New Bicycle!

This summer I had been saving up my money in order to buy a better transportation then what I currently have.  I was debating between a scooter or a road bicycle.  While I was thinking this through a scooter just didn't make that much sense.  If when I get to the student teaching part of my major I will need to get to the school that they will assign me to.  Well there is a possibility, a good possibility that where they assign me will be out of scooter range.  This to me made a scooter impractical.  So I decided and went ahead with buying a road bike.  I tried out several of them and finally settled on one.  I bought a 2008 Raleigh Grand Sport.  It is a gorgeous bicycle and one that will last me several years.  In other news I'm doing good.  A few weeks ago I went into the doctor's office and told them that I was not feeling as well as I should.  He ordered me to have a CT scan.  After waiting far too long, I finally got the results back.  It turns out that I had a fair amount of inflammation in my ileum (the ileum is where the small intestine meets the large intestine).  Luck for me I did not have anything which would cause me to have to undergo surgery.  The doctors once getting my results from my CT decided to double my dose of remicade (it used to be 5mg per Kg).  I went to the doctor's office again today and well I still am not feeling my best.  The doctor said the remicade is not a failure yet but has put me on Entocort (it's a steroid) to try and help me until the remicade can kick into full effect.  Anyways I thought people might be interested in knowing what has been going on in my life. 

Update from Aurora.

Hello Family,
Colette I love your posts! Thanks so much for keeping us all up to date with you and Erik, it makes the miles between us much closer, and … you motivate me to post a blog too!

I can't believe that summer is almost over for me. I report back to school Monday, August 18th. I've had a busy summer: I subbed for summer school for two weeks, spend a week taking a grad class, attended several one day trainings with my school district, enjoyed reading a lot of wonderful books, and sewed a bit. The girls and I have also enjoyed visiting the pool and volunteering at Feed Me Starving Children. But as I look towards the last two weeks of freedom I have mixed feelings as I'm excited about returning to the classroom, but there is always so much more I perhaps should have done, but haven't and probably won't. I guess that's life.

News with Kristen is that she is now employed at Loehman's. It's a store like TJ Max, but it's merchandise is more upscale. She has been training in Oak Brook for the past two weeks, which has been hard, but since it's on Lee's way to work he has been driving her and bringing her home. They are opening a new store about 1/2 mile from our home and thankfully has begun working there this week as they are loading the store for the grand opening this weekend.

We have a couple of pictures to share with everyone. First, we want to share Katie's first cucumber! She has planted several container gardens on our patio and this beauty was her first harvest. We ate it that night and it was delicious.


Some of her other plants include cherry tomatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. We have enjoyed several zucchini and she also makes a mean zucchini bread with her delicious zucchini's. YUM!


One day last week Katie and I went to Color Me Mine where she enjoyed painting this lovely trivet.

Here's the final product.

Well hope all is well with the rest of the family. If you need help blogging, just let me know.

Love,
Joey

Birthday, Vacation, and Car Talk!

Erik skillfully cutting my cake up for my birthday. He baked it himself! He did a great job, it was delicious. 
Here is what Erik was creating with my cake. He has done this every year since we have started dating! 
Erik put 25 candles on the cake, I am only 23. How rude. I couldn't do it in one blow, because of the massiveness of the cake. 
YAY! A bread machine. It doesn't only cook the bread, it kneads it too. (Erik didn't know that!)
The day after my birthday we packed up to enjoy a weekend in Burley. We had a great time. We played on a really large slip and slide on Saturday, but because I was playing I didn't take any pictures. This picture is of Coral. I asked her to smile for the camera, but she wouldn't. So she got this ball to smile for her. 
Carson, who is now 1, and Cooper showing us their musical abilities. It was great to see them both and I can't believe how much they are growing. 
We had a birthday party for me and dad and all those August birthdays (Carson, Talia, Abbigail, Cooper, Quinn, etc...) Those are Jon's arms. He and Quinn, Wendy, Jacey, Parker and Paige were there and of course Grandma and Grandpa. 
Here is our birthday cake. Nate baked it. It was great and it took a lot of time.
Monday, the last day we were in Burley we went to Shoshone Falls. 
We had a picnic down at the falls with stuff we bought at Costco. 

