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.