So here’s my Christmas summary update post, as promised and earlier than I expected to do it. Perhaps a day-by-day? Why not, lol

Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve evening we had the whole station and Aunt Mary Stone and Aunt Joy Hart all in our house for a meal. Big meal. We had tacos and ice cream and chocolate and cookies and crackers and cheddar cheese and summer sausage. Lots of it. Very full, very fun. Then we played a game where we had to decode the names of christmas songs from really weird language (like “Miniscule Male Master of Precussionistic Cylinders”) and another one that was kind of like password but with Christmas words. All the time we were playing we were eating candy. A missionary family we know that’s on furlough in the US right now sent out a whole bunch of goodies, so that’s what we were eating, hehe.

Christmas Day
Coming in two parts, so let’s start with stockings and presents. I GOT A WEBCAM!!!! YAY! It’s totally kewl, even if my connectin can barely handle it. I got The Incredibles too, hope to watch it soon 😀 Got a couple books too “It’s Not About Me” by Max Lucado and “White” by Ted Dekker.

Lunch was at Ezels. More food! Stufing and ham and turkey and mashed potatoes. They have two toddler-types and a lil baby. Emme! she’s soooo cute, hehe. She rips my hair out and grabs my glasses, but that’s easily forgivable, hehe… lotsa fun.

Oh, part three of Christmas Day (I know I said two, but who cares? ;P), we had a bonfire! Lotsa fun, sit by the fire and, guess what? EAT! More candy and cookies and crackers and REAL (ie, cheddar) cheese and summer sausage. Got to hold Emme a lot, funfun, hehe 😀 roast mellows and do riddles and listen to my bro with the guitar. awesome stuff.

hope you all enjoyed your christmas as much as i did mine! 😀

It is Christmas Eve and I hear people arriving for our big meal together tonight. I’ve uploaded new pictures to my Flickr from just after the Christmas Program all the way through Conference pictures 🙂 I should be updating again soon to tell you all about our Christmas 🙂 Have a merry one, and happy birthday to Trev!

Just after that huge long post is another small one, here to annouce (finally!) the post of pictures on my flickr of the Palmview Christmas Program and My Birthday Party. You can view only pictures from one event by clicking the appropriate link, or just go to my main flickr page to see them all.

Just a note to those who may notice my facial hair again in these pictures — I shaved before conference, so there! HA! 😛

Yes, it’s me, finally back and showing my face! Ok, not literally, but whatever ;P This may end up being long, so for those who want the short story here’s and outline :

• New computer
• Sick
• Conference
• Misc (ie, Chels, lol)

New Computer
The last shall be first — or whatever. While this is a relatively new development in my life, it is an old development timewise. It’s the most important anyway! 😉 My new computer is awesome! 3.4Ghz with a 185GB harddrive and 512 MB memory (eventually to become 1GB)! For those of you to whom this is Greek take my sister’s approach — the case looks way cool! Bubbly black and silver with blue LED light-ups 😀 On top of that I got a brand-new 19-inch LCD monitor to go with it! Biiiiig 😀 Ok, enough crooning, on to real news 😉

Sick
I am sick still a bit, flu-ish, but not as bad as I was, or as others have been. On saturday night I started shivering uncontrollably out of the blue and could barely control my muscles enough to take the two extra-strength tylonol I needed and climb into bed. My brother was far sicker just a day before that — throwing up and such. My mother still has severe diherreah. In fact, most of the TEAM Chad field is sick. Comes from eating together for a whole week 😉

Conference
Now for the longish bit (power may go off in the middle and me losing my train of thought, but we’ll see 😉 ). Day-by-day perhaps? Let’s see if my memory serves…

Day 1 (Friday) – Travelled all day to N’djamena with all the other kids (sorry, teens, nope, sorry, youths ;P). Had a lot of fun talking and playing road games et al. Had a good talk with Aunt Mary Stone (our driver and the only ‘adult’ in the car) about my past, present, and future relationship with Chels. Arrived at the conference centre (just outside of NDJ, actually) dead tired and dragged my suitcase into the small, isolated room that I shared with my brother (no duh :P) for the week and crash. At 7:00PM the whole field had arrived and we met in the ‘caffeteria’ for a… ‘meal’. I don’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t any good 😛

Day 2 – Started with breakfast — corn flakes! And not stale either! They were actually pretty good. Talked with the new radio operator from Romania. He doesn’t speak much English, so I had to practise my French, but it was cool 🙂 Power cut right here, this is the next day, sorry for the delay in the post, now back to it. After breakfast we joined the worship/devotional time with the adults and then went to the (first ever) teens/youth/callussomething program. It was pretty fun, we did a lot of stuff on identity — especially in relation to God and the world… all though the two leaders that came out from Aussie to do the program had a lot of fun with our numerous (VERY numerous) digressions. A lot of fun in the activities, a lot of good talk time.

