cool picture

no caption necessary.

Christmas ski trip

left to right: Jim, Kacie, Dan, Joel, Jay, Debbie, Kyle, and John Hocking

for Christmas this year, Debbie and I joined my mom & dad, and my brothers Joel and John on a trip to NY to visit my Uncle and his family. We went skiing at Holiday Valley, which is pretty decent - and had a ton of fun. Thought I'd include a few pictures from our ski trip.



And below you can see a short clip of Debbie skiing down through our favorite section, with lots of nice evergreens, and Debbie almost getting hit in the head by a clump of snow.

mural project

Some of you may know that I (Debbie) have been working on a mural for several months...I'm still at it, but at last the end is in sight! It's been a really fun project, and I've enjoyed getting back into a "working artist" mode. Here's one of my favorite little sections:


I hope to finish the project in one week, which is amazing to hear myself say, since there were times I felt like this was interminable.

So, in a week I'll let you know if I achieved my goal!

Free Rice website

well, the geography quiz game was pretty popular, and here's another cool one:

www.freerice.com

everytime you get a question right on this one, 20 grains of rice are donated to the WFP (World Food Program). It's paid for by the advertisers at the bottom of the page. Play as often as you like! (and check out the totals, it's impressive, even for grains of rice). There are between 29,000 and 130,000 grains of rice to a pound (depending on long grain or short grain), so even if we average it at 100,000 grains, that's still over 2,000 lbs a day that are donated!

update

well, i've already gotten behind on this. Just wanted to update everyone on what's been going on. We were in PA at the beginning of the month, visited the Lititz church, and spoke to 12 different ABF's about the Château ministry - really had an awesome time there. Also got to stop by on our way back and see Matt & Marianne Vosberg, and their new little girl Morgan.

Debbie's been working on the mural, I've been working on design stuff, not too much new going on. We spent Thanksgiving with my family, actually we spent a whole week with them, since we decided to let a French couple stay in our apartment that week. The Griffiths (fellow missionaries to France) had some of their friends from France visiting, and since our apartment was right across the hall from the Griffiths, we decided it would be much nicer for their friends to stay there, rather than in a hotel somewhere.

My brother Joel and I (and his friend Drew) got up at 4am to sit in front of Staples on black Friday, hoping to pick up some good deals when the store opened at 6am. We're pretty geeky. Not as geeky as the 8 people in line in front of us, but still, pretty geeky. But I'm happy with my 400GB SATA hard drive for $50 :)

Debbie and I celebrated our 5th year anniversary on the 23rd, and enjoyed a nice trip up to Chicago to see a broadway musical, and shopping. I can't believe we've already been married 5 years, we're so ancient.

Know your world?

Think you know alot about geography? Try this:

http://minijuegos.com/juegos/html/index.php?id=5974

and post your score (if you're proud of it) in the comments.

(you can try it a few times, it changes the questions, although you'll get a few repeats)

stats

just in case anyone is curious, this site has been up for one month now - and here's the traffic stats for it:

269 visits by 76 different people in 6 different countries.
Of those visits, 25% were using an Apple macintosh computer, and the rest were windows (other than 2 visits from linux, which were probably Dan Sandlian, since that person uses "chunghwa telecom data communication" which sounds suspiciously Taiwanish to me). Apple still has a ways to go in it's takeover of the world. Still, it's a start.

off to PA!

This weekend we'll be heading over to PA - visiting the Lititz church on Sunday, and meeting with a few other church mission teams or mission team leaders - and we're hoping to touch base with a few people who may be interested in working at the Château as interns - it'll be a busy 4 days.

Other than that, not a lot going on. Our garage sale went well, we have slimmed down our belongings and are ready to move out of the country. We found a home for our cat Nadia - she's staying with my parents, who already have two cats, and really didn't want another one, but my parents are way too nice, and agreed to watch her for us. That's about all that's new - just working, visiting churches, and raising support :)

Thought I'd throw in a video I put together about the Château ministry, some of you have probably already seen it, but some haven't. Enjoy!

TOTW

This past week has been busy, but good. I picked up my parent's from Indy (they're back from 2 months in Africa). Debbie helped my brother John make little makalas (800 of them) for the Africa table at Grace College's Taste of the World during missions week. There were plenty of French missionaries around to help with the French table (if you're wondering why she wasn't over there making Boeuf Borgignon - is that how it's spelled?

