For Richer, For Poorer - Nov 22

Hello all!

Good news: Alyssa survived her trial day. Everything went pretty good and they didn't even make her work hard as a cover teacher either; she mostly TA'd and shadowed a couple other teachers. She said it seemed like a pretty strict place, but that has its advantages. And the group of academies to which this school belongs looks, from our perfunctory research, to be kinda prestigious so it would follow that it ought to attract a certain kind of student. One drawback is that the school is really massively far from the house; If you imagine the central part of London as a kind of squashed lemon shape with the squiggle of the Thames running across it, we're at the top of it and this school is right on the bottom. It took her a lot of time and a hefty transit fare to get there and back today. With the right transit pass and a good book, that won't be such a problem, but it may mean that I'll be the primary dinner-cooker. That's not so bad, at least if she doesn't mind a pretty simple rotation of grilled cheese, bangers and mash, and whatever-frozen-thing-at-the-store-looked-good-today. We don't know if she'll be offered the job or not, but the odds aren't bad and if she does get the offer we'll need to make a pretty quick decision about whether it's worth it for us or not. So if you want to pray for something, that's a bit of discernment we have ongoing. 

Also good news: We have internet in the flat! I was still sick this morning so I stayed home. But after sleeping until lunchtime, I was feeling a lot better and so I nipped off to the shopping centre and got a dongle for us. Only one of us can go online at a time, and we're restricted to text-ish stuff so we don't eat all our data. I like to think of it as a phone plan with data minus the phone part. In fact, the dongle works using a SIM card. Which is good news; the stick will work anywhere that we'd get cell reception. And so far nothing but full bars in the flat. In spite of my plans as of last post, we didn't swap phone plans yet. There's a couple wrinkles; unlocking the phones, porting over our old numbers, etc, so we're taking a minute to second-guess. Also, my long distance rewards on my phone just rolled over again so I kinda want to eat through my 200 minutes or so of calling back home before dumping that SIM in the trash. 

We're learning to do something very fun together: budgeting. Laugh and giggle and facepalm all you want, but we're doing the whole cash-in-envelopes thing now until we get a bit of a better bearing on what is a normal grocery budget, transportation budget, etc. It feels like all the money managing skills we developed when we were single are less transferable, though, and not just because we're shopping for two. Something about a strange currency has certainly made me feel a couple times like I'm reinventing the wheel. We're doing fine; teachers make pretty good money even if they are sick a day or two, and we're so far enjoying the challenge of living frugally. 

Even more good news: tomorrow we go to our first small group meeting with this new little church we've been going to. Now that I mention it, I don't know if I've said much about this church. It's technically Church of England, but it's not very liturgical. Looks like the story behind it was that a bunch of young people from the local parish wanted to to a plant and they bought an old pub and renovated it into a worship space. On Sunday evenings a couple dozen people gather on a busy street corner just a 5min walk from our flat for worship and some really challenging (and theologically solid; don't worry all you evangel-y friends of ours) teaching. The little bits of the liturgy have been enough to make me feel like I'm at home without alienating my lovely Pentecostal wife, and it's been really refreshing to hear worship music we both recognize; if we'd kept going to Hillsong we were worried we'd need to buy their latest CD just to recognize and sing along in worship. The people are really nice and pass out tea and biscuits after the service, and enthusiastically invite you out to the pub afterwards. We haven't gone yet; usually 'cause it's late and we have a hard enough time waking up Mondays as it is without a residual pint buzzing around in there, but we'll probably have to take them up on it sometime in the next week or two. ANYWAY, we're going to small group tomorrow! Which is super-exciting. We're really itching to start making some friends, and a small group of brothers and sisters is exactly the kind of people we're looking for. I am hugely stoked about it. 

Now that we're online; drop us an email! We'd love to hear from our friends and family and know what's going on in your less English but equally exciting lives.

In SIckness and in Health - Nov 21

Hello friends and family,

We have some not-too-bad news. Both of us have fallen a bit ill. With colds. Nothing very serious, but it's given each of us a couple days out of work to sleep and think and, in my case, compose a short blog entry. We did it a bit staggered; Alyssa got sick last week and missed a couple days. I picked it up over the weekend and so I spent today at home although I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be passing for better enough to discreetly cough my way through a day of work tomorrow. But I'm letting my wonderful nursemaid of a wife tell me if I'm being stupid so far so if she says stay I'll probably stay. You can say a lot of things about me, but I'm a pretty good patient.

We have some good news, though. We priced some things out and we're probably going to pick up one of those mobile internet dongles to get broadband; our install date for home internet has been delayed and indefinitely postponed a second time and this way will actually probably save us money. One unfortunate consequence, however, is that it has some pretty steep use limitations. We'll mostly be confined to the web activities we'd already been doing, but in the comfort of home and as long as we want; emailing, blogging, etc. downloads and streaming are out (so no internet tv; shucks) and skype is completely not-supported. But we also looked into some new phone plans now that we're figuring out what our usage patterns are like, and we'll probably get one with enough US and Canada minutes to call home about 30 min a week each. And there's not much stopping us from doing the skype thing in more public places like, for example, the pub. Although I'm trying to picture what that would look like and I don't like the face the imaginary bartender is giving the imaginary me with headphones talking to himself. That'll probably get sorted out in the next day or two, depending on if I'm still sick and if my wife lets me go out of the house while I'm sick.

This past weekend we wanted to take it easy 'cause we were both feeling a bit pokey so we canned our planned trip out of London and went to Buckingham palace again to see the changing of the guard. We got some nice photos, but I have to confess to being a bit underwhelmed. I guess I expected something on a grander scale. There was a long boring bit we couldn't see because we'd gotten spots on top of the Victoria monument to see them march in and out from the high ground but couldn't see past the crammed pack of people by the gates. It didn't make our top 5 list, anyway, and for the time investment (2 or 3 hours by the time it's all finished) I wouldn't build a day of sightseeing around it. There's probably cooler stuff to do. 

