It's....so....hot.....

I just want to say, I am totally not cut out to live in Texas my whole life. I don't know about the rest of the state, but Dallas is crazy hot right now (though today we're only supposed to get up to 97....woohoo!). Hopefully that tropical depression down in Galveston sends some love our way and we cool off before school starts.

On another note, we have no fans in our new apartment. Zero. None. Coming from our old place where we had a ceiling fan in every room, this is quite a shock to the system. I can't count the number of times I woke up last night drenched in sweat. I easily drank three large cups worth of water over night, and I still woke up parched. I probably lost 10 pounds in water weight just by sleeping. And that's with the air conditioning on. I guess we're just used to having moving air, not just cooler air, throughout the apartment.

But, we love the new place. It's HUGE - or at least it feels that way. The other Luke commented that any apartment feels bigger when you have to walk from place to place. And that is definitely true here. Plus, Tiffany and I keep trying to leave the apartment by walking through the study, which is a dead end. Can't really figure out why, but whatever. Hopefully we'll get over that wasted motion soon.

Thinking of next summer

Is it bad to be looking forward to next summer when we're still in the middle of this one? I mean, I still have to survive the next school year, which will be a feat in and of itself. But, if I do survive, I think Tiffany and I have a lot to look forward to. Granted, it's still 11 months away, but we've already gotten in touch with Children's Relief International about going to Mozambique next July. So, I've spent about the last hour thinking about how cool that trip is going to be, and how awesome it'll be to go on a mission trip with Tiffany, possibly to the place where we can serve full time. And that's all I have to say for today.

I threw in a map of Mozambique for those that don't know where it is (just north of South Africa), and also because I wanted to put a picture on the blog somewhere.

Infuego!

So, there wasn't much to see, but at about 5 this morning there was a frantic knock on our door. I had been in bed maybe 3 1/2 hours (I had gone in to work later Tuesday night), and was pretty slow realizing what was going on. Tiffany said "Do you hear that? I'm not getting it...I'm in my nightgown." I proceeded to blindly reach in my pile of clothing next to the bed and found a pair of shorts. As I go to open the door, the knocking continues and is accompanied by more knocking on the window. "Fire!" they yell as I open the door. "You need to get out." I looked out the window and saw fire trucks everywhere. I wonder why I never heard any sirens...I must have been sleeping pretty well...

Anyway, Tiffany at this point had realized that she wasn't in her nightgown, but was wearing shorts and a tank top. She put a t-shirt on over the tank top as I grabbed the cat carrier. "Grab the cat," I called to her. We proceeded to struggle to get Yoda into her carrier, but eventually we got her in (and I got a healthy 6 inch scratch across my abdomen) and we went outside to stand around with our neighbors.

Wondering what exactly was going on, we walked far enough away from the building to see where the fire was. We could smell the smoke, but we couldn't see anything. There was a fireman down at the electrical boxes looking at something, and another handful of firemen on the top floor ripping a wall apart, but no flames anywhere. We saw some flashlights inside the apartment on the third floor right by where the firemen were ripping out the wall, so we assume that there were more firemen inside checking stuff out. At one point they got out the hose and sprayed into the hole in the wall they had created, so maybe they saw something we didn't. After about an hour of this excitement, the firemen began to pack up and told us it was safe to go back inside.

We still don't know what caused the fire, or whether there was even much of a fire at all. But, we praise God that we were kept safe, along with all of our neighbors. We are also thrilled to know that the neighbors we have care enough about us and each other to make sure that everybody got out of the building safely. And the response of the Dallas Fire Department was phenomenal - we had around 10 trucks there, though most of the firemen sat around looking upset that they were there. But still, we felt very safe and very well taken care of. And from what we can tell, nobody lost anything and none of the apartments suffered any severe damage. My guess is the severe damage will come in a few months when this whole complex gets torn down, but that's another story....