Some Good news for Sunday's Activity

We got some good news for Sunday's baking activity. An older sister of one of Shantal's classmates would like to tag along. She asked us if she could come over to help her English. We naturally said yes. It's good to get to know the families here as best we can and that is why we are doing the american baking activity.

Climate Change is stoppable?

I just saw an add - in German - on Facebook.

Stopp den Klimawandel

In English this means: Stop Climate Change, essentially click here to stop the climate change.

I believe that this advertisment, like most marketing slogans, is just that - a marketing slogan. I don't think we can stop the climate change.

I thought of the following scripture from the Mormon cannon of scripture:

What power shall stay the heavens? As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints. Doctrine & Covenants 121:33.

Something for the Girls

Well We've finally put something together for the girls in Shantal and Spencer's class. Shantal and hopefully 5-6 other girls (there are 8 other girls in the class) will be baking chocolate chip cookies one week from tomorrow.

Tamara will naturally be running the show, but I can babysit the other kids quite nicely, so I'll do my part. Below is the invitation (in German naturally).

Terminal Stop

The subway in Düsseldord recently added english translations of it's announcements. It goes like this:

Belsen Platz; Verbindungen zu; Connections to; . . .

This is rather entertaining in and of itself as the cuts from german to english and vice versa are so abrupt it's hard to get into the rhythm of the message. But the last stop on the line was the best of all. It went like this:

Am Seestern; Endstation; Terminal Stop;

This is a correct translation, but has somewhat ominous references. Like something terrible is about to happen at the next stop. In the U.S. we would say that someone has a terminal illness. And so I immediately associated Terminal Stop with terminal illness and assumed the worst. Gratefully, nothing happened and all the passengers were able to exit the train unharmed.

Fungus Pizza

I went to a pizza lunch again today and a co-worker ordered what I affectionately refer to as a "fungus pizza." Why do I do this. Because apparently the Italian word for mushroom (German word is Pilz) is related to the english word fungus.



Very entertaining.

Football Pics

Hi all. Sorry for being so neglectful lately. I had big plans, honestly I did.

Anyhoo, here are some pics of our last football outing, thanks to grandpa. It was a great time.




It's a bit hard to recognize in the background, but the soccer goal in the far background indicates that we hijacked a soccer field in order to play football. In America this would be the other way around. Kids would be playing soccer on a traditional football field.




Now the action is getting started.


Now you can see the soccer goal much better. But more important - did you notice that awesome quarterback leading his team to victory. OK, there isn't much defense, and we really didn't keep score. But it is fun to play quarterback and teach the kids the game, how to call plays, go long, button hook (what was that in german again?), three step drop, etc. Great group of boys.


Giving one of the boys the chance to quarterback the team. They do really well.