Fall is Here!!!

It's been some time since I last updated this blog, life just has a way of flying past so I am trying to slow down and enjoy each day that God has given me. It's 59 degrees outside and I am enjoying the sunshine and cooler weather today.

I am between surveys right now so I am getting caught up on my reading. Yesterday I finished three books. :-) I'm currently re-reading Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin. I do start a new survey sponsored by Dartmouth about the media influence on teenagers soon, that sounds like it should be fairly interesting.

Chris and I are planning a lovely Labor day picnic here in our front yard. I plan to make Iowa sweet corn for the last time this year, we'll grill some steaks and have his mother's baked beans recipe and twice baked potatoes and stuffed mushrooms from Hy -Vee-yum!

We are down one cat since I last updated this blog. We found a home for Gizmo on a farm in the country and dropped her off never to be seen again. The people we left her with say that she took off and they haven't seen her since. I feel bad that she is missing, but ever since she got fixed she has not been the same cat. I have suspicions that she was under the anesthesia a tad too long because she was a very energetic fun loving kitten but then she turned into a brainless fat lump that didn't like to do much of anything but gobble down her food and puke it back up again. The final straw for me was when she puked on edge of the bed and it went all the way down to the floor. We found her a new home shortly after.

Today I am baking a Spicy Apple Cake for our young adult Sunday school tomorrow. I got the recipe out of my Apple Lovers Cook Book that I got at the Iowa Arboretum. It's a really cool place. If you've never gone there you really should-that is if you're in Iowa of course.

I'm in the mood for Fall, I have already started putting out my Autumn decorations. I went to Hobby Lobby the other day and they had all of their seasonal items on sale. It was hard not to go crazy but I get my thriftiness from my mother who always asked us "Now, do you really need that?" whenever we started whining about stuff we wanted to get. Even if we used our allowance she would always ask us that question. it was annoying when I was a kid but now that I'm an adult I realize the value of it. Of course, no one beats Karen Conkle when it comes to being cheap, but I'm still in training :-)

I just heard from my baby sister who is in language study in the country of Guinea. She writes that their language teacher is going to teach them how to use the squatty potty, now being an MK, I would think that she doesn't need lessons in this, but perhaps she has forgotten the lessons of her childhood. It reminded me of something I heard on WHO Radio on Thursday, the host of the show was talking about Drew Barrymore and some other Hollywood stars who recently spent a week or so in a remote village in Chili with no electricity or running water. Ms. Barrymore spoke about taking a dump out in the woods and how thrilling it was. Now me, I wondered, how did the villagers take having her poop out in the woods in the middle of nowhere where anyone could walk into it instead of using the facilities that I'm sure the villagers had set up. I mean I've been to remote villages in West Africa where they had a specific place set up for bathroom facilities, it was a squatty potty but it was still a potty, you didn't just go anywhere you felt like!

One of my other sisters-I have three altogether-Becky, is a missionary in Mali, West Africa. She is 7 1/2 months pregnant is hosting a sleep over for Ella, her oldest while her youngest, Lydia has bronchitis. She claims her middle child, Aiden, is just like me as he constantly walks into walls and things, she says this because on Wednesday I managed to trip over the floor fan in our living room and take a flying leap. I now have carpet burn on both knees, elbows, and wrists.

My other sister, Becky's twin, Rachel, is currently suffering for the Lord in Paris with her family visiting her in-laws who are missionaries to France.

My youngest sibling and only brother, Ben, is currently getting ready to enter med school in the Caribean. Apparently you have to be 100% healthy to enter med school, he just had to get tested for HIV and is now getting tested for TB. My mother is concerned because he is the only one of us without a spouse, she found what she thought was the perfect wife for him once but he would have nothing to do with the poor girl!!! Ben has inherited the full strength of Conkle stubbornness. If he doesn't want to do something there is no way you can make him. I still remember when he was a little boy and Mom made something he didn't want to eat he would sit at the table all day with the food in front of him and still not eat it, the rules being if you didn't eat it the first time around you had to eat it for the next meal. I also remember a time when he smacked Abby for something-she was great at provoking him until he snapped and then running crying to Mom and Dad that Benny had hit her, what a brat! So Dad would haul Benny off to get a spanking and I'd hear him yelling, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry"-meaning he was sorry he was getting spanked, not that he was sorry for hitting Abby. Of course Abs would also get a spanking for bugging him.