BACK!

Key:
Whitney: regular type face
Sander: italic type face

We’re back! Not just to the UK, but also back to blogger. I am really sad I haven’t kept up more with this, or emails, the past few months. Yes, the job is busy so neither Sander nor I can type anything up while we are at work, but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse. I am setting up a schedule, using google calendars, which should help me be a lot more focused and actually post more often.

On the subject of google calendars, have you used one yet? I love it!! I have gotten in the habit of using an electronic calendar (or diary as they call it here) at work and so it is so easy for me to just transfer dates and times from my Gmail to my google calendar. They even have a special button for it. As an added bonus you can access it from any computer and you can choose to share it with others. Sander and I have a joint calendar and can get into it at work even though gmail is blocked. Then, other friends can share their calendars with you and you can add it to yours. So, if our youth leader shares a ‘Youth’ calendar with us, we can add it to ours and all the youth events will automatically show up but in a different color so we know what is what. I would highly recommend it.

In recommending things, I would recommend not getting a strange fever a few days after getting back to a foreign country like I did. We flew back in on the 6th and had to be back at work on the 7th. I just went back to work as usual, but Sander went to a three day, off-shore survival course. I’ll let him type in his experience:

So I show up to the training center Monday morning with my swimsuit, under-fire-gear clothing, and surprisingly little jet lag, only to have to sit through a day of lectures on safety, British law, how to not fall off the side of a rig, etc. Booooring. But at least I was the only American and got made fun of by our South African instructor all day. Well, the jet lag kicked in around 2 and I was dead asleep in class. Totally got called out on it, but the instructor didn’t really care. At the beginning of the day, he told us that all the lectures were as boring for him as they were for us, and that there was a butter knife in his desk drawer in case any of us should feel the overwhelming urge to jab it into our hands.

The second day was MUCH better. We donned our dry suits and practiced swimming in the 2 degree water using as little energy as possible in the effort not to waste heat. Question…when the water’s so cold that you die of hypothermia within two or three minutes, would you want to look like an idiot concentrating all your mental abilities on conserving energy to last another 3 seconds or would you rather just kick back, talk to God, and ride the waves to the Promise Land? Me too. But if I told them that, they’d fail me, so I complied and swam lying on my back and paddling my hands like a T-rex. Then we got to practice being rescued by helicopter – they throw down a harness that you swim into and lie in motionless while they hoist you up with a winch. We got picked up like 20 feet above the pool, which was pretty fun. Next we practiced getting out of a helicopter after it’s crashed onto the sea. You brace for impact, touch down, and then bash the windows out and swim to safety. That was cool, but THEN we got to practice what to do if the helicopter capsizes after you hit the water – even more fun! They actually flip this helicopter replica over in the pool really fast and you’re totally disoriented but still have to swim to safety, all under water and breathing through this apparatus that’s really just a bag you blow a bunch of air into right before you go under and then breathe out of until you get to the surface. Highlight of the week.

After all the swimming, we had to demonstrate that we could put out any of 6 types of fires and know what means to use. That was fun because they have this fire area where they set all kinds of stuff on fire: “rubbish,” oil, motors, cooking grease, and way more stuff that we all got to use the extinguishers and hoses on. That was cool. And last, we had to find our way out of a burning building with oxygen masks on. They actually have this building we went into where there’s a real fire and real smoke, all really close to us and we have to find our way through a maze in it. It was awesome. At one point, the fire’s about 5 feet away and if you have any skin exposed, they said we’d get some pretty nasty burns. Even with the fire gear they gave us (which, by the way, isn’t anywhere near the quality that firemen get), it was so hot at the close points that some of the guys freaked out and didn’t want to go forward. My team got out fine, and had a great time doing it. When we came out we looked like in cartoons when Yosimite Sam gets blown up – all black and covered in soot. Don’t really know how that happened since we were all covered up, but we looked hilarious. So that was my Offshore Survival Adventure. Good times.

You would think with all Sander’s activity, he would be the one to get sick, but it was me. I ran this strange fever from Thursday to Monday and even missed a day of work. It wasn’t that tragic though since they have no system by which you accrue sick leave – you just get as much as you need. I know they would get suspicious if you started getting sick every Friday, but still! I am all better now and survived just fine.

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We have found a new photo posting site at http://www.dropshots.com/SanderandWhitney. It groups your pictures by date and not by album, which can be weird, but I’ve decided it will actually help because I can just drag and drop whole folders of pictures and then, with the date feature, it will sort them out for me automatically. You will have to look at each day to see the whole trip, but that shouldn’t be too hard. I will keep these updated for sure even if we don’t blog every weekend like we plan to today.

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This reads like a teenager’s diary – except for Sander’s part which reads like romantic poetry - I feel like I should have a deep thought, question some aspect of the social structure, or open my heart in a special way. At the very least I feel I could write more good. But sitting day after day at a computer with only emails to compose makes me feel like I have lost my ‘edge’ and lost my ability to write anything worth reading. = ( Look – I am resorting to using symbolic facial expressions to get my point across!! Oh man.

I’m off to a birthday party for the PA who works at the desk next to me. It should be quite the event. She is super sanguine and is known for the birthday parties she throws for herself each year. She asks everyone to throw in 10 pounds and then she buys food, drinks, party games, and rents a mini-bus to go back into town. It starts at 4pm and lasts all night. I offered to be the dd and bring some of her friends from town to her house (about 20min south of town) and then will come back around 7pm so Sander and I can go on a date. The party should be interesting…especially when the inflatable limbo game comes out.