Ruminations after 15 months.

This post leaps about like a flea at a picnic.

We like Scotland, especially Edinburgh. Actually a more accurate rendition of that sentiment is, we like Scotland, everywhere but Glasgow. We LOVE Edinburgh. Edinburgh has grace and charm and style and beauty. Edinburgh makes money out of its tourists by wooing them and charming them into spending time and money in the city. It treats them like honored guests, humoring their little ways and only occasionally honking when they mess up on the roads and drive the wrong way. Glasgow also makes money out of its tourists, lots and lots of money; they take photographs of their tourists (and residents of course) when they mess up and drive the wrong way and then send them traffic tickets as souvenirs. And no, in case you are wondering, we have not ever personally received a traffic ticket from Glasgow.

 We have made our fair share of driving mistakes, but never in Glasgow. We drive in Glasgow when we cannot avoid it, but always on tenterhooks, lest we accidentally let a wheel cross over into a bus lane. We are, however, not-so-seriously considering establishing a charitable fund to help pay traffic fines for the poor missionaries who are assigned to live and work in the wicked stepmother city. They probably make about the same number of driving errors as missionaries everywhere else, but incur many, many more fines. 

Traffic and parking tickets in Scotland and Ireland are all camera mediated. Three or four weeks after the offense, a ticket arrives in the mail. We hope to get through our mission without ever receiving one, but meantime Richard deals with quite a few.

Distances seem greater because driving speeds are generally slower than the wide-open freeways of our American west. But, on the other hand we have glorious Scottish and Irish scenery to look at while we're ambling along. We continue to be thrilled when we cruise over a hilltop and see the countryside or the ocean laid out before us, as our own personal living documentary.  (I would have said reality show--but those are always scripted.)

We like the food in Scotland, especially the fresh produce, the fish, and cheeses (and the chocolate of course, but that would go without saying if I hadn't just said it.) Many of the fruits and vegetables are imported, and their crisp freshness never ceases to amaze.  We eat fish quite often and sometimes, especially when we are tired, have fish and chips for our evening meal. There is always the option of going to a "chippie" but we usually prepare it ourselves,('preparing' in the case of fish and chips being defined as hauling frozen fish and equally frozen chips out of the freezer, bunging them into a pre-heated oven, and waiting 25 minutes for the food to be ready to eat). The oven baked fish is much less greasy than deep-fried "chippie" productions, and tastes not quite as good. Most chippie fish is excellent, but the chips are very variable in quality. On average, oven baked chips are slightly better. Preparing "fast" food at our flat, if not actually faster than hanging around the chippie waiting for them to prepare it, at least feels both healthier and faster, as we usually spend the waiting time preparing a salad or doing something else useful.

Fast food is not a concept that seems to have caught on in this fair land. 'Takeaway' is common, but speeding up the food preparation process so that people can eat before they die of starvation or old age is an alien concept. The food is quite often worth waiting for, but we have learned by sad experience that if we want to take missionaries out for dinner, we had better take them to a buffet, so they will be able to spend their dinner  break eating instead of waiting, and then bolting the food when it arrives because dinner time is very thoroughly over. 

Speaking of ovens, (we were, a paragraph or two back) we have finally worked out what is wrong with ours--the oven door doesn't quite close. You may wonder why on earth we didn't realise this sooner, as we use the oven most days. The discrepancy is only about quarter of an inch and we didn't notice it until a few nights ago, when I (Louise) shut the oven a little more firmly than usual, and noticed that the door bounced back from closed when I released it. Ever since then we have pushed a kitchen chair against the oven door when baking, except when roasting vegetables, when it is actually an asset to have the element on all the time. It is nice to be able to bake bread without burning it.

Missionary flat inspections (we now do just three every transfer) are a very good idea. We identify problems that need to be fixed, either by the letting agent/landlord or by the missionaries themselves.We heard the other day that some of the senior missionaries do their inspections on the "honour" system. "Is your flat clean and tidy? Right! We don't need to look. We trust you. Let's sign it off and go out to lunch." The problem with this has nothing to do with honour - most of our missionaries honestly believe that their flats are clean and tidy - and has everything to do with awareness. They just don't see the problems until they are pointed out to them. And then they forget and need to be reminded. So we (meaning Richard, mostly) go carefully through the checklist, making sure that everything is in good order. Our missionaries come here just out of high school, probably leaving messy bedrooms behind them and now they are responsible for cleaning, cooking, shopping and laundry (all in their very limited "spare" time)  and also notifying the housing coordinator or landlord about maintenance issues. Their mothers are far away and will probably never find out if they play football in their living room or trampoline on their beds. (Yes, both of those have happened). Occasionally we are blessed with a truly tidy missionary. We appreciate them and hope that their companions do too.

