Fun with Friends

The kids had a busy weekend with sleepovers and cousins and friends coming over.  These are from Sunday night when Levi and Virginia came to play.  Emma and Virginia are getting pretty good! 

 

 

David and I had a relaxing weekend in the mountains celebrating our birthdays.  This is for sure my favourite time of year, I finally enjoy the temperature and like hiking around :)

First Snowman of the Year

Josiah gathered up almost all the snow from the backyard and made this cute little guy.

Ruggum

What we do when the kids are at school...

 

Normally, you'd find David doing something like this...

 

ruggum and I sat in the grain truck with david one day:)

 

But when he gets a day off we can do things like this...

Don't Forget Tuva

Its easy for us to get caught up in our lives here in Canada but we always feel the pull back to Tuva. We miss Tuva, we miss our friends there, our co-workers, the culture, the land. So we thought we would include this excerpt from our co-workers blog to give a little update on what is happening in Tuva as far as our work there is concerned. Of course language and culture study and relationships continue to be the main focus of all our endeavors but our community development work is in a bit of a transition stage:

"Originally we had thought that starting with relief projects was the way to go, and that we would look at economic development in the future. However, due to a variety of reasons we've decided to look in that direction a little earlier. As we started to examine how we could really boost the local economy, one opportunity that stood out was starting a business to process locally-produced pine nuts.

Once you get them out of the pine cones, this is what the nuts look like in their shell

So, in short, that's what's happening. Together with a business partner, we're opening a firm that will process and sell pine nuts. Hopefully, you already love pine nuts, but if you don't - what's wrong with you? They're yummy and healthy. Recent studies even indicate that they act as an appetite suppressant, and there can't be that many things in the world that are healthy AND delicious. The one downside is, of course, that they're expensive, at least in the West. Here in T-land, though, you can just go into the woods and pick the cones off the ground.

Once they're shelled and packaged, this is what they look like on your grocery shelf

That's the plan, basically. Buy the nuts off the people who pick them, then process them (shelling, peeling, packing) and sell them. So, to that end, we've been doing lots of research and writing a business plan. Once we've secured financing, we hope to start shipping the nuts next fall, so if you know anyone who needs pine nuts have them get in touch with us! ;-) Minimum order 1 ton, so hopefully they need a LOT of nuts".

 

We're going nuts!!:)

One more from the race

Just one more cool picture from the race:)