33 34 35....and counting

Prayer warriors and friends
I am so sorry that I have not written for 3 weeks (and a half) let’s see if I can catch you up to speed on life in Slovakia:)

Week 33 started spending the day with the O’Connell’s in Kosice. It had the benefits of getting me out of the house and I got to visit them before they headed home for the holidays. I have not had so much fun with legos in a long time, thanks Will. The rest of the week was fairly borring. I was worn out an homesick with a long to-do list and little motivation. I did another round of edits on the CampFest Hymn video and not much else. I spent a lot of time waiting for people to look at what I had done. I baked a lot of cookies, baking cookies is a relaxing thing for me to do even if I have to use someone else’s kitchen and convert all my recipes into Metric. I was antsy all week because week 34 meant my birthday and Micah!

I spent the weekend cleaning and trying to get the video from the wedding captured to my computer and edited. It was a project that involved buying an external Hard Drive (in Slovak!), and dealing with a lot of switching video formats since I used one European camera and one American :). The video did not get finished before Micah came. I’m still working on it.

Monday of week 34 the YFC staff went to Svarin (the new ranch) for a annual 2-day vision casting meeting. We spent most of the day with everyone sharing about what they do on a daily basis, where they see their ministry going and what God has done in the last year. It was a very encouraging time. And in the evening after the meetings were done it was nice to just hang out there. Since the meetings were announced with short notice, I was not there for the second day since that was the day that Micah was flying in.

Tuesday I woke up very early, took a bus and then a train to get to Kosice to pick up Micah from the airport.(I bought the train ticket all by myself for the first time!! Let’s do the public transportation success dance!) Andrea took me from the train station to the airport and when I got there Micah was waiting with his suitcase the size of a house (he brought my birthday and Christmas from my family). Big smiles. We took a bus back to Presov and then a city bus to my house. Micah stayed with Martin in the room next door. We had a very relaxing time, watched black and white movies, ate pizza by candlelight and talked a lot.

The highlight of his visit was on my birthday when we went to see some castle ruins and had a picnic, Micah surprised me with Ale-8. And as if Ale-8 and a castle for my birthday weren’t enough, that evening we danced on my balcony and he asked me to marry him. I said yes :) (as always, pictures at Flickr. www.flickr.com/photos/stasigh )
(side note: the highlight for Micah was the coffee shop in town that had good coffee and chocolate cake)

Toward the end of his trip, I started loosing the battle with the cough I was fighting so we didn’t do a lot of exciting stuff mostly hanging out and I took a lot of naps. We spent Sunday in Kosice where we went to a church that feels a lot like Mars Alliance and an American spoke.

By the time Micah went home, on Wednesay morning, I had totally lost the battle and spent the rest of the week coughing my lungs up, sick in bed. My plan had been to make a few of my favorite thanksgiving dishes to share with the Biros family, but since I was too dead to get out of bed to shop for what I needed and no one would have wanted anything that germy me cooked anyway, I celebrated Thanksgiving in bed and let Mrs. Birosova feed me Haluski.

Today is Monday and I am finally back in the office. It is good to start getting back to my regular routines. I am still feeling a little sluggish but I think a bit of Pepsi will help with that :) (i am my mother's daughter!)
This week I’ll be capturing CampFest video so that we can edit the 2006 DVD and I’ll also keep tweaking the Music Video and CampFest hymn video as suggestions keep coming. This weekend is a big worship festival/conference here in Presov and we are having 24 hour prayers leading up to that. There will be a lot of little details and technical things to get done.

Please continue to pray, especially for:
-Worship Conference/Festival in Presov this weekend
-My being all here (homesick, distracted with being engaged, on the downward side of my year, trying to find out where God wants to send me next -- all of that might distract me from beign where I am)
-Slovak learning (I’m getting into the more detailed grammar stuff and its complicated!)

Thank you all for being faithful in praying the past weeks even when I am less than faithful in keeping you updated.
:) Stasi!!