More Front Yard/Side Yard Wildlife Sightings

This morning Isaac found a nice surprise in our yard.  Between the back side of our house and our fence we have a narrow path and on it Isaac discovered this nice looking beast.

Yes I think it's a tarantula.  Yikes!  Fortunately it was dead just like all the recent scorpions that we keep finding.  It's been a week or so since we've seen any more scorpions.  I have lost count but I think we were up to 5 or maybe 6 scorpions?  So far though God has been taking good care of us as they have all been dead.  And I have no idea why?

On the more friendly side of wildlife I saw this next guy trying to climb our front fence the other day.  These creatures seem pretty cool and are fast bright green with a brownish black tail that is longer then the rest of him.  I don't know what it's proper name is.

And this last picture is of another cool creature again I don't know it's proper name.  It is hard to see as he matched the tree pretty good.  I tried several times taking pictures of him.  He had a bright light blue neck fin thing that he would flare out.  But my timing was off and I just got a lot of pictures the same.

Micky D's

Well I never thought I would say that I enjoyed eating 3 nights in a row at McDonald's for supper but I did.  Our family along with 2 other families had to venture to Jakarta for a couple days to renew our passports.  Yep it's been almost 60 days already in country and our temporary visas came due.  Couple of the big high lights beside eating at McDonald's was having A/C in the hotel rooms and for Julie best of all they were ant free.  As well the kids loved eating at McDonald and in all honesty I enjoyed it too.  The passport renewal procedure was pretty painless as we had an amazing MAF team there that help us go through the process.  We also navigated taxi rides, shopping malls, airports with using our new basic language skills and managed to accomplish our goals and return safely home.  Some of the surprises or down sides of  the trip was that we had four twin beds in two different rooms for our family so we were short a bed.  Julie was the hero and shared a bed with Jaclynn.  The city was crazy busy for this Canadian farm boy.  But I guess when you are in a city with possibly more people than all of Canada things will be busy and crowded.  I was glad to get back to Salatiga where life moves a little slower.

I wish we were better with the camera as we saw so much and took so little pictures sorry.

Okay this wasn't Jakarta but it was our first care package from home :)

One of our rooms in Jakarta.

View from our window.

Cattle hauler Indonesian style.

 Basicly it was a small pickup truck with some side rails and they tied the cattle in place.  Saw a couple that were a bit bigger and had four cows in those ones.  This one only had 2.

Enjoying Pizza Hut for Lunch.

On the scooter side of things I can hardly believe that in essentially 5 days of driving we put just over a 100kms on it already wow.  My feet are very thankful for the wheels.

New Found Freedom of Sorts

Well it finally worked out to buy a set of wheels.  When we set out from Canada we're hoping to manage without.  But we soon discovered that we were just to far away from somethings, mainly school.  To purchase a bike it's not quite as straight forward as back home either.  We still don't have the correct visa for the long term, which also means that we can't own property like vehicles, houses and the like.  So we got help from a good friend of MAF (local of Salatiga) that was willing to put the bike in his name for the time being.  I wish I thought of taking a picture of the odometer sooner but I didn't think of it till 10kms in, as we likely won't have another one is with only 1.3kms.  Currently we can't go to far from home as we don't have plates for it yet but we still managed to put 40+kms in a day and a half.  I think we should get some better gas mileage as well.  It only holds 3.6L from what I gathered from the owners manual which came in one language and it wasn't English :).  And with a liter of bensin ranging from $0.55-$0.70/liter roughly I'm thinking our gas budget will be a little lower here which will be nice.  Multipule trips will however be in order as 5 large Canadians just don't quite fit on a Vario like 5 Indonesians would.

