Sega!

Here's Chloe, getting the hang of things:



And here's Julia, a bit more cautious, but also bustin' a move:



Sega is the national cultural music and dance of Mauritius. Historically, it is the event for which slaves in Mauritius (ancestors of today's Creoles, such as Isabelle and her family) would gather during the night. Men were chained to a ball on their right ankle and so danced accordingly, while the women were unencumbered, and also danced accordingly. The men's steps have been carried forward until the present time.

It was hard to believe the changes that take place over nine weeks for a three-year-old and a one-year-old. Now I'm trying to find my rhythm and some discipline with my time again after languishing in my bachelor shoes those nine weeks. Too much play and work with the girls now that their jetlag doesn't knock them out by 7 pm.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Merry Christmas!

Our wish to all our friends and family is for you to have a blessed celebration of our Savior's birth, and high hopes for a happy new year.

Thankfulness

How can we learn to really appreciate what we have? How easy it is to fall into the trap that the Pharisee did in the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

Isabelle's and Medge's brothers and Medge's husband now find themselves unemployed indefinitely from their profession as pig farmers due to the arrival in Mauritius of African Swine Fever. I still have my job.

Some friends of ours who used to go to church with us have a precious son who suffers from a multitude of food allergies which prevent even the occasional experience of normalcy that most of us enjoy. Julia caught a bug and threw up before bedtime Monday night, and although Isabelle had to get up with her once an hour that night, by the time I got back home Tuesday she was her adorable old self.

My cousins' cousins, two out of the three boys in their family, find themselves forever changed due to a car accident that left the younger one paralyzed from the waist down, and the middle one learning to swallow, talk and eat again after having brain surgery to remove a tumor. Their ages added together amount to my age, and I can't even imagine their plight.

A long-time friend of mine, at this time last year, suffered a miscarriage in the ninth month of her pregnancy. We await Chloe, with great anticipation, having been told by our doctor that Isabelle's pregnancy so far, is "perfect."

Another long-time friend of mine nearly died due to a heart defect combined with a virus that attacked his heart. I remain in sloppy shape, relying on walking to the bus and back after ten years of relying mainly on walking my dog a mile each night before bedtime.

Earlier this year, we bid a final farewell to a husband and father in our congregation who succumbed to colon cancer, after two years of fighting and living like he was dying. His wife and four children somehow continue to endure. Her neighbor and sister in Christ and three young children lost their husband and father to a psychotic meltdown almost five years ago. She ministers to the new widow and her new husband ministers to those who are addicted to anything or anyone besides Jesus.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot. I am thanking when I should be confessing. Please forgive me.

Weekend to Remember

Hi from our fifth year of a wonderful marriage, the ninth month of an arduous but exemplary pregnancy, and the last day of our daughter Julia's 7th quarter of life. Yes, I was a math major, and my father was an English professor.

Isabelle and I just spent a great weekend at a Weekend to Remember conference held at the Frontenac Hilton just a little ways from our house. It took me a little time to wind down from a hectic week of work, but gladly we had Friday evening, Saturday morning and afternoon, and Sunday morning and afternoon to hear some excellent speakers providing good guidance for our most important relationship here on Earth. Thanks to my dear wife Isabelle for talking me into it, and for our friends Jim and Freddie G who recommended it to us.

Also, we must pay homage to Isabelle's sister Medge, who did us a huge favor by taking good care of Julia for our weekend. Not only does she help raise our child, but she also rakes leaves and clears brush! And she has been staining our rather lengthy, shadow-box style wood fence out back in her spare time.

This trip has been a roller coaster for Medge, having learned not long after she arrived that Mauritius had been visited by African Swine Fever, and all pork processing had to be stopped. This is the livelihood of Medge's husband Jacques, and her and Isabelle's brothers Jean-Marc and Denis, and their mother, Marie-Josée. And then, with all that going on, we just found out that Medge's tourist visa for Canada was denied. We had made plans for her to visit her aunt Monique in Quebec City.

We're thankful that she is with us. We'll try to find a way to show her some sites in the southern US before she has to leave us.

Fargo

It was a big day in Fargo, with the hometown Bison trampling the Big 10 (11)'s Golden Gophers of Minnesota. I'd rather think about this game than my team's game today, another in a string of humiliating and arguably emasculating losses by the Nebraska Cornhuskers, to the likes of Missouri, Oklahoma State, and Texas A&M. If it were Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, that's one thing, but these guys? Nebraska can only take pride in still being in today's game at halftime, being down by a score of 16-14. Then the second half played out like their prior two entire games, as they ultimately lost 36-14. Against Oklahoma State, with venerable three-time national championship coach Tom Osborne and his 1997 champs looking on for homecoming, the Cornhuskers returned to their status as Bug-Eaters (their original designation) as Oklahoma State utterly skunked them and led at halftime, 38-0. For forty years (longer than I can remember), something like this was unthinkable. I read in the ESPN article about North Dakota State's victory today that Craig Bohl is their head coach. He is mentioned as a candidate for Nebraska's opening as Bill Callahan's seat is on fire it's so hot. However, if memory servers, Coach Bohl was on hand as defensive coordinator for an infamous 62-36 loss at Colorado in which not even Eric Crouch in his Heisman prime could save us from a complete defensive collapse. That year they still somehow backed into the BCS National Title Game but that 37-14 defeat by Miami was the beginning of the end. I was thinking Coach Callahan had reversed Nebraska's obvious inability to recruit that first surfaced under Coach Frank Solich, post-Tom Osborne, but now it looks like we are stuck in a combined recruiting and coaching vacuum.

So, why am I paying attention to college football in Fargo, anyway? Well, utlimately it's because I owe a promised post to my dear aunt, uncle and cousin who call Fargo home. We got to spend a lovely weekend with them during our trip this past summer, just at the beginning of July, which is the time to visit. Fargo has been known to dip into the 30s in the winter. The MINUS 30s, that is.

Here is a picture of me with Julia and my cousin Matthew, aunt Vel Rae, and uncle Keith. Currently, Vel Rae is recuperating from bypass surgery, and Keith from cataract surgery, while Matthew is a recent cancer survivor. Matthew is an active and excellent actor and director in community theater, while Vel Rae is a retired Food and Nutritions professor. and Keith is the retired City Planner for the city of Fargo. He was on TV plenty back during the Red River flood of 1997.

The Minnesota Giants

Actually, from our perspective, these are the Minnesota Second Cousins (of Julia). And they are brothers but not twins. They are the sons of my first cousin Anne Byrne, who lives in the Minneapolis suburbs. We were able to visit them during our recent trip.

Michael, on the right, is 6'10" and studying engineering (we forget what kind) at the University of Michigan. Matthew is 6'6" and stockier that Michael, and he has just entered Duke University as a freshman.

Their dad Pat has decorated their rec room half in Michigan's colors and paraphernalia, and the other half in Duke. Home Depot carries school colors, in case you were wondering.

So, let me fill in some details on our recent trip so it starts to make some sense. We had three weeks, so we decided to take a train across the northern US, since many from my family live on the route of the Empire Builder. We flew to Portland, Oregon, and visited my sister who lives in Cottage Grove. Then we took the train to Williston, North Dakota, to visit my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousin. Then we continued and visited my aunt and uncle in Fargo, ND, and cousin Anne in MSP, and then finally we visited friends in Detroit, before flying home from there.

Anne knew how to play a lively pattycake which kept Julia enthralled.