October 25, 2008

We just booked our flights and hotel for this little trip we're taking to Tromso. We're leaving on a Saturday morning and coming back the following Tuesday night. Tromso is a fairly small city, like 50,000 people. 99% of the hotels in the city are booked through January because everyone is wanting to go on holiday there to see the Northern Lights. I've included a map to give you an idea where Tromso is:


We found some very cheap flights there for Nov 8 to 11th, but all the surrounding dates were either booked or full. Tromso is right in the middle of the Northern Lights zone, the best place to see the aurora borealis! This is a sample image courtesy of Arctic Norway, but I hope to have my own great photos of the aurora to put up when we get back. At this very moment G is studying Norwegian, which amazingly as a Germanic language is quite easy to understand and pronounce for native speakers of German and English! So far we have learned important words such as "Yelp!" which means help, "Stop tieven!" meaning "Stop thief!" and of course G's new favorite "Vohr kann jei chope en vi-kingyelm" which means "Where can I buy a Viking Helmet." :)

(Arctic Norway-
http://www.fjordtravel.no/images/destinations/tromso/tromso_norway8.html)

I forget if I mentioned that this week here in the UK is Half Term, which is the one week all school children and students get off right in the middle of their term. There are 3 terms here (as opposed to our system which uses 2 semesters) and there is a week break in the middle of each one, with 2 to 6 weeks inbetween each term depending on the season. There will be a 3 week break at Christmas, and 6 weeks in the summer. Most British families are away on holiday this week to various places around the UK or Europe. Our events at StAG basically stop this week, which gives us a nice break as well. I'm planning to go into London to help some friends of ours out moving into their new apartment, and to see some things in London together on Friday which will be good fun.

October 24, 2008

Yesterday being the 23rd we celebrated what we call GK Holiday- every 23rd of the month we think about how thankful we are that Gd brought us together, and we think about our engagement which happened March 23 in 2004. Sometimes we go away for a trip, but most times we just hangout and enjoy each other's company, going for a walk, watching a movie, or as in the case yesterday playing this hilarious game called Sheep's Quest. It's a computer game where you have to direct the sheep to collect coins to upgrade their farm. Nothing fancy, but it's sure funny to see how each of our brains work differently and how we play differently. I laughed until my sides hurt. :)

Today after G has nagged me about doing this a million times, I finally broke down and contacted a laundry service for a quote. With the weather getting worse and our radiators not getting hot enough to dry the laundry (although the house is still mostly warm so that's ok) I'm finding it impossible to get our clothes clean and dry within a week. Our washer is so small that it takes me about 5 loads a week- sometimes 6. All of those clothes have to be dried outside on the line, which of course when it's raining part of the day is not happening- I've given up taking them off the line if it rains. I just leave them there now! :) I only have space outside for one drying thingie and I do have a clothes line, but not enough for more than 2 loads at a time. So you can see how this is all getting ridiculous. Besides getting a larger bed means larger sheets and duvet covers. I can fit 2 sheets and one duvet cover in my washer. :) Why am I telling you all my laundry woes? Because there are tons of places here which will pick up your laundry once a week, wash it all, dry it all, fold it all, and return it to you at your house for like $20 a week!! No joke! It just didn't seem right to me to pay someone to do something that I can do myself- but when G pointed out that I could be spending an extra 10 hours a week with our internationals instead of wasting all this time on the laundry I gave it some thought. I never thought I'd outsource my laundry, but for $20 I'm feeling like it is worth it at this point. My time is definitely worth more than $2/hour. We'll see how it goes.

The nice thing about living in Cambridge is so many people use these services that it makes them cheap and easy. Most women work here, and most of the people in Cambridge are working in IT or science or at the university so they can afford to use a good service. And that makes it good for the rest of us too. :) What's true of the laundry service is true for cleaners as well- you can get a cleaner to come in once a week for like $25. May have to think about that too. :)

October 22, 2008

We've had a little plan in the works to go to Tromso, Norway to see the Northern Lights. We're getting some things on that finalized now- Tromso is above the Arctic Circle, which would make you think that it's cold there right? Take a look at this comparison between Tromso and SE Michigan:

	Tromso High	Clinton High		Tromso Low	Clinton Low
Jan	29	32		20	15
Feb	30	36		22	17
Mar	33	46		23	26
Apr	38	59		28	35
May	46	71		54	46
Jun	59	80		48	55
Jul	57	84		45	59
Aug	49	82		38	57
Sept	49	74		38	49
Oct	41	62		32	38
Nov	34	48		26	30
Dec	31	36		22	20

