A new additional to the family

No, the baby has not come early! The new addition to the family is Phayu, our new golden retriever. She was given to us by some American missionaries leaving Lampang. At 20 months she is the youngest member of our family (not in dog years though). Luca has started her training process already trying to walk her around the house with the leash. I'm trying to potty train her to poo and wee in one part of the lawn, so far without much success.
Some have questioned why we would get a dog when we have such a dog problem on our street with barking dogs keeping us awake at night. Fight fire with fire I replied jokingly. Phayu has changed things already in 2 short days. The strange neighbour next door who we have not yet talked has started bringing dogs to meet Phayu (we hope not to impregnate her because she has not be sterilised) and tonight I caught her/him (we're not quite sure if our neighbour is a woman or a man) feeding Phayu something through holes in our gate. I have started having these fears that we'll come back from a trip to Chiang Mai and a couple of weeks later find out that she is pregnant!
Pity there are so many stray dogs in the streets that I don't feel comfortable taking her for walks in the street yet. Our neighbour warned us not to take her out because she's liable to get bitten by other dogs.
I've changed too. I've never had a dog before and I never thought I ever be a dog person but ... days before Phayu arrived I was waiting in anticipation and now I love playing with her. It is a steep learning curve though as we've been searching on the net about what to feed Golden Retrievers and how to care for them.

Ministry Centre

These are photos of our new ministry centre which we have started renting for 8,000 baht per month (about AU$270 per month). We found the house through one of elderly gentlemen I play golf with each week. His daughter owned this house and rented it to us at a relatively cheap price. The house is quite old and will cost quite a bit to repair but it is in a great location. We will run most of our outreach activities at this centre. Please pray that it will be used greatly by God. Notice on the centre column a shelf for the idols to sit. We will of course remove the idols but there is a spirit house in the courtyard.
But what to call our ministry centre? At our team meeting last week, we considered various options, The Pit Stop ("Pit" in Thai means wrong or error - so it has a double meaning - "stopping error" - I thought of this one), Hope House, the M Centre ("M" for ministry), The Centre, The Happy House, The Sun House, the Lighthouse and others. What name would you have chosen?

Spot the difference

There has been work going on for the last 10 days with lots of grinding noise. Now can you spot the differences?

Workmanship?

We recently installed a hotwater heater into our guest bathroom as Jenny, a short-term worker from Australia is coming out to help us next month. The electrician had to drill a hole through the wall to get electricity to the hotwater unit. I would have expected the electrician to patch up the wall after he had finished but he just left it like the photo below. I asked him what he was going to do about the wall and he told me that I could just patch it up. What did I expect? The same thing happened when the plumber came and install a new pipe into the kitchen sink. There is still a hole at the back of the house where the pipe comes in.

What's missing now?

We had been praying that someone would purchase the house next door to us which had been repossessed by the bank and vacant for over a year. Our prayers were answered and two weeks ago we saw work being done on the house. What we didn't expect is this. What's missing?

All the trees. Almost every single tree was cut down. Unfortunately I didn't have a 'before' picture but there were several huge trees in the front yard. All gone. Gone with it is the shade for our house and front yard.

We were pretty upset about it but what can we do?