Our Weekly Update

Dear family and friends

El and I both had bouts of gastric flu this weekend and we had our NZ cousin Hannah and her new husband staying with us… so it was pretty hectic! All in all, though, it was a rocking weekend because we got to spend a lot of time just chilling and catching up on the last 9 years or so – which was awesome. Another new addition to our family arrived last week – a baby tortoise… it’s the cutest thing ever!

Monday morning El took Roo to the vet to have her kittyrectimy. We had borrowed a fancy cat transporter vibe from Heather and Owen and on the way to the vet Roo managed to get out of it! There was one catch missing along the side and she managed to force it open far enough to break the second catch and push the door off… that’s determination! When El got back from school in the afternoon we went to fetch her and she was highly cantankerous to say the least, the drugs weren’t kind to her temperament. She was fine on the way home but when we took her to our room she swore and moaned whenever we tried to pick her up to move her. We decided that she would recover best with some alone-time so closed her in our bedroom for the evening. I got the Weber fired up and we had a braai for supper, the weather was stunning.

On Tuesday I tried something new with my two guitar students, I combined their lessons to try and get them to compete with one another. It worked fabulously and they seem lank amped to practice for next week now. El’s colleague is still off on personal issue reasons and so school is still pretty hectic. They’re also in the process of organizing a fashion show so she’s busy busy busy. I’m going to be operating the sound desk and now they’ve also asked me to source all the music… and the show is in a week’s time! But it’ll all be good fun.

Hannah and Caleb arrived on Friday afternoon and shortly after we sat down to have some coffee El started feeling very nauseous… it was quite sudden and unexpected and we thought it may have been food poisoning or something. She got progressively worse as the evening wore on so we stayed in and watched a DVD. The weather was also very miserable so it worked out quite well actually. We had planned to go to Monte Casino on Saturday and check out their birdpark with the cousins (Stu and Sarah you remember the bird park in the yellow car…) but the weather was just as miserable as the day before, really bucketing down. El was not any better on Saturday morning so I went to the chemist and took H&C with me. When I got to the dispensary the pharmo told us that gastric flu was rife and they were having loads of people coming in with the same symptoms that El had – upset tummy and aching joints and muscles. They told me that I had to get her to a doctor for a drip, which seemed a little intense to me, lover of needles and hospital stuff, so I phoned the family nurse (me mom) and she said plenty of fluids, some painkillers and TLC should to the trick. So we stocked up on fruit juices, coke and lucozade and headed home. El spent the whole day resting but joined us in the lounge for a movie in the evening. Caleb brought a copy of his band’s demo and I was lank impressed with it – they’re called Fly by Wire and sound (in my opinion) like Foo Fighters, which is a good thing :). They are very tight on the recording and have a full sound, keep an eye out for them in the shops!!

We introduced the New Zealanders to the SA braai on Saturday night and El was feeling much better. We decided to skip church and try for Monte’s again if the weather was good. The weather was stunning but then I woke up with the GF… so that was bad bad bad luck! I agreed to brave a breakfast as long as we were close to some public facilities so we drove through to Clearwater and had a great meal together. In the afternoon we had invited some people around for a braai so I asked Gabba to take the position of braaimaster so that I could sleep. When we got home from Clearwater I was absolutely finished and crashed for a couple of hours. It was great to see Gabba and Yvette again, we haven’t been able to hook up for a couple of weeks so I was glad that we could spend the afternoon with them (even if it wasn’t that long for me… but El enjoyed the afternoon).

I couldn’t get out of work on Monday and neither could El, although both of us still felt pretty grotty. I got to jam a bit with Caleb before we took them off to the airport for the stay in CT. We were sad to see them go as we got along really well and had so much in common, hopefully we’ll be able to catch them on their way home at the end of November.

We wish you all the best of God’s presence and blessing in your weeks

Our Weekly Update

It is with tired eyes that I write this as we’ve had an action packed weekend with too many late nights… makes us sound old… We’ve had a blessed week and spoken to lots of you back home so we’re looking even more forward to our 4 weeks back in Cape Town!!

