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We traveled to Lawrence this weekend for Joella's med school graduation hooding ceremony. Dan drove to Wichita from Tulsa in the morning, met up with us and Joella, and we all carpooled to Lawrence together. We arrived at about 2:30 and met our Phillips grandparents, our Uncle Don who flew in from Pittsburg, and Nathan and Ashley at an old family friend's house.
Joella and Don 
Grandmother Phillips
Grandfather Phillips
Ashley and Nathan
Dan
We hung out there for a couple of hours, then adjourned to an early dinner at Marisco's, where we met up with Uncle Mike and Aunt Robyn, and Grandma Frye.
The hooding ceremony at the Lied Center started at 7:00. We arrived a little early, giving us more time for family photos. An ice cream truck was trolling the parking lot for customers, and someone dared Nathan to chase it down. He gladly obliged. The truck driver didn't seem very amused when he found out that Nathan was just running after him for a photo op, and not for a tasty treat. LOL
Everyone minus the photographer
The Phillips side of the family
Aren't we cool?
Just for you, Stacie
Sisters (I'm glad I'm not the only pale person on the planet)
Nathan in an unusual moment of exuberance (and the Frye side of the fam)
Joella gets ready to go in
Nathan goes for ice cream
The ceremony itself was a little long, but it was cool to see Joella get her hood and her two awards. She was awarded the Janet M. Glasgow-Rubin Achievement Citation for being a woman in the top 10% of her class, as well as the Willard J. Smith, M.D. Award for Academic Achievement for her superior academic performance. She was also recognized for her participation in two honor societies: the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She'll be going on to a couple of residency training programs: a Transitional year to be spent at Methodist Hospital in Houston, and then four years of Radiation Oncology Residency at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. She's very excited about both (they were her top choices for residency programs).
Joella is hooded
Dr. Joella E. Wilson, M.D.!
We drove back home to Wichita with Dan after the ceremony. Jeff and Dan napped while Michelle avoided several suicidal deer on the turnpike. It was NOT fun. Luckily, we and the deer survived our harrowing journey home.
I believe that today is our one year anniversary of joining the Y. I'm pleased to say we are still members, and that we've gotten into a routine of going at least four times a week and sometimes five. We're both definitely healthier now. I've lost over 25 pounds since joining, plus another 10 or so that I worked off at home in the few months prior to joining, so about 35 in all. Jeff's lost a few pounds too, and is definitely more toned than he's ever been. He still complains about going, but not too much. :) Fang and Errol have maintained their diets this year, too. We're just quite the healthy household of late. I'm proud of both of us for keeping it up and I hope we'll be able to continue the healthy exercise habits the rest of our lives!
We had the pleasure of a visit from two of Jeff's college friends, Sara and John, the other night. They brought their new daughter, Julia, along with them. She's a little over six months old, and she's a cutie, but no, we still don't want one. :P
Errol was a bit of a monster during the visit. I don't know what's wrong with him, but he just can't deal with children. He barks and them, and jumps at them, and tries to get in their carriers with them. Of course, this freaks the kids out, too, so things just escalate. Errol got to spend some alone time in his crate for a while during the visit, but when John let him out a little later, he seemed better. Julia didn't care at all what Errol was doing, because she has two dogs at home. Errol settled down when Julia was put down on the floor and they became friends.
Julia and Errol
Julia liked playing with the rug - she used it to pull herself when rolling over
Errol gives Julia a sniff - yep, smells like baby
Jeff accepts temporary custody of Julia
Jeff absentmindedly scritchy scratches Julia's head
Fang investigates the newcomer
Errol gets some much needed attention from John
We had a bit of a sad experience on Saturday. It was time again for our semi-annual community service day that we do through our church. The City of Wichita provides us with a list of projects to work on. This year, we invited a bunch of other churches around Wichita to join us, and 26 accepted! There were a total of about 3200 volunteers that served our city that day at over 100 different job sites.
Jeff and I were given the opportunity to be team captains again this year. We had a team of about 40 young adults to help us with our project. The city provided us the name and address of a woman who has been in violation of city ordinances for several years. She's a hoarder, and her yard has been accumulating junk for some time. She's been found guilty on several counts, and was about to be put in jail for this, but the judge decided to give her one last chance to clean up the yard, and we were the ones who agreed to take the job. She had a bunch of other things - dead tree, piles of tree limbs scattered around the property, general landscape cleanup - that we were going to help her with as well.
We knew that she was going to have trouble letting all this stuff go, so we and our team spent the month before the project praying for her. We, and several other people at our church and in the city offices, invested a lot of time trying to get her to return phone calls and let us meet with her before the project so we could get to know her and let her get to know us before the big day. She finally invited Jeff and I over to her house a few days before the project to show us around and let us see the work to be done.
When we met with her, we could tell we were in for a difficult task. She had an excuse to keep everything, even the dead leaves and tree limbs. We decided to go ahead and try the project anyway. We didn't want to give up then and just let her go to jail. We kept praying for a little miracle.
On the day of the project, we arrived early, along with a police officer, the neighborhood assistant, and our senior pastor. The city provided a huge dumpster for us to use to throw everything away. Jeff and the other three starting working with the lady right then to try and get her to let us move her junk into the dumpster. I took the rest of our group and got them started working on the dead tree and the other landscaping projects.