Now I’m beginning to wonder why I ever started listing items by the day — I really won’t be able to do this, so I’ll highlight from here on (*hears cheers*). The study was mostly as described on all days of the conference, and was overall really nice. I got just about zip schoolwork done though because I actually enjoyed the program this time so I didn’t sneak off to do my work like last year ;P I got my hands on a good parenting book (for parenting teens) while up there and devoured the whole thing during siestas. Very good book.

There were two ‘Sports & Leisure’ afternoons during the whole conference — which were mostly sports or watching. I played volleyball the first time and it was really a lot of fun. The net was tied between two trees and the serves from the other team kept getting caught in the branches and then falling out of bounds (“Tree-fense!”) The second afternoon everyone was sick and tired (literally! 😉 ) so we mostly lounged around.

Then there was the brilliant Megan evening. We (the teen gang + leaders) were outside in the evening, preparing for our first and only evening ‘session’, when Aunt Anne Hoyt (Janelle’s Mom) came out and asked us to look after little Megan Godbold for the evening so that the little kids’ team could have a break. We agreed — mistake #1. Don’t get me wrong, I like little kids. Ask someone who knows me well and they’ll tell you that I positively adore little kids — sometimes even after they can talk. Megan is like 5, and at that age where you can give her ideas, but then they’re hers. The night was too bright to play the game we were going to play, and we couldn’t have a serious spiritual discussion with Megan around (“No, my daddy says…” *cough*). So we decided to play “Follow Megan”. Part way into our following Tim (one of the leaders) decided it would be funny to pretend a tree was eating him. For the rest of the night Megan led us around, identifying ‘bad trees’ and having Tim speak with them to command that they leave little children alone. You can imagine how the whole thing turned out! 😛

Ok, then came fun night. Fun night (which is best described as a skit night where there are some non-skit performances) was the funnest in quite awhile! Recently we’ve had a lot more serious stuff (music performaces and the like). This year we had multiple side-splitting performances, including a repeat from 7 years ago when I first came to the field! MAF’s was, as always, the funniest. They did a MAF-on-MAF thing, exaggerating some of the problems they’ve been having etc. The skit was ‘hosted’ by Uncle Patrik, who used to be a professional circus performer before he became a pilot. The whole act was hilarious with numerous balloon tricks and some other stuff in just to make it funnier as we went!

The day after conference we (my family) went to the TEAM station in NDJ and I lounged for the day, reading. My parents went shopping and we all went out for lunch (normally something I hate, but this place had GOOD cheeseburgers :D). Then the next day my siblings and I jumped in the back of the pickup (travel plan changes) and we drove all day to get back down. No more to tell, here we are 🙂

Misc
What post of mine would be complete without some mention of Chels? There already has been minorly, but just a footnote here. She’s still grounded and (hopefully) more comitted to obeying the rules of that grounding. For those who haven’t heard (which is no one) she and I are not anymore. Not even close. She’s been on to better and more and is now single. I had more to say (not about her) but it’s lunch time and this is long enough for now. So long, and thanks if yu actually read all of this!

So what happened to me and the Sleepover / Christmas program et al? Well the sleepover went alright, and it actually was a lot of fun. We played a lot of crazy games, like one where we put some M&M’s on a paper towel stretched over a bowl full of water. Then you poke holes in the paper towel with a pencil. The person to send the M&M’s into the water has to eat them out of the water without using their hands! That gets disgusting We stayed up really late watching Hook and generally had a good time.

Next day was the Christmas Program, which went well. I played my one song with the band and then watched the rest from the audience. Everything went off perfectly without problem and we quickly came to the best part : Refreshments!

The Symons left a few days ago, they’re in N’Djamena now and soon on their way out.

On Friday the whole TEAM Chad field goes to Annual Conference, including me. We’ll be gone just over a week with probably no Internet or Email of any kind the entire time.