As Promised!

Monkey, originally uploaded by russandval.

That's right, friends, more monkeys. Keep reading and you'll find out the details. First I have to fill you in on where we've been.

For starters, we were getting our schedules back on track after our vacation and my parents' visit. Then the unthinkable happened- the laptop died again. Died for real this time. But it died during the week that the Parkers (read: free tech support) were moving, so we weren't able to do much about it. Then Monday we headed out on a team retreat.

Someone commented recently, "You guys seem to go on a lot of retreats!" Well, lately we have. The one in June was postponed from March (we were a little busy getting ready for the church to start). That was strictly a working retreat. We reviewed what was happening in the church and how that compared to our strategy. We reviewed our strategy to see if that's still what we wanted to happen. We evaluated our ministries, ourselves and everything else under the sun. Definitely not a vacation. (It even stormed the whole time we were out there, so the beach was not an option!) The latest retreat is our annual spring retreat. It is strictly for renewal and relaxation. Most of us (okay, mostly the women) even avoided saying the word "church". We spent three days going to the beach, swimming in the pool, playing games and eating.

Which brings me to the monkeys. We rode out with the Maberys and were there several hours before everyone else. While we were eating a fabulous lunch of imported food (peanut butter sandwiches and chips and Rotel!), something all of a sudden landed on our table. Russ and I turned to look and saw a monkey! There was another one in the bushes behind us. After lunch, we were in hot pursuit of the monkeys. There were four adults and a little baby one, who I tried to convince to come home with me. We spent the afternoon watching the monkeys and laughing at the Maberys' puppy, Nala, interacting with them. Once everyone else showed up, the monkeys got a little scared. They came back one other time, but not like they were the first afternoon.

We got home from the retreat Thursday and managed to get our new hard drive and all our programs installed that night. Now we're back and will hopefully be blogging a little more.