Dear Elder Powrie
Life is slowing down a bit now J But now’s the time to be catching up on
all sorts of admin. Like having our annual health checks (my Vitality age is
now 29, compared to 31 last year J And I’m also
now younger than my actual age of 30!) Plus taking Caleb for his last baby
immunisations. I now only have to take the kids at age 6 for their last
immunisations! It’s been 5 and a half years of fairly regular visits, so that’s
quite something!
At work I’ve been doing things like
setting my exam paper, and attending meetings with planning agendas. Today I
also attended the annual UCT Teaching and Learning conference. I didn’t present
this year, but it was interesting to hear what other people are doing in their
teaching. Most of the talks I went to were about how people are using
technology in their courses. It’s an interesting time, because we’re trying to
be preparing for the future of education, but no one knows what the education
space is going to be looking like in 5 or 10 years, so there is lots of
uncertainty, but it’s also quite exciting! We’ve already started offering some
courses online, using a company called GetSmarter. And we’re planning on
offering an online BCom Accounting degree, targeting the rest of Africa. So in
a few years’ time there could be very interesting things happening!
We’re in the process of buying a car for
Andrew J What’s been happening is that he was
using a company car, and when they went to cost to company the cost of the car
was added to his salary, but although we’ve effectively been paying for the
car, we won’t get a car at the end. So it really was time to be buying our own
car. So we’re getting a Citroen C3, which is quite a nice little car J But all sorts of admin around that, and
organising finance! I’ll be glad once this whole process is over!
We finished reading the first Faraway Tree
book with the kids last week! Less than 3 weeks to finish it, which I thought
was pretty impressive! But this evening Hannah wanted me to read “a new book
that I brought to my room yesterday” – ie one of the other story books, with
proper pictures. She’s obviously a bit too young to only be reading books with
a picture every 20 pages or so… But that’s fine, we can do both.
On Friday Josh and Hannah both went to
play at Dane and Emily’s house, the friends who moved recently and we had the
missionaries helping their dad. So when I fetched them I chatted a bit to their
mom, and I even invited them to come to church, or for the kids to come with us
at least. She wasn’t completely excited about it, but she didn’t seem
completely negative about it either. But the success is in the inviting, not in
having the invitation accepted J But it was also
great because I had prayed that morning that I would have a chance to talk to
her about the church, and then it was actually her that basically got the
conversation going that way, so my prayer was answered J
Yesterday was a hectic day in terms of the
children’s behaviour, and then Andrew only got home from church at supper time!
But because of how the kids behaved during sacrament we had them practice how
to sit reverently in the evening. They had to sit quietly for 10 minutes
without talking or moving around, and Hannah had to start her 10 minutes over
again a few times… But hopefully they’ll remember and be willing to sit better
next week!
We also had a baptism of an 8-year-old
yesterday, so it was nice for the kids to be able to see a child’s baptism.
Looking at Joshua, it’s really not that long until he gets baptised! Pretty
hectic! The family had their neighbour coming along to the baptism, and asked
me to sit with her during the classes, so I went to the Gospel Principles
class. It was actually really nice to be there J And then I
attended the Elders Quorum as well, so none of my normal classes yesterday, but
a nice change J
This time next week my students will have
written their exam, so this week ahead is going to be full of student queries
and getting things all ready and finalised… But at least it’s a downhill ride
from here J
Take care
Shelly
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