christmas cards

Abi told me about Shutterfly giving away 50 free Christmas photo cards to folks who blog about shutterfly, I love Shutterfly. I did my wedding album with them and get lots of compliments. I try to put together a book each year of highlights (just finished 2009! go me.) My sister has a cute calendar of her kids on the fridge. They do other kinds of cards as well announcements and invitations and whatever you can think of cards.

I signed up for the giveaway back in November, but there's a problem. My current blogging funk aside (I am still alive by the way), I waited till the last minute to post this mostly because I am not sure what to put ON the photo card. We don't have adorable kids, we do have 2 cats, but we're not those kind of people. We're not even sure Mo is alive since no one has seen him in 2 weeks. It's just Micah and Me and no one really wants or needs a photo of us in santa hats. Besides, I don't have (m)any good photos of us together (let alone in matching hats):

(remember folks, these are the BEST that I could find.....)

And even though you can put like 6 photos on some designs, even the ones of us separately look like this:


seriously the best photo of Micah and I is from the Bike Tour this summer in Gettysburg after we had biked a million miles and climbed an observation tower. And we are posing by a canon. Yay for Peace on Earth!

I have more Christmas canon card options than any one person should.


Merry Christmas,

bet you all can't wait to see what we send out this year.

Thankful for Guests

My sister is experiencing a lack of thankfulness since she came to my house. I am going to jump-start her list. She does not know I'm doing this but it's for her own good. So here I am doing my first guest blog under cover! (how exciting)

So here is her list of things she is thankful for since she came to my house:

11. neices
12. nephews
13. advil
14. her own bed which she can't wait to get back to
15. her husband
16. cookies with milk
17. washing machines
18. sisters
19. haircuts
20. new computers

**Edit. I am indeed thankful for all these things. Thanks Abi.

Thanks Be

Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.
2 Cor 9:15

Well it's November. It's actually kind of unreal. The past few months have flown by but God has filled them with a lot to be thankful for.

1. Jesus
2. My mom, for starting this tradition of thankfulness
3. Traditions
4. A place to live (with a hot water tank!)
5. Great in-laws
6. Parents who are a Godly example
7. My sisters who make me laugh
8. Nathaniel and Angie
9. Trees out the window
10. People who are patient with me

I feel like I should note that these are in no particular order except for the first one and there are 90 more to come.

casualty!!

I have always tried to avoid running over pins with the sewing machine. Especially since I am always borrowing a machine that is not mine. I assumed that it would break the needle or even cause widespread catastrophic damage to the machine. I had never even considered that this might happen to the pin. Sorry about your pin Angie, good news though: the machine and needle are fine.

A light and tumble journey

I have a problem. A week from now we will be on a plane to NYC. this is not the problem (that we have not started packing may be a problem but it is not what this post is about.)

We will spend the weekend with my sister Abi and my other sister will drive up for the weekend. (this is not the problem)

We are going to relax have rootbeer floats visit "Grand Central Park" and, in light of the fact that Micah has never been to a zoo ever in his life, on Monday a trip to the Bonx zoo is planned. (none of this is the problem but we're getting there I promise)

We are so excited about being in the US again and seeing our families and we are really excited about the zoo. The problem is I just heard the Simon & Garfunkel song "at the zoo" and now my allegiance is torn. I have always been quite attached to Peter Paul and Mary's "Going to the zoo tomorrow"

oh the Randomness!

Please read the title like, Oh, the Humanity! you know like the Hindenburg. Does Hindenburg have an H at the end? darn German language.

I am learning German. Kind of. I am learning from a 2 year old. Oh Nai! Bapi, Hies, ganz meine meinung! (translation: oh no! Daddy, hot, my thoughts exactly. OK fine, I learned the last one from my cousin's blog, not the 2 year old.)

peach and passion fruit tic-tacs are the bomb.

I paid someone 10Euros to kill a cat that was not even ours. Darn Cat. Darn Dog. Darn Milan.

hot dogs for lunch. with ranch dressing, banana and kaiser rolls. on the only clean plate left. I hate being sick and lazy. Who knows what will be for dinner. I need to grocery shop.

my hair is growing. If I am generous with clips, I can kind-of form a ponytail. I will try to restrain myself from chopping it again.

The second song has way too many lyrics. darn. back to the drawing board/InDesign. darn eSpe.

Home

murderer!!

