I Have An Extra Minute!!!

Hello Everyone! I am blogging for the first time on my own. Well not really I had to have a little help from friends but I am now making my first post with pictures and everything!!! Isn't that awesome! I feel so computer savvy! So, we are doing well! We had a wonderful Thanksgiving feast with the Wrides and the Hildagos and Jose, our grounds keeper and his son showed up too!! We had a great time visiting and eating good food. We gave thanks for our blessings and gathered for an hour together to listen to an inspiring message from Michael Medved on the true story of Thanksgiving. We haven't listened to all of it yet but it was wonderful what we did listen to and I can't wait to get back to it again! We are so thankful that we were able to have Thankgiving this year. I will share with all of you our everyday miracle that made it possible for us to even have a feast! I woke up on Wednesday and realized that Thanksgiving was tomorrow and we had no money and we were had no food to cook either, except food storage food. I talked with Dannan about it and we decided that we should call Tiffanie and see what her plans were for sure. (She talked to us about getting together for Thanksgiving and being 'family' earlier this past week but we didn't have any plans layed out.) We thought if we combined our resources we could possibly pull off a decent meal. So we did and she was excited and willing to celebrate with us! Hurray!! We love being with the Wrides, they are an awesome family! So, we added up all our money and it totaled out at $30.00. We need to open a bank account and it takes about 50.00 to do it, so we were saving that for the deposit, but we felt like we should use it to buy what ingredients we could for dinner. We headed out to the store and Dannan thought, hey, why don't we just check the account and see if there is anything in it. Well, the day before there wasn't but, alas, when we checked there was $150.00 in there. We had enough and to spare to buy all that we needed to make everything we were hoping to have for Thanksgiving. So that was our little miracle for Thanksgiving. We truly had a wonderful time being with friends and enjoying the sun and warm weather for our outdoor, pool party Thanksgiving Celebration! We made grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, southern style green beans, carrots and celery, and four kinds of pies!! We had a wonderful german chocolate pie made by Rachael and Coconut/Banana Cream pie and "pumpkin" pie and apple crisp (made completely by dried food storage and it was fabulous!). I made pastry dough for the second time ever and it turned out Perfect! I couldn't believe how good the crusts were on all those pies! We feasted and feasted! A little tid bit on the pumkin...they don't have canned pumpkin here or real pumpkins for that matter, so I had to do something else. We found some large squash at the market and it kind of looked like pumpkin and smelled a little like pumpkin(they had some squashes cut up and wrapped). Well, I thought, yeah, I could use that to make pumpkin pie and they actually had butternut squash as well, so I got one of each and headed home to get busy baking. When I cut open the squash it was green!! Not ripe at all! So I was quite bummed out! I called and talked to Dannan but he was already at the lab and Rachael and I have no working vehicle, so I was stuck. Finally Rachael had the great idea of calling Tiffanie to solicit help. We did and she was willing so she headed out to the grocery store by her and they didn't have pumpkin either so she got sweet potatoes instead. When she got to our place we hoped in the car together and headed back to the market bought the already cut squash that I knew was ripe and headed home to make pie. It turned out great thanks to the help of a great friend and we had tico squash and butternut squash pie, yummmm!

So we are good and well and are here at the lab today to talk to family, unfortunately no one was home so we are just using the internet and now we are going to visit a friend. Love you all.... So the pictures are of some of the animals and such that we have seen here at our home or at the beach. The parrots, butterflies, hummingbirds we see all the time and it's so wonderful to watch these beautiful creations. The large spider that you can see is a tailess whipscorpion. We have seen a few of these around and it's pretty scary. We've seen a couple scorpions as well! The iguana you see here is the same kind that is living in our roof and we get to see him all the time. The crab is similar to the one I saw at Samara beach. This blue butterfly is a blue morph they are very large and are so graceful to watch fly!