www.engrish.com

I'm married to the man of my dreams. It's been almost 8 years since we met at the TMC Chorale retreat in August of 1999 and 7 1/2 since our first date in February of 2000. It's been almost 5 years since the day he proposed in September of 2002 and 4 years today from when we took our vows, June 25, 2003.



I love my John for so many reasons and I discover more almost everyday. He is kind and gentle yet strong and uncompromising. He is loyal and honest and the truest of friends. He is a man of the Word and of worship. He is an effective worship leader who knows his theology. He is faithful to our church and happy to serve.

He is ferociously talented and genuinely humble. This is one of the things I love best. He can outsing, outplay, outproduce, outlead, outcompose just about anybody but he would always prefer to honor someone else. He never considers a service opportunity to be below him and he submits to what the leadership has asked of him, regardless of style or preference. He has had ample opportunity to brag but I have never heard him take one. When complimented he thanks graciously and is quick to give honor to the Lord and the other musicians involved. When criticized, he does not respond in self-pity or anger, but rather listens, applies any truth and moves on without holding a grudge. I've even seen him giggle when he has been unreasonably attacked.

He is a man of integrity, unwilling to bring dishonor to his Savior or his family. He is a disciplined and hard worker. He is punctual and respectful of other people's time. He is confident in who he is and does not tend to be a people pleaser. He is creative and he is consistent.

He has a hilarious sense of humor and the most contagious laugh. He's able to both laugh at himself and entertain a crowd.

He is a godly husband. He shepherds me gently with understanding and protection. He is loving when he compliments or corrects me. I love that he is not afraid to correct me. He tells me the truth and keeps my feet on the ground, while making me feel treasured. He is ultra romantic and loves to surprise me. He is a good steward of our finances and our home, but he is not cheap or stingy always willing to give to others. On many occasions he has gone without so that he could supply the need of a friend. What I love most is that He points me to Christ. He lives each day as a sacrifice of worship and inspires others to do the same. He is a MAN AFTER GOD'S OWN HEART AND HE CONTINUALLY WINS MINE.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MY LOVE!
Today I love you much more than yesterday and much less than tomorrow...

.....As we got older and less inclined to hang out with our parents we loved to designate an empty site as the "youth site." We wouldn't set up any tents or anything like that, we would just make sure it was supplied with firewood. Every evening we'd bring over snacks, sodas and a boom box and hang out for hours talking, laughing, telling stories and singing our favorite worship songs. It was basically the same group that hung out every summer during those years, plus or minus a few. We'd pretty much stay out of trouble except for the occasional noise warning, but there was one year we decided to go to the beach after hours. We all piled in the back of Larry Roe's truck and drove down the hill to the beach to play capture the flag. To my recollection, we had played only 15 minutes when Ranger Roy drove up to scold us for breaking the rules. It was a thrilling trek into the wild world of rule breaking.....



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.....For many years Family Camp was around the first week of July. In the green state of Washington, the 4th of July weekend is statistically the rainiest weekend of the year. Consequently, we had alot of rainy Family Camps. The dads (I'm sure led by my Dad and Jim Martin) would rig up tarps all over the camp ground so that you could walk from site to site and never be in the rain. It was a site to see. The whole group campground had an odd blue glow and the rain sounded about 20x louder than normal....but it was super cool. If Google earth had a feature where you could see satellite photos from the past, I'd look up Camano Island State Park Campground in July of 1990. I wonder if we threw off any overhead flights or attracted NASA's attention.....



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Makin’ it Easy - Food Network
Serves: 2-3

Sauce
2/3 cup apricot preserves
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons ketchup
6 slices unpeeled fresh ginger
Freshly squeezed juice from 1/2 a lemon
 
So it has time to cool, make the sauce before starting the chicken. Combine the preserves, soy sauce, ketchup, and ginger in a small microwave-safe bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and microwave on high until the preserves melt, about 30 seconds. Stir in lemon juice and let cool.

