Visit from friends

Wow, it's been an incredibly long time since I updated this. My apologies.

For the past few days we had some very good friends from out of state visiting us, some ladies my wife and I met on the Notebored. Their visit was wonderful, a blessing to us, and hopefully to them as well. Of course, trying to work ahead for that visit and then spending practically every possible minute with them means that I haven't had much to do with the blogging lately.

Another factor has been our pursuit of a house. Dealing with HUD, home insurance places, and the lending industry is proving to be an arduous war of attrition. I think we're winning, but that kind of war is all too slow for comfort. We're still hoping to be out of the place we live now by the end of the month, but there's no telling at this point if it'll happen or not. We've done just about everything we can (aside from select a home insurance company, which I'm working on), so it's basically up to the lenders and the lawyers and the government how soon we'll be able to close.

By way of update, my brother has a part-time job at a fast-food place for the time being, though I think he's keeping his eyes open for something a little higher on the pay scale that still gives him some flexibility.

The wrestlers I work with have started their competition schedule, even though they don't have the whole team yet (one of the perils of having a small school and a football team into the third round of the state playoffs). One of them has been to church a time or two with us in the last couple weeks.

Our church took up a collection to help needy families in the area have nice a Thanksgiving meal; we know several through our bus ministry in particular. We hoped to help at least four families (the number we helped last year). As of Sunday, the crews delivered the goods for five meals -- and were given another $180 Sunday. It's terrific being a part of a church where people take outreach and caring for others seriously.

This is a very random, scattered post -- rather deliberate, so I can compress a lot of catch-up into a single post, rather than spending several posts giving old news. I'll try to be back much more quickly for more of your posting pleasure.