This week's top ten

We are thoroughly/mostly enjoying our mission and things are getting better all the time. By “things” understand the following. Here are the top ten.

1. The days are lengthening and it is light when we drive to the office and drive home. This makes an enormous difference to our mood and the beauty of the drive.

Yesterday we went out exploring Craigmillar Castle. Here's the view from the battlements.

Craigmillar Castle is a ruin, built in the fifteenth century, and remodeled and extended in the sixteenth, seventeenth and later centuries. Currently all the stone walls, stairs, parapets and battlements are still standing, but there are no roofs or wooden floors.
On our way home happened to merge with the route of our normal drive home from the office, but we weren’t sure for a few minutes that we were on the right road, as we could see the buildings and the surroundings, so everything looked unfamiliar.

We enjoy walking in the park when we can, and with increasing daylight we can more often than before. Richard is enjoying his early morning runs--well bundled up against cold, wind and rain, and wearing reflectors and flashing LED lights so passing cars and bicycles can see him. We would both like to get more exercise and are working out ways to make that happen.

Talking of walking in the park, we even have our own 'Squaw Peak' in Holyrood Park (shown here). Except this is actually Salisbury Crag. Both the crag and Arthur's Seat stand up high enough that they are visible from miles away.

2. We survived our first transfer. Some of you may remember transfers from your own mission experience as young missionaries. From the point of view of the mission office it is hectic and chaotic and stressful. Mail and packages to deliver or hand to missionaries to pass on, lots of bus and train tickets to organize, areas to create and delete, funding to be updated (there is a significant difference in costs between various areas), flats to open or close, old loved missionaries to bid farewell to and new soon-to-be-loved missionaries to welcome in and train, as well as lots of missionaries and luggage passing through the mission home--several with a question prefaced with “Can I just ask you a quick little question …”, which is usually a challenging financial or medical problem that they’ve saved up until they could speak to you face-to-face.

With all this we have learned much of what we need to do to keep our parts of the office work running smoothly. There is still stuff to learn but we are having fun streamlining some of the procedures. There are a couple of jobs that took Louise’s predecessor a day or two that can be done in an hour or two, harnessing some of the features of modern technology. She is having fun overcoming prejudice and learning to use Microsoft products, like Word and Excel. She may even become a convert and use them when she has Libre Office available. We’ll see. Richard likewise is re-designing training materials and changing/simplifying financial procedures--but very carefully/nervously, because lots of money rides on the results

3. We have reached the point where all the roads have magically been widened a little for our benefit. Richard is gaining confidence in his ability to drive with only inches to spare on each side of the car, and taking gaps when he has the right of way--just assuming the other car will stop, and so far it always has. We still have problems with our little Hyundai. It drives normally some of the time, and then randomly fails to respond when you accelerate, so you accelerate a little/a lot harder, hoping desperately for a response, and then when your foot is flat on the gas pedal it suddenly surges forward, like a steer in a rodeo trying to buck you off. It can be really scary, but the Area Office keeps on buying Hyundais, so we must assume that the cars just don’t like Scotland much. All the car-driving missionaries in our mission complain of a similar problem.

4. We still have fun grocery shopping. The almost infinite variety of interesting foods will probably not pall for a while. Yesterday we tried Scotch Eggs. (Hard boiled eggs surrounded by a half-inch casing of sausage meat, then crumbed and deep fried. Richard bought two, we ate one, and he will eat the other one later, because Louise feels they were okay, but the fun lay in the experiment rather than the end result.

5. Edinburgh is not a particularly large city, and we are on the south-eastern edge of it, so a few minutes drive east will bring us to the sea and a few minutes drive south will bring us to countryside. The ruined castle we explored yesterday was just 2 miles from our flat. We climbed up onto the battlements (Yes, Louise did too! See 6) and looked around us at miles of green fields and woods. It was beautiful and refreshing and exploring the ruin was fun and interesting too.

We are still entranced by the local scenery, both human-built and natural. I don’t think we can say we are used to the idea of a hundred-year old building being considered “recent” but we are no longer surprised by it. Nothing follows a grid pattern--except for a small part of downtown Edinburgh, which is made more challenging in its own way by multiple, non-intuitive one-ways and bus-and-taxi only streets, which apply on some days, but apparently not others?! The old buildings and winding streets are still charming, but Sat-Nav (GPS) is necessary, not a luxury. We can now get to and from work, church and our regular shops without it, but for the rest it is the first thing we turn on after starting the car. Actually the second thing, the heater is the first thing, the days are still ‘a wee bit nippy’ (i.e. close to freezing and windy)

6. The stair-climbing aid that Richard made for Louise is most useful. Think of a little wooden box about 4 inches high and the size of a foot, attached to a walking stick. She can place it on a step, step onto the box and then onto the next step, then lift it to the next step, etc, It’s slow and means taking twice as many steps, but each one is only half as high, so doesn’t hurt her knees. We call it the ‘halfstep’, which is accurate though not hugely imaginative. If anybody would like to publicize this on Facebook or somewhere, we would love to share the idea, and will cheerfully provide photos as it is quite liberating and we would love for other people to be able to use it. Louise can climb several flights of stairs without significant discomfort and this is quite an asset for accessing most crumbling ruins. Sometime the stair risers are very high and she decides that discretion is the better part of valor (i.e. she stays on the main floor) but mostly she tackles the stairs and goes wherever she chooses.

7. We have spent two days recently in Glasgow looking over possible flats for a senior couple. We found nothing suitable the first day, which is why we went again. We learned two valuable things that first day. One was that neither of us like Glasgow very much (and we do like Edinburgh) and the other is that despite the creaking floors, our flat is rather nice, especially now that it is furnished and well equipped. On our second trip to Glasgow we saw four flats. One was a “No!”, two were nice and acceptable, and the fourth we fell in love with. We expressed it as “Rent that flat and send us to Glasgow!” but we won’t say it again in case someone takes us seriously, as we still don’t like Glasgow and do like where we are. On the other hand, if we were sent to Glasgow, we sure hope we would end up in that delightful flat. The people in Glasgow were very nice, but the city is grubby.

8. When we were in the MTC we did an exercise where the group took turns reading verses from a chapter in Mosiah, and then we discussed them. Basically, anyone who had something to say on the subject of that verse just said it. We have taken up doing that for part of our scripture study. We enjoy each other’s insights. We wouldn’t care to do all our scripture study this way, but it is a good supplementary activity for us.

9. Being near the ocean is wonderful. As in we still miss living in Durban after all these years, and waves, even small ones, are always a delight. On the other hand, this is the North Sea we are visiting, and we go bundled up with coats and hats, scarves and gloves, and our fingers and toes are icy cold when we get back in the car. We have no desire, not even a little bit, to go paddling.

10. Louise burned some flapjacks yesterday, baking them at the recommended temperature for less than the recommended time. She is getting acquainted with her new oven and soon they will be good friends. But not yet. Meantime she scraped off the black bits and the flapjacks taste jolly good. Scottish “flapjacks” are like crunchie cookies but made with oats and no flour. Try googling “flapjack recipe with condensed milk” if you would like to try them. For further confusion, Scottish “tablet” is fudge, made with not much butter--we haven’t tried that yet. Frankly, if one is going to go to all the trouble of making fudge and if one can afford the rich and delicious ingredients, why make a less rich and delicious version? Of course, curiosity may still lead us to try it sometime...