Highlights from vacation:

We got to see old houses, older than anything we have in NE. They were beautiful!

We went to the new Creation Science museum in KY. It's expensive, but very well done.

I was able to spend an hour in the Lexington, KY cemetery. It's beautiful and rich in history.

We saw family in Ohio that we hadn't seen in ten years.

Lowpoints of vacation:

We were in tents. Jen and I shared one and everyone else had the other.

It rained, and everything including us got wet

I had to cook over an open fire from limited supplies

The bathrooms were always a long ways away

We had to set up and take down camp more than five times.

There is the short version of our two week vacation.

Vacation does not mean you will have time to relax

In the last two weeks I've been to Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri, and now I am finally home. My favorite part of our two week vacation was visiting the Lexington KY Cemetery. I'll post more about it later- we're still unpacking. When we got home we found that our water distiller had leaked all over the floor and it had gotten moldy and ruined the wood flooring. Ugh. And tomorrow Dad is being ordained as an Elder in our Church. There's so much to do!

Rainy days

It's been a turbulent spring season for parts of NE, but all the big storms missed us and we only had normal rainstorms in our area.

Raining in the sun- can you see it?

Now, though, spring is over and we are getting into the hot weather of July. We are going to be tent camping for two weeks at the end of this month. I fervently hope that the weather will be decent!

Independence Day 2008

“Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors.”

-Joseph Story

People in general seem to be very forgetful, so the repeating of the above quote and others like it should not be seen as a dull repetition, but as a necessary reminder.

"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."
-John Adams

We spent our 4th of July in Nebraska’s Capitol, attending a celebration that included the recitation of the Declaration of Independence , a speech, and a dramatic presentation of the poem “Rodney’s Ride”. We got home late and crabby, but it was a day well spent.

Daughters of the Revolution
Celebrating Liberty in Lincoln, Nebraska

Vacation at our Iowa Resort

We are having a great time, relaxing and being lazy, doing fun things! We've eaten all the ice cream and the whipped cream, and we are working on the chocolate sauce. We've watched plenty of movies and jumped on the trampoline. We did get some sewing done, and yesterday we went into Omaha to volunteer at our Church library. We labeled about 50 books with the Dewey decimal system, and there are about 250 books left, or more. We learned the Dewey decimal system real well, though.

Our hosts' chickens are surviving under our care, though we were too scared to force the sitting hens off their nests to get at the eggs, so now there is a little chicky added to the brood, with maybe more to come. Won't our hosts be surprised when they get back!
Today, our last day of freedom, we are planning to go(if tornados don't stop us) see "Prince Caspian" and do some grocery shopping. Tomorrow and Saturday we will be at conferences all day and we will have to clean house Saturday morning before we leave. Then it's back to real life and responsibility on Sunday. Not that we didn't have responsibility here, just way less than at home. I think living alone long-term could make a person very self-centered, because there's no one to take care of but yourself!

The Big Event

Jennifer's high school graduation is on Saturday. Why do we put ourselves through so much stress and work to proclaim that we are officially done with school? When usually in the case of home schoolers there's so much to read yet that you end up doing continuing school for some time after you graduate? It doesn't seem like my graduation was this stressful! Maybe I'm just tired and I have a faulty memory.
The day after Jen's graduation she and I are escaping for a little vacation. We are really just house-sitting- but we will be alone and we are planning on relaxing and getting some projects done. I am hoping I can convince Jen to share a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream and a batch of chocolate sauce with me. She is so reluctant to eat any type of sugar, but I think sugar is essential to any vacation.

My four hours at the primary

So yes, I was at the County Courthouse for four hours yesterday helping at the voting booths. My job was to hand people their correct ballot in its (ugly brown) plastic sleeve, and take it from them when they were done and then carefully slide the ballot out of the sleeve into the ballot box without looking. There was a lot of emphasis on the “WITHOUT LOOKING” part! We were NOT supposed to see what boxes were checked on any ballot. So it wasn't a big job or hard work at all, but I did learn a little bit about the voting process. There are a lot of rules! It was required that six people be there to help- there were four nice Grandma ladies and the precinct supervisor, who was a county employee. She mostly handed out the “I Voted!” stickers. We were in charge of eight precincts. I think we had somewhere around 700 ballots provided, and only 276 ballots were used. There was only one green vote all day, which is no surprise since we live in an agricultural county where the farmers think nothing of polluting the universe through hog barn waste and crop chemicals. There were no Nebraska party votes, and maybe a few less Non-partisan votes than Democratic votes. The majority of votes were Republican. Nebraska is a pretty Republican State.

I think people should be able to choose what ballot they want, whatever party they may officially belong to, and the smaller parties should be added to to the Dem. and Rep. Ballots, instead of being separate. There was hardly anyone to vote for on the smaller ballots because fewer people were running under those parties.

None of the ladies working with me knew why NE had a Democratic caucus besides being able to vote yesterday. It doesn't make sense to me why would they caucus and vote both?

After the polls closed at 8pm, we counted all the leftover ballots and only we were only one off. I left before the ladies figured out what happened to that one.

Four hours got to be a little long when there weren't many people coming in to vote, but I am glad I went. For one thing, it's good to get your name out as someone involved in politics. That way people know to contact you when they need help and then you can influence the political scene for the better, in little ways at least.

And on the way home, I stopped to see the sunset.