The Move

So, we're all moved in to our new place. It was a chaotic move but we are moved. Anyone who knows us well, knows that we have moved...a lot in our life and had it down to a science. This last move? Not so much.

We're good on the Eastern Front

I just realized that it has been about 9 months since I last posted and that is waaaaay too long. It is easy to forget especially these days with the popularity and use of Facebook. It's definitely easier to scroll down a news feed and get the highlights of people's lives.

Summer Past

So, here it is...the first of October and it's just sinking in, from the calendar and the cooler temperatures, that summer in the Maritimes is fading and autumn is taking center stage. It is, of course, the way the seasons roll...spring, summer, autumn and winter...summer just flew by so fast! It was a full summer and much of it, I was remembering today.

The Spudwick Papers Returns

Yikes! Has it really been more than a year since our last post?! That's when Blogger tells me we last signed in. We've also had a few people ask us if they were still on our mail out list so allow me to set your minds at ease.Yes, you are still on our mail out list for the Papers updates. You haven't seen anything from us in a while because I have been a slacker and not posted anything new in over a year. However, in my defense, I was in school for the bulk of the previous 12 months finishing up my nursing diploma and the workload for school really limited my time available to leisure things, like writing a blog. Please forgive me. It certainly was not from lack of desire, more from lack of time and needing to prioritize my tasks. Now, let me get you filled in on our happenings over the past year and though I wish I could say it will be short and sweet, I suspect it become longer-winded given the time frame that needs updating. So, grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea or if it's still rather warm in your neck of the woods, a tall glass of refreshing sweet tea and get cozy...this could be a long one. :0) This time last year, I was starting back to my classes at the community college where I was finishing up my Practical Nurse education. It turned out to be one busy start to the year. Not only did we have the usual schoolwork load, most of my fellow students and I were battling traffic nightmares as one of the bridges used regularly in our fair city was closed for major construction. So a long school day was turning into an even longer day with an hour or so of traffic tacked on to each end of the day. That construction finally ended well after the first proposed date...and the next one....and the next one....and the next one. It was closer to Christmas than summer by the time the bridge finally opened, if memory serves me right. The whole city was relieved when the bridge re-opened. Much of my time was spent working on my required school work but I was still needing to work part time at the coffee shop; mostly on weekends since I was spending an hour in traffic on school day afternoons and that was putting me arriving at work too late. So, school, work, breathe on Sundays; school, work, breathe on Sundays became the routine for the bulk of the year. To boot, the second year of my program spends a lot more time in the clinical setting than in the classroom setting. It's a different kind of learning and a different kind of tired. But we made it through and the entire class successfully graduated and gained employment right away. The last hurdle was to write our national licensing exam (which we wrote last week). In 4-6 weeks, I'll know if I am fully licensed practical nurse. In the midst of all the busyness of school, we did manage to find some time to do some fun things. Jeff ventured down to his 20th high school reunion in Virginia and had a blast re-connecting with old friends he had lost touch with over the years. He had a great time. He was also able to stop in and see his family for a day, whom he hadn't seen for about a year since he stopped trucking long haul. We did take a winter excursion to an artisan B&B in a rural area here in New Brunswick with our new camping buddies. The weekend package included a 2-night stay and either a horse back trail ride or a 2-hour pottery class. We all opted for the pottery class since none of us had every had an opportunity to try messing with clay and make something functional out of it. I appreciate good pottery, especially coffee mugs. No award winning pieces were fired that day but we all had fun and now each have a little memento of that trip. Through out my time in school, Jeff has been faithfully working for a local trucking company, who continues to treat him well; but he has been finding the job more and more unsatisfactory. He's been dabbling with re-purposing old wood (primarily broken down pallets) and furniture; give it a new coat of paint, spruce it up a bit and give it new life. His latest passion has been coat racks made from a piece of pallet wood and cast iron hooks or old door knobs. He made a custom coat rack for us in a confined space in our entry way and it turned out really well. He's been spending more and more time working on the details of building these projects more consistently, especially since he sustained an injury to his back around Christmas time last year. It limited his ability to perform his work duties to the full extent and he has spent the better part of this year in physiotherapy to try and get him back to a pain free function-ability. Should he continue to progress positively with the physio and return to full or near full normal function, he is ready to move on from trucking. It was never our goal for him to be trucking for a long period of time. It was a means to an end; put me through school being one of the more important goals. That goal has been reached so he can think about moving on to other things. Nothing has been decided yet, so for now, he'll keep working as a trucker and trying to build some little projects in his spare time. The most excitement has been what we have seen in growth in our home group. This year has seen many supernatural things occur in our midst that we know is true from what we read in the Bible that is available to us today. We have seen many healings in our group, we are growing in the prophetic and relationship and community with the people in our group. We are friends as well as co-laborers in God's kingdom and doing our best to bring the Kingdom to our meetings, our neighbourhood, our city in a tangible way. We are certainly still learning as we go and the journey there is just as important as our destination. We believe that God is always in a good mood and he wants only good things for us, his children...and that's a really good place to start. And that's a really good place to close this update. I will leave you thinking about how much God loves you and thinks you're pretty awesome. VeggieTales says it well; "God made you special and he loves you very much!" Goodbye!

