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We have moved a few times since moving to Ethiopia. Now we believe we are settled into our final house here, and are very to happy to be settled, but our friends  naturally ask what the new house looks like or what kind of car we are driving … So, I thought I’d try to answer some of those questions.  We actually don’t have any photos of the new house yet, so you might have to wait a little while for our edition of “Ethiopia Cribs” but here is a photo of what a Pajero looks like and our dogs Wubz and Michelle too.  I will have to get some pictures of our new house.

Claire's Baptism at the Bishop's house in Cheyenne in JulyClaire was christened this past July while we were visiting back home in Cheyenne. We had a small ceremony in the chapel at the Bishop's home and the ritual was performed by our friend Fr. Carr who has been acting as Bishop recently.

Claire found the whole experience quite exhausting, but here she is finding some comfort in Grandpa’s mustache.  We hosted a reception at the Warren-Nagel, but unfortunately Claire and spent most of her party sleeping on the sofa.

Tess, however, looked absolutely fabulous and ready for tea.

Our Internet access has taken a bit of a hit this summer and fall, and the updates have fallen off.  New jobs and new offices have meant that there have been few opportunities for us to update, and probably won’t be many options for Jeanne to update the blog going forward.

However, I  have had a new connection for a couple of weeks  and have been using it to update the plumbing on this site.  Upgrades have been numerous, but always have the potential to break things … anyway changes included updating theme, so you might notice that the Amharic title has morphed at least temporarily to Chinese.  I knew this was would happen and we haven’t been hacked (at least as far as I can see).

On the subject of hacking; for the time being I have turned off the ability to join the blog because of potential security holes.  We were not really vulnerable to the issues with user accounts that I knew of, but that hasn’t stopped lots of people from creating accounts and trying to hack in.

We hope to take care of these tasks quickly and get back to posting photos, but thanks for your patience while I renovate things.

Difficult to believe this big guy was my little baby only a few years ago … Jacob is into basketball and badminton, writing short stories and poetry, nerf battles and legos. At the risk of bragging too much, he is adapting marvelously to Ethiopia; of all of us, he speaks the most Amharic and is anxious to explore the sights. The third-term report card was wonderful, as are the comments from teachers, school staff and his friends’ parents – he is really a lovely young man!

Princess Claire prepares for battle

Claire loves to dress up in princess dresses, and especially in fancy shoes, but she also has her tough side!  Here she is loading up for battle.

Claire may have a bit of Jedi in her. Claire is shown here again in attack mode.  (We put together a 3 picture slide show, that you can play at full screen if you like, use the “esc” key to exit, and you can use your arrow keys to operate it.)

Claire's pancakes are delicious!

I got a new camera for Mother’s day that’s given me new motivation

"Dadda, I cookin'."

to post.  Here are some updated photos of my babies!

Jeanne recently took a trip to northern Ethiopia in the Tigray Region (click for a map, written like this: ትግራይ ክልል and pronounced: Tigrāy Kilil).  In Mekele our friends there suggested that the girls should also have traditional dresses to reflect the style worn in that region.

Our girls thought this was a great idea of course.  Jacob on the other hand thought his purple geode was a much better present – he loves it in the way only a young boy can love a rock.  The girls, even little Claire, love their dresses in a way that just goes beyond what a fellow like me could explain.  Some things are just fundamental I suppose.

I used Microsoft’s Live Writer to post once or twice on previous blogs. While it worked very well overall,  I saw a few issues and didn’t really need its help.

It will be a bigger help here in Ethiopia where bandwidth is so limited.  No need to be online to write a post, and because it looks just like the real thing, I can catch a few other types of mistakes before posting.

Live Writer was recently updated and I have been anxious to try it out.  Here are 3 photos of my lovely assistant Claire (enjoying sugar cane) to help me test it.

Among the features I rememered in Live Writer are the built-in image tools.  Effects like drops shadows etc, that were just more convenient to create right in a blogging application.

OK, I know they won’t look so great right next to each other here in my test, but this will speed up posting and might make posts prettier too, even when I dont have such and attractive model.

Jacob and Tess work to solve a mystery.  It was a mystery to Jeanne and me in any case.  We tried to understand the story they constructed around bits of bone and broken pottery they found in the garden, but their theories quickly became too complicated for our less agile minds.  They, however, were  having fun trying to piece everything  together despite their serious demeanor.

Our house in Addis

The house is not as large as it looks in this photo.  We have 3 medium to small sized bedrooms all on the main floorwith no inside entrance or stairs to the downstairs room where we  have a washing machine.  Whomever wakes up first always wakes the rest,  so it is “cozy” I suppose in real estate terms.

Still we all like the house and the garden is fantastic.  We are happy to be settling in.  Our air-shipment of linens and Christmas presents for the kids finally cleared customs after more than two months of sitting around, and so we opened presents and had ourselves a merry little “material Christmas” complete with a tree that arrived in the box.

We all spent Christmas at our old friend Nancy’s apartment.

Both girls loved their new dresses in fact so much that we had to let them open them early and wear them for high tea at Addis’s palace- like Sheraton.

Click for the rest of the album

Tess, Jacob, Claire and their friend Pavitra built some fancy gingerbread houses and generally loaded up on sugar to kick off the Christmas season here in Ethiopia.  Being a mostly Ethiopian Orthodox country means that for our family at least, Christmas sort of happens twice this year.

Our Christmas kit and presents are still at sea and dodging Somali pirates, but hopefully will arrive by Jan 7th for the official Ethiopian Christmas.  If you follow the link by clicking on Tess’s picture above it will take you to an album of pictures with the rest of the crew.

Tess and Jacob went on strike to seize the means of production (i.e. the laptop and Internet connection) .   The pickets were noisy, spirited, and quite cute – As management we had no choice and quickly gave in to workers’ demands.

I have noticed that the Comments feature doesn’t seem to be working … Please don’t assume we are trying to stifle dissent just because of a picket or two, however, I have decided to disable new comments until I can fix the problem and it may take me awhile to figure this one out.  (update 2/22/09: Comments are back on – I am still working on a better photo/gallery solution, although the existing integration with Picasa works better than I had expected, and I can’t get the italics off )

Click to open the album

As I mentioned we can’t see the older photos here, even though they almost certainly will show up for anyone else outside of Ethiopia.

So, I created an album where we all can see virtually all of the photos from the old blog even inside Ethiopia. Ok, this is just for our own benefit here and for testing the Picasa plugin used to make the albums.  Clicking the picture above will open our Picasa slideshow in a new window.