The thing that is most surprising to me is that Tromso is only marginally colder than Clinton (my hometown, 40 minutes south of Ann Arbor) in the winter months! After all it's above the Arctic Circle! Why isn't it colder? I was envisioning all these crazy snow clothes I was going to need, but a high of 34 and a low of 26 in November is really no big deal at all to me. So next time you get cold weather there just think about taking a vacation to somewhere warmer....above the Arctic Circle. :)

We're hoping to have 2 friends come along with us, and our plan is to go from Nov 8-11. Tromso has a population of 50,000, and plenty of interesting things to see and do there. One of the nice things about being so close to London is the abundance of really cheap airfares to all over Europe and beyond. I'm hoping to visit a friend of mine who is in Morocco with the IMB, and needs to take a short trip outside the country to renew her visa. We're going to meet in Madrid, and for me to fly there costs 5 pounds. It's no wonder Brits take so many short vacations all over the place.

iBASE went very well last night- we had a girl who is from Kazakhstan, which is in central Asia. I also had some good conversations with people, which were a bit exhausting since we didn't get home until midnight! I've been meeting once a week with one of our other leaders in training to help her to plan some Saturday events, and to help her to prepare studies. We meet Thursday evenings before the Camera club. I also had some great chats with Chinese ladies at the moms of preschoolers group (BAR) with at least one Chinese lady offering to teach me Chinese, which I think I'm going to take her up on! I hope to be able to say some basic things at least by Christmas, so I can chat with them all in Chinese. Pr for me as I study- I already clearly hear the words that they're saying, I just don't know what they mean. So I need a lot of vocabulary study. And on top of that since my friend and I are meeting up in Spain I'm practicing my spanish as well, particularly my Spain accent. Good thing I love languages. :)

October 20, 2008, part 2 :D

I think I remember mentioning that we'd need some pr as we start filling out all the required forms for taking some classes through River Training Center in Wichita Kansas. Many of our friends go to the ch there and are part of the training center, which trains people to be tentmakers (that is using their job, education, or career skills to live overseas, giving them a chance to form relationships and share JC with people in closed countries.) Anyway we'd thought we were going to move straight there and then Gd brought us here instead. However, we're still aiming for Wichita (whenever that's in Gd's plan) and we'll be heading down there to take a class for 1 week in January that they are offering for credit. We need 20-30 credits of Chrstn studies before we can be placed permanently overseas, so we're trying to get that process started now. Hopefully we'll be able to take some online courses after the New Year as well, and get the credits out of the way. Anyway this application is quite rigorous and VERY long, and I've just finished mine today!!! The questions are very good and deep, asking about our lives, our character, our beliefs...but those sort take a long time to answer. Once we get that app sent in we'll officially be part of the training center, which we've been informally a part of for like 5 years now.

Next on my list is the form for Midwestern, the place we'll be taking the courses through. It'll be so good to see our friends in January, since many of them are taking the class as well. The class is about forming a philosophy of ministry- a sort of "what are we about and how are we going about it" document. I'm looking forward to it. Thankfully events here won't start back up until January 14th, so we'll have a week with our families at Christmas, then a week in Wichita, and then heading on back here with possibly another visit in MI after the class. We already have a cattery booked for Nelly too, so we can avoid the stress of last year's Christmas time rush. :) We miss our family and friends in Michigan and are looking forward to seeing you all soon!

Well it's 5:30 and the sun has already set...having this application done is a huge load off my mind. :) Keep pring for G as he's still filling his out and he has less free time than I do generally.

October 20, 2008

Strangely enough it's 7:30am and I'm actually awake. :) I woke up at 7 when G's alarm went off (he has his men's pr group this morning) and since I've been sleeping really lightly I wasn't very asleep anyway. It's like I'm not actually getting any deep sleep cycles in the past few nights, which has resulted mostly in my being exhausted all day and sleep deprived. At least I feel reasonably awake right now, so that's a good thing. :) G's office doesn't have a set "in the office" time, and most of the guys come in after 10am for sure. We've gotten used to that so it's pushed our schedule back quite a bit since we've been here. The sun has just come up, and our time change will happen next Sunday, when we'll switch from British Summer Time (BST) back to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). BST is actually GMT+1. So for a little while we'll only be 4 hours ahead of those of you in EST. An unfortunate (in my opinion) side effect of this time change backwards is that the sun will be setting at about 3:30pm here when it gets close to December 21st. And coming up at like 8am. I'm not sure why they bother with a 1 hour time change- if it was me I'd just leave it alone I think. :)

In other news, I have determined that my tomatoes have the tomato blight. I wondered how the tomatoes managed to go bad before they even turned reddish, and it's from the blight, which lives in the soil. I just bought all that top soil to use for the tomatoes and to find out that it has blight in it is quite annoying. Anyway the tomatoes are basically done for the season now anyway.

