Day one has begun, and I’m still not packed… I just finished posting the initial bits to this little website. You can watch the map and keep track of where we are on a day to day basis. I started in a couple days ahead though. I am getting more excited as the night wears on and I am debating whether or not to go to sleep. We have to leave around 3:30 am – normally my bedtime.

So, I am going to go finish packing and prepare for a day of airports! Our route tomorrow (I mean today…is: Des Moines to Chicago to Washington to Vienna to Cairo.

Mickie bought me a really cool travel pillow, that should help.

Well, its t-minus 3 days before we leave for Israel. The trip should be awesome, and you can follow every step here. You will also get a preview of the new blog format. I am switching to WordPress when I get back – though the design will be different.

Mia went in on Monday for some tests due to recent uti’s. It was a fairly stressful day as the sedatives didn’t really work and she had a bad reaction coming out of one of them. The good thing though is that she doesn’t seem to remember any of it. We don’t have any results back yet, but pray that everything would be okay, or that they would find something and know how to treat it.

I just upgraded our home computer with 3 200 gb hard drives. CompUSA had an awesome sale this weekend where they were only 29.99 each. I now have almost a terabyte of storage at home. I am in the process of putting all of our media (dvd’s, music, pictures) on one media drive that will be able to serve the entire house on our wireless network. There is some really cool free software called Media Portal that I think will do everything I want. So in the end we should be able to access any movie/cd/picture on any tv or laptop with just a couple clicks.

I was reading in Hebrews 1 and 2 yesterday and was really struck by how awesome Jesus is – God the Father calls him “My God”, and “My Lord.” And then in the midst of his glory and honor he calls us (humans – His creation) His own brothers – stop and think about the significance of the statement for 30 seconds or so. Incredible.

I’ve been watching a little of the Olympics but have been disappointed with the selection of things being shown. Maybe it’s just my timing of tuning in, but it always seems like there is something that is unbearable to watch – like cross country skiing… Is there anything that makes you want poke your eyes out more than having to watch cross country skiing? Maybe – if you are forced to watch women’s hockey. I would like to see some combination of sports – like the biathlon and ski-jumping. You could have the biathletes ski over to the ski jump and try and shoot the jumpers. I would also like to see a combination of NASCAR and luge. How cool would it be to go 3 wide in a turn going 90mph? Bump drafting would take on a whole new meaning.

Time for this post to end. See you in Israel.