Time has Little to do with Infinity and Jelly Donuts

Well, we have internet back at the Hollis house, so hopeully I can get back to posting with some regularity.

We are leaving this afternoon to spend the weekend in Destin.  It will be both Katie and Sophie’s first trip to the beach and we are all very excited.

I don’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m leaving most technology at home.  Laptop, etc.  Katie thinks for some strange reason that I’ll try to work on school stuff while I’m down there (she’s right).

I hope to have pictures and an update sometime next week.  I’m taking a couple of rods that will be big enough for surf casting.  I’ve never done that before, and I’m excited about getting up early to hit the beach.

Back with you soon.

Well, the Hollis household is a technological wasteland: no phone, no net, not a channel on our TV (you can actually sing the previous line to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island”) but things are going well.

I am bumming my neighbor’s wi-fi (yes he knows) to write this in my backyard. Katie’s laptop can pick up the signal from one corner of the house. My laptop is not so fortunate.

We received an email this morning from our social worker. Our homestudy is complete and should be sent to Lifeline this afternoon. We also received a phone call from Lifeline. They have received our application. The next step is to wait and see if we are accepted to this agency and then we’ll begin putting together our portfolio.

We hope to make it down for a family reunion in a couple of weeks. With gas prices and work schedules, it’s still up in the air.

Hope all are well.

We’ve cut off cable and internet at the house for the foreseeable future. There were a number of reasons, but one big one is we found out that this fall we will have to replace our HVAC unit. We’re trying to be responsible and plan for that expense.

We’ll still be blogging. There’s enough free wifi around Nashville that we can get on every couple of days. If you email us though, we might not be able to respond right away.

I don’t usually provide post music, but since today is a special day, I thought I would provide a little listening entertainment while you read about our yard sale. Turn up your speakers. Click “play”, then read on.

Welcome…to my Empire.

We worked very hard yesterday. I borrowed a friend’s truck and ran around town getting donations (the truck was red, too. Fitting for the theme music) while Katie and her girlfriends set everything up. I decided to camp out last night in the yard just in case anyone got any funny ideas. My friend Geoff camped out with me. About 11:30 or so the 20% chance of rain that was predicted became 100% as we frantically shoved purses, electronics, and other things up under tarps, tents, and under tables. I rolled out a therma-rest pad and found an egg crate mattress someone donated. All in all, I got a pretty decent night’s sleep.

This morning the earlybirds came out and we have been off and running. You’ll have to excuse the darkness on some of these pictures. I forgot to change the setting and the camera was set to underwater mode for my aquarium pictures.

Here I am drying off some stuff from last night’s rain.

Shortly after start time.

View from the neighbor’s house

This was the traffic most of the day.

We don’t have a total yet. We’ve still got almost 4 hours to go. We have been praying that this would be our best yard sale yet, and it is shaping up to be just that. We have had over 30 families donate items for this sale. We feel very loved, blessed, and supported.

****Updated Part****

Wow, it’s been a long day. I spent a lot of the day cooking meals, helping take care of Sophie and being moral support. Why wasn’t I out there selling? Well, the reason is simple: I wanted to maximize our success. My lovely wife, who worked her way through college selling cars, is a much better wheeler and dealer than me, who worked his way through college…identifying frogs.

A few more pictures

Here we are at; the end of a long hot day…well, right before we took a couple of pickup loads of leftovers to ThriftSmart.

Here’s Sharon, Katie, and Lorie with some silly hats they found. Yeah, that’s right. I’m in trouble.

Here they are again.

We are now exhausted with a few boxes of trash in the driveway.

All told, we raised just over $1160 $1200 for our adoption. Most of the time in the past when we have raised that much, that’s been over two days. We are truly blessed and thankful. We got to see God work in some neat ways as well. Late in the afternoon as we were wondering just how we were going to get some of the leftover things to Thriftsmart, a young couple from Sierra Leone stopped by. They ended up buying all of our leftover clothes to send them over to Sierra Leone for impoverished people there. It was truly neat to see God work on multiple levels.

Soli Deo Gloria