tired of winter and of being sick!

so, it's been awhile. a lot has happened in the past couple weeks....we've gotten more snow, found a new apt. and signed the lease (yahoo!), went out of town for two days, been sick for the past week, and yesterday we moved our church from the school back to it's old home - very exciting!

so, i'll start w/ the new apt. - we were so excited to find it so quickly. it is literally a block from the lake - yippee! it's still w/in walking distance of church for phil but not too close to our beloved cubbies....however, parking our car will be more difficult, so that is something fun to look forward to. :) and one of the best parts is that we wil be a lot closer to many of our friends! it's a "garden" apt., meaning half below and half above ground. but it has really high ceilings and full size windows, so it doesn't feel like you are in a cave. it's a bit bigger than our current place, but not huge by any means - which is fine, we just wanted to be able to open up our dining table again and have more than 4 people sit around it! we are planning to move the last sat. of march...gotta get packing!

last sun. after church we headed out on a little adventure that phil planned for us - he didn't tell me where we were going until we were almost there. my surprise destination was starved rock state park, where we spent two nights at their lodge. it was really good to get away and just relax and we did some hiking - phil got some neat shots of the wooded winter scenes and we saw an eagle and several deer. it was a nice time, except that near the end i started getting this annoying cough which developed into a cold/flu thing which has continued and now phil has it - fun times. (apparently it's really going around though - i talked to lots of people at church yesterday who have it or had it)

then yesterday was our last day having church in the elementary school that we have called home for the past 2 years. it was neat to see so many people stay after and help us move all our stuff over to the church building - it went really fast. we're so excited to be back in our old home and the way God brought us back is such a cool story of redemption. for those who don't know, we moved out b/c of issues w/the previous owner. but the building was sold around a year ago and the new owner had actually been attending our church. he has done a lot of renovation and restoration of the building and it looks amazing, and now we are back as the primary renters. he is calling it a "community center" and wants it to be used for other organizations and events, so we don't have exclusive use of the building any time we want it. but our offices are there and it will be worlds better than meeting at the school, so we are extremely grateful!

so i guess that's the "big stuff" from here. please pray we feel better soon - we have no energy for the packing which needs to get started! not to mention we will be working on getting unpacked and settled in at the church this week too! have a great week!