We'll be home a week from today!

Yessireebob, the countdown is ON!
Not that I'm anxious or anything :)
While we've had an absolutely wonderful time on home ministries, and enjoyed every minute spent with friends and family, we are more than ready to be home.

But speaking of time with family... Had a great weekend with Kyle and Tina, and yesterday we stopped in Elkhart on the way back to Michigan so we could have lunch with our son and his wife.

While we were with them, Jon took a look at my computer in an attempt to figure out what I did the other day. He was at a conference this weekend (computer related, of course) and I sent him the following e-mail, which he shared them with some of those he was with. They found my plea for help vastly amusing:

I have NO IDEA what I've done, but all my books have disappeared off my Kindle.
I think I'm going to quit for the night before I do any more damage.
I've also made several hundred items in my downloads folder disappear too. There are two items left.
Don't ask me how I did it.
I have no idea.
Seriously.
How can one person do this much damage?!
Hope you're having a good time at the conference.
I'm going to watch some TV and call it a night.
While wondering if I should laugh or cry.
Maybe a bit of both :)
Love you bunches,
Mom

So glad I could inject some laughter into what I'm sure was a very serious geek time :)

And the upshot of it was, I really made things COMPLETELY DISAPPEAR. Like magic. [Only with magic tricks, you can make them reappear and such was not the case in this instance.]

I wasn't so upset about the downloads folder, since that stuff gets erased eventually anyway. But now I have to re-load my Kindle -- not hard, but time-consuming.

Oh, and that wasn't my first e-mail to Jon. Just prior to this one I'd sent him another S.O.S. about an entirely different problem, which he was able to talk me through.

Anyhoo, we also stopped at an outlet mall and Ivan was finally able to find tennis shoes! Which is not as easy as it sounds. He has a really hard time finding shoes that are comfortable. So our success yesterday caused me to do a happy dance right there in the parking lot.

Today Ivan had to go to Lansing to The Office of the Great Seal. No, I am not making this up. It's a real place! He's trying to get his paperwork in order to get his pilot's license validated in Argentina. He's been working on this for several years, and they keep coming up with yet more paperwork that he has to do. We're really hoping these are the final documents that they'll require.

While he's gone I'm working on re-packing. Over the weekend we found only one big suitcase although we stopped at five thrift stores. Ivan's going to check out a few more places on his way back from Lansing today. I really need another 3 large bags, and then I think I can consolidate the smaller ones and end up with a manageable number of 50 lb. suitcases.
I hope.

What I've done today is open up ALL the suitcases and pull out non-essentials... like Tupperware containers, some decorative items, books, and table linens -- nice but not necessary. All things I'd really like to have, but could live without.

And I've been trying to get the essentials packed together in such that each piece of luggage weighs as close to 50 lbs. as possible. Not an easy task, let me tell you. I still have several bags weighing in the 30-35 lb. range, even though I've packed them as full as can be, and tried to put heavier items in.

It's like a puzzle that I can't quite figure out.