Kosuke

So, for the last 5 or 6 years we have been opening our home to kids from Japan as part of a Japanese exchange program.  The first couple of years we did it through various local organizations, but for the last few we have gone through the Everett Community College.

It has been wonderful each time, and I can’t say how much we have loved getting to know each of the kids.

The unfortunate thing is we generally only get them for a couple of weeks – never enough time, and this time was no exception.  Kosuke was a great guy and a lot of fun to be with.  We’re looking forward to staying in touch and maybe someday getting together again.
He will always be welcome in our home.

A Little Catch-up

Ok, so the last couple of months have been crazy busy and I haven’t had much of a chance to sleep, much less write up a new blog post.  I’ll see if I can somehow get things kick started again and write more often.

One thing you may have noticed is that I’m playing around with colors/themes again.  In the last week or so I moved the hosting of the shurtzfamily.net domain over to Blogger, so it allows me a lot more flexibility in everything.  I haven’t had a chance to look into the fancy ways of customizing this page yet, but I’m sure I’ll get to it at some point.  According to Khalina, the current look is “ugly”, so it will most likely change soon.

Ok, I also wanted to point out a couple of the photo galleries that I’ve pushed up in the last month or so.  If you’ve been watching the “Recently Added” section in the photos.shurtzfamily.net site, you may have already seen them, but just in case here’s a summary:

Ammon had a birthday in May:

Later that month we hiked up to Wallace Falls with Ny & Val:

For pack meeting that month we went ice-blocking:

The first Saturday in June is always the Highland Games.  It was
as spectacular as always:

To get ready for our High Adventure bike trip, we did a shorter ride over to Cascade Park:

Khalina’s birthday was in September when she turned 12!

In October we went over to Moses Lake to visit with Dad Peterson:

Later that month we went over to Carlton Farm to pick a pumpkin and walk around:

And Christmas was peaceful:

Well, that’s it for now.  I haven’t finished going through last year’s pictures yet (there may even be some from 2007 that need to be pushed up), but I’ll see what I can do to speed things up a bit.

More later…