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Showing posts from September, 2023

Equipping class

In the last few years, our church has started some great opportunities they call equipping classes and crash courses. Mark and I signed up and attended an equipping class at our church on sharing your faith. We met weekly for 4 weeks during the late service. One of the topics was global missions. This was one of the statistics that I never had really heard or realized and it really shocked me. There are 8 billion people groups in the world and 40% are unreached! I just found that kind of wild. It was a great class and I really enjoyed it. It made me think more about how to start a conversation and how to talk about Jesus to both strangers and to friends, family, and co-workers. One of the speakers was a local attorney that invited us to his connection group. I think Mark was very interested and connected to Tim. I hope we can finally find a connection group that we both can belong.

The Generations of Faith & Farming

 We come from a long line of farmers and our roots run deep with black Iowa dirt and country living. My parents farm, my Dad's parents and their parents farmed. My mom's parents are the only family in our family that lived in town. They lived on Nancy Lane in Webster City Iowa. Mark is a 5th generation farmer. His mother's parents also were a farm family. Add in our siblings, My brother farm's and both Mark's sisters farm. One sister lives on a farm, but doesn't actively farm. We are farm family through and through. 5 of my nieces are now married and they all live in the country too.  Another awesome statistic within our families, marriage runs deep. My parents just celebrated their 50th anniversary. Between Mark and I , all of our parents, grandparents, and siblings are married and have stayed married. There is no divorce. Faith runs deep in our families as well, all come from a long lineage of Christian families. I am happy to belong to a family that's roo

Kitties and Cats

 This has been the hardest year on our cats. We lost 7 cats this year! 4 of them were aged cats. It has been so sad to lose some of the greatest ones! Coco was our most special. He was part of the family and lived in our house. Black kitty with a white spot on his neck,  Mocha quit eating, he lived 11 years. All Black long and lanky kitty, Latte was attacked by our Dog Ricky, he too was 11. Gray striped kitty, Bandit we never knew his age. He was a stray we had 8 years. Grey stripped kitty Wall E ,age7 just vanished. We brought home 5 kittens this summer and one got got ran over and another vanished. 7 sweet cats gone in one year. At this time we have Little Monster, Darla, and the three kittens Pumpkin, Sugar, and Walter. They all recently got spays and neuters. I hope they are with us for years and year!  Latte Bandit was a lover, liked to have his belly rubbed. WallE and Bandit were such look alikes.

September Happenings

 It was back to reality this week after being on your nice vacation. It felt like fall with temperatures in the 70's all week and lows around 60. Monday was 9/11 and that is always a heavy day. Mark got a Salford in for the crew to assemble. The rush is on to get it together and out the door because harvest is just around the corner. I took the three kittens to a spay clinic and got them all fixed up. I like healthy cats that don't over reproduce. On Wed night I had my Buff City Soap party. In Feb I won a drawing during the grand opening of the new store. I just stumbled upon the store at the right time and entered a drawing I knew nothing about. I won a $250 party for  ten people to make bath bombs. I finally scheduled my night and invited my pool ladies and connection group  ladies, all CStone friends. It was a great time. I brought snacks, we chatted, made bath bombs, and shopped. Everyone had a really good time.  Joker came back to us this week as well. He was supposed to b

Watercolor

 We flew to Florida to start our big week long vacation with friends in our favorite family destination spot, Watercolor. Because American Airlines had the best rate that worked with our dates, we flew with a connecting flight to get to FL and back. I regretted not flying nonstop through Allegiant.  We left home in the late morning and arrived in Florida at 9PM. It made for a long day of travels. Because I didn't pay the extra money per person for seating preference, we each got stuck in random places in a middle seat for all the flights. That means in rows of three people, we were in the middle between two strangers. Ugh! On one flight I had a seat beside me that was empty and Luke left his assigned seat and joined me for awhile. I  felt pretty lousy on a couple of the flights from motion sickness on the decent. Another factor, Labor day weekend is considered the number one or two busiest travel weekends of the year!! The airport was so busy packed! We flew into Charlotte, NC for