Helps Celtic Mission

Holyrood park is ... interesting. Set near the middle of the city, it is quite wild except for being criss-crossed by decidedly civilised roads and walking paths. The roads are rather heavily travelled (ie busy) in spite of the 20 mile per hour speed limit, largely because going through the park tends to be a universal short cut (just as cutting through BYU used to be a short cut for so many in Provo). The walking/running paths are scarcely less busy. We happened to drive through the park close to lunch time yesterday, and saw hundreds of people out walking on the various trails. The runners (dozens rather than hundreds) tend to dominate the scene when we usually drive through the park, at about 7 am and again between 6 and 7 pm. We also go walking (or sometimes, in Richard's case, running) in the park at about 6 am, or at a slightly more civilised 7 am on Saturdays or for a decidedly civilised amble at 9am or later on Sundays. This is a new development for Louise as she is r...

Brief summary: The mission office had a hotel room booked and paid for in Dundee, and no-one was going to use it, so we said we would take a trip up to Dundee, just in order to use the room. That is the local version of economy, or something. It was in the middle of the week, so we left work a little early, spent the night there and came to the office a little late next day. It was fun, except for the traffic on our way back to Edinburgh. A bit more detail: We finally crossed the Firth of Forth bridge, which we haven't done since 2012, and it's a different bridge now. The new Queensferry bridge is an engineering marvel and only opened a few months ago. It's a record-breaking 1.7 mile long cable-stayed bridge. We didn't get a picture of it (we were too busy driving on it) but here's a link for engineering types. We could see the old Firth of Forth bridge while crossing the new one. Here's a picture of that. Actually we didn't take that picture either...

When we arrived in Edinburgh, it was dark every day from about 4 pm to 8 am, so we travelled in the dark. Richard seemed to find his way pretty quickly (by dint of spending hours poring over maps,) and besides, we have a Sat-Nav/GPS, so we couldn't get too lost. The sunrise to sunset period has lengthened by about four minutes each day, so life has improved, but everything looks a little different when it is light, so we had to find our way again.  Then, last week, it snowed and snowed and snowed. Everything looks different and we are having to find our way all over again. After a year or so, we should know our way around pretty well in all atmospheric and light conditions. Actually, it has been snowing and snowing and snowing ever since we arrived, but the snow used to melt off each day so the net result was a prevailing sogginess with patches of  snow and ice in the shade. This past week it has been cold, as in consistently below freezing. The snow has not melted off, but ...

We did a trip to Glasgow to look at flats. On our way home we stopped at Falkirk to look at the Kelpies. Thanks to a family book group reading of Celtic myths we knew at least that kelpies were shape-shifting water creatures that could become people and lure unsuspecting travelers to their death in the water. We went on a brief tour and Andy, our tour guide, was entertaining and knowledgeable. He shared several different variants of the Kelpie legend and managed to do it in a way that was entertaining for the bairns on the tour as well as the older folk. He is a lecturer at a local college as well as an artist so he has a great background to talk about the amazing sculptures created by Andy Scott. Andy Scott (the sculptor, not the guide) is famous for working in steel and has a number of pieces on display around the country. Here's a link . He is strong on representative sculpting that conveys a message. Another of his famous pieces, the "Angel of the Nauld" is visib...

Interruptions are the story of my life at the moment. I (Louise) am the receptionist for the mission (among other things) so no matter what I am doing, the phone will ring within a minute or two. The “other things” frequently require concentration so I have learned to scrawl a little note on a bit of paper to remind me what I was doing before the interruption. A couple of days ago I had 6 bits of paper stacked up with things I had to get back to, as soon as I had dealt with the interruption to the interruption…and then, when I finally unrolled the stack back to a particular piece of paper, I couldn’t make out what the scrawl on it meant. Fortunately the phone rang while I was wondering, and my subconscious kicked into gear while I was dealing with what the caller needed, and I realized I had already managed to deal with the scrawled note's issue while I was on the phone doing something else. And speaking of scrawls, I am so grateful now for years and years of Indexing experienc...