Trip pix

Well--here are some of Alec's pix, with minimal commentary where needed.

Caro, Tony & Chris, before scuba diving

Canden, Elie, Stephanie & Samuel

Hana and Denis (Isa's younger brother)

With Sylvio, Marianne, & Alec

Singing at the Cascavelle Church

Jonathan, Caro, Coline, Tony, Noah & Joey

Isa & the luckiest guy in the world

The Chorale in Marseille

Philippe, Dolores, Nathan, Katie & Craig

Craig, Chris & the Algerians

Emilie, Katie, Esther & Craig

Chapelle Du Fuveau, Marseille, France

Chris & Justin Dauner, our host

Chris & Craig at the Continental Divide

Not Dead Yet

Whew! Where did November go? Oh yeah, let's see...let me summarize here. I almost went 0 for November on posts but I will sneak this one in and try to cover the highlights and lowlights.

First let me explain that I was out of the country until November 15, and now I'm home alone. Yes, I left my family on some island somewhere. So life is a wholly different set of concerns for me than what I'm used to. No more brushing Julia's teeth, washing Julia's hands, encouraging Julia's toilet training efforts, reading Julia's books to her, etc. No more clowning around with Chloe, holding her hands while Chloe practices walking, etc. No more kissing and other activities with Isabelle. For the time being, that is. I am reduced to picking up after myself, cooking for or otherwise feeding myself, clothing and doing laundry for myself, and finding ways to spend my time all by myself.

I was single for 35 years before getting married, but somehow I can't just slide back into my old habits. I am managing to watch football I care about on TV again, but otherwise, I can't imagine how I used to watch so much football I didn't care about or other crap on TV. Nor can I imagine spending entire evenings playing word games via the Internet (WordOx and Scrabble). I like having my family dominate my time and energy, it turns out.

So, this Thanksgiving weekend, I had a pretty good one. An extended African American family at our church invited me to join them for their feast on Thursday itself. They told me to come hungry and I'm glad I did because it was delicious.

Friday, I had to work, and I thought I would get out early enough to join a Hungarian gathering at the home of some others from church. But things didn't work out like I expected and I missed it, so I crunched leaves in the yard with my mower (leaf blowing and/or bagging is for saps, it turns out). Then I came back inside and decided to watch ABC News. Only it turned out that the Nebraska-Colorado game which I had forgotten about was just winding down. I hope you got to see the highlights. Nebraska's kicker, Henery, booted a 57 yard field goal to put Nebraska ahead 33-31 with about two minutes left, which is when I started watching. On the second or third play, Colorado's QB had his pass batted up in the air, and a great big defensive lineman grabbed it, and started rumbling for the end zone. For many of us, this caused flashbacks to a game against Texas Tech a couple of years ago that would have been won by Nebraska had a defensive lineman who got his hands on the ball in the last minute simply fallen to the ground to clinch the victory but who instead fumbled the ball and the game away. But this time, our big guy took off and had only the QB to beat. The QB caught him, but got stiff armed and bounced right off our guy's legs, and our guy took it on in to seal the victory. It was a great finish.

So then on Saturday, I got out early and crunched some more leaves. Oh yeah--this is all in response to a letter I got from the city of Crestwood while I was out of the country stating that I was in violation of a statute requiring that I keep my yard in a "clean, safe and sanitary condition" by having "limbs and debris" in my back yard. Sanitary? Really? Anyway I got the log pile in pretty good shape and mowed behind it for the first time in a while, and I went out and mowed behind the back fence which had been cleared of much of its brush when Isabelle's sister was here. Then I remembered that oh, yeah, isn't the cable that supplies my house out here exposed by the sidewalk somewhere back here? Yes it is, and sure enough, I severed it. Panic set in. No Internet!? No cable TV (no big deal). No Vonage!!! I called my electrician to see if he could stop by on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, but when he didn't answer, I decided to try to fix it myself. The first couple of attempts were unsuccessful but then the third time I was out of slack and I left a bit more wire exposed and it worked! Whew. I hope it holds up. I'm almost ready to give up on the cable company, but not any second like that.

