weekend's end

Duncan and Meg Dempsey came over on Saturday and played with the kids while Demps and I caught up. We hadn't seen each other since I left for the States!

Tonight I did part two of the series on the life of Paul. Tonight was about Paul's conversion. I learned a ton from the preparation. It's been a great study for me to do. I've mostly been just using the text and reading The Apostle. It's been a great resource.

The talks are online but only in Portuguese (obviously). And some of the songs from the services as well. This week I'll only be able to add a text file because my computer froze up with only 4 minutes remaining in my talk. Ugh!

Only 2 days left to finish my novel. I made a list of all the loose ends I have to wrap up before then... I guess we'll see. One way or the other I hope to finish it. Depending on how the rest of the week goes I hope I can do a general editing job to get it presentable enough to print it out and let Amy read it.

the baby room

Lemon and I worked on the baby room today after our Bible study. We mostly worked on patching up some old holes in the wall and then painted over it. Tonight we are going to put up a new shelf when the paint dries.

...

In just a few hours we are expecting around 30 guests here at our apartment. We are going to eat Sloppy Joe's and then later have Chico lead us in a moment in the Word and then later we are going to sing some worship songs. Our prayer is that God would continue to form us into a community that truly reflects His love among us and to others.

6 and counting

Tonight I crossed over the 40,000 word mark. In just 6 short days my novel will be "finished". Lots of people have been asking about what "finished" means. It means that the story will be complete. But I won't have done any editing or filling in after the 30 days are up. So, I plan to only let the most loving friends and family read it for now.

...

Last night was a rough one for me. I watched almost every hour pass on the clock: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7... I have been fighting a cold lately and last night my nose wouldn't stop "leaking" and it brought on a serious headache. Today I've been okay but I'm hoping that I'm not in for another night like last night. It seems like when I lay down it gets a lot worse.

...

Sunday I preached about the life of Paul at church. I talked about Paul's life before his conversion. I tried to mostly set the context by sharing about Paul's upbringing (what growing up in a Pharisee family was like) and then I told the story of the stoning of Stephen. I felt like the major lesson for us was are we testing our "religion". Paul was in the right place, among God's chosen people, but he didn't recognize the Messiah.

the baby shower

Larissa and Maggie hosted a shower for me and some other moms from the team today. Candace is due in October and I'm (Amy) due in September and Wendy just adopted Emmi who's 3 (and who was also the hit of the shower)! The food was delicious and we got lots of fun new clothes and linens. All pink, of course, and plenty of diapers as well. It was fun!

Save-Ums

Today I was working in my office using a highlighter on a text I was reading when Braden decided he would come in and color too! He's been working on a set of Save-Ums pictures that I downloaded for him off the internet... something he's seen on Discovery Kids!

Birthday/Holiday

This past Monday we went over to our friend Giuliano's house. It was his birthday (and some kind of religious holiday) and a great excuse for everyone to get together and have some cake and pizza.
I always particularly enjoy going to Giuliano's: his father is a pilot and always seems to have a good story to tell, both Giuliano and his brother Marco like to play the guitar and so we sometimes "jam" together (which we did yesterday... I took the mandolin!), and last but not least, he has a great basketball court. We got to play a few games yesterday before soccer won over on popular vote.
Here's a picture of Amy and some of the girls from the community (L-R: Amy, Gisele, Aninha, Roberta and Jussara and of Simon course pretending to be a panther and eating his own arm!).

novelling

I "jumped in" today and now I feel like I'm "out of the woods"! Week two supposedly is the hardest of the 4 week trek to 50,000 words. I'm almost through; only one day left.

Current Word Count: 22,146

...

Yesterday, Braden, Rafael, Lemon, Luke (more on him later) and I went to see the United States or should I say a United States basketball team participate in a round robin with Brazil, Argentina and Canada. The US team was awful even though they eventually won the game versus Argentina. Brazil was pretty fun to watch in the 3rd quarter, but other than that it was just sloppy basketball.

Luke is a student from Tennessee Tech visiting for several days. He's about to graduate and is considering going overseas someday as a missionary.

Kent, our director, went today to see the US play Brazil (lost by 10) and experienced the highlight of the tournament. He got his picture taken with Dennis Johnson! Many of you may remember him from the Larry Bird days of the Celtics.

Ahoy Mateys!

I can't decide if these are the villains are the heroes for my novel yet. Besides I can't give away the story before it's finished.

Current Word Count: 14,422

Things have picked up in pace here. This is the second week of classes and today was our first investigative study for some of the new students we met during the last two months. Today we talked about our great need for God. Please pray that many of the students will be willing to join in these discussions with us.

Amy's new outfit

Our friends Sam and Marcela were married last night. Amy had to special order her outfit to suit her and the baby. Only 5 or so weeks remain before we meet her! The wedding was lots of fun... lots of friends. And we are really happy for the new couple. I translated the service since it was international.

The pink scarf Amy had attached to the pants suit is from Thailand from our trip earlier this year. We are hoping she can use the outfit again for Paige Hardy's wedding on September 9th... only days before the due date. We'll see.

NaNoWriMo in August

I am writing a novel!

While in the States this year I bought a book (one of many I've bought on the subject over the years) called, No Plot? No Problem!, which walks you through the process of writing a book in 30 days.

The author basically shares two ideas: trash your internal editor and create a deadline for yourself. The writer was either the creator or part of the creation of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The "competition" is kind of like running a literary marathon of sorts. You don't really enter to win but more to prove it to yourself that you can do it. The only problem is that the competition is in November which is just impossible for me because of our preparations for our beach project. So I'm declaring August my own personal NaNoWriMo.

Feel free to write a word of encouragement and to check in on me to see how everything is going. One great benefit is that we'll be TV-FREE this month, since that's one of the things I cut out to have time for writing. Amy's goal is one page of Creative Memories a night for Simon's baby album before the little girl arrives.

Today is Day 5 and my word count is 7,206 of 50,000.