdoor service is that some people unexpectedly end up at church as they are just walking by and decide to stick around.  God is so good and our Easter was really great.


Wanted to share a little with you guys to get a taste of our service.  We opened with Revelation Song mixed with a Spoken Word piece by Celita Lewis.  Hope you guys enjoy.

Our 3rd Anniversary!!

As Friday morning (4/15), I knew that we were going to be celebrating our 3rd anniversary by going out of town somewhere and that's all I knew. Brian planned a surprise getaway for us, and I was very excited. I found out on the drive out of Atlanta that we were going to Tennessee near Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. Brian had rented a cabin up there for us for the weekend. :)

This was our front porch, complete with rocking chairs.

This was the view out our back porch.

When we got there Friday night, we put a pizza and appetizer in the oven and unpacked. Brian surprised me with a 1 pound bag of Skittles (favorite) and with the information that he had picked this cabin/resort because there was a spa we could go to, if we wanted. :) Then we popped in a movie and enjoyed our pizza and spinach artichoke dip.

Brian had surprised me AGAIN and borrowed Disney's Tangled for us to watch. I had been wanting to see it! We had a very relaxing Friday night.

We even had a pet squirrel for the weekend :)

Saturday morning we woke up and decided to go on a hike at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Well Brian made muffins for breakfast first, then we went out for the hike.

We went to Rainbow falls.
It was 2.7 miles uphill to the waterfall (5.4 miles round trip), and it was a gorgeous day to be out in the park. The first part of the hike was beside a creek/river.

Then we got to cross the river/creek about 3 or 4 times.

At this point (thanks to the heavy rains the day before) we had to swim across. Well not really, but it was fun trying to decide which rocks to cross over on.

Then at other points there were these nice man-made bridges.

But we made it!

We enjoyed a packed lunch up here and then headed back down to the car. We kind of made our own routes back down. :)

We also saw this cool guy under the water.

After our hike we went into Gatlinburg. Oh, good ole downtown Gatlinburg. :) We drove through Pigeon Forge and they have an upside down house

and the Titanic (iceberg and all) along with lots of other carnival/touristy things.

We wandered around and also played mini gold at "Adventure Golf", complete with pirates, dinosaurs, and alligators!

As you can see behind me, we were held up, so we had some fun taking pictures.

Brian, in the "jungle".

Brian humored me and took a picture with the other alligator.

Saturday night Brian took me out to a nice place called The Peddler. It was a neat steak house where there Peddler comes to your table to "sell" you your steak and shows you the cut you'd be getting.

Us outside the Peddler.

That night, unfortunately we ran into a unwanted adventure. Stay tuned for post #2 for that story and more pictures.

Weekend Recap.

So the PE Exam is officially over!  So happy to have Lu back and she is so less stressed already it is great.  She finished, although didn't feel super confident about the test.  I still am positive she passed.  We won't find out till June though.

Still working on being a better blogger, which i guess means taking more pictures to put up here, so no pictures of our weekend but, we were thrilled to have guests this past weekend. My lil sister's boyfriend, has been living at our house and his parents cam to visit.  It was fun to have a full house and to get to meet his parents, they are really great.  I had a lot of fun.  Lindsey was still a bit busy with lots todo for our mission trip to South Africa, we are leading the team from our church.  but all in all she was able to decompress after months of prep for her test.

We went on a lovely bike ride and enjoyed the weather on Saturday.  Also had a blast with great friends coming over to visit for dinner and games.  Matt and Anna are so much fun.  After a quick bite down the road at Zaxby's it was back to the front yard for some KanJam. Definitely check out the link for instructions on how to play, but it is a frisbee based yard/tailgate type game.  Loads of fun.

We also got to play some Scrabble Slam! and some Carcassonne.  Really enjoyed a great evening with good friends.  Looking forward to this week.  3rd Anniversary is tomorrow, and we are getting away this weekend.  should be a lot of fun too.  I am excited, especially since I planned it all. :)

To all the fans.

Last post: Jan 15, 2011.  As the cursor blinks, all I can see is the subtle reminder of the lack of posting that this blog has seen over the last 2 and a half months.  A sad story for those who love and care about us but don't get to see or talk to us regularly.  I so easily forgot how much of a way of keeping up with us this blog has become.  Thanks to a good friend whom we got to see this weekend, I am very much reminded of that fact, and purpose to improve upon the previous lack luster posting record as well as endeavor to encourage my better to half to provide her own updates as well.

Lets see, to catch you up on the happenings around here.

Lu is taking one of the most important tests for her career this Friday, the Mechanical PE Exam.  That leaves me the house husband duties, laundry, dishes, general cleaning and just trying to make sure the house isn't a mess so she doesn't stress about that onto of all the studying and preparation she is doing.  I know she will do great even in dealing with how lengthy the test is and the mushy brain afterwards.

Beyond that work is going well for us both, nothing new to report, other than today my guest chair was missing when I arrived.  Not a big deal I guess but I was left a note that said it was removed to adhere to corporate furniture standards.  I have had that same chair for two plus years in my cubes, and have never been aware of furniture standards in the past but hey its all good, just come take my chair.  I am not upset just find it ridiculous because likely they removed it for a fire hazard, but hey if I can't get out of my cube with an extra chair in it, wouldn't the gene pool be better off?  Just my thoughts on that.

In other random news, I am really enjoying and being blessed by the opportunity to lead a small group of 6th grade guys.  I have great parent support and the guys just love being there.  They are all excited to learn and discuss biblical things.  I can't always say they get it, or remember it, but they are there and want to be there, which is so incredible with the innumerable options they have for activities.  Really really awesome.  Plus I have a junior who is co-leading with me.  Having a blast with that too.

I guess for those who haven't seen me in awhile, you might not recognize me as I am rocking a beard for around 3 or so weeks and have lost around 20 pounds since the beginning of the year.  Lu is talking like she will start training for a sprint triathlon once her big test is out of the way.  I can't think of much else to update on right now.  I will see what else I can come up with and maybe post more later this week.  Until then good bye blog fans and thanks for sticking with us.  We hope to be better at this whole actually posting thing.

Babies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No, I'm not pregnant, but goodness gracious I know a lot of people who are! There was definitely a season of weddings a couple of years ago, and I feel like now is a season of babies. It's so fun to hear about pregnancies and new life and adoptions and families growing.

So to all our friends and family out there who have new additions or are expecting new additions soon, congratulations! I'll definitely be hitting you up for advice (and maybe old baby stuff you don't need anymore) when our time comes. :)