Those of you interested in weather might find it interesting to know that it is often quite windy at night here, and just after sunrise the wind stops. In fact it stopped just now, this very moment! It's also often sunny here in the mornings, with clouds developing around 10am. I'm really missing the Michigan weather- there just aren't any good strong thunderstorms here.

Nelly is trying to get my attention and wondering what I could possibly have to do at such an early morning with the laptop on my lap. Laps are her favorite place to sit, so she gets a bit jealous. :)

October 19, 2008

There's nothing like getting back into a routine to help you lose track of time. It's been a fairly mundane week for us, but we've been blessed with some very good conversations this week. iBASE (that's our 18-25s internationals group) went well on Tuesday, and we had a surprise visitor who was invited randomly by some of our members when they ran into him on the street outside where we've been meeting! It was a bit challenging as he's almost 40 and has Asperger's Syndrome (which is on the Autism Spectrum, but they are usually highly functioning) and has issues with being socially appropriate. He also likes to argue. But that doesn't intimidate me at all (those of you who know me well might be laughing at this point) and we were blessed to see how our iBASE folks truly loved him and accepted him, and challenged his thinking in a kind way.

Wednesday morning I had some good chats with new ladies at Bounce A Round (moms of preschoolers), including several Chinese ladies. One of these ladies is a professional opera singer, and I've been looking for a person to continue my voice lessons since we moved here. This woman told me that it is very difficult to get lessons in the UK because people take lessons recreationally but don't have very much ambition, so the standards are quite low compared to the US and Germany. I talked with her awhile about her methods and understanding about singing, and I'm hoping to pursue taking lessons with her as I get to know her better. It would be a huge blessing for me, and since I'm pretty sure she's not a follower of JC it would be a good opportunity to get to know her.

Thursday am was our first combined ladies international study and orientation course. We had intended to hold the study and this new course at the same time, but we had some miscommunication and we ended up combined together. Our intention is to offer this orientation course to new ladies to help them adjust to British culture, as well as passing on important information about doctors, shops, play groups, etc. We're hoping some ladies will become interested in a CE course over time. Anyway in international work you have to be flexible- I spent about 4 hours preparing the study for this week and we didn't end up using it. :) But that was fine. :)

I do have some good news to share on the camera club front- I've persevered in going, and it's been about 6 weeks now. They invite a speaker in every week, and I have to say that some of them have been very dull, with photo after photo of bland looking butterflies or moths. :) Now that's saying a lot because I love animals, but 7 not very good photos of badgers in a row is not good for the part of my brain that gets quickly bored. :) Anyway I've kept going and I've now had several conversations with some folks from the club, and this Thursday another new club member even approached me to chat! This is a huge deal- it's the first time it's happened. I'm aiming to have a conversation with at least one person every week, even if it's quite mundane. But you know, other new club members seem to seek me out, so I've been meeting lots of newbies and trying to make them feel welcome. Since I'm not British I'm not entirely sure how to do that, but I'm learning as I go. This whole camera club thing has been a good chance to practice adjusting to new cultures- I would enjoy it a lot more if people were friendly, but it's been good for me to think strategically about forming relationships. My new friend there, Emily, is quite a new photographer, but she lives in the village and I'm hoping to be able to pursue some photo based relationship there. Pr for me to persevere in the face of a lot of coldness among the other club members. :)

I hope you are all well (that's a very British thing to say) and enjoying the lovely autumn colours (another British thing to say.) :D

October 13, 2008

Where has the time gone? It seems like my parents just got here, but tomorrow night they're heading into Heathrow to stay the night at the Yotel there so that they can catch their 9am flight easily the next morning. Yotels are a fun little mini hotel that they've started putting into airports which you can rent in 4 hour blocks. It's wonderful for people like us who might end up in an airport overnight. :) Anyway they'll be back in the US Wednesday at noon.