Other bit of news; we booked our flights to Paris over the Christmas break, and we're getting super-excited. We've been poring over the chapters on Paris we've got in the travel books we have already and we may start scouring the library soon for other ideas on things we want to put on our to-see list. It's going to be a lot of fun.

I think that about wraps things up. Please be in prayer about sickness, as well as some job stuff. Alyssa has a trial lesson for a potential full-time position starting in January tomorrow. She'll be doing a day of cover, except one lesson will be a maths one she's prepped and will be observed for. Seems to me like trials happen even before interviews here, and the impression we're getting is the school is quite keen on her, so we're hopeful. 

Cheers!

News - 17 November

Hello friends and family. It's been a long time since an upate graced this site and the principle reason is that we're both working! Quite a bit.
The first week or so was pretty good; we got a combined 7 days of work which is buot enough to survive. We've both been to a couple really nice schools and we've both been to one or two much more challenging ones. This week we were both working every day until Alyssa came down with a pretty sharp cold. I'm home today bolstering my immune system and trying to be a good nurse. But there's some big stuff on the horizon. Alyssa has a trial day booked on Monday at a school that might hire her on for Maths from January to July. So prayer will be very much appreciated. I don't have anything like that lined up, but I am getting pretty steady supply work and for the time being that's pretty good.
Supply teaching is a little bit like having a job interview every day, though. we want so badly to make a good impression, we don't know anyone, we often don't recognize the schools we're going into. Or rather, it's like the first day of a new job every day. You want to impress your supervisors and make them happy to have brought you in, but you'll be in a brand new place tomorrow with a whole new st of people you want to impress.
Eventually, people tell us, we'll be able to more pick-and-choose the schools we go to because they'll know us and ask for us. But so far I think we're hungry enough for any work that we'd be pretty hard-pressed to turn down a day even at a school that was tricky once before.
In the evenings, we're slowly polishing off the very small library of movies and tv shows I have on my computer as we continue to wait for internet in our flat (should be sometime near the end of this month). The big news is what we do on the weekends (sorry about no pictures again, but I'm on a library computer).
Last weekend we had planned to get down to do another round of museums but we only got to one of them (The Victoria and Albert Museum - which, btw, should be the first museum you go to in London. We liked it muh better than the British Museum). We got sidetracked by a couple of the royal parks in London which were very nice to walk through in the warmish autumn breeze. In between Trafalgar Sq, St. James' Park and Green Park, we half-stumbled on Buckingham Palace. We've vowed to go back for a changing of the guard, perhaps this saturday, but there wasn't one when we arrived. The building is gorgeous, and we got a kick out of peering at the Canada gates on one side of the courtyard; they are on the north side of the roundabout where the Mall meets the palace gates and they're big, impressive, and have the coats of arms of the Canadian provinces built into them. The gates at the opposite end were the Australia gates, which were a bit less interesting to us but still quite nifty.
The other big higlight was Speaker's Corner on th northwest end on Hyde Park where it meets the Marble Arch. On Sunday afternoons this place bursts into a platform for grassroots political speaking. People come with soapboxes or stepladders and posters and start declaring their opinions while curious onlookers gather to be harangued. What struck us, though, was that the big stuff bing talked about the most wasn't politics; it was religion. Namely, a kind of strange conflicting debate between Christianity and Islam. We're a bit sad to report that we didn't feel very well-represented by the speakers waving scripture around like a cudgel and we left before long because the spectacle made us increasingly uncomfortable. Still, it seemed like a more interesting spectacle than the little video booth ''speaker's corner'' that used to be in Toronto.
I should run and tend to my sick wife. Please be praying for us and especially her congested self the next couple of days. Thank you for keeping us in your thoughts and prayers.

News from Away - November 3rd

Greetings all,

So things have settled down, although I say that in a bit of a qualified way.

For example: work. Neither of us have done it yet. I know I said Alyssa would be working on Wednesday but that fell through a couple hours after I so triumphantly posted it. So we both waited by the phone the next morning, and this morning, to no avail. Ah, the life of supply teachers. It's not just that there isn't work, though. We've had a couple rather short conversations with the folks at the agency about readiness and process and the like. And we've been getting calls and leads on some more permanent teaching jobs that could start in January. Not to mention taking down phone numbers for a few different agencies.  So we're waiting, a little tensely, to see what God will do. He didn't pull us over here and smooth everything out before us to let us starve. We'll be fine.

As for church, we're thinking about visiting a new one this Sunday. We had plans to go to a small group thing through Hillsong tonight but it's been since Sunday that we signed up and nobody's called or emailed us to tell us where to go. And we've found something just around the corner that looks quite promising. We'll see. Maybe we'll double-dip, at least for this weekend.

Right now we're sitting in a McDonalds about a 20 minute walk from our flat, since we didn't feel like paying for beer just to not insult the folks at the pub with net access. And we're being good, even though it's lunchtime, and not buying American fast food in the UK (again) because we've got bagged lunches waiting for us at home.

In general, I find myself remarkably less worried than I thought I might be. Much less than this time last week. God has proved himself and His provision so much recently and so ham-handedly that I can't help but look for blessing around every corner. Which, I'll maintain, is a much more sanctified way to live than looking for burdens instead. Your prayers over our work situation are always welcome, and if there are things we can pray for you for, email one of us. We're finding that, with all this waiting by the phone, we're getting a lot more time than we're used to for reading our bibles and praying.

Incidentally, we signed up for library cards today at our local Islington public library. So were pretty committed.

Cheers!