Finished teaching for the summer!

First off, I'd like to thank G0d for answering all my pr@yers for this long teaching year to end. I'm thankful to my mom & dad for their support and how well they trained me to be a people person and good teacher. I'm thankful to my beautiful wife for her support, encouragement, teaching tips, for all the late night talks and late night dinners, for walking me to and from classes so often and for her never ending patience with my ever changing schedule. I'm thankful to my language teachers. To Peg Comfort and Natalie (Nolan) Hebden for giving me a strong grammar foundation and a love for language. To Frau Bethke, my first language experiences with German and Spanish. To Pam Beddor and Andre Cooper for my linguistics training and strong phonetics background and....

not white nights... but close

Amy and I just returned home after walking our friend Tammy back to her flat. It's 12:15am. I'd say now it's almost dark... but when we set out - it was still light out at 11:30pm. Isn't that cool?

Summer is in swing - I feel like it should still be spring. The apple blossoms are everywhere and some evenings the wind blows them in little swirls. I came home two nights ago to a little flower shower... honestly it was pretty miraculous.

Guess it wasn't about a hernia....

The good news is that it looks like I didn't have a hernia. No surgery needed... Apparently it's quite a bit similar to the pain from passing a kidney stone...

a KIDNEY stone?! Are you kidding me? Well, looks like I should be getting more hydrated.

Brown Sugar... and a hammer

Today I made a pot of chili to go with our recent snow fall. (That's right! It's May 3 and it snowed about 4 inches last night -- welcome to Siberia!)

Well, as you know cooking is really just advanced chemistry. So, I was making the chili and it wasn't sweet enough and of course, I had to add some brown sugar.

Well, we haven't found brown sugar here since ... maybe February. So, we don't have much left and it's been around for a while. A magic piece of bread, isn't going to soften this sugar...

so I took a hammer to it.

That's right, I just hammered until part of it fractured off... and then I added it. So it was a bit too sweet, so I had to spice it up a bit. Turned out okay -> just thought it was a funny story...

brown sugar and a hammer.

A knifing

We woke up this morning to head off to ch^rch and pick up Svetlana Viktorovna and as we unlocked Jim's car to get going - I noticed that one of the tires was flat.

Well, Amy just filled all of the tires with air (with a foot pump I might add) on Saturday (it's Sunday today) - so there's no reason for there to be no air in the tire...

And then we saw it. The inch long incision in the sidewall of the right rear tire. So, changing from winter tires to summer tires is a bit more difficult as we'll have to get one of the tires replaced or repaired...

Life is more complicated here... where is Discount Tire... or Belle Tire?

Building photos... How incredible is this!?

This photo is inside on the third floor

View from the street.

There's no need for a long post - it just rocks. G0d is good. No utilities, but the shell is enclosed and finished.

HISnia?

Why are hernias called HERnias when most of them happen to men? They should really be called HISnias.

Anyway, on Tuesday (today is Friday) I woke up with a slight pain in my lower right abdomen. Of course, we had a moment of worry that it could be my appendix - but our Scottish friend Dan assured us that the pain would be more intense if it was appendicitis.

So as the pain has decided to move a little bit more to the south --> it certainly is hurting more.

I'm not so interested in having surgery here. So, I'm hoping for it to be minor enough to not need surgery, for it to be postponed until we're back in the States, or a healing (really I think the later is the best option).