Wow! It's been awhile since we blogged.

Hi there everyone. I can't believe it's been 3 weeks since we last blogged. I'm avoiding doing grading and grades are due on Monday for the first Quintile so any excuse will work and blogging it is. We are all doing well. While I'm thinking of it...we are in desperate need of a good potato peeler and of chocolate chips. Both things we can't seem to find here. I know for sure there are no chocolate chips. One of the teachers packed 30 lbs of chocolate chips to get them through the year. We are enjoying our time here. Still amazed when we stop and think about it that we are actually here. It's starting to get cooler here. Highs for the next 10 days are in the mid 60's F and lows are in the 50's. Perfect weather if you ask me. We like where we are living and we love our landlord. Our driver is always teaching us more Azeri and we are teaching him English. It's very fun. The driver told Tim today in English "I love you, Tim. You are a super man." It was very sweet. We just think the world of our driver. Jonathon can carry on conversation now in Azeri. He's very proud of that and we are very proud of him. The driver is always saying, "Jonathon" and then he tells him something in Azeri and Jonathon tell us. It's pretty cool. Jonathon and his Azeri have gotten us out of many a jam now. His Azeri teacher says he is the best student she has ever had. He's studying right now what they would normally be doing in December if they were lucky. We have purchased a couple of children's stories for him in Azeri and he is translating them into English. We had heard that there was 1 bookstore that had books in English. When we got there we discovered that it was a Christian bookstore, too. I was so excited. We bought a lot of books there. The people were so nice there, too. Our driver talked to one of the managers for a long time and maybe there is hope for him to become Christian, too.
Speaking of our driver...we just missed being in a very bad accident yesterday. Literally missed it by a few inches. There was a large delivery truck on our left and a cement barrier for the bridge on our right. The truck apparently did not see us and pulled into our lane as if there was no one there. Our driver swerved to miss the truck, slammed on the breaks and we fishtailed all over the place and we were able to stop about 1 to 2 inches from the cement barrier. There are no real seat belts in Azerbaijan and so I was in the front seat and went flying all over the place. My knees went into the dash. Tim was in the back behind me and had turned to talk to the boys. He, too, got thrown around. The boys were fine. Tim and I were both sore last night and still a little today. The most interesting thing is that the driver of the truck (hearing all of the skidding I guess) slowed down and hung out is window to apologize. Then a couple of minutes later pulled over and motioned for us to pull over. The driver both got out. The driver of the truck was very sorry and he and our driver shook hands and kissed and then we all went on our merry way. Tim and I laughed because in the US if two cars pulled over after a situation like that there would have been no shaking of hands and kissing. Tonight we were coming home from a dinner at some friends house and the traffic was really snarled. Come to find out a driver had caught his front tire in a manhole that had sunk about 8 inches and he couldn't get out. As we were just about to get up to him about 10 men came out of the dark (it was truly weird) and helped him lift his car out of the hole. Then they all went back to their cars and left. In the US if you get a person or two to stop you are doing pretty good. It was pretty cool. There's tons more to tell you but it will have to wait until tomorrow. It's almost midnight and I am sleepy.