More painting

I was gone pretty much all day today so I wasn't there to see the progress that was being made until this evening. I was in a nearby city helping Daniel A. clean his flat (apartment) after the reconstruction he had had done. It wasn't a whole lot of work, but there was a lot of dust!

So, what about our Manna room? I can report with some pictures. First you can see what my (old) room looks like with it's new paint job. I think it looks like a new room.

Since most of the big surfaces are covered and looking new, our attention is now on the one wall with all the drawings on it. When I got back this evening it looked quite different than it did yesterday. Now all the outlining is done and the coloring in between the lines is taking place. I haven't really helped much with this because I can't seem to figure out how to draw on a vertical surface.

Since I wasn't able to help with the "coloring" I found the new outlet covers and switches and decided to install them. I found out, after a quick examination, that they were completely new outlets, which meant I would have to do the wiring in the itsy-bitsy boxes. The first one was interesting, but after the second one I kind of got the hang of it, even when the last one gave me a curveball (no ground wire). I have to say that they really do help the overall appearance of the rooms.

OK. So I got my room all cleaned out and my desk taken apart. I still don't know where I'm going to put it all. As for my room, it is now a nice shade of pea-green. It didn't take very long to get all the walls covered because it's a much smaller room than the other one. I'll try and post a picture tomorrow (I kind of got side-tracked until now).

My (old) room

I just got in a few minutes ago and thought I'd take some more pictures of our painting. I guess it's not really all that much to look at, but I thought you might want to see our progress so far.

There is still a bunch of stuff in the room, as you can see in the pictures, some of which is going to stay there (the low coffee table and the multi-use baby table thing-a-ma-jig). We're "refurbishing" a couple of small, wooden children's chairs which will be used, as well as some other tables that are (or will be made) short.

There's still a lot to be done: window and door frames that need to be painted, light fixtures that need to be picked out and installed as well as switch and outlet covers that will be replaced, shelves that will be built onto the walls, and part of the floor that needs fixing. That's probably not all, but that should be enough to keep us busy for a while.

This morning I'm working on cleaning out my old room. I know, I know, it looks like a big mess! My excuse is that it's a small room and everything is everywhere because we already took out the shelves I had in there. Right now I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put everything. Ok, I've really got to get started or nothing will happen (funny how that works). If we do get my room painted today I'll try and post some pictures on here before tomorrow.

Another week gone by...

...and I haven't written anything of it. We've been busy preparing one of the rooms here in the church (my old room and the outer "library") for the Manna project. We are hoping to open it as soon as we can, but first we have to make the room more usable, i.e. cleaning out all the junk that was in it. The stage we are at now is painting the walls. We started last Friday and got one wall done and another with black-lined drawings all over it.

The wall with the to-be pictures on it is not finished. There is still more that will be added and then it will all be filled in with color.

Finishing the walls that will be yellow was what we did today. It really isn't so hard to do, and the fact that the paint is water soluble is great (that means we don't have to worry if it gets on anything, unless it's another wall!).

I'll try and keep up with this project as we keep working on it. I'll also try and take more pictures (it's kind of hard to do while I'm painting!) so you can see the progress. More to come!

The youth conference is coming up this weekend and I've been running around trying to get ready the stuff that's in my charge. This has mainly been trying to figure out all the sound equipment stuff so we won't have (nearly as many) problems (as we usually do). Making cables and fixing non-working ones, soldering a transformer box, and making sure we had enough of everything were all on my list of things to do. Koco and I are going in a few minutes to look at the room we will be using. Got to get going...

OK, I'm back! The room is actually in a totally different building. We will be using the Evangelical church's second building which is used for all kinds of activities, very much like what we'll be using it for. The reason we'll be using this building is because our main room upstairs isn't finished yet (!). The room we'll be using looks like it will work out fine, but it could be kind of awkward if we have a lot of people. Now I can rest a little better knowing what we'll be dealing with on Friday.

Up in the Air

That's where my brothers are by now, either that or they are in between flights. Daniel and I dropped them off at the airport at 5:00am this morning. We got everything packed last night, but didn't make it to bed until after twelve. The problem with this was that we had to wake up at 2:30 to be ready to go! It's amazing what you can do before normal breakfast time if you wake up that early; that being said, I think I'll stick with rising at a more normal time.