Having my parents here has been great- we always have the best discussions. In fact just now we talked about the plague village of Eyam (they volunteered to quaranteen themselves to prevent the spread of the plague), small pox and how the vaccine developed, and earlier we were all talking about the rise and fall of civilisations and how domesticated animals and crops played into European culture gaining weapons before South American cultures did. Fascinating stuff- I'm so lucky to come from such a smart family!!

We ate dinner again at our local pub, The White Horse. They are so friendly there, it reminds me why I wanted to live in a village. I love village life.

By the way I just realized today is Columbus Day- a day of celebration for some, and I suppose mourning for others, whose ancestors' way of life was destroyed and land stolen by colonisation. It's a good time to think about how we are all accountable one day to the One who created us, and we'll have to tell him what we've done with our lives. Not one of us can stand on our own before a holy and just judge in heaven because we are all imperfect and deserve to experience the just sentence he will deliver. But thankfully he loved us enough to provide a way for that sentence to be transmutted- his own son took our sentence himself so that we could go free. I'm thankful for that today, and the knowledge that that Judge will deal justly with everyone who has done unjust things- injustice won't go unpunished.

Time for bed here in Swavesey- it's been warm and very very nice these past few days, with glorious days of sunshine and cloudless skies...everyone has been encouraged by the weather, and the tree leaves have been so beautiful here. not as beautiful as Michigan, but still lovely. I miss the beautiful colors of the sugar maples in Michigan right now...I hope you're all enjoying the beauty of the fall.

October 10, 2008 Duxford War Museum

First and foremost let me wish our friend Clare from the Living Proof class a very happy 90th birthday!!!! We have been so blessed to be your friends and we wish we could celebrate your birthday with you!! We're pring for you and lifting you up as you turn 90 that the Ld would continue to bless you and your family.

Today I went with my mom and dad out to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, which was a major air force base during WWII especially. In fact some of our Living Proof friends may even have flown out of Duxford themselves during the war! Can I just say how much I thought of you Living Proof folks as I walked around at Duxford and looked at the WWII planes and read the stories of the people who flew them. I owe so much of my understanding of that time frame to your sharing with us about what life was like during and after the war. Thanks for sharing such valuable experiences with us, we have been so greatly blessed by you! Whereas many people can only read the stories from the war on a plaque at a place like Duxford, we have had the blessing of knowing you all and hearing straight from you what those times were like. I think you should all write novels- you may not realize just how interesting your lives have been, but I know loads of people who would buy them if you wrote about your lives. Those with computers, you should start blogging!!

I really enjoyed Duxford- I enjoyed the old planes, many of which are still operational, and I enjoyed reading the history of them and the stories written by pilots who flew them. I've put a few pictures up here (it's late and I have to get to bed but we're going into London all day tomorrow and I wanted to be sure to get this up in time for the Sunday printing by our wonderful friends who lived during these times and might find it interesting to see photos of planes they flew hanging in a museum- I bet you never thought you'd see the day that war planes would become a tourist attraction. :)

Those of you who were airmen in WWII- know that you are remembered and honored!

Hangar 1 at Duxford, a mix of old and modern planes

I've a horrible memory for plane names...this one was used in WWII.

I love this kind of stories- I could read them all day. If you have stories like this that you haven't told me from your war experiences write them down and send them to me!

Inside a Concorde Test Jet.

A WWI plane

Another view of Hanger 1

A WWI plane

WWII Mosquito

Many planes are being restored to flying condition here.

The American Museum


Inside the museum hanger

A B-52 bomber

A U2 spy plane!

My reflection in the engine of a U2 spy plane

A memorial to the 30,000 US air force personnel who died during WWII flying from the UK.

As I said before, if you have stories from your war service please blog them or write them down for us- we would LOVE to read them!

This is a photo from Willow Run plant, which made bombers during WWII.

