I filmed some of my classmates trying to start an airplane last winter. No easy chore for sure. Have a look.

Heather and I had a nice trip last weekend. We watched Holly graduated from Northwest Missouri. Howabout some pictures?
There's holly getting her diploma!


The graduation was on Saturday. Afterwards they had a little party for holly and her two roommates that also graduated. One of her roommates is our cousin Amanda.....who is also getting married this summer! Her other roommate is their friend Jaci. Here's a photo of the three of them.

To see some more photos, click below

Holly's Graduation

We headed out a day earlier than we had planned. Heather's stepdad Dave's stepmother Barb had passed away during the week and the funeral was Thursday morning. It was a very special funeral. Heather and I had not gotten to know Barb very well, but it was neat to hear about her life during her funeral. The whole service was done by the pastor of her church. She had a very good relationship with her pastor, and he had been there for her over the last several months while her health was failing. So he was able to make the service very personal. Barb had begun to go to church about nine years back, and the pastor described for us the transformation that had taken place in her life. One story the pastor told stuck in my mind. Since Barb had a terminal illness, she had the chance to think about and plan her own funeral service. A couple months back while she was bed ridden, she called her pastor up and said "Pastor, I need you to come over here right now, I have something to tell you." As soon as he got there, she said (not a direct quote but as best as I can remember) "Pastor, I want you to write this down. When Jesus came into my heart, there was just no stopping him. He changed everything. He changed my desires. He changed my actions. He changed my life." That story really made an impression on me.

On the way back home we made a little stop by Hannibal, Missouri, which is the home of Mark Twain!! In this picture you can see the town and the Mississippi River in the background

Here she is! This is Isabella, the 1 year old we got to watch last weekend. Isn't she a cutie? These pictures were taken at the butterfly exhibit at Meijer gardens. She definitely liked the butterflies.

A few pictures

Here's a few pictures from "fairly recently"......which means from this year. There's us in the snow when it was really coming down last winter.


And this is from last valentines day. We had a really fun valentines. We got dressed up (as shown) and went to this neat little restaraunt downtown.



Heather gets kind of annoyed because I do this to her all the time....




This weekend Heather and I have an opportunity to watch a one year old....for the whole weekend! It is one of the babies that Heather nannys during the week. I haven't done anything like that before! I was telling my mom last night and she joked that if we do that she wouldn't get grandkids until even longer. I know it shouldn't be too hard though because Isabella (the little girl we're watching) is an abnormally content little baby. Should be fun. Next weekend we're heading to Missouri for Holly's graduation (Heather's sister) from college. Man how time does fly! We are excited because Holly is going to come up and live with us for the summer after she graduates. Here at school we have only three months left. Man how this year has just flown by. We are just starting to get into engines. This is the part everyone gets excited for. Engines are just fun to learn about and work on. We are going to work on teams to completely disassemble and re-assemble an airplane engine and get it running again. I feel very blessed to be getting this kind of experience.

TRYING SOMETHING NEW!

So we're trying something new with the website. It was fun to have our own website. We used Microsoft Front Page to create it. But it was too darn hard to keep updated. (The people who view it regularly frequently remind us!!) We would normally have to go to Panera to get the laptop on the web to update it. So it ended up every 2 to 4 months we would change it. Which is not getting it done!! We needed to try something new. We had a missionary speak in my class the other day who raved about blogs. He showed us his. He loves them because they are free and really easy to update. Those two things sound really nice. I would like something Heather and I can both update easily. I don't know if Heather even tried to edit the old website. Now it will be easy for her. I hear you can even email your blog and it will update it for you. Amazing. Well I know the blog will have less flexibility and freedom. The photo archives are a thing of the past. But we can still put pictures in with our posts. And I've just started to learn about these blogs but I'd bet there's alot more cool things you can do with them to make them like a website than I know right now. So...since this is the first post I need to throw some pizaz in here. Let's see what kind of picture I can come up with...

So there we are. Most of my pictures are on my external hard drive, so that's the best I could come up with right now. That airplane, affectionately known as "6-5-Xray" was purchased on ebay by a guy. He made some crucial mistakes..... First was buying an airplane on Ebay, second he didn't have it inspected before he bought but afterwards. When it was inspected afterwards they discovered some major problems with it. So a long story short our school ended up with it and we are fixing it up!!! My friend Jeffrey and I have been tangling with some interesting problems lately involving the flap cables and the fuel selector valve. Well how's that for a first post? It's April 11th and it's snowing outside!! Only in Michigan.