a long time coming

I have been slacking on the blogging lately. I started teaching summer school at Castro Valley High last week. It has been an interesting, draining experience. I am teaching a Freshman English class full of young scholars. I recently found out that many of my students are actually juniors, which makes me that much more concerned about the future of America. It has been a good learning experience however, and it's only four hours a day. As I said before, we went to Tahoe last week with Mel's family, my family, the Foster's, Ty-Town, and more. It was a lot of fun. My brother took a bunch of fun pictures of Tate. He posted many of them on his blog but I'll put a few on here as well. It was Tate's first camping trip and he did really well. My dad and I went on a really cool ike ride on his birthday and we saw a bear. Unfortunately the bear didn't talk, but if he did I can imagine he would have had a lot to say. He looked wise. Anyway, my car died on the way to Tahoe (this is the abridged version of the story). We left it at a mechanic in Rocklin and rented a car. We then had to drive back to Rocklin a couple days later to pick up my "fixed" car only to have it overheat again near Donner Pass. Awesome. I ended up leaving it at a Mechanic in Truckee. They "fixed" my car and then took it back to camp. Long story short, my car overheated again in Vacaville and then again a half mile from my house. It was terrific. Funny part of the story was that I ripped my shorts in the car when I was bored. I pulled on a seam and then instantly I was wearing a camoulflage kilt-skirt. I didn't anticipate having to get out of my car to open my hood. Needless to say I looked funny standing on Palomares with my boxers hanging out of the bottom of my shorts. Fast forward to today and my car is still in the shop. It's just a car and Mel and I have another one so in the whole scheme of things if having a broken second car is the biggest difficulty in our life right now, we live a pretty blessed life. The team from Valley Bible left for the Navajo Reservation on Friday. This is the first Mission Trip Mel and I haven't been on since 1996. Insane. God wanted me to be at home so I could teach summer school and so we could be with Tate. We are going to try to go next summer but we'll see what God wants us to do. Pray for the team while they are away and follow their adventures on the VBC blog.
(I'll add a lot more pictures tomorrow!)