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Wow! Week #2 has come and gone. I am not quite sure how time can pass this quickly. As you have probably noticed, "I" means Ashley. You will more than likely NEVER see Wes post on this blog. He isn't a typer. I do ask for his input, although it is hard to get it out of him! I am tired. Emotionally and physically. Wes says this week has been a better week for him than last week.He says he had a great week, feels like he got a lot accomplished and really enjoyed the group that was here. I say last week was better than this week. This is because for me, this week took its toll on me emotionally. I have had my share of tears this week, due to many different things. On Tuesday when we woke up at 6am to get ready for work, Wes thought it would be best for me to take the day off. After a bit of convincing, (it did not take much) I decided to stay home. So I started off my day by sleeping 5 extra hours. I stayed on the couch in our camper until 4:30pm, when I decided it was time to go to the post office to send off a Birthday card to my Dad! This week, Wes has built a porch, sheeted a roof, built porch steps, poured and troweled concrete for the floor of a house, and for a porch on another house and finished face boards. As for me, I finished nailing in fire blocking and earthquake strapping, nailed the sheeting onto the roof, made sure there were no "shiners" sticking through, (this is what they call nails that missed the rafters) and hammered them out and put a new nail in, (this process takes hours, because if you miss them, they won't want to pass the inspection.) I also helped with odds and ends, as did Wes. Wes and I were on the same site most of the days. (When i tell you what work we have done, this is all with help!) We see wild turkeys and peacocks almost in herds, on top of vehicles, and in truck boxes daily on our way to and from work. And also sometimes on the jobsite! This weeks group consisted of 18 short termers, who were from 2 different groups. One group was from Montana and one from Pennsylvania. All the people were older, some retired. The long termers out here, besides the project directors, are a younger couple from La Crete AB, one retired man from Ohio, and an older couple from Pennsylvania. There were also 2 older retired couples from Ohio who were here for a month, and are leaving tomorrow morning. So tomorrow morning we have to get up and move our camper out of this tiny parking spot so that the 2 couples can get out with their campers, then we have to move farther back and re-hook up. After that our plans are to hang out with a girl we met in Louisiana back in Feb 2009. She is in California at the Dulzura project. We were planning on going to the beach tomorrow (the water is too cold to swim though) but it is raining now and it is supposed to rain tomorrow. So we will see. Wes has not been a crew leader yet, but this next week he will start. He is in charge of Chris s house. (my apostrophe doesnt work!) This house is a whole nother story of its own, which I will share another time. The picture of the bearded man in overalls is Chris. This week we had two inspections, and did not pass either of them. California is different. In everyway possible. Especially these inspections. It makes it really hard to be at a house and have all this work in front of us but can do next to nothing, because we have to wait 3 more days until the next inspection until the next step. If you are wondering how to pray for us, that would be one huge thing. That the inspections will go well, that they will pass, and the inspectors will be good to us. This can get very, very frustrating, and make things move so much slower than they could. But this is what needs to be done. Weather this week was usually around 20 C and sunny. This week, Wes and I visited with both of our parents and my sister and brother-in-law, on skype. We can call anywhere, unlimited in Canada and the US for $3.00 a month. So we need to take advantage of this! I also took the time on my day off to email everyone in our families who have email addresses. I got some quick responses too! I cannot tell you how good receiving these emails and hearing those voices felt to me. It felt good to both of us, but it really helped lift my spirits on Tuesday when I was down. It makes us feel like part of us is still back in Manitoba. I am actually kind of missing the snow, believe it or not!!! But our arms, neck and faces are glowing nice and rosy from the beautiful sunshine out here too!! I am almost as dark, in 2 weeks, as I get in all of Manitobas summers! Not quite, but it wont take long! I am sorry if i repeat things from post to post, I cant remember what I have written before! On Tuesdays and Thursdays, our cooks have something called "the blue plate special." So after we're done eating, she says, "Hear ye hear ye. Tonight is the blue plate special." And then she'll tell us where we have to look to find out who are the "lucky" ones. One time I had a paper taped to the bottom of my chair, so me and 5 others had to leave the room, decide which person will tell something true about themself that nobody knows, and the other 4 will make something up. Then we go out in front of everyone else and tell them these things. They have to decide who is telling the truth. Wes got the blue plate special yesterday, because he is a male. So all the males had to leave, and get dressed up in newspaper made grass skirts and were given cans and bottles for instruments and had to come and dance and play their instruments for all the women. It was so funny! Especially when you only know some of the men as serious men, to see them dancing around in grass skirts....oh you had to be there. But I will post a picture or 2 of this! This week, our cooks had International week with their meals. So we had themed nights of Mexico, Pennsylvania Dutch, Hawaii, Russian and we will see what tonight is. I think it is Italy. These things just make the week a bit more fun, and lighten things up. This week Wednesday we had one of the homeowners named James Lamont, come for supper and share with us his story of the fire and how he lost everything. It really does give our work a whole new meaning. This is one of the houses that we drive 100 miles daily to get to and from work. 100 miles total. It is in the mountains, right beside Palomar mountain. Before the fire, he lived in a tiny, very tiny log cabin that he and his wife (who are now separated) built with a chainsaw, because their saw broke on them within the first hour. This log cabin had no running water or electricity. Before this he lived in the valley/creek in his backyard, under poles with canopy over them. He liked this self-sufficient lifestyle. He was not allowed to build just anything after the fire, so it was MDS building him a house, or nothing at all. So running water, electricity, a flush toilet, basically EVERYTHING will be new to him. I can't even imagine. We are excited for him! He came home from a visit with his step-daughter when he saw the fire and smoke in the mountain by his home. This was in 2007. He could not enter from the front so he drove way around to enter from the back. He stayed until at 2am, he saw the smoke come up from right behind the mountain next to his house. So he left. As he was driving away, he was watching the smoke and flames from his house, through the mountain. The reason he even returned was because years ago, a fire had switched directions when it reached that same point, so he thought it might again. It did not. There is so much more to the story, I hardly know where to begin.

