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.