Last Monday, as you’ll remember, we took Roo to the vet to have a lump on her neck drained. It turns out that it was a massive bruise that we think may have been caused by one of the windows that doesn’t have a proper catch – and it’s the one she always uses... So, I have a hardware visit and some handiwork to catch up on, hopefully it’ll happen before the next letter… Whilst Roo spent the day at the vet we thought it high time that Pooh have his visit to the dog parlour and so he has had his summer shave. His hair is cut on a number one so he looks really cute, they left the hair on his head so he almost looks a little like an army recruit…

Tuesday saw our usual activities unfold until I got to Appleton College to teach Tyler guitar and found out that she’d forgotten all her stuff at home… so that was annoying but at least I got to head home early and spend the afternoon with El. One of her colleagues left work early – she’s going through issues at home and bringing them to work – so El had an extra 8 kids squeezed into her already tight classroom, and this lasted the WHOLE week!! That pushed her stress levels up so I was glad that I could spend the afternoon with her. They have a silly system at her school that when a staff member is off ill they split their class amongst the rest of the grade. As a result, they don’t just disrupt one class but an extra four! Sometimes El gets kids as old as grade 3 sent to her class to be babysat, whilst she’s trying to teach her unruly mob of grade ones!

On Wednesday I worked quite late up at the office on home group booklets that we were wanting to get out by the weekend. In the evening I ran our home group up at the church to try something different. We played a ball game on the grass outside our offices and about 20 mins in, managed to smash one of the windows in the hall… I suppose you can’t be called a youth group until you’ve broken a window and hung the curtains incorrectly… we still need to do the curtain thing. We had a lot of fun though and I’m looking forward to having a youth group next year. I won’t lead it… but I’ll make sure it happens!

Thursday morning was another hard slog in the office but Paul was away at a meeting so I was able to spend the morning grafting at the computer. When he got back at lunchtime, he said that he hadn’t finished on the week that I’d been working on all morning so I shelved that idea and worked on the presentation for our AGM. We were, once again, hugely blessed by the Woolworths food collection and had an hour’s workout packing the crates and the bakkie. We had a worship practice in the evening and it was a lot of fun – both El and I really enjoyed it.

Friday was a better day for El at school, even though she still had all the extra kids in her class. They’ve been busy with learner assessments so I think she was relieved to get to the end of the week! I didn’t manage to finish the AGM presentation by 13h00 so I took it home and finished it there. At about 15h00 the power went out and we thought we’d be having home group by candlelight… fortunately the power came on around 18h00. I shot up to the church office to load the AGM info onto the server and Paul’s laptop and was back in time for our group. We played just a minute – a fun debating ‘game’ that I used to take part in at school. For those of you who don’t know, you have to speak for a minute on a given topic without hesitating, deviating or repeating yourself. It may sound like a short amount of time but it is really difficult to speak about something for a minute without repeating a single word! I had chosen some Bible topics and it was interesting to see who knew what about the Bible and who didn’t. After home group Anthony and Nadia had supper with us and then we went to a late night movie with them and had coffee afterwards… so we were DEAD tired.

Saturday morning was a great lie in – although it didn’t feel like we’d had the extra sleep at all! I went up at 11:30 to meet with Anthony to setup sound for Sunday. We hired a movie, Next, which is a movie about a guy that can see 2 minutes into the future. Nicholas Cage is the lead actor and it’s surprisingly good… Paul had recommended it to us. In the evening we went through to a 21st for one of our young adults – Jeanine Els – and they had a large screen for the rugby… of course. It was a great party and they’d asked me to sing a song, which went down pretty well.

On Sunday morning Paul came knocking on my door 10 mins before I was about to go up to say that we’d left some important slides out of the presentation… the finances! So I raced up to the office and quickly copy & pasted and edited in Bryan Habana time to complete the presentation. When I loaded it onto Paul’s laptop the one slide wouldn’t work… so more stress! But God kept me calm, despite the panic around and we managed to make a plan in time to still have a sound check. The service was very long as we had a lot of business to attend to but it was well received and our time of worship was awesome. Heather and Owen took us and the Smit’s out to lunch at Clearwaters to the Meat Company - delicious. El finished her marking in the afternoon and I hired us another DVD, Perfect Stranger, which was also well worth the watch if any of you are stuck for a good option.

So that’s our passed week, hope you all have been experiencing the blessing of God in your lives.

Our weekly news

We’ve just had an amazing weekend away in the Magaliesburg with our youth and young adults. God blessed us with a special and intimate weekend that we could never have planned better ourselves. Thank you to all those who’ve been praying for us! We had a vicissituous week with some serious spiritual warfare and emotional highs and lows but we are proud to say that we’ve emerged unscathed!