Blessed From Above

This Sunday our entire family was blessed by attending an Indonesian church.  Greg and Jaclynn had gone to it a week before with some friends and really enjoyed it so Greg wanted to take the entire family this time.  Poor Isaac was very scarred and worried right before we left but by the end of the service he was smiling again.  It was a small church but wow can they sing and praise the Lord!  I didn't catch to many of the words but I sure felt the power of the Lord through the singing and the message.  I can't wait until I can sit through a whole sermon and understand what he is saying. My eyes were filled with tears as I got to listen to them sing a couple songs in Indonesian that I new as tunes from back home. It was so amazing to sit through that service and realized that God had provided another church for our family to attend.

Julie

Mt. Telomoyo Trip Pictures

Da Salatiga international biker gang a top Mt. Telomoyo.  This past Sunday morning bright and early well maybe not bright but certainly early (3:30 a.m.).  A group of expat men from Salatiga rode bikes or scooters up the mountain to view the beauty of the sun as it rose above the horizon. A great time was had by most I think, I know I enjoyed it.

  

On the way home we stopped at some rice fields for a break and some more picture taking.

How Great is Our God!!!

How you ever woken up one morning and everything just seems to go wrong.  That is how my (Julie) Sunday morning seemed to go as I was looking at our clocks wrong and was an hour behind.  And as most of us know getting your family ready for church can be stressful on any given Sunday without adding to the fact that you are actually an hour behind. Thankfully, I realized my mistake half an hour before church started and we where only about five minutes late. I must say that my children have become great speed walkers these past couple of weeks! On top of this we all of a sudden had no propane for our stove this morning (after just putting in a new propane tank) which can really throw a person for a lope there.  I was especially missing a McDonald's as we did not have any cereal or bread this morning and it is hard to cook eggs without any heat. So thankful for banana bread and apple cake as that is what we found to eat this morning. By the time I arrive at church I am pretty stressed and thinking ahead of how I was going to make lunch without a stove that is working.  And then God  just hits something home that had me in tears.  As we came to the to the part of the song where we began to sing "How great is our God" I realized that I really was putting God in a box and limited what I was allowing Him to do.  If He can move mountains, create the whole world and raise people from the dead  ( just to name a few things) then why in the world am I worrying about Him not being able to help me through my small problems. I am always amazed how God can take little things in our lives and teach us big lessons.  We do serve an Amazing God who is Great beyond description so let us live like we actually believe this deep down in the inner being of our soul!!
And after a great worship time we arrived home and Greg was able to figure out the problem with the stove and we were able to have a warm lunch. How Great is Our God!!!

Back Yard/Front Yard Wildlife

We have the privilege of cohabiting with several different types of animals in and around our house.  So far the only cockroaches I've see have been dead ones that the ants are harvesting for food.  Speaking of ants we have them in all shapes and sizes in and outside the house.  One small green lizard thing (about 8" long) in the back yard that somehow survived about 30-45 mins. of being Tina's play toy (Dog).  I think we have rats in the attic but I am not sure, whatever it is they sound big and tend to be up when we are trying to sleep.  I have managed to get a few pictures of some of the wildlife that is definitely not what we are uses to.  

Small Banana Spider I think.  He was only about the size of a silver dollar.  They get much larger here as friends found one the size of a man's face the other day in their yard.

This guy is a little harder to see.  Had he not moved his throat I probably wouldn't  have seen him.  

The common gecko.  We have these everywhere and the kids are still pretty fascinated with them too.  They help eat some of the bugs so we like them to hang around. 

Glad we found this one on it's back dead today.  It was about 4-5" long.  I have no idea why it was upside down dead on our front porch but that's how and where we found this one.

Same one just flipped over.  We did see a small one about an inch long the first morning we were here it was also taken to the second dimension via a big foot.

We haven't seen any live snakes or large reptiles yet.  So far the only snake was a small very flat 2 dimensional one that didn't make it across the road. One of our family's routines has been gecko watching just before bed as they tend to come out more after the sun goes down.  Usually our side porch has 6 or more running around the roof and walls.  The children's goal is to try and catch a gecko to keep but so far no luck!