Movember

One of the fun, weird, English things we (by "we" I mean Dan) have been able to join in with this year is "Movember". Men from every walk of life grow moustaches in November, and get sponsored for it, and the money goes to a couple of cancer charities, specifically research into and care for prostate cancer patients. Redcliffe staff together raised about 600 pounds which is great.

Some men looked more or less normal, while others purposely grew silly moustaches, and one Redcliffe guy dyed his pink for the last day. One female student wore a stick-on moustache for some of the month because she felt left out...

Dan grew his biker moustache which I find quite cute...

(better than the Tom Selleck one from his past... )

Beginnings...

This is a day of new beginnings... today was the barbeque for new students at Redcliffe College. (Old students and all staff and anyone else pretty much - and their dog (!) - were there too.)

So Dan is about to start his teaching life at Redcliffe, kicking off with a course on Christ and the Transformation of the Human Condition (or something like that)... Also Introducing Applied Theology in Global Perspective. And Biblical Interpretation in Intercultural Contexts.

We have already got to know most of the staff, a very friendly bunch, almost all with a missions background.

Today we met some of the new students - several Dutch people, a German lady, a Ugandan we already knew from last year, a girl from California, a few Brits - there are also Polish, Brazilian, Spanish, and many other students - a great mix. Although I won't be teaching there  at present, I am going to help Dan with his student group (community group), which will meet at our place, so I look forward to getting to know some of them.

Dan's new office:

Meeting students at the barbeque (there are some of the lecturers' kids in this picture - the students here are mainly in their twenties and thirties!) :

Some of our new colleagues: l to r, Dave Fisher (worked in Tanzania with Tracy and their children), Christine Memory (worked in Spain with Jim and their children), Carol Kingston-Smith (worked in Bolivia with Andy and their children):

Some other pics of the college:

Dan's office is top right - up in the attic!

This is his view. The building there is the accommodation block.

... why I married him

Dan gave me a new oval blue Le Creuset enamelled caste iron pot for my birthday. One of the joys of this pot is that it is large enough to do a good pot roast in. Another joy is that it has a new, clean, unscratched, unburnt, shiny inside. Well, it did... Today I burnt it well and good. I put the olive oil in it, set it on the hob to heat up before putting some meat in, went upstairs... and forgot.

Fifteen minutes later the aroma of burning oil wafted up the stairs. Followed by the crashing of my feet running down the stairs, along with some wailing, and gnashing of teeth. There in the middle of my beautiful pot, - a round dark brown circle, with smoke billowing out. Oh oh oh!!!!!

I grabbed it up with some oven-gloves, rushed it towards the patio doors to get it outside before the smoke alarm went off, set it down on the mat in order to open the patio doors, picked it up, and found a perfect oval melted bit in the middle of the mat, one blackened ragged section now hanging down from the bottom of my pot ...

At this point Dan came home. I hung my head and told him that something bad had happened, and that, no, the mat wasn't the bad part, and then, he saw the pot.

Silence. Yes, a disappointed look, but, a sympathetic one.

A few minutes later, Dan was to be found bending his head over the sink, scraping away at the inside of the pot, while I started cooking with another pan. I leaned over the sink to put some water in a saucepan for the peas. I reached over to twist the mixer tap over the pan, and caught Dan smack in the middle of the forehead with the tap. So hard that I heard it. Dan looked at me, dried off his hands, rubbed his head, and did not emit a sound. He did go out to the garage though and started sorting out his books...

I knew I should marry Dan when I was visiting him in the US, early days, and I slept at a friend's house, so I had to drive his car from the trailer park where he lived to that house. In the morning I was getting his car out of the driveway and I managed to reverse it into a ditch. I wasn't at all sure how he would react, back then, so I phoned him with some trepidation to tell him he now had a puncture and a stuck car. He was so calm and cheerful about the whole thing, with not one word of criticism of me - and I knew right then.