Just for fun!

For those of you out there who appreciate the work of boy bands, you will appreciate this. For anyone else, it's just a good laugh! Enjoy!

My Own Summer Reading Club

Do you remember as a kid waiting for the summer to come because then you could spend every possible spare moment, reading as many books as you could get your hands on? The last day of school was spent anxiously waiting for the bell to ring so you could bust a move outta dodge and head for the library to sign up for the summer reading club. Okay...so maybe I'm only one of a few bookworm-y kids who really looked forward to spending the summer reading. But now that I'm a bit more grown up and have spent this past year reading textbooks and having very little time to venture into a world beyond the wardrobe, I am totally taking advantage of the time I have available to read. I don't really want to set a goal for myself to 20 or 30 books but I am still very much wanting to read as much as I can in the time that I have it. I did finish a book a couple of weeks ago and that was huge accomplishment for me. I have started many a book in the last little while but didn't finish them because I couldn't keep renewing them from the library or it was just not the kind of book I could get into at the time. The story I just finished was a book I've been carrying around for years. I think I got it as a gift one year for my birthday or Christmas when I was 15 or 16. I had started it several times but just never finished it. This time, I finished it and found that it had a surprise ending. It is the first in a three book series set in an Amish community but now I want to finish the series since I own the first and third books. I doubt that they will be ones that I keep forever but I imagine I will pass them along to someone else who might need a light read.

To my fellow readers out there, keep reading! And to those who don't read so much, keep trying...eventually you'll find a book you can't put down.

Winter

The great white north truly is very white! We just another foot of snow last night to add to the other 3 feet we already had.

Needless to say, I was very glad that our scenario is one where Jeff is home more and we're able to clear out our couple of parking spots together which always makes the work go faster. But we have had quite a bit of snow over the past few weeks and we had debated on whether to invest in a small snow blower or just tough it out for another winter. We had another sizable storm earlier this week (my school was canceled because of it and my school never closes!) that dropped a good 8 inches of light, fluffy snow so clearing out the driveway was not bad and didn't take long. Last night's storm, however, dropped a foot of heavy, wet snow. It was great opportunity to find out if our investment in a snow blower was really worth it. It was a little harder to push and pull around in the heavy snow but once we got a path cleared out, it was easier going. And it made what normally would have been a 2-3 hour job much easier. The shoveling has been challenging because the snow piles are so huge, you have to throw them really high and hope that it doesn't just come back down on you and end up down your neck. I had tried to make a snowman but there really is no ideal spot to build one. I did build one earlier this year but I built it in the front of the house beside the sidewalk and the sidewalk snow blower knocked him over. We didn't take any pictures of the snow mountains in our backyard and it is currently too dark outside to get any decent pictures. I will try and get some this week and add them to this post.

Stay warm out there! It's winter!