Whenever it gets hard to be away from Chicago and friends, I just convince someone to come out here and see me!

My friend Kim is coming to visit for a long weekend. She gets in tonight and I'm so excited to spend time with her. For a year we were Sunday lunch buddies and cooked together at her apartment after church.

of all my friends, she the most beach-loving, so we'll be heading there at least a couple times.

Oak Street Beach, Chicago

Tonight, we're going to C-level to eat and watch the sunset. Then heading over to the Old Globe to see Emma, the musical.

Also planned for the weekend: brunch at The Brockton Villa, La Jolla shopping, Orfila wine tasting, Elfin Forest hiking, and lots of laying in the sun.

(the weather looks like it will cooperate)

house disaster (proceed with caution)

On Saturday morning, out of the blue, we discovered an unwelcome substance in the closet: Mold.

Eric had an old belt on the floor of his closet that was just coated in it. It had turned green and white, and was so disgusting we were gagging. You guys can all thank me that we threw it out so fast I wasn't able to take a photo of it.

Commence freak out.

And begin to empty entire closet. and find more mold.

(if you don't want to see any of these pictures, you may want to skip the rest of this post)

We ripped out the carpet pieces laid in the closet (our closets are about an inch raised off the bedroom carpeted floor and extra pieces of carpeting were cut for the closet floors and just laid in them), only to find this:

From then on it was just like a bad movie. We started pulling out things from our other closets, in our bedroom and office. And wouldn't you know. Every single closet was infested.

Things we don't often pull out--like luggage, old school books, board games, and old clothes. Everything smelled gross and musty, and a lot of things had mold spores on them.

Somewhere in the midst of this, we called our landlord. He said he'd have an inspector come out early this week (hopefully today?) to see if he could figure out where moisture was getting in.

Most of this mold has to be somewhat recent because it wasn't all on old/unused stuff.

Bu it just seemed like once we started looking, we found in places we couldn't believe we hadn't noticed it before (inside a kitchen closet, on the baseboards).

E's blazer

Lots of stuff ruined, some stuff salvageable with a lot of effort

Eric started unloading the contents of every closet, inspecting items.  We started throwing things in piles: garbage, try-to-salvage, just needs a wash, and seems ok.

Anything that smelled I set out in the sun.

I started the laundry, adding baking soda and vinegar to each load, and hung things to dry:

(SO thankful for a sunny day!)

Then I made a bleach and hot water solution and we started sponging down every surface in the closets.  Looking back, we probably should have gotten gloves and a mask, but I just wanted to get it done. Every fan on in the house, every window open.

I can't believe I'm going to share these pictures, but this is what the house looked like in process.

5 hours of emptying, scrubbing, bleaching, laundrying, sunning.

I had done about 6 loads of laundry at this point and sometime after dinner (Eric's mom brought us In 'n Out--life saving!) we just quit.

Sunday was spent trying to put our lives/house back together.

Apparently you can't find dehumidifiers in SoCal (who would expect humidity?) so we stocked every closet with cedar blocks and moisture absorbing crystals something like this.

I did more laundry and we started to carefully restock (it was a good opportunity to purge!), leaving the floors clear, doors open, and still running fans. Not everything is put back together, but we're getting there.

I imagine we'll be paranoid for a while(even if it turns out to be a fixable problem). We rotate the fans every night and leave the ceiling fans on all day.

I feel like this is only a tiny taste of what home ownership will be like. yikes!

Xapa!

I have an infinitely higher respect for all seminary students since starting a Greek I class this term.Yep, biblical (Hellenic) Greek is on the docket for this spring.  I'm taking it for credit, primarily in order to keep up with the work. (I knew it would be too hard to learn it without having committed to doing the exercises..and it's really hard to do homework/take quizzes if I'm not taking it for credit.)

2 weeks in and I have memorized 30 vocab words, 4 noun paradigms and 2 verbs conjugations. (well, memorize is used loosely)

Did I mention that I'm not even using the English alphabet letters (The word alphabet, ironically enough is made of the first two greek letters: Alpha and Beta!)

Eric will continue to say "I told you so" and "It's not that hard, just wait until you get to xxx" while I slave at the kitchen table in the evenings, but I'm really enjoying it.

Eric preached from Galatians 1:1-5 on Sunday and I was able to follow along in his Greek NT and knew about 8 of the words he read.(exciting!)
ps. you can listen to his sermon here


Some Present Deponent Indicative verb conjugations :-)

In the meantime, you'll find me with flashcards in my pocket wherever I go! (including in the ride lines at Disneyland yesterday)

ps. the subject of this post is pronounced Chara (with a guttural k) and it means joy in Greek :-)

An Update: 2010

Well since I directed everyone here on our Christmas postcards, I thought I better do a 2010 recap in case you were hoping for a little more of an update!
(I should also do a better job of posting in general...)