Our last couple days together were full of all kinds of stuff. This weekend was the carnival/open air market here in NM. That meant that a lot of streets were blocked off, a lot of booths and rides, lots and lots of people, and now lots of trash. M & O got to experience what it was like and I'll leave it to them to describe it. I only went on Friday afternoon when some of us went to look around at the booths. There was everything from "Made in (Asia)" to traditional hand carved wooden spoons. O yea, plus a lot of people. If you think you've ever been somewhere that's crowded, then you have some idea of what it's like. Now imagine taking away the comfort zone that Americans have and you'll have an even better idea. I've heard of the phrase "an ocean of people"; this is a literal example - it's like walking in the ocean.

Saturday morning Owen, Daniel and I got up at around five o'clock to take pictures of the sun rising. We drove up to the top of foothill on one side of the valley and waited for the sun to come up on the other side. It turned out to be surprisingly cold and windy up there, but we were able to hold out until the sun went up into the clouds around seven. I'd post some pictures here, but I haven't loaded the pictures onto my computer yet so you'll just have to wait. That afternoon we, the three mentioned above plus Morgan, went and watched a futbal game here in NM's stadium. It was a pretty good game all things considered, plus we one the game 2-0.

Yesterday, which was Sunday, was the day to say goodbyes and everything. Late in the afternoon we, the three mentioned in the first part of the above plus Daniel A., went to see a hockey game in Trencin. It was a good game with us winning 2-1. I don't know if any of you who are reading this have ever been to a hockey game like we experienced yesterday or not; if you haven't, you need to. Talk about atmosphere!

I took it...

...this chance, I mean. I was sitting here at my computer waiting for some files to transfer to another drive when the thought came to me, "Why don't you just take this chance (like all the chances you've had before!) to write about today?". So, here I am doing it!

This morning we slept in, I admit, and after riding into town we stopped at the A's house to check on things*. We almost immediately started working on the gate to their house/yard/driveway (it's not a compound!). M & O had started working on taking the old paint off a while ago, but for some reason never finished it. Today we got all the paint off with the help of a wire brush on a grinder, plus we got the first coat of paint on. Tomorrow we'll go back and touch up where it's needed and put on another coat as needed. I'll try and remember to take a picture or two.


Tonight we, the "group" (D&M, Koco, Majka, and myself) got together after the service and discussed the youth conference we'll be hosting the last weekend of September. I'll write a little more about it sometime later, but needless to say we might have close to 80 kids coming. Like I said, it'll be a weekend meeting; Fri. evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday will be regular church with something afterwords. I'm mainly just writing this to let you know of something coming up on our schedule here; your prayers would be great. I'll try and get some other info on here when I have the time...

* If you don't know why, just email me.

I'm still here, don't worry

It's been a long time since I last posted, too long in fact. I kind of got into a bad habit of not typing anything for a number of weeks. I'll try getting back into the swing of things. It's been a little intimidating trying to get caught up on all that happened while my family was here and this is probably the biggest reason for why I haven't written. I'll start trying to post new news on a regular basis (again) and save all the old news for when I have the urge to type and the time (or maybe that should be the other way around).

You can be sure that things have been happening around here; we've not been idle. In fact, as strange as it may sound, I have things I could post here nearly every day if I had a mind to do it! Thursday of last week we dug out the dirt in the courtyard here at the church in order to put down paving stones. Part of that also included digging a ditch a meter deep (I'll let you do the conversion) right next to the exterior wall of the building. This was so we could put in a tar-paper water barrier to try and keep the moisture down in the basement (it makes paint peel and does nasty things to anything made from wood). Then Friday morning, after having to purchase 15 meters of tar-paper (they don't sell it in shorter lengths) because we were 1.5 meters short the night before, we began work again. This consisted of holding the tar-paper in place while all the dirt that was dug out the day before was put back in. After having done this we started leveling the whole area as best we could. This worked out fine and we were done by lunch time. We had been waiting on sand to make cement all day and it still hadn't shown up by the time Daniel had to leave. What do you know but about an hour after he left the truck came! We decided that we had enough time to at least pour a section or two before we would call it quits, but it was going so fast that we just kept mixing and laying until it was all finished. I don't know how other people do it, but I used a hand trowel to smooth out the surface and a small board to level (along with a level). I have learned that, although this works, it's an extremely fatiguing way to lay concrete.

By now, the above said concrete is dry (it's not very thick - about 3-4 cm) and we are waiting on what will come next. Problems with one of the three part-owners of the courtyard (we are one of these) is kind of keeping us from completing it. Funny, it's the same man who said we would have to fix our part of the yard before he would change his no to a yes (on a vote from neighbors; this is a must by law) so we can get our permit to work on the church. Now we've got two projects going but nothing being done - for right now. I think we will probably be putting down the sand a bricks here sometime soon. To be continued...