I have killed 3 spiders today.
Monday night I hit something with the car. I'm not sure if it died,
or what it was. It was raining and there was an oncoming semi on a
curvy road.

new word

Learned the word for burp tonight. Grgnut.
I love this place.

fine then

I am eating a fried egg.
I got the fried egg from a nest about 15 minutes ago.
Often when I gather eggs, I feel sad that I do not know how to juggle.
Often i think about trying anyway.

an update

I have nothing deep or insightful to say
Here is a photo of some chickens.

It is raining today.
It has rained almost every day for a month.
I really want pecan pie.

Earth Day Bag Giveaway!

Most stores in Slovakia don't give you a plastic bag when you shop. They don't bag your groceries for you either but that's a different story. It is also why i take Micah to the store with me.

Last summer I entered a giveaway for a reusable bag. and I WON!! I never win but I won this bag! go me.This is me with my bag last summer. Anyway this bag came folded up in a regular envelope and I always keep it rolled up in my purse, I use it all the time. It holds a TON of stuff. A great bag!

My bag is #5,158. The Green Bag Lady has given away a total of 9,061 fabric bags. She and her friends make over 100 bags a week!! And she's giving them away on her blog again!!
You can win one too!!
Just go to her website before Friday and leave a comment. She's giving away 40 bags for Earth day. When you comment say that Stasi sent you. (since i already have a bag, i'm entering the refer people contest.) This is win-win, You might win a bag and if you leave a comment with my name in it, I might win.

If you don't win, the site has easy directions to make your own. If you can't make your own and if you ask nice I might make you one especially if I win.

Besides all the fun of winning and getting real things in your mailbox, Seriously, Plastic bags are BAD. :(

~ Introduced just over 25 years ago, society's consumption rate is now estimated at well over 500,000,000,000 (that's 500 billion) plastic bags annually, or almost 1 million per minute.

~ Single-use bags made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) are the main culprit. Once brought into existence to tote your purchases, they'll accumulate and persist on our planet for up to 1,000 years.

~ The average family accumulates 60 plastic bags in only four trips to the grocery store.

~ Each high quality reusable bag you use has the potential to eliminate an average of 1,000 plastic bags over its lifetime. The bag will pay for itself if your grocery store offers a $.05 or $.10 credit per bag for bringing your own bags.
(Source: http://thecreativeplace.blogspot.com/2010/04/going-green-everyday.html)

Ok so click HERE, leave a comment on the Green Bag Lady Blog, and make sure to says that Stasi sent you.

Three tablespoons of cow.

What is going through my mind when i write notes to myself?!

The day the Refrigerator died

Yesterday our fridge died. Currently our perishables are in 2
different refrigerators and 1 freezer in 3 different locations. Today
marian helped Micah trade our old refrigerator (pictured above) for
our new old refrigerator. The new old Fridge came out of the furnace
room and has a piece of paper with the word "eggs" taped to the
front. It has real shelves on the door, and the added bonus of
keeping our food cold! i can't wait to be reunited with my condiments.

I found myself imagining the old refrigerator singing Bye bye miss
American Pie.... This will be the day that I die, this will be the
day that I die..... ( unrelated: "helter-skelter in the summer
swelter" are some of my favorite song lyrics ever)

As a direct yet random result, I currently have the Weird Al version
stuck in my head. "My, my this here Anakin guy may be Vader someday
later now he's just a small fry...Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi..."

The Way It Is

Well, That's the way it is with weddings and life in general...
one near disaster after another and a whole lot of ignorant bliss.
~Beth Webb Hart, The Wedding Machine

Posting

A week ago we woke up to an e-mail that Micahs sister's husband had
died on friday evening. We decided not to fly home. That was so hard
for us. I htink if we had realized how hard ti was going to be when
we made the decision we would have been on a plane sunday morning. We
stayed because we knew that if we flew home it would be almost
impossible to convince ourselves to come back to Slovakia.

I am nowhere near as well spoken as jason. So I will let him do his
own tribute.

http://www.ilovealtoona.net/jasonswords

Sledding!

Last Friday and Saturday Micah built a sled. It is not a thing of beauty. Ingenuity, yes. But not beauty. The important thing is that it worked! And it was a lot of fun.

On Sunday we went with Simon Angi and Zoe to a hill near here and sledded till we ran out of light. (is sledded a word?) We wrecked some, the hill had a curve in it and our sled lacked in the steering department as well as looks. Fortunately the snow was soft.

This is not our sled. But it is both of us. Our sled didn't really fit us both. We did try one run with me sitting and Micah standing behind me. That didn't end well.

You can't argue with happy eggs

At least the eggs are having a good day....

