October 2017 Update

A lot of you who read this also get my brother, Ken’s, monthly update.  He mentioned fall arriving with changing leaves and even snow in the mountains.  Of course, fall has arrived here too, but God in His sovereignty has apparently decided we haven’t had enough summer weather.  Our leaves in our area are weeks behind normal in changing color, our temperatures have played with cold (we had frost earlier this week) but keep bouncing back into the 60s and 70s, and allergy causing ragweed is hanging on and messing with us.  But life goes on, and here’s how it’s gone on for us.

 

I mentioned last month that we’d sold our van.  Well, this month, my old commuter car, a 2004 Hyundai Sonata, was put to rest.  It needed about $2000 worth of repairs (leaking gas tank, noisy exhaust system) which is about 10 times what it was worth, so we sold it to a junkyard.  I bought a 2005 Toyota Corolla to commute to work, and we’re borrowing cars from Cody and Kevin to get us around (Krista to work, Zach to school).  I don’t know if I ever mentioned it here, but Zach started this fall going to Genesee Community College in a program called Accelerated College Enrollment (ACE) that will enable him to finish his senior year of high school and get a head start on college at the same time.  He’s working hard and doing well between that, playing soccer with Cornerstone Christian Academy, Awana, CAP, working at Burger King, which all keep him quite busy.

 

My new (to me) car

This month’s birthdays since I wrote last were Ella on 9/21 and Alma on 10/6.

 

On 9/23, my barbershop chorus competed in our regional event in Rochester.  We sang “That’s Life” (made famous by Frank Sinatra) and “I Didn’t Wanna Fall” about a guy who didn’t want to, but did, fall in love.  In the second song, we had our biggest guy in a wedding dress as the bride.  We came in fourth out of nine choruses, so we were happy.  It was a ton of fun, and Krista, Abigail, and Seth got to come see us perform.

 

The Chorus of the Genesee

Levi has started playing on a community flag football team.  There are only two teams in the league, so they are only playing four games (two at each home field).  So far, the visiting team has won every time, but since we’ve played twice on their field, that’s good.  We’re all hoping they win the last game this weekend to break that trend so his team can end the season 3 – 1.

 

This past weekend, our church held a marriage conference.  We decided we wanted to make sure Hannah and Kevin and Ella and Cody could go, so we volunteered to watch their kids Friday night and all day Saturday.  We haven’t had four little ones in our house that long that were our responsibility for a long time, and they wore us out!  They were overall very well behaved—that wasn’t the problem—it was just their energy compared to ours!  But we had fun, and their parents said the conference was well done and helpful to them.

 

Alex

Jem and Mommom built the kids a fort

Last night, our chorus performed again for a local nursing home.  We sang a whole bunch of songs in many styles from the traditional barbershop “Lida Rose” all the way to an arrangement of the Beatles’ “Something.”  It was fun to sing for a very appreciative audience.  They even gave us cookies when we were done!  I can see me doing well with that slogan:  “Will sing for cookies!”

 

Until November!