We arrived in Charlotte safe and sound. The only drama was gas. You may have heard the Atlanta is having gas supply issues. Well, so is the entire region, even 100 miles out. We were lucky to find gas and make it through the state last night. Taylor started working in the SIM office today, prepping computers and other equipment to start shooting and editing video. The house we are staying in is owned by two retired missionaries who are visiting Africa for 3 months. It’s perfect for what we need. More soon!

We had a successful estate sale last week. A few larger furniture pieces were left but sold quickly on craigslist! Thank you to all those who helped us during the sale and our move to Taylor’s parent’s home. We continued our busy weekend with a trip to Austin to visit a church that has supported us and had a great time with a couple who has been mentoring us along this whole process of getting to the field. It seems surreal that we are this close to beginning this next chapter in our lives! Thank you for all of you who have helped us along the way!

Please be in prayer for us as we pack up yet again for a long trip to our agency’s headquarters in North Carolina. We will be starting the drive on Sunday and hope to be there by Tuesday. A big praise is that our housing need is taken care of! We will be house sitting for some fellow SIM missionaries, which is a tremendous blessing!

After our time in Carolina we will be heading back to Dallas for our church’s missions weekend October 24-26. We will then be making a few more trips to see family and friends before the big departure day, November 15! Please keep Avery in your prayers as she will be spending many hours in her car seat. And pray that we are able to find true rest and peace in Him during this busy time.

Tonight I sit at my parents computer typing this blog post. About 2 hours ago I found out that my messenger bag which held both of our computers and many other digital accessories (hard drives, digital cameras, etc.) had been stolen out of the back of our U-Haul trailer. To say the least, this is a blow to our moral at this time. Thankfully we have become faithful users of backup drives, so not much is lost there. But fears of what kind of stuff can be accessed on the laptops is scary. We have renters insurance, so we’re hoping coving those items will not be an issue. At some point in time, I know that I paid extra to raise the ceiling on the coverage for computers, but I’m not sure how much or if I ever lowered that back down to the default limit.

We ask for your prayers. We might have to take a financial hit on this if for some reason our insurance does not cover these items. Again, our moral is low and right now we’re working feverishly to get ready for our estate sale we’ll be starting on Thursday.

We’ve been packing, sorting and throwing away everything we own over the last two days. With one more day to go before our estate sale begins (Thurs-Sat) we just have to get all the left over junk out of the house and pose everything. Taylor’s parents have generously offered a room to us so that we can keep a few pieces of furniture and store a few personal items while we’re overseas. Over the years, that will become less and less important as Africa truly becomes our home. But it will be nice to have a place to come back to on furlough that we can call our own.

Well, at the last minute we thought we’d have a garage sale to clear out some of our house. It’s become a complete mess as we’re starting to pack to move a few personal items into storage, some to Africa but still leaving enough for use in Charlotte next month. All while slowly selling off our things to friends and random Craiglist.com people.

We knew Ike was coming, but we were thinking we could beat the storm and have a sale this morning. Little did we know, the whole hurricane is nearly the size of Texas. Even though the eye of the storm just passed landfall, the rain from the same storm just hit. It’s so strange looking into the sky and seeing the clouds move West, and the wind coming from the East.

So, as I went outside at 7:30 to survey the weather, I made the call to cancel our last minute Spring Cleaning. Only 15 minutes later, it began to rain heavily and hasn’t stopped yet.

Hopefully we’ll be ready for next weekend for our true estate sale. We’re selling it all! And the rain can’t stop us this time, since it’s in our house.

Click cloud for the big version. Provided via wordle.net.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may have heard about Ushahidi already. The original version was put together in only a few days to respond to the political violence following the last election. Today they have relaunched. With grant funding and developers all over the world, this thing is going to rock. It exists as a portal to gather info about acts of violence during a crisis. It’s not really meant to gather individual acts of crime, but larger scale events. Eventually they will have an engine that anyone can use for themselves. Check it out by clicking the image below…