Hey folks, I like Richard. You are supposed to love everybody in general and your spouse in particular, and mostly that is true, but I am pleased to realise that after spending almost all of every day of the last 15 months with Richard, (This is a wee bit of an exaggeration; we work in different offices that are next door to each other and frequently work for as much as an hour without speaking to or seeing each other.) I still would rather spend an hour with him than with anyone else I know. 

A couple of weeks ago we were gathering pebbles at the beach at Burntisland for our Primary class. We are trying to encourage the children to pray more, and decided to make them little prayer rocks to keep on their pillows, to remind them. It was bitterly cold, but still we enjoyed walking along the water's edge picking up different colours, shapes and sizes of pebble. After a while we had enough - Richard was balancing them  all in his hands, and I wished aloud that we had a container with us. He looked at me, handed me all the stones, rummaged in his coat pocket, and pulled out a neatly folded plastic grocery bag. And invited me to toss the pebbles into it. What sort of man carries a neatly folded grocery bag in his pocket?  Richard does. He also generally carries or has access to, if not the "right" tool, at least something that will work. If I am going to have an adventure, I would rather have it with him. We have different strengths and weaknesses, and between us we seem to be able to sort out most situations. In fact, with the Lord on our team, we are pretty invincible! (I think that should be expressed as us on the Lord's team?)

We have a great gift for arriving at each week's seaside village at low tide. For a while, this was a little frustrating. We were there to see the sea, weren't we? Life could hold greater joys, I suppose, than walking along a sea shore with waves slapping against the rocks below, or rolling onto the beach, but few that I could think of on a Saturday morning, striding out in the breezy weather while the sun played peek-a-boo behind the clouds. Only, each Saturday when we got to that day's beach the water would be way out there in the distance, while we were faced with miles of sandy/rocky/seaweedy shoreline, festooned with seabirds and their tracks, rockpools, marooned boats waiting for the tide to float them again, and the occasional remnants of a shipwreck. It took us a while to realise that low tide is actually much more interesting than high, and now we appreciate both. Some parts of the shorelines we explore are steeply sloped; others are very flat. When we walked in one direction along the Burntisland beach the water was perhaps 300 meters away; by the time we were heading back in the other direction, perhaps 45 minutes later, the water was less than 50 meters away, and advancing rapidly. It was fun to watch.

All my life I have loved patchwork quilts. I love the idea of taking much-loved, worn-out clothing and preserving the good bits in a new incarnation. Using them to create a thing of beauty and utility appeals enormously. Going to a store and buying various colours of fabric, cutting it into pieces and sewing them together in various intricate patterns appeals much less. I can admire the artistry and the beauty of the finished product, and can admire the effort and skill that go into this particular artwork, but have had no desire to participate. Not till now, that is. In Scotland so much of the countryside is a giant patchwork of various shades and textures of green, brown, and whatever is blooming currently. The fields are all different shapes and sizes, divided by grey-green stone walls or dark green hedges. I would love to try to recreate this beauty in fabric. I may or may not not ever get around to it, depending on what life holds in the future.

We are starting to prepare to/pack for our return to Utah. Seriously. Well, we will any day now. Or week. We have no desire to haul all our suitcases home with us, so are planning on shipping one or two (or three or maybe even four) of them in advance, depending on whether we fly straight home or choose to explores a little first. So we are starting to identify things we will not use again while here in Scotland. We have done pretty well so far. There is a heavy coat that will land up in the missionary "free stuff" closet, and a heavy but delightful reference book on British plants that we gave to a friend at church. We also have a fair amount of clothing that will go to a charity shop - the local equivalent of Deseret Industries. We have not actually put anything in a suitcase yet, but we have plenty of time!  Even if we end up throwing almost everything away (have you any idea how tired a person can get of wearing the same outfit again and again and again?) We borrowed a couple of large suitcases from our children so feel obliged to return at least those to the US when we go home. 

Meantime, the days and weeks slip by like a string of pearls through one's fingers. We like Scotland, (said that before, but it's still true) but have no desire to live here. We are foreigners here,  We sound like South Africans, but we are foreigners there too. If home is where the heart is, then our home is just east of Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. Of course we are foreigners there too, but foreigners that belong.