We also had a display setup trying to lure another unsuspecting college student to the Château to help us out as an intern. Not sure if it worked or not, but we talked to several students, handed out a lot of flyers about the need for interns, and gave out a lot of good chocolate. Please continue to pray for some good contacts with people to help us out this next year, and also keep praying for the people who are already seriously considering it - that the application process would go smoothly for them.

Debbie found a home for Nadia! Thanks Brandee Martinsky for connecting us with Jane!

The prayer guide is just about done - which is the largest project we do here at GBIM, so I'm really happy about that, it's a big load off my back, as we're beginning to see the end of the project. BTW, it's a great way to pray for missions, so pick one up when it comes out... it's free of course.

Work has started on the re-stucco-ing of our house - it's too late to finish it this year, most of the work will take place in the spring, but still, it's nice to see it started.

Debbie and I also enjoyed a party with some friends---it was a pirate themed mystery murder dinner thing. Thought I'd include a picture of Debbie and I in our pirate outfits.

A Home for Nadia

This is our lovely and sweet cat, Nadia. Since our apartment is pet-free, she's been spending the summer happily living out-of-doors re-connecting with her wild side. Now that the weather is getting colder, however, she really needs a home where she can be an indoor, or indoor-outdoor cat again. Are there any locals our there who would be able to take her in from the cold? We don't want her to look like this all winter!



This would be a temporary situation, as we are planning on taking her with us to France. (We hope to leave sometime in January, but it could be later than that.)

She is both litter-box and great-outdoors trained.

Please let me know if you might be able to help in this way! Nadia will be so happy; as you can tell from the first picture, she loves her creature comforts and can't wait to have a cozy home to curl up in again! Thanks a million,

Debbie and Nadia

MK from Africa goes CRAZY!!!

Jordan Cone, a friend I grew up with (and now lives in the missionary residence), just showed me this video of him jumping off the world's highest land-based bungee jump. This was only 5 days after being married, and he was still on his honeymoon. Location: Switzerland. James Bond also jumped from this in the movie Goldeneye.

Harrison Jim

well, someone said my dad looked like Harrison Ford - I've done a quick photo comparison, and can see no similarities.

can't get much cooler than this

this is easily my favorite old missionary picture I've found (at least so far) - well, i should qualify that - there are some pretty FUNNY pictures that probably top this one (one's that I probably won't dare to post), but as far as sheer coolness of style, I believe the Griffith's have won. For those of you who don't know them, Dave & Sue live about an hour or so away from the Château - they're missionaries with GBIM. I do believe we'd have an easier time of support raising if I had a mustache like that.



And here's one of those funny pictures.... no I don't have makeup on... yes my dad has hair

Florida!

We're sitting in a beautiful apartment - thanks to Doug Brennan who let us stay in his time share this week. We had an un-eventful trip down to Florida on Friday and Saturday, spent the night here in Fort Myers Beach, then drove up to Sebring for the morning service there. Had a great time, really enjoyed the visit, made some new friends, and saw a few people we knew. The Gorniks were there, which was a fun surprise - they'll be there for a few weeks studying with Randy Smith's Bible Institute - which btw sounds very interesting! We were really encouraged by this church - the Sunday evening service we shared in went really well, and a lot of people were really interested in what's happening at the Château - asked a lot of good questions. It's really cool to be a part of a small fellowship like the Grace Brethren, where people feel connected to each other, and the ministries of GBIM. I think at least a dozen people from the Sebring church had been to the Château - so far, there's been someone from every GBC we've visited that has been to the Château.

Debbie and Tarrah Dubusak making crêpes 3 at a time which we shared with everyone after the evening service (it takes quite a while to make 120 crêpes)

We've enjoyed a bit of Florida cuisine - we had boiled peanuts - which from the picture below don't look so appetizing, but looks aren't everything - these were cajun flavored, and were pretty good!


We visited with Serena Nelson on monday (she took the day off work even!). We went down to the inverted pier in St. Petersburg (right next to Tampa where she lives). They had a sweet airport for small planes which was pretty much in the bay - you didn't want to overshoot the runway. We had Cuban sandwiches for lunch, and went on a dolphin tour boat ride - which was tons of fun. We only saw two dolphins, and they have a guarantee that you'll see dolphins - aparently, two isn't enough, because we got free passes to come back again sometime (Serena will be able to treat someone else to a trip sometime). I think we had as much fun looking at the crazy huge houses along the shore - there were some pretty fantastic designs there.