Now it is Friday, 8:30pm, (10:30 pm your time). I have just finished giving Wes a haircut in our camper. Boy it felt weird putting on my cape and picking up my scissors! I actually felt kinda shaky! But I must say, I have not missed my job of hairstylist once. Sorry to my former clients! I enjoyed you, but my time is done for now and it feels good! We have pictures of our family and friends, and of course, my cat, (yes I love my cat) posted all around our camper. This makes it feel like home. Before we left home, (I dont even know what to call home anymore...but I mean our Plum Coulee house) I put together a small photo album of our family and friends, neices, nephews and kids of friends, of course my cat, and stuff we did back home, and pictures of our house. I can look through the photo album, but whenever I come to the pictures of our house, I cannot get myself to look. I just skip by. Yet I cannot get myself to take them out. This will take time.

Many people ask us why, or how we decided to volunteer with MDS for a year. Here is the story, if you dont already know it. For those of you who know it, you can skip this part.

Wes and I got married in 2006. While dating, I already knew that Wes had a passion for volunteering with MDS. He was always very passionate about it whenever we talked about it. You could just tell it was something he loved. He said half of his heart would always be out on MDS. And he always said he just couldnt explain it. So naturally, I was very curious to find out where the other half of his heart was. Probably about a year into our marriage, Wes started to not feel right about being home. This too, is hard to explain if you have never gone through this. He needed something, he just wasnt sure what. He tried the different job thing, which was a whole nother leap of faith for me, and God completely changed my heart about it, just as I had asked Him to do. It did take about a year, but He did. This did not work out, so things went back to how they were before, but he still didnt feel complete. I was confused about this for awhile. I wasnt even sure how to pray, so I began to pray that God would conform our will to His will for us. When the idea first came from Wes, that we could sell our house and go on MDS for a year, I was not a fan. It was no right from the get go. I would not even think about it. No no no. I will not sell my house unless we would move to the country. There is absolutely no way. But after that first mention of it, a fear stayed with me that this may happen. This happened for 2 summers. I love flowers. My favorite thing to do, is as soon as I was done work, change into home clothes and get into the dirt. My time to unwind. The first summer, I felt myself get emotional every time I went out into the flower gardens. All I could think about was this may be my last summer here. I got so sad but tried to push it to the back of my mind, thinking I could ignore the feeling and fight it.

