Recent happenings

It has been a while since I updated my blog and I have been severely reprimanded by several Aunties... So here are your Bella pics. You can stop the harassment anytime :).

This is a recent photo from the front of our house. I like the cute smile on her face, and it is only slightly blurry so you can get the feeling of constant motion that accompanies the child.

This pic is from a recent overnight camping excursion that we went on with a group of my friends from college. There were 10 adults and 11 kids under the age of 5. They put us in a campsite a little too close to the river for comfort sake. Luckily, we only had to fish one of the little ones out of the water and no one fell in the fire this year, so all in all the trip was a rounding success.

We brought our two hammocks and they were a hit with the kids. Here is a picture where we managed to get 10 of them in at the same time. I kind of felt sorry for the ones who got stuck in the middle. (you can kind of see the pained look on Eleanore's face)

Bella and myself in a quieter moment when we had the hammock to ourselves. I love my hammocks. This is one I bought in Brazil while on my mission. (We got to cross the border once in a while for our P-days in order to buy cheap stuff in Brazil and eat at the Brazilian buffets. It was the highlight of serving near the border) My other hammock is made of multicolored plastic twine and I got it in Nicaragua. My host father there knew how much I loved theirs and helped me bargain for one from a door to door hammock salesman. (I guess he wasn't actually a door to door salesman actually just someone who walked down the street calling out and selling his wares. He only came to your door if you called out to him saying you wanted to buy something. It's a sales technique that is used too infrequently here in the US. The ice cream trucks have kind of cornered the market.)

This is a rather freaky pic of Bella taken during the 4th of July fireworks. She must have moved just as the camera went off. Unfortunately none of the pictures we took that night look much better. The reason I am posting this is that it reminds me of a scene in the second Ghostbusters movie where the evil overlord spirit is trying to take over the body of the baby. A bit too much Vigo the Carpathian for my tastes.

New Service Project

So on Sunday evening I was reading through the Ensign and came across this article about the church looking for 10,000 bilingual volunteers to help with the extraction of Spanish records. So I figured, why not, I'm bilingual and have an Internet connection and it's probably more productive than playing Spider Solitaire on my computer in the evenings while watching videos with my husband.

So that's what I've started doing, and it has actually been kind of fun. I decided to do batches of a project from Managua, Nicaragua where I extract names and dates from wedding records, all hand written by some clerk in 1934. I actually spent a summer in Nicaragua, just outside of Managua in a ghetto called Ciudad Sandino so this project jumped out at me. My husband joined me last night in puzzling out some of the handwritten names, fantastic gems like Pasquala, Borges, and Efrain. Though I think my favorite was Elia, I actually thought it was pretty though my husband was less impressed. Though he was somewhat surprised at the number of grooms that listed their occupation as carpenters (and how many 16-17 year-olds were getting married).

If anyone is interested I highly recommend it as an easy service project that you can do working at your own pace. For those that are not Spanish speakers there are plenty of English projects to choose from as well as a couple other languages. The batches are easy to download and they only take 15-20 min apiece once you get use to the handwriting and where to find the information you need to extract.

All this thinking about Nicaragua is making me remember my 8 weeks I spent there. I need to dig out my pictures....