CORTNEY'S CORNER

Dan works from home. Our house technically has three bedrooms but we took the doors off of one of them and turned it into the headquarters for Young Life Ross County. YLRC Headquarters. Where Dan and his Associates (pictured, center) spend a lot of time. We love our house a lot but we've pretty much exhausted all of the space inside of it. We don't just have empty rooms for storage or anything. A few months ago I was offered a new job at OCU and after a lot of prayer and deliberation, I decided to take it. I'm putting my Environmental Science degree to good use as their Director of Marketing (hoping that people see what a joke this is). I mostly like my new job even though I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time, but that is an entirely different post. Anyway, with this new job came the offer of working from home about half the time. This was very exciting to me, especially since I spend basically an hour a day getting to and from work. But the...

The past two months have been crazy. I feel like we've been everywhere besides home. We started out December by spending a long weekend in Seattle to celebrate our second anniversary! It was so fun. We spent a lot of time at Pike Place Market, went to the tippy top of the Space Needle, got drinks from the first ever Starbucks and ate a lot of really good seafood to celebrate two years of marriage. In front of the original Starbs! We were then home for two weeks, in which we attended two work parties, two Young Life parties, one church party and one family party. Six Christmas parties in two weeks, guys. It was a lot . We traveled to Kentucky and spent a few days before and Christmas there. Then we drove to South Carolina to spend a handful of days with my parents. Then we drove back to Ohio and stayed at our house for approximately 28 hours. Then we headed back to Kentucky for a few days to celebrate our niece's birthday and see some friends. Then flew to Orlando for ...

We got home from our trip to Timber Wolf Lake a little over a week ago! And it was the best week of our lives! It's hard to blog about camp. SO much stuff happens in such a short amount of time. This was definitely a different trip for me though. We brought 8 girls and 4 boys to camp and all of them were already Christians. So instead of focusing on helping students walk through making a decision of committing their lives to Christ, which is what most of my camp trips have consisted of in the past, we focused on growing deeper in our faith, fostering community and casting vision for what it looks like to go home and radically love our friends and to chase the Kingdom with all we have. And it was GREAT! As I said, I have a hard time writing about summer camp, so instead I'll just share some of my favorite pictures. And maybe one day our Area Director (ahem, ahem...) will finally get around to posting all of them on facebook (aka go bother Dan to do it!) ...

For the past two months we've been renting a house. It's a great house. It's huge and is the perfect location and has a lot of character. Though, there are some down sides to it. It's very old so the pipes froze a lot in the winter. The walls are plaster, not dry wall, so there are lots of big and unsightly holes. Our backyard is a muddy mess. Stuff like that. But overall, I like our house a lot. Unfortunately we have had a few disagreements with our landlord. After a miscommunication in Mid-February she offered that we could break our lease with no penalties if we wanted to move out. At first, the idea was daunting. We had literally JUST unpacked our last box and hung up our final piece of artwork on the wall. We couldn't imagine packing everything back up again, transporting it, then unpacking again. But we had signed a two year lease and just weren't sure if we could stomach another two years of living in this property. So we started looking around, just...

That's right! Our little family grew by two last weekend! We brought home two super cute and super fluffy little German Shepard pups. Meet Dez and Penny! Dez Penny Dez and Penny are only ten weeks old but we brought them home when they were 9 weeks old. They're brother and sister. We got them from a guy who lives a few blocks away from us. He has two military service dogs who had babies back in January. We knew we were going to get them for a while but had to wait until they were old enough to leave their mama. Picking names for them was pretty hard. We knew that if we got two boy dogs we were going to name them Lewis and Clark. But when we decided on a boy and a girl we had no idea. I suggested Mr. Beaver and Mrs. Beaver (you know, from Narnia). But Dan didn't like that. He also wouldn't let me name them Beyonce and Jay Z. I did some research on the internet for dog duo names and seriously, people have some of the worst ideas. A top suggestion was Ched...

That's right people, I'm a working woman again! For about three weeks I worked part time as a substitute teacher in the Chillicothe city schools here. It was fun and I liked it. I got to hang out with students all day long and I often had time to read or browse the internet. And in a few rare moments in math and science classes, I actually got to teach. But it was hard for me to go to bed at night and not know if and where I would be working the next day. And I was out of work for a straight week because mother nature dumped EIGHT inches of snow on our little town. So although I'll miss hearing things like "Do you think I could get my butt surgically removed? Like the whole entire thing?" (yes, I literally overheard this from a 7th grade boy), I am excited and ready to go back to working full time... and getting paid regularly. I'm now working at Ohio Christian University as the Trailblazer Academy Admissions Coordinator. What is the Trailblazer Academy, you...