The Talens' Tales

Well, summer is ending quickly. School starts tomorrow. And I am looking forward to it. It is nice to be in a routine, have a schedule and see some different people. Summer is wonderful, but teaching is good too. This is the first year that I have very few concerns going into the year. There are no classes I am dreading teaching, no really new responsibilities and I am not drastically changing my curriculum. So, I go into this school year with a prayer on my heart that God's name will be glorified and praised and His spirit will be very evident in the halls of school this year.

So the whole "smart board" technology is really big right now. Really big. But, being the little private school we are, it was not really feasible. Until now. The company 3M is a big supporter of private schools and they donated six of their version of a Smart Board to our school on the condition we give two of them to our feeders schools. So my room now sports some snazzy technology and it has been working great as I have been testing it out in my room. I hope to use it a lot. And I am just pretty excited to have a projector now to show movies and stuff on too. Hurray for technology that is free!

Our teacher meetings start in about an hour. It is so hard to believe the summer is almost over. But we had a great end to our summer with the wedding of my sister! Congratulations guys! I unfortunately did not get a great picture of Joy and Chad, but here are a few highlights. All of the bridesmaids and my beautiful sister. The three sisters, all happily married. Actually, we do have one more fun thing before I am going to say the summer is really over. In two weeks we head to California for a weekend for Joy and Chad's second reception. That should be a ton of fun.

I just love the fresh tomatoes and peppers from our garden. We had BLTs last night and tonight is tacos with all of the fixings.

For whatever reason, our summer movie watching has been limited this year. Usually we watch a lot of movies in the summer, but other things have been taking up our time this year I guess. But we just recently watched Amazing Grace which came out a few years ago. It is the story of William Wilberforce, a man who fought his whole life to abolish Great Britain's slave trade. The story was very powerful and challenging and told very well. It was wonderful to see a man be so convicted of something through his faith that he saw it through until he was finished. We highly recommend this film!

As I have said before, Christian fiction is not something I like to read all that much. It is just too unrealistic for me. Well, I have found another set of books that I really like in this genre. It is the Fairlawn Series by Angela Hunt. I will admit that I didn't think I would like these books though. Someone said that Angela Hunt was a good author and she has written about a million books, so I thought I would give her a try. I read two and I just didn't like her at all. They both had main characters who were not Christian and then they meet this guy who is and their life is turned around and everything become hunky-dory once they know Christ. A nice story, but as a Christian women it seemed way to cheesy, unrealistic and formulaic. But the Fairlawn Series features a Christian woman who is just trying to figure out how to live in a world that is far from perfect and filled with fallen sinful people. Of course there is a little love story woven in through it which I saw co...

At least that is what I think this potato looks like that I dug up in our garden yesterday. He was very tasty!

One of my traditions is making a cheesecake for my birthday. I love cheesecake, so every year I try a different kind. I would not say I am an awesome cheesecake baker yet, but it is fun to try and the results are always tasty. I am still learning how long I actually need to bake the cheesecake for. My tend to crack on the top as they cool. So, here a picture of a piece with the topping on it. For my birthday this year, I asked Wilbert for a cake decorating kit. Even though I don't make a decorated cake for myself, I still wanted to be able to make and decorate a cake if I wanted too. So, he obliged and got me one. And I of course wanted to test it out right away, so I made a cake for Wilbert who was gone most of last week at choir directors convention. It is fun to experiment with cakes.

Wilbert never misses a chance to remind me of his Canadian heritage. He spent one afternoon showing me videos on Youtube of the Canadian Heritage Commercials. One of those talks about the Inukshuk , which is a piling of stones that looks sort of like a human form. We see them every once and a while in the road in New Brunswick. At our campsite Wilbert decided to make is own version of an Inukshuk. Putting the finishing touches on. Now the people will know we were here, too (if it is still standing).

The beauty of creation was so evident up north on our vacation. Here are a few examples of wildflowers we saw. I don't know what kind they are, but they are beautiful and they were profuse.

We decided to take off this weekend, just the two of us and head north. Our original plan was to camp at a state park and go and see some sights each day. However, we didn't realize the magnitude of the great weekend migration that happens every weekend apparently here. We stopped at four state parks and all were full. At the fourth we asked where else we could camp and the super nice employees called a nearby campground and found they had several open sites. It was near the town of Finland. It was nice, small secluded campground. I think it has about 20 sites and we saw a total of five people the whole time were there. Our camp site and tent. Our plan still worked, even though we ended up a bit further north then we had wanted too. We saw many different things including: The view from the swinging bridge at Jay Cooke State Park. The Aerial Bridge in Duluth. Wilbert skipping stones on Lake Superior. The view of the coast from Silver Bay Cliff. The waterfalls in Gooseberry Falls Sta...