We went to the falls, after we went to the Twin Falls Temple open house. The temple is beautiful and Mom and Dad were ushers and showed us were to go. 

Here is Mt. St. Helens. We went there for a field trip with work. It took about 4 hours to get there on a big, yellow, school bus. So that is not actually St. Helens, it is a replica. That is what it looked like after the eruption. 

This is what we saw...BOO. We saw clouds and rain and no Mt. St. Helens. Poor kids were sad (I think) I know I was sad. You can see the mud were the water ran off and that is about it. So basically we rode 4 hours to see some clouds, a movie about the eruption in the visit center, and the kids played on a different playground. Oh well. I will just have to go back when it is not cloudy. 
Saturday I did something that I have never done...wax a car. Here is Erik demonstrating the proper wax on technique. 

Here is the car all waxed. Erik is admiring his work. Oh and my work. 

Wax off. Notice the difference between the two sides? So that is what we did this weekend. It was a lot of work good thing Erik did most of it.  Oh and a bird pooped on it at church today. RUDE!! 

Dungeness SpitHere is what Colette showed from our 4th of July. As she will describe it is a very long hike, and both of us did get blisters. Hope all is well.Erik

Dungeness Spit
Here is what Colette showed from our 4th of July. As she will describe it is a very long hike, and both of us did get blisters. Hope all is well.Erik

This is where we went on the 4th of July. If you look at the map you see a little green thing poking out into the water. That is the Dungeness Spit. We walked along that small bit of sand, all the way to the end. It took 6 hours, but it was a lot of fun. 
This is a very happy tree that we found along the way. There was a lot of driftwood around the beach. It looked similar to the last pictures we posted, Ebey's Landing. 
This was the final prize at the end of the 5.5 miles, a lighthouse. At the top of the lighthouse were some binoculars and we could see Victoria, BC! It was pretty good. That is it right above my head. 
Here is the lighthouse. The light house use to be at the end of the spit when it was build in the 1800s. Now there is about a 1/2 mile past the light house. The spit grows an average of 15 feet a year. Crazy. Soon it will stretch all the way to Canada! 
This may just look like water, but in the water are some small black dots. Those small dots are harbor seals! It was really fun to watch them hang out and splash around for us. 

We enjoyed our Holiday and watched the fireworks on the pier. It was pretty cool, mostly because there were people shooting fireworks off all around us

A day with Ralph and Rosie... (Kind of a family thing!)

For those who may not know, Ralph Engelking is my Godfather. His Grandpa (Heinrich Hartmann) was my Great Grandpa. His father married my Grandpa's sister, they had 13 kids, Ralph was the last, and only surviving one left. He's 86. And he, and his much younger wife Rosie, are just a blast!

So I picked them up on Monday morning...

1. The first thing Rosie had to show me the fancy bloom on her flower. It was a beauty!


2. Then we took off and headed over to the Schaumburg Township Building on Schaumburg Road in Schaumburg, our old home town. What happens just as we are entering the Township Building? We run into Alice Gerschefske! It doesn't get any better than that! We yacked and yacked. Note that Ralph is wearing his White Sox T-shirt. I had to suffer no small amount of boasting about how the Sox swept the Cubs over the weekend!

3. Then we said, hey Alice, come back inside and let's go look for that quilt that is supposed to be hanging on the wall upstairs. We found it OK, complete with the Sunderlage house, St. Peter's Lutheran Church, the Easy Street Pub, the old General Store, and lower left is the old WGN tower! It was a work of art. We pulled some chairs into the hallway there and before long we had quite a crowd talking about the history of Schaumburg!