Today, I managed to get some packages in the mail, and do a little Christmas shopping. How did I ever fall so far behind on blogging? I'm also behind on phone calls I need to make. I am on the phone with Isabelle daily. And Saturday morning we had a webcam session and got to see each other which was a treat.

Last weekend, I attended a guys weekend in Harrisburg, home of Lance. Scott and Mike also came. Scott and Ann's blog has a link right over there and they have a cute new little guy named Nathaniel to keep them hopping. Mike works at GM so there may be hard times ahead there. Scott, Lance and I went to church there where Lance is a member at Harrisburg Christian Church and it was cool to take it all in since the Christian Churches are first cousins to the Churches of Christ where I am a member.

Before that was the trip. As I mentioned in my last post, we (our family) had a few days in Northern France, and then we and Alec Hill had eight days in Mauritius, and then Alec and I had eight days in Marseille with a visit to the Ardeche reason in the middle of France.

I will do justice to the trip in upcoming posts with photos from Alec's camera, since I could not do justice to it otherwise. Isabelle has our camera.

I should be able to find time to do this again before Christmas....Dad visits then...there's a CFS (Christian Family Services) trivia contest on Dec. 7....I hope to visit Tom in Mt. Carmel the weekend of Dec. 14...Mom visits sometime...

Heading Out

We are almost out the door. Tomorrow morning we will be on our way to the airport for a big, big trip. Yes, we Mauritian-Americans are about to live up to our moniker. But not without a few built-in detours.

Tomorrow we start in St. Louis, and then via Chicago and London, we will find ourselves in Paris, hoping to make it the rest of the way to our dear friends' Alisa and Frederic's home an hour away. See their link to the left for a window into what's in store.

Wednesday, we return to London and meet up with our good friend and dear brother Alec Hill, also from St. Louis. From there, we take the twelve hour flight to Mauritius. Over the last few months, numerous rendezvous's with us have uncovered Alec's gift for language and given him a reasonable foundation for being Christ's ambassador from Mid-County to its mission works in Mauritius and Marseille, France.

On November 8, Alec and I will make our way to Marseille. We believe some tremendous time of mutual encouragement is in store for us, and we are especially looking forward to visiting Camp Harmonie in the French Alps and serving in whatever way we can.

At the same time, a huge void in my person will begin to be felt as Isabelle, Julia and Chloe will be staying in Mauritius until January 23. Alec and I will return to St. Louis on November 15.

Look for some posts along the way over the next three weeks. I wonder if our country will look the same after three weeks of additional financial havoc and a quite spirited presidential election. May God our rock enable us to weather the storm.

That's Our House!

I don't know if everyone knows to do this, but click "That's Our House" above to see what I'm talking about. Clicking "Stanley" below takes you to a CNN story that was the basis for that post, but clicking "That's Our House" takes you to a public 360 view from the middle of our street that includes our house, courtesy of Google maps (you may have to click the A, and then "Street View"). I checked my friend's house in Detroit, and there's a view right in front of his house also (Dave, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get ya...) but I checked my Dad's house in Lincoln, Nebraska and the closest you could get was the nearest major thoroughfare.

Isabelle is gone with the girls visiting Grandma. So lonely...so lonely...so lonely.......

Alive and Thriving

David Allen Harrison is not the kind of name you want to try to track down on the internet. When his AOL address, MTMDavid@aol.com (MTM = Marvin The Martian), went defunct about 9 years ago, I lost touch with him, a former college roommate. At the time I last saw him, in 1998, he was about to get married.

I went to great lengths to try to connect with him again, even signing up at Classmates.com for his high school class with the name Marvin Martian. No luck.

Well, this spring, after I had given up, another former college roommate of both Dave's and mine at different times managed to track Dave down via Linked In, the social network for career professionals. So we found out that he was living in Beaverton, OR. Isabelle and the kids and I were already planning to visit my sister Courtney in Cottage Grove, so we worked in a visit with Dave and his family. Yesterday he and his wife Cindy celebrated their tenth anniversary, and their five-year-old twins, Leah and Samantha, start kindergarten today.