Last Monday we started out extremely positive and Satan slowly moved in to annoy us and break us down. We were both fasting for daylight hours so by the afternoon our resources were low. My guitar student was super cheeky and difficult, which seriously rocked my boat. El was a gem and encouraged me with some great ideas to get him to practice more. On the plus side, his mom paid me for two months worth of lessons in full! Some much needed cash – as you’ll read…

On Tuesday I had two young adults cancel on us for the camp – which was not what I wanted to hear. Work was pretty mediocre for both El and I and I managed to get all the printing done for our camp booklets. In the evening we’d been invited to dinner with Ant and Nadia, so I’d been looking forward to that all day, especially since we’d been fasting! We got to their place in good time and were early for once… They have a tiny, tiny place but have really done a nice job of setting it up. Nadia cooked a fantastic meal which was followed by a delicious chocolate fondue for pudding. Anthony whipped out his PS2 gaming console and steering wheel/pedal controls to show me his racing game. They have a massive flat screen TV with some impressive MISSION speakers and since the size of the apartment finds you sitting right in front of these speakers, the gaming experience is awesome. We all took turns in driving a car at about 200mph through a busy street where the aim was not to crash but take as many other cars out as possible. It was so much fun and just what El and I needed to lift our endorphins for what happened on Wednesday night.

Wednesday went well and I had called two young adults (Jeanine and Ryan) who hadn’t filled in camp forms yet and confirmed that they would be at homegroup and would sort out the final stuff for the weekend. In the middle of the afternoon I was working in the office and stretched behind my chair and hurt my neck – the same old injury that Aunty Penny physio’d for me last year. So that got me stressed and in pain. Then when El got home Paul’s dogs were in the front garden (which we have to drive through to get to our cottage) and so she had a hard time getting through both gates without their dogs eating ours. So we were both on edge when Honey and Pooh decided to have massive fight – fortunately they didn’t injure one another but their vocal chords painted a very different picture of what happened. Then, I got an sms from Jeanine saying that they couldn’t come on the camp anymore, followed by another saying that they couldn’t make home group either. Then I scalded one of our pots and burnt the rice for our supper, this was followed by the arrival of Themba, who hadn’t bathed in several days and requires a great deal of attention as his English isn’t great and he’s a little slow on understanding simple concepts. El pulled out another pot and started the 40 min process of cooking the rice again (remember that we hadn’t eaten the whole day yet). I realized that Honey was not well as she was growing even more ill tempered with everyone and wouldn’t eat, so I called the vet and she told me to give her half a panado! Themba had bought himself a cellphone which was annoying because he doesn’t even have enough money for rent, let alone food and parafine and now he’s bought himself a really budget phone! He had 12 messages that he couldn’t read so I showed him how and they were all “please call me” so he proceeded to send them back… So, when written down, it may not seem that bad but with our diminished patience and everything hitting us within the span of about 2 hours we felt the attack! We decided to postpone home group and took the night off to regroup with one another and pray.

Thursday started off pretty well and both El and I had much better days, I fetched the woolies food with Paul in the afternoon and El and I had a final camp meeting in the evening. The meeting went really well and we all encouraged one another as the other leaders had been under attack as well and we all needed the comradery of the meeting.

Friday was camp day and I received three more cancellations! Plus, Honey was really not looking well (despite the panado…) so I took her to the vet and found out that she had billary. Fortunately we’d caught it really early and her four injections (yes, 4!!) sorted her out. Satan really was doing his bit well… but God was doing His bit even better! I made a decision a couple of months back that we would have the camp – regardless of how many kids came. The church hasn’t had a youth camp in about 7 years, so anything would be a great start. By 16h30 everyone was at the church and all the cars were packed so we headed out to the beautiful Magalies Mountains in Christian convoy. Our first night was awesome and we had such a good response from the kids and young adults.

Saturday’s highlights were the obstacle course and the Weakest link. We ran the obstacle course in two waves, the kids in the morning and young adults in the afternoon. I’d spoken to the camp facilitator and told him that we had allotted 1.5 hours for the course but only had 8 young adults – would he be able to fill the full time? Well, he didn’t realize that of those young adults there were 6 ladies… so the course took almost 2 hours!!! El and Mike organized the Weakest Link and El was Fiona. Everyone loved it and were talking about it the next day. Mike did the graphics for the projection and we had a little animated Weakest Link vibe on the wall with the points accumulating just like the banking in the show – it was very cool. We worked with teams instead of individuals and a point scoring system that allowed groups to stay in the whole time, they just lost all their points if they were voted the weakest link. After that we had a bonfire which was followed by an almighty thunderstorm. It was pretty awesome because the wind and rain only came about 40 mins after the lighting started so we sat outside in the calm watching the lighting. When the wind came it was incredibly strong and we literally all just went running to the dorms and hopped straight into bed!

