Lovely Day

Today was lovely indeed! Minus one slightly scary incident, our Saturday was as peaceful as we've seen [that I can remember]. Here lie some highlights of our day:

• We got to sleep in, to some degree. During the week we are usually up by eight, which, although late by South African standards, feels early to most of us. Today, however, we had no reason to be up that early!
• Gabby made roll kuchen, delicious fried dough thingies, for lunch. Yum!
• It was a gorgeous day - sunny and breezy and warm but not too hot.
• Tomorrow we celebrate American Thanksgiving! We weren't able to celebrate on Thursday, but tomorrow we will be celebrating with other North Americans. It's gonna be awesome. Today Anna and I made two pecan pies, and with the leftover pie crust we made an impromptu apple pie that we happily ate.
• We watched "Slumdog Millionaire" while eating apple pie :).
• I got to make dinner! Yay for Indonesian food.
• Anna and I went to the grocery store, and on the way home were followed for a block or so by some weird guy who kept saying "You so pretty" and "Can I have your number?" It was irritating at first, then scary. We began to think of how to keep him from knowing where we lived when we got closer to our house, and I started to get legitimately worried. And then, finally, he left us alone.

So that was our day! It was very nice indeed.

Dwight!!

We have a new addition to Team South Africa: Dwight the Baby Cat!
We spent yesterday and the day before yesterday removing a big pile of sticks and compost from a corner of the church property. We would load up a trailer with these big branches and sticks and whatever else was there and then drive thirty minutes out of town to a township called Sweetwater, where we unloaded on a farm [the best part was the drive up - it was gorgeous!]. Anyway, one fateful moment, as Kyle removed a stick from the compost heap...a baby cat revealed herself to us! She is black and white, about four inches long, and basically incredibly cute. I love her!
We have been talking about getting a cat ever since we found out we had mice - so basically since the first week here. However, before yesterday it would have required either a) going to the SPCA and paying for one, or b) catching one of the many strays that hang out in our yard. Neither one of those things ever happened, because we're too cheap for the SPCA - sad, I know - and those strays are not people-friendly. Little Dwight [so named because we all have an obsession with the NBC show "The Office"] is an answer to prayer! Hopefully she doesn't get too big so we don't have to spend too much money on cat food, but hey - who's thinking about that now? We got time :).

ohhh rain...

Rain, rain, go away, go away and die.

That is how I feel.

Yesterday the sun teased us for a few hours in the morning. I woke up to a blue sky and couldn’t help but smile and think Ooo, hello sun! Thank you for coming out! And then Anna did laundry, and the wet clothes scared the sun away. By 11 o’clock it was cloudy. And then the inevitable rain appeared.

Today Anna and I had ESL and we were late. Neither of us could bear to step off the porch into the downpour, even though the walk to the children’s church building (where we hold our lessons) is only about a minute long.

On days like today I just want to go back to bed. I don’t understand why South Africa, which I have always heard is so beautiful, has trapped me in a deluge of water and cold weather. I spend my time outside looking down at puddles, trying my best to avoid them, and all I can think about is how cold I am. Even at home, as we huddle in the kitchen around cups of tea and hope for the oven to warm the room, half of our conversation is about how cold we are.

When people ask us how we like South Africa, we say “It’s too cold.” And boy, do we mean it.

On a completely separate note, I want to just say that The Celebration of the Wiebe was awesome, and I want to do it again. We spent three days (Sunday the 15th through Tuesday the 17th) celebrating Awesome Gabby’s birthday. We had some delicious desserts, went to the movies (quick note: Law Abiding Citizen is awful), partied like rock stars, and had a generally delightful time. I also made her a giant birthday card, complete with “A [Fourth] Birthday Comic”. Making cards is quickly becoming one of my favorite things to do, and celebrating birthdays (as long as I get to make cake!) is always awesome. So maybe if we can just keep busy with celebrations – December 8th, the Celebration of the McKinney, is right around the corner – things here won’t be so bad. Hey, I can dream.

church church church

[over there: all the gum we collected on Friday]

Today in church I spent more time watching the drummer than anything else (it doesn’t make me a creeper. I just like the drums).

Don’t get me wrong – I think church is important, and I sort of tried to pay attention…but my favorite thing about praise and worship here is the drumming, and it’s easy to get distracted when the service has very little variation from every other service we go to.

I am feeling a bit drained when it comes to church. We go at least three times a week, which is way more than I ever have in my life. Sunday, of course, means morning worship and (maybe) also the 2:00 youth service. Monday nights we have prayer, and Friday evenings we have youth again. Sometimes there are additional things we attend, like leadership meetings. And sometimes on Sundays (for instance, when we are doing a skit) we go to all three services – 8:00, 10:00, and 2:00.

