The Weather

I'd give you an update on how my ordination process is going, but to be honest, I'm not really sure how to begin going about explaining our current situation. With that being said, we'd appreciate your prayers as we seek to move forward, hopefully continuing to stay in England and ministering within the Church of England.

And now for something completely different.

I picked up a little gem of a book by Richard Mabey entitled 'Turned Out Nice Again: Living with the Weather'. Brits are pre-occupied by the weather and it is normally the first or second topic to come up in a conversation.

This passage from the book sums up British weather pretty well;

We don't have to live with active volcanoes or sudden tsunamis. The temperature has only exceeded 100 degrees three times in the last hundred years. The heaviest rainfall in a single day was eleven inches in Martinstown Dorset on 18 July, 1955. When you compare that with the several feet that can fall in a couple of hours in a tropical monsoon you can get our weather in some sort of perspective. What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you're going to be under three feet of snow every December.

Whimsical is a good term for it, but it's hard to feel very whimsical about the weather when you wake up for church on Palm Sunday and have to scrape your windshield and expect similar for the rest of Holy Week.

British Summer Time

Summer Time in Britain started today. Granted seven of the last eight days have been mostly sunny, but with a predicted average temperature this week of 52F and rain forecasted you can hardly call it summer.

Fortunately for summer's sake, British Summer Time is to the UK what Daylight Savings Time is to most of the U.S.

All in all, I think it is just a bit of deceptive advertising.

Groundhog's Day

Because of the Groundhog's Day Blizzard of '11 is covering most of the U.S. we are still in the UK.
A short recap...

We were supposed to fly out of Heathrow to Chicago O'Hare on Wednesday morning. Late Tuesday night we checked our flight status and saw that it had been canceled and that we would be on a later flight on Wednesday. Fair enough. Instead of getting up really early we slept in a bit, finished some cleaning around the house and got ready to leave to catch our 4.30pm flight from Heathrow.

We checked, double, and triple checked our flight status and finally left for Heathrow yesterday afternoon. We got to Heathrow, got our luggage out, found our ticket counter, and the girl's headed off to the toilet. As soon as they were out of hearing range the announcement came over the speakers. "American Airlines regrets to inform passengers that flight 91 to Chicago has been canceled. Please come to the ticket counter for more information."

We trudge to the counter and are told that Erica has been put on a British Airlines flight to Chicago via New York at 8.30am on Thursday and that Inga and I would be on the same flight that had just been canceled except on Thursday. Well that was no good, so we arranged for all three of us to be on Thursday's 4.30pm flight. The difficulty with the 4.30 flight is that we get into Chicago at 7.30pm which is too late for Erica and I to catch our flight to Cleveland. So we have to stay overnight in Chicago (very thankful for the Brankatelli's hospitality in this regard) and catch a Friday morning flight to Cleveland.

So now it is Thursday morning. We slept in a bit, finished some cleaning around the house and are getting ready to leave to catch our 4.30pm flight from Heathrow.

Again.

It is Official

We arrived in England and managed to take part in the coldest winter in 31 years.
(deep breath) okay...we are done talking about snow.