Hampton Court Palace

We took the tube to Waterloo station then a 30 minute train ride to Hampton Court. This is a view of the Palace after crossing the bridge over the Thames. Hampton Palace is a Palace that Cardinal Wolsely had built for himself during the reign of Henry VIII. It was later given to King Henry and was used for Kings and Queens thereafter.
There are extensive gardens at Hampton and this is a maze they had. There were only 3 dead ends and it wasn't too hard to get through. It's January but it has been mild weather and in some places of the gardens where it is sheltered, there were daffodils, crocuses and whatever this is.
Here is sooking at the Palace from the side viewing it from one of the main large gardens.

This is a huge arbor to the side of the palace. We have decided that we need to go back in the Spring or Summer when things are in bloom.

This is the inner courtyard. The ladies of the court would promenade around this square to show off their latest dresses.
The is the fountain in the centre of the inner courtyard.
You have to go under this large poster of Henry VIII to enter into the palace. Looks like Ed was trying to look up his skirt.

Foxes at the LMC

I was sleeping in on Sunday (our church is in the afternoon) and Ed was already up. He sticks his head into the bedroom and tells me to look out our back door into the back garden. In the shelter of the corner of a hedge were these two foxes. They were there all day and Ed has about 30 pictures of them using his telephoto lens. We've been told that fox are common in London.

It's been a busy week even though there have been no seminars going on. We've had some guests come through and more people show up at the door inquiring about the Centre. The last one was a man who gets our literature in the post but has never been here and had the day free so drove down to look at the book shop we have. He ended up staying part of the day and using the prayer hut. He had little knowledge of the Mennonites and Anabaptists so I did my best to inform him about who we are.

Our server is still being repaired/rebuilt and we are limping by. We met with the family who will rent one of our flats that has been empty for three months now. Hopefully they will move in next week. Ed spent most of today shampooing the carpets.
We had a great visit from Luke Thornton, one of Ed's co-workers from when he was at Harper Industries. He was in the UK on business and so he stayed at the LMC on his last night before flying home. We had a nice meal out and some catching up.

Ed bought me a Raclette machine for my birthday and we had most of the house up to our flat for raclette on Saturday night for supper. I meant to take a picture but forgot until all the dishes were washed. Can anyone take a guess as to what raclette is? Well you know it's something to do with food. I know Ed's family knows but how about you Kansans?

South Kensington Walk

We took a walk on Sunday morning since our church services are in the afternoon. We went to the area where there are about four museums within an easy walk within each other. We have actually been to them all so we just wanted to walk around the area. Here is the rear view of the Royal Albert Hall, London's grandest concert venue.
These buildings are just down the street from the first picture and I really liked the color and shape of them.
We walked through the Ennismore Gardens Mews through these quaint cobbled stone streets.
This is the Brompton Oratory. Legend has it that during the Cold War KGB spies used this vast Catholic Church as a dead-letter drop.
This was the highly original, proto-art deco Michelin Tyre Co. which now is home to the Bibendum Oyster Bar. You can see the Michelin man in the top center above the window.
We had just emerged from the tube station and I was looking at the information card that was directing us to these places. We stopped at the corner to look up at the building to admire it when I looked in front of us and there was a guy who had the same card in his hand looking from the card to the building just like we were. These cards are popular I guess. When we were at the airport a year ago in Atlanta waiting for our London flight, there was a guy with the same pack of walks of London cards that he was looking through.

We are still without a server and we are limping by with alternate ways of doing what we are used to doing. I can't get to alot of my documents that I had stored and so much of my work is waiting to get done at another time. I have been ending up with quite a headache each day trying to get done what I can.

Oh yes, Thanks to my former Sunday School Class at Pleasant Valley Mennonite Church in Harper for the wonderful rendition of Happy Birthday over the phone. The best part being that it was 9pm for them but 3am for me!!! Some people get more ornery and brave with age.

I turned 51 on 6 January. Since that was Sunday, I was honored at a birthday tea on Wednesday instead. So if you haven't read before what we do at birthday teas, I got to choose what kind of dessert/treat I wanted (it's hard to choose when you like so many things but I settled on lemon meringue pie), they sang happy birthday to me in whatever tune I wanted, someone read the 51st psalm, and I was to reminisce on past birthdays, especially a fond memory.

On Thursday we had a seminar at the Centre of 13 people. It went very smoothly. Ed and I are getting much better at getting all the details put together for seminars that it's not so much stressful as it is tiring.

