New York City!

Hi everyone, this is Will. Here are a few pictures from our New York City trip. Enjoy : )

This is the apartment we stayed in while we were in Manhattan.

Central Park(ers)

We got to see Adriana Zabala and her new daughter, Valentine (Val-en-teen)

Later that day, we met up with my mom's friend, Mia Dillon, and saw the New York Philharmonic Orchestra play in Central Park. We enjoyed the free concert and fireworks with about 60,000 of our closest friends.

Our friend, Pieter, moved to Pennsylvania a couple months ago.
He and his mom drove up to the city to visit us. It was great to see him again.

We went to visit my mom's aunt, Janet, who lives in Pennsylvania.

The house, Pond Hole, in the background is where she lives.
We were there a day and a night before returning back to NYC.

That's the Brooklyn Bridge in the background,
and two familiar looking folks over there on the right.

These are my parents friends and their son: Jeanne, Fred, and Freddy.
They are letting us stay in their apartment in Brooklyn while they vacation in Europe. : )

I hope everyone has a great summer, see you when we get back!

Quiet now, but that will soon change

I’ve not posted another blog entry, basically because we don’t have much exciting to report. Liz and I had a quiet and productive week in the lakeside cabin at Camp Allen in the 2nd week of June and accomplished a lot of reading. Since we returned to Lake Jackson, we’ve continued our reading and note-taking, dealt further with our house and yard, and seemed to have made a lot of appointments with doctors, dentists, orthodontists, optometrists, etc. It’s great to have time these days for prayer, meditation, exercise and nap-taking. We considered adding photos to this blog entry, but snapping a picture of Liz reading and a picture of Andy reading didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Ben and Will are counseling for several weeks at Camp Allen and Will led the worship for the junior high mission trip to Houston with Josh Orsak and St. Thomas, Nassau Bay two weeks ago.

I spent two even quieter days basically as a hermit in someone’s home in the country. There, in addition to my studies, I actually managed to write two poems one morning. In late June, Liz and I went to Houston for a couple of days, so that I could give the invocation for the swearing-in of the new President of the State Bar of Texas, Harper Estes. Harper and I have been good friends since we were boys in Lubbock. At the President’s Gala, Liz and I danced for the first time in a non-church setting in about 10 years—not that we danced any differently!

Just last weekend, all five of us, plus my parents, went to see my brother Kevin and his family in Houston for a few days, to celebrate the 4th of the July and what the Parker s call our Aggregate Birthday Party.

This week, Ben and Will are counseling at camp again, Caleb is bored, and Liz and I are continuing our house-and-sabbatical work. (Right now, I’m actually waiting to get feeling back in my mouth after a long session in the dentist’s chair.) And we are ramping up preparation and plans for our Big Trip, which begins Sunday. All of us are flying to New York City for two weeks. We’ll take a train from there to Boston, where the boys will take part in St. Timothy’s mission trip. Liz and I will fly from Boston to Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend the Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image, a journal of Christianity and the arts. During the mornings at the Glen, Liz will be taking a drawing workshop and I’ll be taking a poetry writing workshop. The afternoons and evenings will be filled with lectures, readings, worship, and visual arts presentations. If you’re interested, you can learn more about the Glen at:

http://imagejournal.org/page/events/the-glen-workshop/glen-workshop-2008/

So, the next time you hear from me on this blog, I should have more to say—and even some photographs!

~ Andy