Pond Hockey (or rather... Pond Shovelling)

Over the Christmas break, I visited Uncle Curt & Aunt Jane's house.   I went there right before that one big storm (when we got over 1 foot of snow).  We decided to play some pond hockey, but by the time we got the whole pond shovelled, we were just about too tired to play!  And we could only play for about 20 minutes before we had to re-shovel.  All in all, we probably did about 2-3 hours of shovelling for about 40 minutes of hockey.  :)

Here's a picture Derek took.  As you can see it was quite blizzardly!

Done!!!

With thanks to the Lord for His goodness and sustaining grace, I have finished my first semester at MARS!

After the final exam week, Erik & Gina (from New Zealand) invited all us first-years and Pastor Vander Hart over for a pot-luck dinner.  Here are some pictures, so that you can see a little bit of my class-mates.  The pictures are compliments of Pastor Vander Hart.

Yevgeni (my room-mate), and Pastor Vander Hart.

Steve and Russ in the background.

Russ and Evan (a friend from Beecher URC).

Richard B. (from Hamilton) and myself, as well as one of Erik & Gina's girls in the background. (I can never keep all their names straight unfortunately.)

Why one deer in the bush is worth two in the hand...

This story is actually a couple of weeks old, but it's been a little bit busy as of late (papers, exams, etc.), so that's why it took a while for this post.  

Anyways, to proceed with the story...

Yevgeni (room-mate from Afganistan-Russia) and myself were happily studying away one Monday night, when Dan (the son of the Swets with whom I'm staying) came in with a story to tell.  He had been trying to get a deer for weeks.  This time, he had a good opportunity to take down a good-sized buck.  But while getting a bead on it, another buck (unbeknownst to himself) walked behind the 1st deer.  So he 'killed two bucks with one shot', not always a good thing, as we found out.  (Two deer = double the work and double the meat.)

Dan had shot the deer a ways away from the road, so he recruited Yevgeni, myself, and Mrs. Swets to help drag the deer to the truck.  It was a good hike, probably a bit over a kilometer.  Part of it was through a chopped cornfield, which was quite difficult.  (I kept tripping and falling backwards onto the cornstalks.  :(  ).

Here's a picture of Dan with his two deer.

The next day, I helped Dan skin the first deer, and then skinned the second one myself later on in the week.   Dan did most of the cutting up, which was a lot of work.  Mr. and Mrs. Swets patiently worked in the kitchen, grinding up most of the meat and combining it with pork.  So we have a LOT of deer meat now!  And Mrs. Swets wasn't even sure if she wanted all the meat from one deer!  :)  But the following week, we had Gary Z. and Aaron V. over, and Mrs. Swets made some chili with the deer meat.  It was really good!

More Seminary Life...

This past Wednesday night, Corey, Simon, and Gary (fellow seminary students - middlers) came over for a hot tub party with Eugene and myself hosting.  (Yes, the Swets do have a hot tub, and a nice one at that!)  We had a lot of fun, with cigars provided by Corey.  It was a good time of fellowship, with conversational topics ranging from theology to Uzbekistan to student life.

Study Break

It's reading break right now (hence the two new posts), and I've been studying all day.  The following was my first study break.   I got the idea while playing with (nephew!) Joel out west actually.

The base is made of 6 sets of 3, then 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1.  I used up every piece of a double 12 Domino set to make this.

I was surprised at how stable it was.  It took a solid bump to the table before it finally fell over!

... definitely time to get back to the books.  :)

Flood Relief

As you probably know, we had a good sized flood in September after the hurricane.  Actually, it was a double whammy.  Indiana got dumped on by two different storms, back-to-back.  I think we had something like 8 or 9 inches of rain on each of two consecutive days.  The seminary was turned into an evacuation center, with people staying there for two nights.  I helped out by staying up on the second night along with Aaron V. and Yevgeni K.

So here's (finally) some pictures of the flood.  None of these are my pictures... I kept forgetting my camera and wishing I had taken it along.  

This past Saturday, I took a break from my studies and helped out one of the relief teams from Oak Glen URC.  We spent the whole morning on this house.  There was a lot of stuff in the basement that was ruined, as you can see.  The man from the house called it the "Wailing Wall".  Apparently,  this was a quite a common sight all along the flooded streets!

Steve & Nicole's Wedding

This past weekend I went to Washington State for Steve & Nicole's (Enter) wedding. The wedding was very nice and went with only one major hitch (sorry, very bad pun :) ). Holly (niece) was one of the SEVEN flower-girls, as you can see in the pictures.



The groomsmen.


The bride's maids (and matrons).


Holly looking quite cute outside. The weather was unfortunately typical Washington weather (grey and rainy), but that did mean that the colors stood out quite well, as you can see.



And of course, another high point was seeing once again Steve, Laurie, the kids (Emily, Marie, Joel, Holly), and for the first time the NEW BABY Jenna!