life

i'm supposed to be sleeping right now. we came home from church, gwen was asleep so we laid her down, fed addi, and she went to sleep too. then not 20 minutes later there was quite the clamor in our close-quarters living environment and it woke-up all of us. gwen and case fell right back to sleep, but addi thinks she's had her nap for the day, and i'm all irritated and ornery about my family being woken up, nap destroyed, and having to deal with a cranky tired addi, so i'm blogging.

hi.

a couple of updates:

  the fees: waived. *smile*

  the land: yes, we bought it. 

it all went down in october. we called the real-estate guy we were working with to tell him we really felt like we shouldn't get the land at this time, well that time i guess, and thanked him, apologized for all of his wasted effort, yada yada. he tried to convince us to get it said 'sleep on it' ... so i called him the next day and said frankly it was a matter of prayer and whether that explanation was acceptable to him or not, that was why we were no longer interested in the land. and we didn't need to sleep on it any more. done.

"ok. well, then you're losing your earnest money."

"our what?"

"the $6000 you gave us as a security deposit. according to contract you lose it if you don't close the deal. maybe you should think about that?"

"no. i asked you about that money. you said it was a guarantee for us not you, to ensure noone else would take the land while we were considering it. i called you and asked you specifically about it."

"oh, well, sorry for the misunderstanding. you lose it if you don't close."

"we asked you to not take advantage of us. we told you we were unfamiliar with real-estate and that we trusted you. are you being serious? we can't afford to lose that amount of money ... "

"then maybe you should get the land."

that was basically the conversation. the prayers were a bit intense. we were willing to eat it (AKA lose a crazy large amount of money) if that's what we needed to do. we prayed and prayed and prayed some more and felt it would be incredibly unwise to dispose of $6000 just like that. the way we felt about it was, 'this isn't the best option. it's not what is ideally supposed to be happening. so since it's option B, there will inevitably be not-so-good consequences.'  

and now, at this very moment, we're seeing the consequences. we found a piece of land here in hawaii. in our price range. we could build this summer ... IF we didn't have the texas land. yah ... so we're hoping to sell our little piece of the lone star state so that we can get a little chunk of the aloha state. it's all a bunch of crazy craziness and a huge testimony builder in the areas of prayer and choice and accountability.

onto other things, case is back from kwajalein and has some pretty nifty pics:

these are some of the islands that make up the kwaj atoll

and this is the main island: on the right side, ocean side of the island, you can see where they dug out sand and coral to build up the island (the rectangular cut outs in the water). isn't that crazy!

the next two pics are from one island looking at another. you could walk from island to island during low tide. i mean, yah, your feet would get wet, and you'd need shoes because it's way sharp coral, but you could walk.they also have small planes and a ferry system to take you between islands. these two definitely aren't walkable, because as you can see, the water gets pretty dark blue between them. that's some deep water. i guess you could swim that part ... i think i would just go for the ferry personally.

kwaj is all military. it used to be real hoppin' with somewhere around 7000 people. now there are only about 1000. this beautiful building was supposed to be a bomb-proof permanent satellite set-up. the large round things are the cemented in satellites. well, that's where the satellites were supposed to be. they were off by millimeters ... so now it's a multi-million dollar storage facility. no joke. they keep old record players and pianos and TVs and stuff in there. 

this is a really big radar. case was saying that you had to get clearance to go anywhere above 15 feet on the island because of the intense amounts of radio waves. like 'no more kids for you' intense ... that's swell to know.

this is a really big plane taking off from a really short runway.

these are some shots of the housing. note: no cars. there are very few cars at all on the whole atoll. most people use bikes and feet to get around. 

a park.

atolls from the air:

coming soon: gwen's 1st birthday. 

i know. i can't believe it either ...