Things I will be happy about today:
- Micah did the dishes last night.
- the sun is shining
- Psalm 32:8
- You can cook tea cookie sin the microwave
- Micah does not like tea cookies = more for ME!
- I have warm slippers
- The Steelers did not loose the superbowl (that the didn't win is
something I'm not thinking about)
- We are almost done eatign turkey
- The chickens are laying again = free eggs. Happy free eggs.

The longer I look at the happy eggs, the better I feel. I am thinking
about not working anymore today. I will just sit here and look at the
happy eggs. Maybe you would like to join me in not working and
looking at happy eggs. I might put on some cheery music too. Acapella
music makes me happy.

Did I tell you about my music? I was running gout of free space on my
computer. I looked into this and discovered that when I loaded songs
from CD's they were loading in an uncompressed format. This means
that some files were over TEN TIMES what they needed to be. I
remedied this and it freed up over 15 GIGABYTES of space on my hard
drive. Even the eggs are happy about that.

Tea Cookies

In case you were wondering: Nutmeg is a key ingredient in tea
cookies. Without it, they just taste like pancakes with raisins. At
least I didn't double the recipe.

I am disappointed by this discovery. I am thinking however about
making it work to my advantage....wait for it.....Breakfast
sandwiches! (please read this like when the pigeon in Bolt says
aliens!) Oh Snap! Just think about it.
That's all I got.

ruffage

Let's just say hypothetically, that you had a husband who bought a 2.28 Kg head of cabbage (that's 5 pounds for the metrically challenged!) thinking he was getting a great deal on lettuce.

Besides coleslaw, what can you even DO with cabbage?

Would cabbage be good on pizza?

How long does a head of cabbage last?

Should it be refrigerated or just kept in a cool dry place?

Can you freeze cabbage?

Why do I continue to let my husband shop for produce? (He also got a zucchini....he thought it was a cucumber.)

*I have been requested to issue a retraction. My hypothetical husband might have known that it was a head of cabbage. He did not know that the posted price was per Kilo.

Micah's latest idea

We met this morning after language school with a missionary who is
living about 50 minutes from us in Ruzomberok. Because he is teaching
English in the local schools, he has a salary and a place to live
provided. We met another couple last month who have a similar setup.
This got us thinking about how much we dislike raising funds. It is
just not comfortable for us. So Micah had a great idea: He will set
up a booth at CampFest, paint himself brown, play native american
flute music and juggle a chain-saw (which we already have!) and
flaming bowling pins (which he is sure he will be able to find
somewhere). They jury is still out on wether he will wear a
loincloth or some other yet to be defined costume. We ruled out a
dunking booth and snake wrestling before coming up with this
brilliant idea. We will charge a Euro admission, and figure if most
people come once and a few come back or a repeat viewing, we can
match our annual salary in a weekend. He will look up how to juggle
on google this evening and start practicing over the weekend.

What will you discuss over lunch?

Turkey questions

Did you hear the one about how we bought a 40 pound Turkey in
October? By accident.
We meant to buy a turkey, just not one that big. For pete's sake
there are only two of us!

Mirka came to our front door one day out of the blue to ask us: "Do
you wanna turkey?"

What?! is she offering to cook us lunch? would we like a pet? did we
replace the goose-ducks? No. It was apparently going to soon be "the
time for killing turkeys" (who knew there was such a thing) and Milos
knew a guy who would sell us a whole turkey.

In our defense we DID ask how big the turkey would be... The answer
was: "you know...bigger than chickens....how big a turkey is." And
while 3 Euros a Kilo (± $2/lb) was a bit pricey, we figured that we
could eat turkey for a few meals, support a local turkey grower/
killer, and have our thanksgiving turkey ahead of time and without
searching a million stores.....

The Turkey (yes, capital letters) arrived on a day while I was 2
hours away in Presov. Milos came with The Turkey in a trash bag and
a bill for 56 Euros ($80!!). He offered to cut it up for us (thank
heavens) and asked Micah how we would like it cut.....Poor Micah had
no clue how he would like The Turkey cut up let alone how I would
like The Turkey cut up. He did well, or Milos did well. Either way I
came home and put the pieces in about 25 1-gallon ziplock bags and
the boys carried them to a big freezer under cottage one.

We have not bought meat (except pork for New Years) since October! We
are. Still. Eating. The Turkey.

I am thawing 5 gallon ziplock bags in as I type. I will bake it up
this afternoon to put in our small freezer and to make soup with.
There are still another 6 or 7 bags of turkey in the freezer. The
only question now is, can you really make soup out of turkey lungs?
And do I really even want to find out....