Even though I can see the good in going to church a lot, reinforcing the community and constantly trying to grow closer to God, it’s easy for me to feel churched-out. When I walk out of the building, sometimes I unconsciously breathe a breath of relief. Sometimes (like right now) I feel blessed to be able to step back and say “Wow, we don’t have to go to church any more today!”

Hopefully as time goes on I will get used to this system of things. On the other hand, the holidays are coming, and we will have some time off for a while…so maybe I’ll just look forward to that instead.

P.S. Also, I spent all morning on Friday peeling (or scraping or forcing or whatever) gum off of the carpet and chairs in the church auditorium. It was sick. But I got to listen to my iPod the whole time, and I liked that.

P.P.S. Today is Mexican Sunday. Anna and I are making Mexican food for dinner! Fiestaaaa!!

All Good Things

Can I tell you a secret? I CAN DRIVE! Yeah, it's true...I'm pretty much the Queen of Vehicular Motion.

Okay maybe not...but hey. It was only a couple months ago that I could hardly sit behind the wheel of a standard vehicle for two minutes without getting kicked into the passenger seat. And now! I drove all the way home from the mall tonight without stalling once! Okay...well I stalled two or three times, but only in the parking lot. It was awesome! I was and still am so excited!

This weekend we are going to Durban, and I will drive again!!!! Oh my goodness!

So yeah. Also today we went to a pizza place and had all-you-can-eat pizza. That was awesome, and surprisingly cheap. And since we were there to celebrate a birthday, I got to spend a good few hours today making a giant birthday card. And Anna drew penguins on it! It was superb.

Also today I taught an ESL class all on my own! We have some new students in the ESL class who know a very small amount of English, so I led a separate class with them. I have never done this before...so I did not really know what I was doing. However, we managed to fill up the two hours with useful information, like days of the week and body parts, so that was nice. I hope I didn't overload them. But I'm really excited to continue teaching this class. Not only is it a challenge (rawr!!), I definitely feel like if I'm able to teach them anything at all it will help them, and I like that.

Trip to Hilton #2 Top Moments!

Today was a day of awesomeness! Phil and Christine [our heroes and favorite people ever!] asked us last night if we wanted to go for coffee with them this morning. We said that of course we would, and then this morning we found out that by “coffee” they actually meant “come to our house all day long, take everything from us that you want, and eat all of our awesome delicious food. Oh yeah, and have fun all day.”
So! Our second trip to Hilton was even more wonderful than our first! And here is a list of reasons why:

• “I love going to Hilton! It’s such a magical place – good things always happen there.” Thank you, me. It was so true.
• “Aaa!!!! Traffic cone!” BAM. Kyle hit a traffic cone on the way there. It was either the cone or a car in the other lane…so…it was awesome. Especially for me, because I was sitting in the passenger seat and it was coming right at me.
• We ate scones at their house. Oh man, so good.
• THE RAVENS BEAT THE BRONCOS!!!! RAY LEWIS AND JOE FLACCO ARE MY HEROES!! This has to do with Hilton because I used Phil and Christine’s computer to look up the scores and I was high on excitement for a long long time.
• Another football story. Kyle and I had a conversation that went like this:

-Kyle: "Bill Bellicheck is a pretty good guy. I call him up and we talk all the time."

-Me: “Oh really? What do you guys talkabout?

-Kyle: “FOOT-BALL.” Especial emphasis on...all the letters.

• Driving! Phil took Anna and I to practice our driving in their quiet neighborhood. It was good practice and full of fun. For instance, Phil said “Shazzaam” a few times so that was nice.
• Belle (their tiny little dog, maybe a daaschun) killed a little rabbit! It was small and black and looked just like Mikey, my sister’s old dwarf rabbit that died from eating rat poison. I was proud of Belle. She also killed a bird when we were out driving, so two for two.
• Ultimate Frisbee!!!!!!!! I love it so much!!!!! Almost as much as football and badminton! Thank you Dung Tran. Okay anyway, we played with Nathan, Lydia, and Annika, girls verses boys. It was totally awesome and the girls won, 6-4. So, yeah. Also, I dove into a fence (de-fence come to life) and Kyle got smacked/scraped in the eye by Tim, even though they were on the same team.
• “So this is the white shop?” Thank you, Gabby. We went to the grocery store with Christine in a poshy sort of neighborhood that is, yes, mostly white. But Gabby said it so awesomely. Woohoo!
• Books and movies!! They gave us like 25 books to borrow, none of them under 200 pages (except maybe The Notebook, Nathan’s favorite book ever), and we also borrowed maybe ten movies or so. They. Are. Awesome. People.
• Even though we were driving down a big scary hill on a big scary highway going scary fast in lots of scary fog, we made it alive and managed to discuss awesome things. Like Phil and Christine and how much we love them. Also Anna finally managed to pop her ears, so yay! Go Anna!