Chicken
6-8 boneless, skinless chicken breast tenders (or just breasts cut into 3rds)
2 cups panko (Japanese coarse bread crumbs)
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus additional for seasoning
3 large eggs
Vegetable oil for frying
Freshly ground black pepper
1 lemon, cut into wedges

1. Set a rack on a baking sheet, put it in the oven and preheat to 200 F. Toss the panko, lemon zest and 2 teaspoons salt in a shallow bowl or pie plate. Beat the eggs lightly in another.

2. Heat about 1/2 inch oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Season the chicken with the salt and pepper to taste, dip in the eggs, and then press into the bread crumb mixture to coat evenly, shaking off any excess. Carefully place the chicken in the hot oil, taking care not to crowd the pan. Adjust the heat as necessary to maintain a constant sizzle. Fry the chicken, a few pieces at a time, turning once, until evenly brown, about 5 minutes total. Keep cooked fingers warm in the oven on the rack. Repeat with the rest of the chicken. Serve hot with lemon wedges and the dipping sauce.

Mountain View Pictures
Presents:

Fritz Vs. The Sprinkler

.....There were always various non-serious injuries that occurred at family camp, most of them not significant enough to remember. Of course there were plenty of sunburns, scrapes, bruises and bug bites, but there are 2 injuries that stick out in my memory.

Sometime around the very first family camp we were sitting around the fire roasting marshmallows and no doubt singing silly songs when Beth's marshmallow caught fire. She swung her roasting stick up fast to blow out the fire before it turned a perfectly roasted mallow into a charred smokey mess. The flaming mallow flew right off the stick and stuck right on her cheek! I don't know if Beth remembers this happening or not. In fact, I don't remember the actual event at all, but every time I roast marshmallows I think to myself, "beware the flying flaming mallow."

Another injury began with an innocent bike ride around the loop. Kaleo and I were planning to ride on the cliff trail through the forest and as we rode out of her site, her mom yelled after us, "don't ride your bike in flip-flops!" "Pfft." I thought. "What could happ...AHHHH" About 25 feet up the loop the gear slipped and my foot slid right off the pedal and into the front wheel wedging my big toe between the bar and spokes. "Don't panic," I thought, "just pull it back out." Yank. Yank. "Oh no..." The toe was stuck and I was caught precariously balancing with one foot on the ground and the other stuck in the wheel. Fortunately, Rico Figueroa came to my rescue twisting the toe till it popped out. It started as a pretty weird looking dent then quickly swelled up to look like a sausage that had been microwaved too long. And so began the curse of the big toe. From that day on, my toe suffered the majority of my injuries and to this day still gets achy on rainy days. I'll tell you one thing, I don't ride my bike in flip-flops anymore.....



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....Once we set up camp....well I'm pretty sure we helped set up camp, at least in the later years. Most likely there were many years when we would jump out of the boat and run straight to the Bradford's or the Figueroa's campsites. In the group campground the church reserved every summer there were about 12 big sites on a loop road with a parking area in the middle, an amphitheater on one side and the stinkiest outhouses in the world on the other. It was in the middle of the forest with all kinds of fun trails and was only about a 10 minute hike from the beach. Each site was large enough to hold 2-4 families and we filled most of them up every summer.

I remember when we bought our family tent. It was at a camping/outdoors store in Everett and Dad got one that was so durable, I think they still have it some 20 years later. It was beige and burgundy and big enough to fit all 5 of us, but I think we were squished pretty close together. It felt like it was huge probably because it was tall enough for my Dad to stand up straight in it. Of course, the older we got the smaller it felt. No one else had a tent like it and I've never seen another since. One summer Amy got her own tent. She had worked for months at one of those points programs where if you sell enough items you get to use your accumulated points to buy whatever you want out of the catalogue. She got herself a gray and blue single man dome tent. She set it up back a ways from the family tent and I remember she, Ang and Renee spending hours talking and giggling inside that tiny tent. It was so cool.