This year was a year of settling (after last year was a lot of change and transition for us)

• I feel totally at home in California now (obviously, Eric is happy here) :-) We've started to put more things up on the walls in the house and feel more comfortable there.
  
• I've gotten settled into my job better, and this spring started doing some recruitment travel.  So far I've only done recruiting to the midwest (IL and MI), but that's fine with me as I get to see family and friends! It's a fun change of pace to my normal routine. (I will travel 4-5 times a year)
  
• I started gardening and am still figuring a lot of things out about the soil, California weather, and plants. I recently planted a winter garden, which I'll blog about soon. (So fun to grow things Dec-Feb!)
  
• We've made some really good friends from the seminary--two couples from the south! We tease each other about our accents and vocabulary, have games nights, dinners and bonfires.
  
• I still enjoy cooking, but have done less in the last few months with a really busy schedule.
  
• We spent a week in Colorado this summer at a family reunion with the Klunders.
  
• We're still involved in our church's youth group that meets weekly all year.  Eric's teaching 9th grade catechism as well.  Eric was also asked to speak at the winter retreat of the regional youth groups this coming February.

We hope this finds all of our loved ones well, and hope to stay in touch with you one way or the other throughout the year!

Blessings,

Eric & Katie

A bookclub

Last summer, with E so busy studying, I decided to pick up reading again and just grabbed something that looked interesting off his bookshelf: The Age of Innocence. So I brought it to work to read on my lunch break.

Barb, a co-worker joined me in the lunch room a few minutes later and commented that she had just began reading the same book, so we started chatting about it.

Then another co-worker joined us, and was curious about our book discussion. It turns out he is extremely well-read, and had read Age of Innocence several times.

We started discussing our progress in the book regularly at lunches, and when we finished the first book, I mentioned that I thought it was time I finally started reading Harry Potter (since it is one of my husband's favorite book series).

We all agreed to read the together--although Dan(the 2nd co-worker) had already read them several times. After discussing the books gradually at lunches, we decided to have an official meeting to discuss the whole series.

And that is how our book club began!

Each of us takes a turn picking out a book and leads the discussion. We usually hold our meetings at each other's houses.I've been really enjoying the variety of books that have been chosen.

Since we started last July, we added another member--the wife of faculty member who is also an avid reader.

Here are some of the other books we've gone through so far:

The Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics)

Olive Kitteridge

The Pastures of Heaven (Twentieth-Century Classics)

I've grown a lot as a reader and as a person through discussing novels with this group. I would highly recommend finding a few other avid reader you look up to and forming a club of your own!

Bomb Factory in town

Lots of excitement going on in Esco today.

A guy was making bombs in his home in town(which is just around the corner from our Saturday morning coffee shop and my usual grocery store.) It was reported that it was the largest amount of bomb-making material ever found in the US.

I took this picture of the street on Saturday on my way to coffee

Last week they detonated a few of the bombs (and shut down a major freeway for half the morning).

Today they're doing a controlled burning of the house because of the explosives they believe to be inside.

We're going to follow it live here: http://www.signonsandiego.com/bomb-house/

You can catch up on the story here: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/20/powerful-homemade-explosives-found-north-county-ho/

we're not in any danger, but it's definitely been the excitement of the week.

Departure of the Deciduous

I come bearing sad news.  Or, rather, you have arrived to read my sad news.

This weekend we had to say goodbye to one of my favorite things about the house we're renting: our big backyard tree

Our landlord had arranged to have someone trim it over the weekend and when he stopped by after the trimming he realized that 1. the trimmers had butchered the tree (chopped off the top and left the low hanging side branches that were supposed to be removed) and 2. the tree's trunk disease had gotten bad enough that its large branches would like fall and could do some real damage.

So he called us while we were both out on Saturday and let us know it had to go.

I didn't realize how few pictures we have of our backyard until I started looking for them!
Here is one taken the evening we invited our church's youth group over for a bonfire last September.

< The tree covered about 2/3 of our backyard (on the west side of the house) and provided total afternoon shade. We rarely turned on our air conditioner because our house was so well-protected from the sun. I've been looking online to see if I could figure out what kind of a tree it was and it might be some species of oak. Our landlord was apologetic, but there wasn't much we could do about it. I pouted and watched out the window while they cut it down, branch by branch

And then, it was over.

Our kitchen is three times as bright, but I think i would give up my sunlight to have that tree back.

I'm trying to look on the bright side (literally--there much more sunlight in our house, and a chance for grass to grow again) but this morning it looked no less sad and lonely.

I'm not sure anything's going to be done about the stump for a while--does anyone have suggestions about how I could make it a little less ugly? (a pot with a hanging plant?)