We just got back from the trip yesterday. Here are some photos.

Chloe and Julia on the beach

Us at Crater Lake

Aunt Courtney and Her Nieces

Stanley?

Black gold. Oil, that is. North Dakota tee.

What? We won't see any new Beverly Hillbillies, but I am forecasting a number of Phoenix Farmers.

I actually did live in western North Dakota for a summer during the last supposed oil boom, which turned out to be a bust. In the summer of 1982 when I was 14, I lived with my grandparents, worked at my Aunt and Uncle's drive-in restaurant, The Twist, and played baseball in Watford City. Stanley was one of the teams we played, so I've been there. I couldn't tell you the first detail about it though.

I'm just hoping that when it's all said and done, everybody remembers that you cannot serve God and money.

Three Babes and a Daddy

We finally got some recent photos off our camera and onto our PC. Am I a lucky guy or what?


I've decided that I have no problem if Julia wants to play hard to get, even with me.


Chloe, on the other hand, is still permitted to be a pushover for now.


Mama has to watch her step, for obvious reasons...

Our Little Flyers

Well, we made it to North Dakota and back, but not without a mishap or two or three.

As usual, we were scrambling to get out of the house to catch our plane. I was collecting the packed bags and putting them in the car, the same bags we took to Florida in May for a trip one day shorter in duration. To my surprise, our carry on bag was empty. Isabelle claimed we didn't need it. It was getting too late to argue but I did express my concern over whatever was in that bag for our May trip that was not coming with us for this trip.

We made it to the airport, and to our plane bound for the Twin Cities. Everything was going fine, Julia by the window, me holding Chloe in the middle, and Isabelle on the aisle with her tray down for the three drinks we had just been served. Then I noticed a two-tone effect in Julia's jeans that I hadn't noticed before. Remembering that she had guzzled down the contents of her travel cup which had been full of sugar-free lemonade rather than water, I quickly surmised what had happened.

Isabelle reacted with greater surprise than I expected and even disbelief. Uh oh. You guessed it--no carry on bag, no change of clothes for Julia. So we made the best of it. I held Isabelle's tray with our drinks on it while Isabelle squeezed out of the seat and stood up in the aisle. Now I had to figure out how to get Julia over to Isabelle while holding Chloe. So I decided to put Chloe in Isabelle's seat. As I did that Chloe straightened up and managed to kick the full cup of Pepsi all over Isabelle's seat.

Things were getting desperate. I had the only dry seat left. We cleaned up Isabelle's seat, and put down a couple of blankets, got Julia out of her wet jeans and sat back down and drank our remaining drinks. Gladly, we were in the second row from the back. But, the flight was almost over and Julia's jeans were still soaked. We decided we had to put them back on Julia while we went through the MSP airport looking for toddler clothes. As I was putting Julia's jeans back on her, she saw that they were wet and began repeating, rather loudly, "It's dirty...It's dirty...It's dirty..."

We did find a nice Elmo outfit for $12 in the airport and got Julia all cleaned up and changed. Then, at the gate for our next plane, just as we heard the first boarding announcement, we discovered that both our girls needed their diapers changed, pronto. I changed Julia there on the floor, without any trouble. Then as Isabelle changed Chloe, Julia observed the obvious, and began repeating, again quite loudly, "It's yucky...It's yucky...It's yucky..."

As might be expected, from then on our flight experiences only got better.

Avis Rosella Rogness, 7/24/1916 - 6/21/2008

We are on our way to North Dakota to pay our respects to my dear grandmother.

Goodbye, Grandma.

Whistler's Mother's Son

Doesn't everyone have some superhero quality? I'm not that tall, or that strong, or that fast, but there is something at which I am unsurpassed as far as I know. So that makes it rather unofficial, I realize, but still...

The other night I stopped by the cleaners' to pick up my shirts and pants. I wear stuff over and over in the winter time, but with Chloe around they get stinky for reasons that aren't directly my fault, but anyway...