Debbie & Serena on the dolphin tour boat

Debbie loves pelicans!

That's a cute little baby fish that Debbie is mercilessly
feeding to the carnivorous pelicans

I also found a great sign - you probably all realize if you've been getting my emails for the past two years, that I like signs where people try to use pictures to communicate dangerous situations - for some reason they always make me laugh. This gate will beat your backside if you try to go through and you're not an auto.

Debbie's First Blog Ever!

Hey there! Congratulations on being here for this historical occasion, as I finally join my own generation in the world of blogging!

As many of you know, Jay and I are gearing up to move back to France, and part of that process is to sort and organize our cumulative 55 years of accumulated stuff!


This is what I started with! Overwhelming!

I thought I'd share some of the fun things that I've found. It's rather embarrassing, but I had a whole stack of Christmas cards from years ago! Here are two of my favorites:


I was Thailan's best locker partner ever!



This is a really sweet letter and reading it just takes me right back to seventh grade! Sigh. I really love how all of the exclamations points are made with x's instead of dots. very cute!

So, this box of old Christmas cards ended up in the trash, along with my worst art project ever, which I am secure enough to show here on my very first blog. I'll probably regret it!


This was a project where we had to illustrate a poem about a guy who was burning old love letters...this assignment just didn't work out very well for me, as you can see.

I'm feeling pretty good about my progress in sorting, and I have to tell you it feels SO good to get rid of so much stuff that we really didn't need!

GBIM Asado cookout

DeArmey and our house

you're probably wondering about the title of this post. "what's the connection between Larry and Vicki and the hocking's house?" you ask yourself. Not much. I just had a picture of the DeArmey's, and wanted to give a prayer request about our house. So not much connection at all. Actually, one time Larry was IN our house, and our cat scratched him and drew blood... but that's about the best connection I can come up with.

Anyway, please be praying for us, as we try to get a construction loan to fix the stucco on our house. We've been working on it for a few months, and have hit every snag imaginable. We rent out our house when we're in France, and we really need to get the stucco replaced before we leave, and it's just causing a lot of stress. Our first attempt at a loan just completely fell through, so we're changing some stuff, and re-submitting an application to another bank.

And since Vicki was the first person to make a comment about the picture of Hobie, I decided I'd put up a cute picture of the DeArmey's.

Chicago

Yesterday we drove up to Chicago with our friend Chris Zeager, to pick up his wife from the airport. They used to live in Chicago, so after we picked up Melissa, they gave us a quick tour of the city, showing us a few places where we'd probably enjoy poking around the next time we visit. Usually, we've always just ended up on Michigan ave, which we're pretty familiar with at this point, and the museums. We actually ended up on Michigan ave this time too, but I had never gone to see the giant bean sculpture thing up-close before. It's really reflective, and kinda crazy. I actually almost started feeling sick when I walked under it and looked up, it's kinda weird. It's called the "Cloud Gate" - cost $23 million, and was constructed betwen 2002 - 2006. That's a lot of money. It could have supplied our entire support at the Château for 270 years. Or purchased about 150 homes in Winona Lake. Or drilled new wells for 1,500 villages in the C.A.R. Hope it was worth it. Here are a few pics from Michigan Ave:






And here's a picture, also on Michigan Ave, of a corn hole competition area. And I thought it was just a small town phenomenon. If like me, you hadn't heard of corn hole before this spring, here's a link for you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_hole

Testing video

I've been having fun looking through the GBIM photo archives - thought I'd share a few (don't worry, there are some good ones of the Hocking family in here as well, I'll get to those). Hobie, you looked as good back then as you do now!

Back from Iowa

Trip to Iowa went well - we had a good time with Sid and Anna, our friends at the Waterloo church. We shared in the morning service about the Château, and were surprised by how many people had been there. They were very supportive, and we really enjoyed our time there. We have a few new prayer partners as a result of that trip, and hopefully we'll partner with the church officially in the near future.

Sid Danforth is working on getting some type of flying license, he has his private license. I don't know how all that works, but what I DO know, is that he's going to fly out here with Anna to visit us (and Jordan and Tirza Cone, who are also friends of theirs) next weekend - so that should be fun.

In other news, the Lititz PA church is now supporting us as well! This brings our support level up to 37%. Thanks for all of your prayers regarding our church visits lately, we've needed them.