It's been a while, but we've had a very busy start of the year! We moved back into our house on the weekend of February 8 and we love it. Specially the new sitting area in our bedroom is a winner!!
When Yerik leaves for school at 06:30 I take coffee upstairs, wake up Pat and the two of us have coffee in this area looking out at the trees, birds (woodpeckers and others) and squirrels. We see the sunrise through the trees and enjoy the peace and quiet while having our first coffee of the day. It is defenitely one of the highlights of our new house.
I, in particular, love our new walk-in closet with enough shelves for our clothes as well as the special storage space we have for suitcases and items we really need on a regular basis. We also have new storage space for things that can be put away for long term. Stuff that one doesn't want to throw away just yet but is not needed regularly.
Pat has done a great job in renovating and painting the pantry. It has now more space to move around in and lots more storage space. Thank you so much dear!!
Against what all the plumbers and people working on the house said, the steamshower, the only expensive item we bought to pamper ourselves, really does work!!! Again thanks to Pat, who installed and connected it with help of Johnny, our main plumber. Pat is now to be called an expert on Chines/English manuals!! It was more Chinglish!!
He's just awsome, worked through all of it, set it up and made it work. We now enjoy our bubblebaths and steamshower on a (very) regular basis. Ofcourse the THING is a regular shower as well so we actuyally use it every day, duh!
The renovation is still not really finished in the sense that we have to do the decorating still, but we need some time to do that. We now focus on our last weeks with Yerik. That to us is more important. He has to leave us on May 27 and that will be a very sad day for us. Pat will miss him every night and I will miss him, full stop. Pat and Yerik fix dinner together, joke around in the kitchen and have some deep conversation in that place as well?! They eat together and after that clean up their own mess! This on the days that I work, which are 4 out of 7. Yerik has become an integrate part of our lives and we hate to see him go, but we knew that that time was to come. It's part of the deal when you have a foreign exchange student in your house.
The good news however is that he's been accepted to 5 colleges here in the US!!! Temple (Philadelphia), Northeastern (Boston), Davidson (near Charlotte, NC), American University (Washington DC) and William and Mary's (Williamsburg). He visited Davidson in December, just came back from DC where he visited AU and next week Pat and he will go up to Williamsburg to visit William and Mary's. Yerik has to make a decision on where to go before May 1 and pay his downpayment.
He's studying hard for his national Kazakh exam so he can get a scholarship from his country, as so many of his Kazakh friends have received. Some of which study at the University of Texas, the University opf Minnesota or, like his cousin, at one of the colleges in the UK. On top of that he keeps up his grades here at Jordan High. Also he is preparing himself for the AP exams in May.
On top of all this Yerik has been an active player in his Jordan High School Ultimate Frisbee team and they have played tournaments in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia in February and March. He and some other guys also played some special winter tournaments in Raleigh and the last one in Boone, North Carolina. He has a real nice trophy at home for 1st prize of one of the tournaments!!
My idea is that he will choose between AU, Davidson and W&M's and we hope to have him back, in a sense, in September when classes start. His room will be here waiting for him for whenever he has a break, or just wants to come home for the weekend has his laundry taken care of and have some of Mom and Dad's great homecooking!!!
Mid March our oldest son Joost and daughter-in-law Laura came to visit us from Spain. I drove up to DC to pick them up and since they got in at 08:30PM we spent their first night in the US in Sterling. The following morning we took the back road (old US 15) down to Durham. They loved the scenery and Joost kept on taking photos!!
They were the ones who inaugurated our new guest suite and they really enjoyed their stay. Ofcourse they were very lucky with the dollar so low against the Euro. They got $1.57 for their Euro!! As all foreigners do they too loved Costco (for the Dutch speaking amongst you, a language joke Joost called it [C]KOTSCO), Target and Walmart. They bought lots of stuff because, as they said, it was cheaper here even without the added benefit of the low $.
We went to the mountains and visited the Biltmore in Asheville NC, and Blue Ridge Parkway. Ofcourse made a stop at the Mast General Store in Valle Crucis and that night had dinner with our friends Luis and Sherry in Winston-Salem. Luis loved entertaining in Spanish, Pat and Shery had their little get-to-gether in the kitchen and I went from one to the other.
All in all, I think it was a great visit. The kids got along with Yerik and spent time with him as well. They played frisbee in the side yard and Laura had some real muscle ache (agujetas) the following day, but they all had a good time.
In May we get our next guest, a former colleague of Pat from England. Now currently living in Germany with his German wife. We love to have you Jim!!
After May 27 we have to get used to a new life again. Pat and I alone in the house with the dogs. Well, before Yerik's arrival we lived like that and I'm sure that we'll be fine, but we will look forward to having him around from time to time over the next 4 years while he studies in the US.
We also want to go to Holland and visit our youngest kids and grandchildren, but that probably won't happen until after the summer. Plane tickets are juist so expensive with the dollar so low that we really have to catch deals and you can just not find them during the summer season.
I miss my kids and grandkids. It was so much easier when living in the UK. I was there for the births of the 2eldest and now I haven't even seen our youngest grandson. It hurts, but that is life. One can't have everything and I know that we'll enjoy seeing them even more because we don't get to see them that often.
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