I stepped up to the counter, and the lady behind it, exclaimed, "Whose are these?" and pointed at a handful of freshly cleaned clothes on hangers sitting on the rack right there. "They must be hers!" she continued, as she gestured towards a car that was backing out of the parking space directly in front of the door, windows up (as far as I could tell).

I sprung into action. I walked out the front door, and, as she had just shifted the car out of reverse and into drive, I whistled. Twice. Loud. She looked at me, and I pointed at her clothes, and she smiled, nodded and parked.

"Thanks," she said sheepishly as she walked in and got her clothes. "No problem," I replied. Later the cleaning store lady thanked me again. "I sure can't whistle like that," she said. No she can't. :-)

Eating, Etc.

Here are our little girls in action. I hope this makes you smile as much as they make us smile every day.

Material Girls and Boys in the Spiritual World

Remember the Police? We Are Spirits in the Material World. They were too cool. Isabelle got me a DVD of all their videos the Christmas before last. Walking on the Moon, So Lonely, etc. They perk me right up.

But how about it? How often does anyone really recognize either of these paradoxes (Being Spirits in the Material World or being Materials in the Spiritual World)? It's so easy just going along being material in the material world.

Last night we went to Target, and I browsed the Blu-Ray selection, which I last visited before Christmas so we would have a few good flicks for our new Blu-Ray player that we got for Christmas to go along with our new HD TV. Most movies were 24.99, 29.99 or 34.99, which was OK for Christmas, but more than I wanted to pay. Then, there it was: T2, $14.99. That's Arnold. Schwarzenegger. In his prime. #73 on imdb.com's top 250. I already have The Terminator, on DVD (#188). A no-brainer, right? Less than the price of 2 tickets to the actual movies for a high-def version of one of my favorite movies of all time, which we can watch on a projector with surround sound.

$16 (with tax). So we can stay home and watch it for 2+ hours, every once in a while. Oh and so we can watch the first one for 2 hours also just prior, most likely, also.

Does anyone else have a budget? We do. That's our material contract with ourselves. But it's a bit preposterous, isn't it? How many people in the world never see $16 at one time? That just slid right into our disposable income. I don't want to think about it.

Oh, and that time we spend watching our movies, that comes from our calendar, which is another contract with ourselves. And (gulp!) it's more spiritual than material! I really don't want to think about this one.

It's so much easier being reactive than pro-active. What must we pay? Bills! What must we do? Change diapers! But wait--why am I watching TV?

Trained! (And A Travel Reprieve)

Ah, training! Nothing scratches a technologist's itch quite like a week of on-site, pertinent, challenging, and thorough training. Our Database Administrators at my workplace (Bank Of America) were thoughtful enough to include us developers in a course called "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SSIS for Administrators." For those who are technology or acronym challenged or both, SQL stands for Structured Query Language (a standard across all databases) and SSIS stands for SQL Server Integration Services.

Another interesting connection here is that a friend of mine since I first arrived in St. Louis, Gerald Hinson, was on the SQL Server 2005 team at Microsoft, and here I was learning all about it. Pretty cool. Gerald can be found among my friends in Facebook. Gerald has since moved on to the Microsoft Zune team.

And, great news about our upcoming trip back to Mauritius. We had been told by Air Mauritius that they had closed their US office. Instead they upgraded, moving from New Jersey to New York. And when we checked, their prices for tickets from St. Louis to Mauritius via London were the same as the last time we went. Whew! No Euros or Pounds required, apparently. Who's coming?

The Trip!

Well, whatever could be next but some details around our upcoming trip back to Mauritius. We're looking at leaving at the end of October, and I'll return in mid-November, probably visiting our missionaries in Marseille, France on the way back. Isabelle, Julia and Chloe will be staying in Mauritius without me until they return in January.

