Last week a lost puppy followed me home and Shirleen fell in love with the idea of having a little pup.  We watched the dog overnight until the owner came to pick it up...but Shirleen was hooked. :-)

On Thursday, Shirleen and I went to the Kenai Animal Shelter "just to look".

I'm happy to announce that "Avu" London, born on Valentine's Day 2008, has joined our family.  Avu means sugar in Inupiaq Eskimo and is a great name for our off-white husky.  Our other dog "Pakak" (which more or less means mischievious) has taken quite a liking to her.  Sunshine, the dog that we are long-term dog-sitting also is warming up to her.

I've attached a "Family Picture" and a short video showing Pakak and Avu playing in our backyard...Enjoy!

With all of our travel lately, it's difficult to think of traveling somewhere to go on vacation.  With AEC, I have 7 weeks of vacation during the year...which is great...but we're really not sure where to fit them in.  However, we have decided on one week.  We plan on attending our friends' wedding in Canada in July.  It will be a blast.  Fortunately, we have miles to get us there for free and then we have a wedding present of a week at a time share, so we actually will basically get a free vacation.  1 week figured out...6 more to go.  We very well may just take "vacation" in our own home and relax and do some fishing.  That's pretty fun too.

Man it feels good to be home for a weekend!  We've been traveling so much lately, it feels so good to just relax.  Last weekend we were in Unalakleet as speakers for a High School Youth Rally.  We enjoyed attending our home church here in Kenai.  We go to an independent Baptist church called Calvary Baptist.  We really really like our church.  The people are very friendly and welcoming.  It's a smaller church...it's probably around 60 folks every Sunday morning...but we like it's size.  They have a mostly contemporary worship service with some hymns as well.  One thing we like the most about it though is how the pastor always preaches straight from the Word.  We are excited to be a part of the body of Christ here.  We're also glad that we get to be here next weekend too...two weekends in a row!  Then after that I'll be heading to Mountain Village to be program director for a Jr. high Youth Rally.  Life in ministry sure doesn't have many boring times!