Then we went to the old ShamRose Inn, now the Lou Malnatis, and had lunch. YumYum!

4. One more stop. We drive West on Schaumburg Road and turn South on Springinsguth Road. Of course, if you don't know, Henry Springinsguth is the chap who married Grandma Heide (Mom's mom), Alma Nebel Heide Springinsguth to be more accurate. As we are crusing south on Springinsguth, we come to the now famous intersection of Springinsguth and Hartmann Drive! Ta da! We are standing on the hallowed ground of one of the Hartmann farms. Oh, Rosie shot the photo while standing out on Springinsguth and dodging traffic! Great job Rosie!

AsAlwaysRalphAndRosieRanMeRaggedHuggs,

UncleBill

It's All About the Girls!

Today Katie went to "Feed My Starving Children" with Sarah, Anna and I. This is a non-for-profit organization that assembles, and ships a very nutritious dehydrated food for children who are starving in the world. On this day the group that we worked packaged enough food to feed 44 children for one year.

Sarah was a runner, carrying boxes, weighing them and taping them for shipping. Don't they look wonderful with their hair nets!

Katie and Anna weighing the packages before they are sealed.


Anna and Katie measuring the chicken, veggies, soy and rice for the packages.

Monday Kristen felt was a bit of "the best of times, the worst of times." Kristen had a wonderful job interview with Loehmann's and was hired later that day. They are like a TJ Max store except the clothing is high end designer clothes that are being sold at 40 - 60 % off. She has the wonderful starting pay of $8.00 per hour. (50¢ above minimum wage!) So that was the good news, and it's only about a mile from our home. Later that day she showed me her toe that was injured a month ago. She cracked a piece of her toe nail off while jumping in a moon jump. Kristen has been very careful with keeping it clean and covered, but nevertheless, it got very infected. So after a trip to immediate care, she came home with only part of her toe nail and a wonderful bottle of antibiotics, and pain killers. She is enjoying foot soaks and spending a lot of time with her foot above her heart.


Don't those piggies look beautiful with the polish, you can hardly notice the bandage.

And while we are talking about Kristen she went on a pioneer trek a couple of weeks ago with the youth from our church. They all dressed like pioneers and pulled hand carts for three days in Springfield, IL. Check out this link for pictures of her trek.

http://treklds.myphotoalbum.com/view_album.php?set_albumName=album01

Finally, I hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July. I have to admit it is one of my favorite holidays.

And Erik, I do agree that the blog doesn't lie and what I noticed is that it has been one month since your last post and it has been only 17 days since my last post. So you may want to consider who needs to shape up! ; )

Here is Another Post

To all,

Today is July 1st. I was recently talking to my mother and she mentioned I have not posted on the blog in a while. We luckily for me blogs don't lie and she surprisingly has not posted since June 16th. In church we heard a talk about how parents are better teachers by example than by what they say. So Mom shape up or ship out!

Sorry for the harsh words, incase anybody is wondering, we are doing fine. Colette has started her job at the Boy's and Girl's club and she is usually quite tired by the end of the day. I continue to go to work and they continue to pay me, so I guess things there are fine. Last weekend it was about 90 degrees F around here and we don't have air conditioning, it was kind of miserable. On Saturday, we helped widen a forrested trail need the local hospital, we found a homeless camp that had been abanded and a lot of fern bushed but no red ones (maybe someday). Well enough of our life.

In our free time (which is plenty) we like to watch this show called wipeout it is pretty funny. Click on funny to see why.

Colette wants to add some pictures to prove to you we haven't lost an arm or something so we went to Whidbey Island and hiked on the shore thing.  

Colette also is around and hasn't lost an arm as shown in Figure 1. It also should be noted Colette is in some kind of shooting shelter which overlooks the Strait of Juan de Fuca (its a real place you should look it up on a map). 

Well that is enough out of me. Colette is speechless (or should I say spellbound?)