Light of Togo

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The day after returning home from Boston, Tiffany flew to the west coast for our very good friend’s wedding (thanks to her mother’s frequent flier miles) and to see her parents. She will be gone for a total of 15 days, which is in my opinion about 15 days too long! Ever since we first planned this trip for her, I have been calling it The Great Abandonment. You see, me and the kitchen don’t get along too well. I am happy to help Tiffany around the house any way I can, but cooking is one thing that I try to avoid at all costs. Rather than resorting to fast food and junk food however, I have brought myself to at least attempt cooking. We have not died or been hospitalized (yet) so I suppose that I’m doing alright, besides Joshua’s crying every time we sit down to eat. He’s also lost about 20 pounds.

We miss Tiffany a bunch, for more reasons than just those that relate to food! She is having a really great time though. She arrived in Portland last night and will be there for the remainder of the time with her family and friends.

Joshua and I are also having a good time. We’re doing several special Joshua & Daddy kind of things. The other day we went down to a park along the river where we rode rollerblades (me) and a scooter (Joshua), then we had a picnic lunch on the grass. Sometime this week, we’ll be taking a short hike through the woods by another river nearby. It’s definitely not all fun and games though, as we are definitely in survival mode around the house!

Read about the return of Tiffany.

We returned last Wednesday from our 5 days in Boston with my cousin and his wife. We had a really wonderful time, and we hated having to say goodbye to Ryan and Janelle. But, it is good to be back home and have things almost back to normal.

Here’s some highlights of the trip.

Riding on the Swan Boats was a very special experience for Tiffany. She has a memory of riding the very same boats with her grandparents when she was just a little girl. Joshua loved it, especially getting to see turtles, a couple swans, and all the ducks swimming along side of the boat.

The Holocaust Memorial is truly a sobering experience. It is located just off of a busy street along a pedestrian walkway. When you approach it, all you see are six very large, very tall glass towers. Once you get closer however, you realize that on each glass panel of each tower are literally thousands of seven digit numbers, each one representing a person killed by the Nazis in the WWII concentration camps. Then, the reality of the Holocaust starts to sink in and you can see visually the enormous number of people who were murdered. To me, the Holocaust is an example of just how evil man can be, and the fact is that all humans are capable of doing such horrible things and worse. We somehow think that we are better people than the Nazis because we haven’t done what they did, but the Bible tells us that we are all corrupt, evil, and “desperately wicked.” Praise be to God for His restraining grace, and most of all for His saving grace!

As you can tell from the photos, Joshua had a blast at the children’s museum. It almost made me wish I was 5 years old too so I could do all the fun stuff with him!

The Plimouth Plantation was a pretty neat place as well. They have attempted to replicate as accurately as possible the normal everyday life in the original settlement of Plymouth. The people who “live” there actually act out their part as if they are really from the 1700s. Asking them questions about email, TV, iPods, or cameras will only cause strange looks and confusion. Most of the actors have even mastered the accent of the European settlers of that time.

Although we did lots of fun things, the best part was definitely just spending time with Ryan and Janelle. Ryan, along with his brother, Adam, have been my closest friends for as long as I can remember. It was a great time of encouragement and edification, and we thank God for giving us the chance to get away for a little while.

For the past five days, my cousin, Ryan, and his wife, Janelle, have been visiting us here in Quebec all the way from Sydney, Australia. We’ve been having a great time, and tomorrow we’re heading to Boston together for six days. It is such a blessing to see them, since they live so far away and the chances to see them will be even more slim when we move to Togo.

So, I’ll be taking a break from writing on the blog for about a week. Please refrain from celebrating! I’ll try to write a post about the trip once we get back.

As they say in French, “bon voyage!”

WARNING: Do not read any farther unless you want your GeekFactor to be raised by approximately 17.82 percent!

Ever since coming to Quebec, I’ve been wanting to help out the church here by redoing their website, which the pastor has been wanting to do for quite some time as well.  A few weeks ago, I found out that the pastor’s son, Jonathan, and another guy, Benoit, both have done website development (webdev) before.  Between the two of them, they have a working knowledge of html, css, and php, and I have a bit of experience in Wordpress, which is the platform we used for the site.  So, on Saturday they came over to our house where we set up our “Webdev Workstation,” which slightly resembled something that one might see at a NASAcontrol room.  We started at 10:00am and began working on a completely new design and functionality for the site so there can be a regular public area and a “members only” section which contains a blog, church member photo directory, and other helpful stuff.

It was really neat to see how the three of us worked together with Jonathan doing a lot of the technical coding and problem solving, Benoit doing the page setups, transferring information, and translating things into French, and me doing the visual design and work within Wordpress.

By the time the public section was done, it was 2:00 in the morning!  But, we got it done.  Yesterday, we worked got almost the whole members section finished, and it should be entirely done by Thursday evening.

It was a lot of fun and I learned a ton of things about webdev in the process, but I am glad that it’s almost done.  Below is a screenshot of what it looks like (click the image to enlarge it) and a link to it if you’d like to check it out.