Congratulations!

Congratulations to Heidi Snyder (Noel's younger sister...not his wife) and Brian Wolfe who are engaged and plan to be married in June 2009! Welcome to the family, Brian! We're so excited for the 2 of you.

Noel's Life

Do gnomes bring you good luck and help you finish faster? I hope so, because he received one yesterday as part of a white elephant gift exchange at the church staff Christmas luncheon. It's a good thing we have a white elephant gift exchange to go to next week; we can pass the lovely thing to someone else!


Noel says: Whew! I'm done! Plowed through that stack of books, wrote my first doctoral-level research paper, and finally had a good night's sleep. The gnome definitely helped me push through to the end. Quite a little task master.

Go Hope (and Cornerstone)!

We are so fortunate to know Bob and Carole Bos. They are both Hope alum and attend our church in San Marino. They invited us over for dinner on Friday for a Hope gathering. Tony and Christen, Katie, Noel and I enjoyed a great dinner, game time, and conversation with Bob and Carole. They are such a blessing to us.

Katie is married to Joey, who we have made an honorary Hope alum, but he went to Cornerstone. I guess that's an okay school as well...at least he didn't go to Calvin! We try not to only talk about Hope when we're together so he doesn't feel left out, but its very hard!
It's neat to be able to make so many connections here just from attending Hope. We are very proud to have attended such a great institution!

Thanksgiving

We had a fantastic Thanksgiving celebration this year. We've spent the past 3 Thanksgivings with large groups of people, which ended up being mostly people we didn't know. We felt like doing something a lot simpler this year and just had dinner with Tony and Christen. It was a really fun day. Tony and Christen brought a few dishes and I made a few dishes. We spent the day watching the Lions (quite depressing!), eating, playing Canasta, and watching Christmas vacation.

Sitting down to the feast.
Showing off both my new baking dish and my totally from scratch stuffing (it was an experiment, but turned out pretty well!).
We're so thankful the Bordenkircher's are here. We love hanging out with them and getting to know them better. Yea for fellow Hope grads!

Not at fault!

I received a call from State Farm a couple of days ago declaring that I was NOT at fault in the car accident! Yippee! What a relief! I no longer have to worry about our insurance going up or having something on my record. As for the deductible, it's quite a long process. The total loss has to be completely settled (the car auctioned off), then go to collections, then work through disputes if there are any (which I'm sure there will be). So, we're looking at probably 6-9 months before we get reimbursed. By that time, it'll be a nice surprise in the mail since we probably won't be expecting it! Anyway, we are relieved and excited to be able to put this (mostly) behind us.

Vegetarian

A couple of weeks ago, I felt very convicted to be vegetarian for the month of November. I can't explain where the feeling came from, but I couldn't shake it and so I decided to give it a try. It's actually something I've been toying with for a while, but just keep pushing it to the back of my mind. I don't eat a lot of meat in general, so it's not a big change, but so far I am really enjoying it. I'm using this month to read and research more about it and try and figure out if it's something I want to commit to 100% or maybe just 90/10 or 80/20. I just can't shake the statistics about how much more energy and land it takes to produce meat for human consumption than grain, veggies, beans, etc. Pretty shocking. Especially when there are millions of people starving in this world. Any thoughts?

Driving

I still have days when I hate driving, but yesterday I was feeling really good about getting in the car and running errands by myself. I felt like I actually even liked our new car, which is the first feeling of fondness I've had towards it. I needed to take the 210 highway to get to my destination. As I was driving along in the right lane of the 6 lane highway, suddenly a flock of about 6 big white birds (maybe seagulls, I don't know) flew up from the shoulder and started hovering just over the right lane. They weren't too far in front of me and I had no time to change lanes. I started panicking, but thought, "Birds always fly out of the way...I'll be fine". But, these birds were a bit slow or something and I NAILED one with the windshield and killed it. Luckily the windshield didn't break. The bird just left a big smear on the windshield. I am once again freaked out to drive. Darn birds.