Ticket prices have gotten really expensive, but we discovered some tricks that are easing the pain. Frequent flyer tickets have become more valuable than ever. We have found that it works out to be better to buy miles for a frequent flyer account even if you have no miles, in order to redeem for a ticket, than to try to buy tickets directly. But you do have to get them early.

So, who's with us? Springtime in Mauritius! And a visit in the south of France!

Foreign Mission Sunday

This Sunday, April 13, we are having Foreign Mission Sunday at our church, Mid-County Church of Christ in St. Louis. Materials here will supplement and in some cases duplicate the live presentation.

It is a world tour. We start in Richmond Heights, Missouri, at our Sunday morning meeting place, and then we fly off across the Atlantic Ocean to...

Marseille, France

Newsletter about their recent trip to Italy

And then, across mainland Africa to its furthest corner...

Mauritius

Slideshow of the Leuteritz family's adventures in Mauritius

Now we're heading across the Indian Ocean to...

Laos and Cambodia

Our friendly American visitor in Laos

Dale Lundy's Cambodia newsletter



We're off again across the vast Pacific Ocean to...

Lima, Peru

One of our favorite daughters, Stephanie (Grigg) Fletcher and her husband Lee's slide show

Lee and Stephanie's Proposal for Partnership for their mission to Lima, Peru

Leon, our favorite South American's Peru slide show

Finally, we make our way back to St. Louis, overwhelmed by the enormity of the Great Commission, but encouraged by those who are a part of it.

Sunday's materials:

Mauritius Slides

Mauritius Script

Slide of Dale Lundy in Cambodia

Julia 2007

Here is our latest minimally edited home video highlight reel.

3 Months And 31 Years

We have arrived on the 16th of March, 2008, and we're all enjoying life. Friday marked three months to the day, and thanks to Leap Year, thirteen weeks to the day as well for our little girl Chloe. She is downright marvelous. She is as healthy as a horse, and although not as big as a horse, she is big. She was born slightly smaller than Julia but for her first two check-ups she eked out higher numbers than her big sister at the same point in her life in height, weight and head-size. We were told at each appointment that each girl was at the 100th percentile in all three categories. I know that's impossible from my math background but what are you gonna do? They're doctors.

Today, we marked 31 years for Isabelle, the one my heart desires as much as ever. She is doing a wonderful job with our girls, and I think she is doing a wonderful job with me as well. I have been an easy one to distract since she has known me, and now I am becoming ever more moody as time goes by. I need her by my side to keep me focused, and to keep the facades of this world from detracting from spiritual reality.

Isabelle remarked that turning 31 years old didn't seem like much compared to turning 30 years old. I just turned 40 years old in October, but as I recall, 30, 40, 50, etc. are not the only hard ones. I submit that those ending in 0, 4, and 7 are all equally hard. So starting even with 24, then 27, 30, 34, 37, 40, etc. there's a subtle transition that weighs heavy on a human. I see it as mid-twenties, late twenties, early thirties, mid-thirties, late thirties, etc. This is impacted heavily by those worldly facades I mentioned earlier, but without much wisdom at those young ages they can still hit pretty hard! Comments, anyone?

I'm uploading a Julia 2007 highlight video to Google video as I blog which I hope to post here soon. Hurry back!

Socially Networked (Possibly Awkwardly)

I hereby announce that I am in Facebook. Click above and you'll find me. 'Nuf said.

We're doing well here. Daylight savings time will knock us out this weekend but Spring will bring us back to life. A 31 years and 3 months post is due around the middle of March as well.

Also, my sister Courtney has a new blog. This dressage business is quite fascinating. The link is on the left.

Girls And More Girls

You may have seen one of my earliest posts about how everyone we know is having girls right now. It almost turned out to be all girls again this round, with our friend Patty giving birth to their second girl, Junia, a couple of weeks ago. But, Bret came through for the guys and little David arrived back before Chloe. With his two big sisters and all these girls surrounding him, he'll need an extra dose of Dad's roughing and tumbling to stand up to it all. Praise God for these little miracles, who somehow make all our pain and struggles disappear.

