Quickly

I have just a few minutes before running out the door to  after Bible Study so I wanted to post a little note here to share what  has been going on the past several days!

• Having our stuff back after all this time has been wonderful.  I'm loving all the baking I can do with an oven and I'm nearly overwhelmed with tools to use in my kitchen. It's been a long time since I enjoyed  cooking this much. Love it!
• We had a grill in our shipment and it's already gotten a lot of use.  I have a husband that loves to grill and that makes for some great, easy meals.  We even took it over to our friend's house for a July 4th party!  
• We had a fun party with friends (a few other Americans, some Indonesians, and even a Brit) to celebrate Independence Day last Sunday.  We played games, laughed, ate hamburgers and hot dogs, and the kids played in water.  Then on the actual fourth of July, we set off a few bottle rockets for the girls.  They were so excited!
• The septic tank for our kitchen and laundry room is in horrible shape and we've known it was going to need work for a while.  So, because the pipes in the kitchen were leaking, we are in the process of totally re-doing the whole thing....which entails a lot of digging.  So, our yard is kinda off-limits for kids (boo!)...and so is washing dishes and doing laundry (yay!).  Luckily, our bathrooms have their own septic tanks.  This could be much worse.  Hopefully, it will be all fixed before the laundry and dishes completely overtake the house, but I love a good excuse not to work ;-)
• Our water pump also decided to explode last night.  It's patched now and working fine.  We were just wondering when this sort of stuff was going to start happening.  
• One of the things that "disappeared" from our shipment was a box full of spices.  Argh!  After all the time and money invested into making sure I had every spice I could possibly need here, it's pretty frustrating. But I have to say, that's one of the few things that went missing and everything is in pretty good shape.  Guess this is a time to just be thankful it wasn't worse, because it so could have been worse.
• No, we didn't get a dog yet. That fell through.  I think it's for the best anyway.  We'll get one someday, but to be honest, I'm a bit sad to have yet another dog that we will eventually have to give up.  Seriously, our family is still very much missing Duke - we talk about him just about every day. Good grief, I still miss Maya (our German Shepherd in Ecuador).  And there are other dogs we've left in our wake.  Why add another to the list?  True, we have no - and I do mean NO - plans of moving for a long time but we can only control that so much.  Maybe I just need a little more time to feel settled here. Maybe after we get back from our two-month return to language school....