Tuesday Night Dinner

This evening we hosted the first of what we intend to be a regular event, our mid-week student dinners.  Our program, FOCUS, is so large these days with between 100-200 students attending a Friday night, that sometimes we feel like we're not connecting with anyone.

To remedy that we plan to invite smaller groups over every week or two.  Twelve is pretty much a perfect number.  Not too many so that people get lost in the crowd, but enough critical mass to keep conversation and activities moving.

Tonight was kind of an EU night. We invited all the European students over that have been to one of our activities during the past couple of weeks.  In the end a nice group of students from Germany, France and Russia joined us for Kathy's famous chicken and dumplings.

We just had a great time!

One thing we did discover though was the embarrassment of having an out-of-date World Atlas.  For most people that isn't a big priority, but when hosting international students at home an old Atlas somehow communicates, "I don't care enough about you to stay current on where you live".  For example, two of our new friends, Jan and Marcus come to us from Kemnitz University in Germany.  Our Atlas shows Kemnitz as "Karl Marxstad".  Oops. We had to apologize all over the place!

A few minutes ago I completed ordering a new Atlas from Amazon.com!

Gutter Blaster II

In other news...  The rains came to Portland tonight and it appears they will stay around for at least a week.  As promised, I completed the upgraded and improved Gutter Blaster II today-- an expandable 14-24 foot copper gutter cleaning tool.  I was in business! Gutters are officially functioning now and I'm looking forward to some heavy rain to test the drains. What a relief--finally.

Just now I'm hearing the sound of water pouring off of eaves outside my office window... Could it be trouble, a failure of some aspect of my cleaning binge of the past 2 weeks??

[Let me run outside to take a quick look... be back in a flash]

Nope!  It's water pouring off my neighbor's eaves!  Around the house is the pleasant sound of water pouring down the downspouts into the storm drain where it belongs! TRIUMPH!

So, as promised to the students that questioned my fascination-obsession with gutter cleaning in my blogs, I hope to move on to new journalistic topics as this problem ceases to dominate my life!