About an hour into the morning, we had to stop. The four people who were trying to get the lady to let us start moving the junk out got to a point where she just said, "don't touch my stuff". The police officer decided at that point that we just needed to quit, so we called everyone off the property immediately, lest she decide to try and charge us with theft or trespassing.
We were all quite saddened by the situation. We knew we were her last chance and that the judge would be sending her to prison at her next court date, after which the city would go in and clean everything up themselves, then send her a bill for the cost of doing so. We know she likely won't be able to pay the bill, and may lose her house and property because of that. It's just heartbreaking, because I know we had the people there to help her fix everything that day. Our team was awesome and we would have been able to get everything cleaned up for her in 3 or 4 hours, but we just weren't allowed to do it.
Our pastor used our project as an example in his sermon the next morning. He was talking about how our church's mission statement is "Being and Making Disciples". The text for the day was the section about Jesus at Gethsemane from the gospel of Mark. He pointed out that Jesus was incredibly lonely and anguished during that time, and that putting ourselves out in the world to do what we're called to do can also be incredibly lonely and painful for us when we're rejected.
We don't think our story with this particular lady is over yet. We're not sure what's going to happen, but we're all hoping that we'll be able to come along side her again someday and show her the love of Jesus again, and that she'll be more receptive to it then.
The good news - our entire team moved on to different projects around the city after ours fell apart, and we were able to help get more work done at the other sites than we had hoped to. So, the day wasn't a total failure. We're also very excited that so many other churches across the city wanted to join ours. We're making LOVE Wichita an annual event, and we're looking forward to seeing where God takes our city in the future. :)
Our plans for our summer vacation have come together in the last week or so. We're pretty excited about this one. We're going to a bunch of places neither of us has been before, so it will be a new adventure for both of us. Here's a quick rundown of the itinerary:
Day 1-2: Fly from St. Louis (we're leaving Fang and Errol with their grandparents) to Zurich, Switzerland. Pick up rental car, and hit the road. Meander our way to Innsbruck, Austria and see the city. Spend the night outside Innsbruck in the quaint town of Hall in Tirol.
Day 3: See Hall in Tirol, then move on to the Swarovski Crystal factory and museum. After that, we continue on to our hotel in Schoenau am Konigsee. We'll spend 6 nights there, using it as our base of operations for seeing Salzburg.
Days 4-8 (except Day 5, see below): See Salzburg and the surrounding region. We'll tour some castles, an ice cave, a salt mine, and wander through the gorgeous countryside during these days. We'll also be see ALL of the sights from the Sound of Music, and we will re-enact many of the scenes. LOL
Day 5: Drive to Munich, ditch the rental car, and pick up our new car! Yes, we're taking European delivery of a car. It's silly, but it's cheaper than buying it here, plus we don't have to pay for a rental car for the rest of our trip. How cool is that? Anyway, we'll get the new car, and tour the car museum and factory. We're hoping to find time to see the Englischer Garten as well, since it was a bit cold there for that last time we were in Munich. Then we will race down the autobahn and back to our hotel. Or perhaps we'll just take it easy since we'll be in the car's break in period. Sad, but true.
Days 9-10: Leave Austria and go back to Switzerland. We'll spend two days in Luzern. I have already located a Mexican restaurant there so I can get my salsa fix. I could care less about the rest of the city. Just kidding. :)
Days 11-17: We leave Luzern and drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, where we have rented an apartment for 7 nights. We plan to spend the nice days hiking in the mountains and taking lots of pretty pictures. We hope to be able to go to the top of the Jungfraujoch and the Schilthorn as well. We'll take side trips to Gruyere (for the cheese, the chocolate, and the castle), to Bern, to Thun, to Interlaken, and to Fribourg on days when the weather doesn't cooperate for hiking (or when we need to speed down some curvy roads in the new car for a while!).
Day 18: We head back to Zurich. We'll have to give up our car there, and they'll ship it back to the US for us. We have a fancy dinner planned that night, then it's off to the hotel at the airport for the last night of our trip.
Day 19: Back home - sort of. We'll fly back in to St. Louis, and reunite with our furkids.
So, what's the somewhat amusing twist to this little story? We found out earlier this week that our company is going to shut down for two weeks this summer. Which two weeks? Why, the two right after we get back from our three week trip, of course! So, we now have a full FIVE weeks off work this summer. Naturally, we don't have enough vacation time saved up to cover the full five weeks, so we'll get to take a little bit of that as unpaid leave. Oh well. We semi-expected this to happen, and we were prepared to deal with the consequences of our decision, so we're not upset or anything. We're just wondering what to do with all that time off!
Joella and Don 
Grandmother Phillips
Grandfather Phillips
Ashley and Nathan
Dan
Everyone minus the photographer
The Phillips side of the family
Aren't we cool?
Just for you, Stacie
Sisters (I'm glad I'm not the only pale person on the planet)
Nathan in an unusual moment of exuberance (and the Frye side of the fam)
Joella gets ready to go in
Nathan goes for ice cream
Joella is hooded
Dr. Joella E. Wilson, M.D.!