We had alot of traditions that we looked forward to every summer. From devotional meetings with camp songs and flannelgraphs to clam chowder cook-offs using freshly dug clams (eventually evolved into chili cook-offs) to beach game day. But my favorite tradition of all was campfire time. Every evening we would all gather in different sites and play cards or tell stories or just watch the fire, but inevitably our site would gather the largest crowd as Dad broke out the guitar. We'd sing silly songs that only Dad could remember all the lyrics to. "Crabs walk sideways and lobsters walk straight so we won't let you taker her for your mate" , "I knows it, knows it, indeed I knows it broder, I knows it, WEE, dem bones gonna rise again" , "Sweet Violet, sweeter than all the roses, covered all over from head to toe, covered all over with sweet violets" and many more. Then one year we discovered Patrick F. McManus. From then on, every year Dad would get out his clip on book light and read a chapter or two. I think we would have read more, but it took so long to get through that much for all the laughter that we couldn't take any more. Some of our favorite chapters were Strange Meets Matilda Jean, The Night the Bear Ate Goomba, and A Fine and Pleasant Misery. I can just picture it now, about 20 of us all gathered around one small fire howling as Dad squeezed out as much sentence as he could, becoming each character, before bursting into laughter, his deep voice reaching new tenor heights as he attempted to read on. I've listened to some of the stories on tape recently and I'm pretty sure I didn't get alot of the humor, but I loved when Dad read them.......

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Some of my favorite childhood memories were made at family camp and I hope that my someday kids will have the joy of making camping memories too. This summer, we're gonna try to start the JLM camping tradition with our first kid, the Fritz. But until then....

Every summer, when I was a kid in WA, my family would pack up the car and homemade trailer and head out for the annual church family camp on Camano Island. As is true with most memorable family vacations the hilarity started much sooner than the first drive of the tent spike into the dirt. For many years we had a "very comfortable" car we affectionately referred to as The Boat, not only because it was ginormous and blue, but also because every one of us was confident that if we were to ever have an accident where we ended up in a body of water - we'd float. I always thought we should have kept oars and fishing poles in the enormous trunk so that if said accident ever occurred, we could just row back to shore and catch some fish on the way. Anyway, for the years we owned the boat, we also owned a custom, single wheeled, homemade trailer that my Dad, AKA MacGyver, had rigged with a bike rack. Now, the boat was already exactly 1 inch longer than the 17 passenger vans my school used to bus around the basketball team and with the trailer....I'm sure we would have qualified as a semi in some states. If we had to stop at a store on the way to pick up last minute items, we'd have to look for 2 parking spots back to back or a bus parking spot at the far end of the lot. To add to the humor of our already odd transportation, we would load up our 3 ten-speeds and Dad would somehow manage to wedge the mattress from the hide-a-bed, all rolled up like a burrito, in between the bikes so that it sat awkwardly protruding out past all 6 wheels. Fortunately, the drive to Camano Island wasn't that long and Dad was apparently a rope-ninja, so the bikes, mattress and trailer all made it to the campsite intact. I don't remember much about backing the boat/trailer into the campsite, but until we got the trailer unhitched, the trunk unpacked, and the boat moved to the parking lot (in the longest spot, mind you) I'm pretty sure we blocked the group-site-loop from any other normal sized cars trying to get through. Good thing my Dad was also a packer/unpacker-ninja........


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um.....
www.engrish.com

Nothing like going to Disneyland with 6 kids between the ages of 8 months and 5 years. I've never spent so much time in Fantasyland....

It's a totally different experience with little kids. John and I had annual passes for 3 years and would go at least once a month....but we never had to consider naps, height limits, scare levels, or where the characters were at any given time. I've never left Disneyland so tired, but it was so worth it. To see the kids' faces light up as they discovered each new magical facet of the happiest place on earth was, well, magical!

We gotta get our passes again...

More Pictures

Gardening is great. I've always enjoyed it...but never had much time for it. I would spend an entire weekend working on the yard about twice a year and always end up with little to show for it. But NOW that I'm home in the afternoons I get to really garden! I love it! Below are some pics from this Spring's garden.

March 3, 2007




May 30, 2007