Seeing fields and trees changing colour daily (read: becoming brown and yellow rather than other colours) keeps amazing me. Autumn has arrived, no use denying it; the summer is definitely over. As the weather gets colder I am appreciating the small (or maybe not so small) things. Everyday when I go out in the morning I do the “breath-test”. Now, if you live in a climate that is warm, meaning that it rarely goes below or near zero, you probably won’t know what I am talking about (unless you’ve seen it in films, where I suppose it’s quite frequent when people are out in cold weather or trapped in a freezer-room). Am I puzzling you? Well, the “breath-test” (my name for it) is when you go outside, and it’s so cold that your breath looks like smoke when you breathe out. It’s really quite interesting, and I remember that as a child it was really cool to pretend that it was smoke coming out of my mouth rather than air being rapidly cooled down.
Yesterday was a very exciting day because I learnt how to turn on the radiator in my room! I am now sat next to it and feeling (almost) nice and toasty. Living in an old house with single-glazed (is that what they’re called) windows, I was getting a tad concerned as to how I would survive the cold (it gets very cold here, one year I visited in January and saw –28 Celsius on a themometer!!), seeing as I was already suffering and it was still “summer”. Now I am glad to say my mind is at ease (except for the fact that it seems the radiator in the bathroom isn’t working… that could be a potential problem).
Life isn’t too filled with action and excitement really, so I hope my anecdotes don’t put anyone to sleep with boredom. The weekend was lovely and another novelty was to be able to pop home for the weekend! It is something I haven’t really done since I moved from home 12 years ago. It is a wee bit of a trek including a drive to the train station, train to the airport, flight to my home airport, and then a drive home, but the whole journey takes me less than 4 hours, which isn’t very much. It was great to be home, and coming back felt very surreal as it felt as if I’d been gone for ages, but hadn’t.
I had a bit of a challenging day yesterday, in a good way (I wonder how come we use the word "challenging" to describe something negative as it is actually positive to be challenge because it stretches us and makes us grow). I was roped into (well, I had offered to help, and was happy to) translating (I think interpreting is the correct word really) for the DTS School from Norwegian to English. The whole translating setting is quite familiar after many voluntary (and not so voluntary) translating times in Brazil, but the challenge was that the language had switched from Portuguese to Norwegian. I think it went well. The funny thing is that the hardest bit about it was that sometimes I didn’t quite understand the dialect of those who were speaking. But it flowed and everyone seemed to be happy and still awake at the end of it.
I’ve been put up to help translate 3 more weeks spread out up to Christmas. In a few weeks I’ll be translating for someone who has led teams coming out to “My Father’s House” several times, and before Christmas the speaker is someone who also taught on the Operation Year I was involved in in Plymouth in 1999-2000. It’s a small world, and the YWAM world is even smaller.
Time passes quite quickly. I still don’t know what I’m doing after Christmas, but I have lots of peace! And it is good to rest in that peace!
Yesterday was a very exciting day because I learnt how to turn on the radiator in my room! I am now sat next to it and feeling (almost) nice and toasty. Living in an old house with single-glazed (is that what they’re called) windows, I was getting a tad concerned as to how I would survive the cold (it gets very cold here, one year I visited in January and saw –28 Celsius on a themometer!!), seeing as I was already suffering and it was still “summer”. Now I am glad to say my mind is at ease (except for the fact that it seems the radiator in the bathroom isn’t working… that could be a potential problem).
Life isn’t too filled with action and excitement really, so I hope my anecdotes don’t put anyone to sleep with boredom. The weekend was lovely and another novelty was to be able to pop home for the weekend! It is something I haven’t really done since I moved from home 12 years ago. It is a wee bit of a trek including a drive to the train station, train to the airport, flight to my home airport, and then a drive home, but the whole journey takes me less than 4 hours, which isn’t very much. It was great to be home, and coming back felt very surreal as it felt as if I’d been gone for ages, but hadn’t.
I had a bit of a challenging day yesterday, in a good way (I wonder how come we use the word "challenging" to describe something negative as it is actually positive to be challenge because it stretches us and makes us grow). I was roped into (well, I had offered to help, and was happy to) translating (I think interpreting is the correct word really) for the DTS School from Norwegian to English. The whole translating setting is quite familiar after many voluntary (and not so voluntary) translating times in Brazil, but the challenge was that the language had switched from Portuguese to Norwegian. I think it went well. The funny thing is that the hardest bit about it was that sometimes I didn’t quite understand the dialect of those who were speaking. But it flowed and everyone seemed to be happy and still awake at the end of it.
I’ve been put up to help translate 3 more weeks spread out up to Christmas. In a few weeks I’ll be translating for someone who has led teams coming out to “My Father’s House” several times, and before Christmas the speaker is someone who also taught on the Operation Year I was involved in in Plymouth in 1999-2000. It’s a small world, and the YWAM world is even smaller.
Time passes quite quickly. I still don’t know what I’m doing after Christmas, but I have lots of peace! And it is good to rest in that peace!