Messy Church

So on Monday after the prayer meeting a neighbour from the flat upstairs brought down her scissors and while she tidied up the team's stray locks the floor grew hairier. Messy Church but great to build relationships with the locals.

Plane to Spain (again!)

We have tickets to go to Spain next week and clear the flat for the following 7 months. Les will probably stay a bit longer than me but we hope to be together before chemo starts or my birthday on 8th July - whichever comes first.
Friends have offered us the use of a holiday cottage over the winter which is amazing and we are so grateful. We also have a different house for July so the bed total is soon going to be 111 different ones, even though I missed the conference room I had booked and Les's birthday night in a hotel.
Meanwhile we have had a little holiday in Orkney, being well fed and watered by Mum... this explains why the standing stone is leaning to the side!

Like it or lump it.

We have been a bit quiet on here about health matters as you heard enough last year on the operational front to last for quite some time.. but again surgery is required and so to make a complete record of this journey we report the bad as well as the good. Fiona found a lump which was cancerous and this week we went to Aberdeen and had it removed. Excellent surgeon and team in a nice clean hospital, such a different experience to last year, and home the day afterwards. Those who saw this photo on facebook asked what the scribbles say. Apparently it is now the procedure to mark the skin 3 times and have it checked to avoid any errors. So Wide Local Excision (the lump plus a bit of healthy tissue) and Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy where they remove the nearest lymph nodes to check if any cancer cells have spread. We won´t know until another 3 weeks when they get the pathology reports back what the next steps are. I will have to have radiotherapy treatment for sure but if there has been any spread I might have to have chemo first. Now you know as much as me but I won´t be back in Spain for at least 2 months.

Open doors

Don´t know how you feel about playing cards, we don´t either! However when we had an open doors day at the new church premises one of our locals tried to teach us how to play cards. essentially they are the same as regular cards except the names, shapes and rules are different. Got that? Us neither.

Inauguration: We are open!

Who would have thought our dark orange painted building would have scrubbed up so well - we were so happy to throw it open for the official inauguration and welcome about 68 people for a buffet and church service to officially mark the start of the mnistry here. I slighly photo-bombed the photo with my sunglasses as Marin our first member to get baptised and our oldest local woman cut the tape. Happy Days! (To be fair I may be second oldest...)

Burns Night

Burns night came late... "Would some power the giftie gie us tae see wursaels as otherssee us.." Even a torch would have been a help as in January we had no power in the new building! However by March we had enough to boil both tatties and calabaza (in the absence of neeps) It was good but in true Burns style we burned the mince. The cook blamed all the posing for photos "wearing something tartan" i.e. a napkin! There is a video of the ceilidh but it won´t be shown anytime soon!

Read me that again?