Missing You!

Okay, as par for the course, let's begin with some of my remaining pictures of Ellie Dear.

Can you find camouflage Ellie?

I was delighted to discover a few months back that an old college suitemate, Jaime Miller, was living with his family on a coffee farm in Nicaragua. I was even more excited when he said he could stop by Athens to drop off a shipment of green coffee beans, and when Bob Klein offered to lend me a roaster. Unfortunately, I believe those pictures are on a camera in Oregon at the moment, but I do have a picture of me roasting a batch of the beans.

Green coffee beans led me to reminisce about another green snack that I used to love so much when I lived out with the Ramers in New Jersey... toasted kale. I finally got around to making some the other day and it was delicious!

Last weekend, Mike (in my math ed program) and his wife Lee threw a birthday party for their daughter Lucy. 

Lee brought quite the creative flair to the party!

Derek (also in my math ed program) just brought flair.

Elisabeth (also in the math ed program) with her fiancee Der**k (not sure how to spell it).

One more week until the ladies return from Oregon. The house has felt so quiet and, although I appreciated the time to catch up on work, I'm definitely excited to see them again. Soon after they come back, JooYeon's mom will return to South Korea and JooYeon's sister and kids will come out here to Athens for a bit. So we'll go from 1 person to 6 in a matter of hours; the Korean family culture is an excellent fit for my travel personality - I like the constant changes in the living environment. I'm really anticipating Tae Geom (my 2-yr-old nephew) because we'll be able to study Korean together... I don't get exposed much to Korean animal sounds when I talk with JooYeon, so this will gear me up for reading to Ellie. I've also started attending a Korean language class on Sundays together with my youth group kids - as Ellie gets closer and closer to speaking age, I want to be more and more ready to converse naturally in Korean. Right now the gap is pretty drastic between how much I can understand in a one-on-one with Joo and how little I can understand of a random Korean conversation among adults when I try to listen in.