The Talens' Tales

We don't have a TV in our house. I have lived without a TV for the past five years. And really, I don't miss it one bit. We started working out at the local gym, if you can call it back. When we started one of the perks was that it they have lots of TV and the Dish Network. It was like a little reward for working out. Sometimes, we even went to work out at certain times knowing that a certain show show would be on. But now, I find that I am bored with TV even then. I have a few channels that I check each time, but if nothing interesting is on, I really don't want to watch it. I have now started to take my book along, so I can read if nothing interesting is on. I can only watch people renovating their kitchens and patios so many times or see people cook with ingredients I have never even heard of, let alone purchase at my local grocery stores. My students think I am nuts when they discover we do not have a TV. "How can you survive?" they ask. "When I get my ow...

Some days you really need a good laugh. I am not saying that today was one of those days or anything, but I have been laughing a bit today at these things and I thought I would share it with you. Laughter is good medicine they say. This book is on that I received for Christmas and it is so funny. It is a book of "cutting remarks" that were overheard on PEI. Most of them could be said in just about any place at all. For example: "She's sweet alright, like frosting on burnt cake" or "He's not completely crazy, just a half bubble off plumb." This book is one that I picked up at a library once for free since the library no longer wanted it on the shelves. It is published in 1967 and it really does have some useful things in it that you could possibly...if you had no other option...and no one around you knew who you were. It might coming handy on a deserted island...but would who in their right mind would be caught carrying this book around. Aside from ...

It is strange to think about what life will be like in ten years. Where will we be living? What will we be doing? Kids? All of that stuff. The super nice thing is that we won't have to think about immigration stuff for that long! Yeah! After a long ordeal with a whole lot of paper work, Wilbert received his new Green Card today and it is good until January of 2019! Ten years is longer then we expected his new card to be valid for, so that is a wonderful blessing. So, even though it can be extremely frustrating to work with government organizations, we are thankful that everything came together better then we hoped. Now, we would like the government to think a little more about taking this paper conservation act seriously. We probably sent about 100 pages worth of copies to Immigration Services. Was that really necessary? Maybe in ten years we will be able to save a tree or two.

Those are the titles of the three book in Ted Dekker's The Circle Series. This is a series that has been keeping me from doing things I should probably be doing instead this week. They describe a captivating picture of this world and its relationship with God. What I love the most is this description of how God shows his love. "How does He show us His love? He chooses. He pursues. He rescues. He woos. He protects." Simple. Beautiful. The Love of God.

One thing I always appreciated about the name my parents gave me was that it was not very common. I was the only Denise in my school growing up and there was only one other Denise at college with me. So whenever I heard my name, I knew people really meant me. Then we moved to Edgerton, where it seems like it is a requirement to be named Denise if you are a female working at the school. I am Denise the English teacher. There is also Denise, the school secretary and Denise, the school nurse and basketball coach. So much for being the only one with my name. Thankfully, I have a husband with a rather unique name too. However, we have discovered that some people still can't keep all of us straight. Denise, the school nurse and basketball coach told us that after the basketball game this past week, a man said to her that, "Your husband's band sounded great tonight at the game." He was referring to the pep band that my husband, Wilbert, directs. What makes this worse is that...

Monday: Early Dismissal at 9:30 a.m. due to coming blizzard weather. Yes, that means we had school for a whopping hour and half. Tuesday: 2 Hour Late start to allow for clean up after the blizzard. Wednesday: 2 Hour Late start due to bitterly cold temperatures. I am sure you heard about those. Thursday: Same as Wednesday. We did enjoy getting to sleep in a bit. Friday: A scheduled 1/2 day of school since we have reached the end of the semester. So on top of all of this, we were trying to squeeze in exams and just end a semester. It was crazy and it felt really rushed, but we made now. And now begins the grading marathon.

This story starts a while ago...like this past summer. This area has very hard water. You really need a water softener or otherwise you start to get mineral deposits on everything. Our house came with one, but this summer it was starting to appear like it wasn't working so well. My handy husband first thought he would look at it. He did everything he could to try and get it to work again. He cleaned it, took things apart, talked to technical support, but nothing worked. Finally he broke down and decided we needed to get a real technician to come and look at it. Our water softener is a Kenmore brand from Sears. So he called their technical support and tried to make an appointment. However, the person that you make a service appointment said the technician is only in our areas on certain days and the technician will some between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. That is it. You cannot get them to come at 4 p.m. when we would be home at school and then don't come on Saturday. So, in October we ma...

That could be the reason I find this amusing. So pardon me if you do not find this humorous in anyway. Through some blog hopping, I stumbled upon The "Blog" of "Unnecessary"Quotation Marks . I found this site rather funny. It amazes me how people use quotation marks and it makes me wonder why they are using them. I really can't believe how many pictures the author puts up every day. And then we went to PEI for Christmas and I found some of my own examples. I didn't take pictures of them, but I will relay them here. In the curling rink, this sign was posted by the exit door. Absolutely "No" Alcohol Beyond This Point What does that mean? You can have alcohol, just don't let us know? And in the church bulletin on Sunday. The offering next week is for the "church." Does anybody else wonder what this offering is really for? The way language is used is amazing, and sometimes, rather humorous.

This year we went to Prince Edward Island for Christmas. Here is a little review through photos of many of the things that we did. 1) Play sports that seem really Canadian like: Five Pin Bowling There are only five pins to knock down and each pin has a different point value. The ball is about the size of a grapefruit and you don't have to stick your fingers in any little hole and pray that they come out. Also, the ball is not as heavy so you can really aim and throw with some force. I (the American) came out with the top score for the family of 162, which I attribute to the fact that this type of bowling is 100 times easier than Ten Pin bowling. Curling I was not terribly excited to spend two hours on the ice sliding large stones and trying to stay ahead of them with a broom. But, it actually turned out to be a lot of fun. That is probably because nobody really knew what they were doing or was any good at it, so we all made fools of ourselves together. Wilbert had a good handle on ...