Today, Grandma B. arrived from Nebraska, and this evening, my old roommate Tom and his parents will join us for dinner. Tom is a good friend, and if you're interested, you may hear him on the radio every Sunday afternoon from 2:30 to 3:00 on 770 AM in St. Louis. I listened long enough last week to hear his co-DJ make an appeal to find Tom a date for some upcoming event, and I let Tom know that we were listening. So this week, Tom dropped our names on the air by way of sending us a greeting! Very amusing and rather exciting.

5 years, 2 years, and 2 months

Hi all. We are past due for an update here. I think the best way to get caught up is to load up on some pix. We can make up for failing to meet our word quota by taking advantage of the 1000 to 1 advantage pictures deliver as compared to words.

We have recently celebrated Isabelle's and my fifth anniversary, Julia's turning two years old, and Chloe turning two months old. We also completed a major road trip that took us all the way to South Padre Island, Texas, with Isabelle's sister Medge and her husband Jacques. Given that information, some sense should be able to be made from the following images...

M. Night ________________

I was at a guys weekend, and as we were surfing around on DirecTV, we happened on the movie Signs, starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. I remarked how much I disliked it, and my old college roommate Scott concurred. Scott and I, being computer programmers, represent the evil, rich element of society in our guys weekends. Mike and Lance, on the other hand, represent the salt of the earth. But I digress. Anyway, when the movie got to the scene in which the director appears as an actor, I mumbled, "There's M. Night, himself" and Scott confirmed it. Somebody asked, "Who?" And Scott answered, "You know, M. Night Shyamalama-ding-dong." My sentiments, exactly.

Quality Uncontrolled

Well, now that the holidays have passed and our girls are settling into their new roles with some slightest bit of predictability, I've been left to gather my thoughts into some consistent themes. First, and foremost, we strive to live out our faith. But an ever increasing secondary theme is that technology is swirling up around us everywhere, while the quality of technology products continually spirals downward and out the drain.

I already wrote about the cantankerous nature of our Roomba robot vacuum, which has been on a roll now for two weeks, and today cleaned up our dining and living room. Other recent products that have demonstrated fleeting quality standards have been ATI's HDTV-Wonder recording software, Panasonic's TC-32LX700 HD television, and Magnavox's MWD7006 DVD player.

The faulty ATI product is effectively nothing more than VCR software. Any standard old-school VCR is capable of being programmed to record a channel at a given time for a given duration on a repeating schedule. Through trial and error, I discovered that the ATI software could not launch in order to record; the software had to already be running in order to record. Beyond that, I discovered that it could only record the requested channel if it was not already tuned to the requested channel. And after the recording, it remained on the channel it had just recorded but indicated that it was tuned to the channel it had come from before the recording. So, after one successful recording, another successful recording could only be made if the channel was changed (and not to the channel to be recorded) or if the software was restarted.

We discovered this while trying to record Teletubbies for Julia for our trip back when she was around fifteen months old. In two weeks of trying to record Teletubbies, I finally did not successfully record a single one. I did get a Caillou and a Curious George, which she watched over and over. Part of the problem in this case was that Channel 9 didn't have the right line-up on their online TV schedule (yet another technology quality issue).

The Panasonic and Magnavox products, both brand new, were both defective. One is a high-end cutting edge product, and the other is a low-end, waning technology product. The TV worked at first, and let me edit channels but within 48 hours it was locking up and then returning with a message stating "An error has occurred and recovered." Finally, it just conked out completely. Panasonic first tried to get me to go through a service center for repairs, but ultimately I was able to get it lined up to be returned and replaced. I had ordered it direct from Panasonic.

The Magnavox DVD player refuses to open its tray. We can manually open it, but when we put a DVD in it and close it, nothing happens. It's hard to imagine how something like this could be a problem at this stage. We will take it back to Wal-mart and exchange it when we get a chance.

As a software developer, I have a pretty good idea what it takes to ensure that a product is of the highest quality. Maybe this sums it up best:

• Fast
• Good
• Cheap

(Pick any two)

Actually, I think we may be only able to pick one these days...