October 6, 2008

Wow- I have been so excited about my parents coming and so busy this week between getting the house straightened up that I haven't posted anything. This week has been crazy- Monday we were in London, Tuesday iBASE, Wednesday I had the Women's luncheon and had to process photos for that (they asked me to photograph it!) Thursday -Saturday I was a bit under the weather, and Sunday was the International Families lunch for StAG internationals. Intermixed with all of that was a lot of photo processing, house cleaning, furniture moving, 9 hours of driving to Ikea for G (more on that in a bit) and general crazyness. :)

So we have needed to get an Ikea bed frame because our mattress is from there and is 2 inches too wide on each side for our bed frame. So we decided to put the old frame in the spare room while my parents are here and get a properly sized frame for ourselves. 3 trips and 9 hours over 3 days later we have it. The headboard wouldn't fit in the car the first trip, so we rented a van to go get it, and Saturday night as we were starting to assemble it we realized they gave us the wrong sideboards...they were pretty unhelpful (although friendly) about it over the phone, so G had to drive BACK down there again to get the right part. Argh. So last night instead of just hanging out and getting to bed early so I could go down to meet my parents at Kings Cross I was up until midnight getting our bed together. :) It was a good experience- a very clear reminder that things in the UK are singularly unhelpful, and that's the way of life here- inefficient and unhelpful. You start to get used to it but it really strikes you when you first come from the US.

My parents arrived safe and sound with no problems, which has been an answer to pr for those of you I've updated aside from the blog. :) They were of course very tired today, but with an afternoon nap they were able to make it to almost 10pm! It's been really great having them here already, and it was so fun having tacos together (tacos is like our family's favorite food.) We don't have any set plans really, just to enjoy ourselves and for them to have a stress free vacation as much as possible. :)

September 29, 2008

I've been late getting this up since we went to Kew Gardens a week ago, but here it is:

So today we went down to London to take a tour of Buckingham Palace's State Rooms, which was pretty amazing. No photos allowed in there though. :) It was cool to see how the palace works and how they set up for State dinners, and what all goes into it. From there we headed on to Kew Gardens to meet up with new friends of ours who have recently moved to London from the US to work with Polish people here. They previously lived in Poland 9 years. We've so enjoyed meeting them and getting to know them. Kew Gardens is a famous botanical garden- one of the most famous I think in all of Europe. It has 3 or 4 huge conservatory houses, and we didn't even see half of them or half of the place. Definitely worth going back there in my opinion. We spent a lot of time in the Palm House, where the huge palm trees are. It's about 150 years old I think.

The biggest palm in the Palm House.

George on the stairs up to the viewing platform in the Palm House. You can look down on the palms and other tropical plants.

The gardens themselves are amazing- they have outdoor exhibits on loads of different types of trees and things.

This is a cork oak, the bark of which is used for corks in wine bottles and things like that.

They have this new special exhibit where you walk up to this high platform and look around and see what it's like at tree canopy height. I loved the view but the platform didn't feel stable enough for my taste. :)

It was a long day but all in all we enjoyed the time with our friends and being able to see some of London. We're trying to see some of the major London sights while we're here. I am getting to feel like I know the city pretty well, although with such a big city there's always something new to do I guess. The museums are next up on our list, and some of them allow photos so I'll share them whenever we get down there.

September 27, 2008

Today we went up to Norwich with some of our iBASE friends. Besides spending time together we also wanted to invite along new friends who didn't know about iBASE so we could form some friendships and invite them along. There are still lots of new people coming in at this time of the year, so meeting them is an important thing right now. We're planning to do an outing like this once a month- I think the next one might be to London.

G and I have been to Norwich before on our own, but we hadn't seen everything that we wanted to see. But Norwich isn't a huge city, so we covered it on this trip pretty much. We're trying to encourage people to have at least 3 worthwhile conversations with people on these trips, and I know I had some great conversations. I made a new friend M from East Germany, and another friend V from Vietnam. G had some great conversations with some of the guys who came, which is an answer to pr since we haven't had many guys coming to iBASE. Pr for our follow up with these new friends as we invite them to iBASE and get to know them better.

I just thought I'd share some photos with you:

G (in the blue), Bruno across from him, Marta, and Tomas on G's left. Marta is one of our co-leaders for iBASE and she arranged this trip for us all. This is at the end of the day on the way home, so we were all exhausted.

Norwich Castle. It used to be used as a jail, but now it's a museum.

Even the bathrooms in the castle were interesting- this is a poem, with painted sailboats in the sink to match it. :)

As you can see I'm not ashamed to take a photo of a toilet- so long as it's clean. :) They put teapot stencils on this one. If there hadn't been other people in the other stalls I'd have take photos of all the other toilets too. :)

G sharing some awesome dark chocolate with a hint of mustard, courtesy of the famous Colman's Mustard shop in Norwich.

Chatting near the cathedral.

G chatting with new friends.