Merry Christmas!

It's a little after 7am on Christmas Morning & I am currently waiting for my two girls to wake up to join in the Christmas festivities. It's given me the opportunity to reflect a bit on Christmas and its meaning. "For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6, NLT). It is so easy to get caught up in the stuff of Christmas that we forget the deeper meaning. I really like this passage from Isaiah - imagine what it must have been like to hear this in the midst of a very dark time - to know that a Savior will one day come to redeem all of mankind. A simple child, born in a manger - and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. This is our God.

These are my thoughts this morning as I wait for our house to be transformed into world of excitement, wonder, and Christmas cheer. In the meantime, I thought I would share a little from our Christmas experience this year. These pictures are from the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium. We went on Saturday night with a couple of our good friends (Aaron & Amy) and my parents. Ellie had a great time looking at the lights (they had lots of glow-in-the-dark animals outlined in lights). One really cool display was of the Tacoma Narrows Bridges with Mount Rainier in the background - very creative (for those of you not from Tacoma, they are currently building a second bridge to span the Tacoma Narrows - in the picture it is the one with the cables lit up). They did a really good job replicating the bridges - even leaving off certain sections of the bridge that aren't quite finished yet.

Sleepless Night

Last night was one of the those nights were sleep just seemed to escape me. I managed to get in about an hour and a half of sleep before I was awakened by our daughter. She was having a rough night (I think her leg was hurting) and had trouble getting back to sleep. Finally after some Tylenol she was able to make it back to dream of her new Pooh bear toy. Unfortunately, by this time I was wide awake. I fought it for a little while but finally decided to give up.

After doing some brainstorming and putting some thoughts down on paper (of the electronic variety), I headed over to my favorite photo site - Flickr. I enjoy flipping through and looking at the variety of pictures. Typically, I look for pictures to use as backgrounds for songs for our worship services at our church. It kind of serves two purposes: our church gets some cool new backgrounds and I get to browse through lots of photos - something I enjoy doing. If you run across any cool images, let me know.

Here's one I like:

Email updates

We've set up a GoogleGroup for those that are interested in being notified by email when a new posting is made to our blog.

Instructions: (this will take 1-2 minutes)
Visit our group's webpage.
Click on "Join this group"
Login to your Google account (gmail, calendar, etc.) - if you don't have a google login, you'll need to create one.
Decide on what format you would like to receive the email in (digest, full, or abridged).

That's it. You're all done!

By the way, I've changed the settings so that you don't have to login to blogger to post a comment to our blog (sorry to all those who attempted to do this in the past - it should be easier now).

the new blogger

We recently switched over to the new beta blogger (operated by Google). Not too much different - a few changes here and there, but it is easier to add different elements now (such as tags, links, etc.). You'll probably need to update our address in your feed reader - the addresses are below. By the way, if you're looking for a good feed reader, I'd recommend Sage. It's a plug-in for Firefox and integrates really well.

Here's a screen shot of what it looks like:

When you click on the icon for Sage, it pops up a sidebar that shows the blogs you subscribe to on the top with the individual postings below. When you click on the refresh icon (located at the top of the sage bar), it checks for any blog updates and lets you know it's new by bolding the text. Also, the magnifying glass next to the refresh icon searches a site for a new feed. So, if you are visiting our site (mike-tina.blogspot.com), you can click on the magnifying glass and it will automatically grab our feed so that you can subscribe to it. It makes life much simpler.

New Feeds for Mike & Tina (either of these will work):
http://mike-tina.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://mike-tina.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Green Eggs and...

I've always thought this was simply the clever title of a book created in the mind of a rather famous "doctor," but about a month ago I heard about chickens that actually laid green eggs - and sure enough, they do!

This morning, Tina, Ellie, and I got to enjoy some of those green eggs (thanks to our friends Mike & Cindy).

I gotta tell you, they were pretty good - although it was odd knowing that we were eating green eggs. If you get the chance, I'd highly recommend them - much better than the store-bought.

Here's a nice "after" picture to see how they turned out (we were making breakfast burritos - very tasty).