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.

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.

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!

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.

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.