On Sunday we had a church service together and then when on a nature walk in the mountains (well, more like hills…). We arrived home after packing and leaving around 15h00 and El and I slept for about 3 hours. The rest of our evening was spent unpacking. We discovered that Roo had a large bump on her neck, which we thought was a cyst, but turned out to be a haemotoma! So we took her off to the vet to have that lanced and the vet said that it was time for her to be neutralized… so that will be happening next week. I’m beginning to think that Vets make a lot of money of El and I… I supposed the Horners may disagree though…

Ciao, have a rocking week!

The old man is snoring

After nearly five months without a drop of rain the heavens have opened in a mighty way and it is raining down like a Cape Town winter! It's really amazing to see how the rain, in just a few weeks has completely changed the landscape.

Our Garden has gone from a dusty dry plateau of failed grass to a lush and flourishing haven of life. It reminded me of our relationship with God, we get to stages in our lives when we can't feel the rain of God, nourishing and refreshing us, we get dry and parched for spiritual refreshment. The good news is that God will send His rain! Just as He sends it every spring, so will He send the rain in your life and growth will flourish.

The new bedroom

For those who have read that we recently painted our room - here's a pic of our old setup, and then the new one with the new bed, curtains, paintings, mirror and painted walls :).

Our weekly news

It is a glorious Sunday afternoon that I am writing this to you and a little later I’m taking my wife out on a date. Church was awesome this morning, I had the blessing of preaching at both services and leading worship for the second and God came and blessed us massive! I had an sms earlier from one of our families thanking me for the service this morning – that was really encouraging. We also had Anthony and Nadia taking care of the technical side for us for their first time and they did an amazing job.

Well, back to last Monday. It was El’s first day back at school after a weeks holiday and she had a great day. The children were exceptionally badly behaved but it was good for her to be back with her colleagues, she is getting on really well with them and forging great friendships. They really appreciate her and whenever I see them they always tell me what a great person my wife is (which, fortunately, I know very well) and they are very encouraging and supportive to her. We had a worship commission meeting in the evening and things are going well there. It’s part of church leadership that I don’t really like, I hate pointless meetings, but I understand that they come as part of the package…

On Tuesday my piano student postponed to Wednesday so I had some time in the afternoon before my guitar student to work on my sermon. El arrived home a little earlier than usual so we were able to spend some time together before I headed off to my guitar lesson. In the evening we spent some time on camp prep which was really awesome.

Wednesday was a busy day at work as I was working on getting my sermon and powerpoints done early – something new for me… but I put it a good effort. El and I went to the shops to pick up some essentials later in the afternoon and then capped the evening off with a fantastic home group :).

Thursday morning was very busy for me as I was rushing to get all my office work done – just in case we had another problem with no power or our photocopier jamming – as had happened last Friday. Paul and I went to collect the Woolies food in the afternoon and there was an absolute ABUNDANCE! We received about 12 crates of meat alone, plus bread and veggies. It took us a while to pack it all into Paul’s doublecab but we managed and were suitably impressed with our packing skills! About 30 crates worth of food all in all. The food went to the central Methodist Church in town which is overrun with refugees at the moment, so they were extremely grateful. We had a good worship practice in the evening, Anthony and Nadia were there to get some more training – they have really been a blessing to us!

Friday started off as a beautiful day, I had done most of my work for the week so had a very relaxed morning. I practiced organ for a funeral that I was booked for on Saturday and watched Utube to pass the time… it was great. El and her fellow gr1 colleagues had to supply a nice lunch for the rest of the staff. It’s what they do in the last term, every Friday is a party day for the staff and each grade gets to organize it. They dressed up and had a really good time. The weather started to darken and get miserable in the late afternoon so El and I hired a movie and snuggled down until home group. Home group was, again, very rewarding, but it is very draining on us. We’re hoping to have some other leaders run one of them next year – hopefully our camp this weekend will establish that for us…

On Saturday morning I played at a funeral at 10am and then had a worship practice straight after that. I hired some more movies for us as the weather was no better and we spent the afternoon watching TV. There was an almighty thunderstorm that started at about 6pm, and continued throughout the night! We were woken several times to the crash of thunder and paparazzi lightning. The power dropped at about 7pm, which was amazingly the time that we finished cooking supper – so we got our supper done just in time!

Please pray for our youth and young adults as we are having our first camp this weekend! There has been no church camp for about 10 years – so this is a big step!

We miss you all stax and are stoked that December is but a month and a bit away :).