Well, it turns out, God had other plans. I did continue to pray that God would transform my will to His. That is all I wanted, whatever it was. So Wes and I did continue to talk about it only between the 2 of us. I still deep down hoped something would change and we could forget about it. Since the summer of 2008, our lives have not felt complete. We had no sense of fulfillment. Nothing in life seemed to be normal. Everywhere we went, everything we did, all our minds could think about was selling our house and what this could mean. Fear. Wes was afraid to go for a year before I had even experienced it at all. So after much, much prayer, Wes and I decided to take the step and send in our application forms one day, to go work with MDS for one month, in Feb, 2009. We were accepted and off our journey began. We had a great time in Diamond Louisiana. I wasnt ready to come home. But we did, and we never felt like our home was home again. 2009 brought many tears, unknowns, and huge steps of Faith. One day I said to Wes, lets do it. I am emailing Evelyn. (who is the lady we deal with in Canada, with MDS) He said okay. So the next day, off went the email. So we met with her, talked about it, and after that decided this was it. Our decision was made. We both had known since 2007, that something was up. God had a plan for us, we just had no idea what, when, and how. One message in Church one Sunday was about saying Yes to God. We can think and plan and do that till we are blue in the face, but until we say Yes, we are not giving it to God. That helped me make my decision, Wes had already made his.

So at the beginning of summer 2009, we started to rip apart our basement and finish it out. In the back of our minds we kinda knew we probably wouldnt get to enjoy it, which made it hard some days. After we made the decision to sell, (which we did go back and forth debating whether to rent or sell) we tried to finish our renos at soon as possible. We did. Put our house up for sale, shortly before Christmas, bought a camper, a truck....still hadnt sold the house, waited, waited, had lots of calls and viewers, but not the right one. In early December Wes was beginning to get scared. What if it doesnt sell. I prayed so much, all the time, and had to work very very hard to have faith and encourage Wes on the hard days. Towards the end, I started to go downhill too. I had had a really bad day. The next day, during the afternoon, I was upstairs listening to music and praying, which I do when I am down. The doorbell rang. I couldnt figure out who would be at the door. I wasnt expecting anyone. So I went down, and there was a man standing outside, so i opened the door and he came right in. He started asking about the house, so I answered what I could. I told him he should call Wes about coming to see it. As soon as he left, I called Wes, breathlessly, and said...Wes! I think God just answered my prayer!!!!! So I told him about this guy and that he may call. That week, we showed the house and things fell into place better than we could have even imagined. GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS! I cannot stress this enough!!! And here we are today.

I know this is a long story, but it did take this long for things to come together. We know our story is a part of His plan.

The decision to sell our house was not an easy one. Like I said, I fought it hard. I just stand amazed at how God changed my heart from black to white. He has done this twice to me. Something I thought would never ever be possible.

Leaving our house for the very last time, was hard. I could not look back, I had to leave. Same for Wes. It was probably the hardest thing I have ever done. I miss it like crazy, I loved our house to pieces. Instead of wishing I would never have had it in the first place so we wouldnt have had to let go, I thank God for allowing us to take care of it for Him, while we could. We are so blessed! We dont know what God has in store for us next, but we do know we trust Him and are making no plans of our own.

We really appreciate your prayers for us. I will say this and say this again. We know God hears each and every one, and we feel them. I do ask that you pray for us this next week, for strength both physically, and emotionally as we think about what we have left behind.

This was a long one, but as I write these posts, I am also journaling for myself. Thanks for coming along. I will post some pictures of different things, 2 of the inside of our camper, the peackocks, the Hawaiian dance of the males, and more.