There have been two different people ring the Centre's doorbell during the day this week to inquire about what our Centre does. One was a young girl in her 20's who was in the neighborhood interviewing for a nanny position just down the street from us. She said that she saw our sign and that if she gets the job she would be a live in nanny and wanted to get to know the neighbors and that she may come to church. The other was a Jewish man who lives nearby and was curious about us. He looked us up on the web, saw that we run mediation workshops and have a lot of books on mediation and he was intrigued.

Every day seems to bring something interesting. Except for the time when the electricity went off for 12 hours and has nearly ruined our servers and we have been without the main workings of our computer system for all this week. It's crazy how dependent we have become on email, the internet, etc. Well at least I have gotten a lot of piled up filing done waiting for the system to get repaired.

We have two flats that we let out, 16A & 16B. 16B was just occupied and 16A is close, so we will have new neighbors to get to know. Actually, in 16B is David George, from the states who has been here for more than a year and needed a new place to rent. He is originally from PA and is a Menno. 16A hopefully will be rented to an elderly couple. More on them if and when they decide they want it.

In closing I ask that you pray for a 20 year old girl in our church who is dealing with cancer. She has gone through much chemo and now has a recurrence and it doesn't look good. Her father died five years ago today of the same cancer. Her mother is in our home group. It gives me much to think about. She is the same age as our youngest daughter, Hilary.

Thank you to everyone who reads this blog and thinks and prays for us. We think about all of you often.

Jane Austin Day

This picture made us laugh when we first saw it. The butts is a large grassy area at the end of the town of Alton.
This is the house/museum that Jane Austin lived in while she wrote a lot of her novels.

Sharon's friend, Alison, was here visiting her from her VS position in Germany. While here, she wanted to do something very English. So we decided to have a Jane Austin Day. On Friday night the women watched the 5 hour BBC miniseries on DVD of Pride and Prejudice. Then on Saturday we took a train to Alton where we walked to the house/museum where Jane Austin lived and wrote a lot of her novels. We then took a bus to Alresford, a quaint village where we had a nice lunch at a pub (very English) with a cozy roaring fire. Then we took a walk around the village where we saw this thatched roof house (very English) stopped at a tea room for a creamed tea,(again very English) then went to a cute book shop and browsed for awhile. It was a nice day even though it was quite cold.

Things are back to normal at the Centre except that we have a major computer shut down. I don't understand what is wrong but I do know that we are really dependent upon computers because it practically shuts us down. I did get a bunch of filing done however.

Getting back into the swing of things

It's 2nd January and it is time to get back into the routine of our jobs. After having close to 50F temps for the past week, it has gotten colder today, now still at 38F. However the sun is shining so that makes up for a lot.

Yesterday was a relaxing holiday. In the afternoon, Ed & I, Sharon and her friend who is visiting, Alison Yoder, played a game of photography scavenger hunt. We mutually made a list of things to find and take a picture of and went out on teams for an hour and a half. We deemed it a tie and went out for muffins and hot drinks in Crouch End afterwards. The first picture is some of us playing PIT. The next picture is Ed's photo entry on the scavenger hunt titled: Reusable Rubish found on the street.That evening we had another New years party. This one given by the director's family of Vic, Kathy, and Janelle Thiessen in our lounge. We had cheese and chocolate fondue, lots of casual conversation, then went around the circle twice where everyone had a turn at saying what meaningful or memorable book, film, trip, etc they experienced in 2007.
When it came to Ed's turn, he reported on a trip and then gave a short report on a book along with the title. Thing is, he made up the name and author of the book. We found out that this was on a dare from Sharon. It sounded pretty good. Several people from the church joined us and of course there was some game playing afterwards.

What did you all do?

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Happy New Year 2008!

What did everyone do on New Years Eve? We first took the bus to Muswell Hill and spent a couple hours at Ed & Veronica Zondell Sirett's house for some mulled wine and eats and good conversation, then Ed (Shirk) and our friend Ian took the tube to Central London (after dropping party pooper Phyllis at the Centre)to view the grand fireworks to be shot off at the London Eye. So they got a good place to stand amongst the estimated 700,000 others along the Thames. However, about one minute after the start of the fantastic show which by the way Phyllis was able to see from many different angles on TV, the smoke from the fireworks blew over to where Ed & Ian were and they were unable to see anything after that. The other LMC group were across the river and had a good view and were really glad that they did this, even if it meant for some of them, standing in one place for six hours to ensure a good spot. So these are the only good shots Ed got off on his camera. Tube and bus fares were free from 10pm until like 4am. A good thing with all the partying going on.
I don't think I have any ground breaking resolutions to reveal just yet.