Delynn and I returned to school this week - and it was a full week indeed. Delynn is busily working on the year end reporting along with the normal monthly items. Thankfully, we have our new secretary to help out, especially with the many necessary German telephone conversations that are required to run a school. Martina is a wonderful addtion to our RIA staff. The students jumped right back into classwork without any major hiccups. I've said this before, but I am so impressed with the vast majority of our students who actually missed school. It is wonderful to teach children who like being there - and like learning!

We enjoyed an exceptional worship today at ACB; we had a huge praise and worship group - one of the largest I have seen to date. The worship group consisted of piano, lead and accoustic guitars, bass, drums and saxophone in addition to the four vocalists. I know that back at VFFC, we would love to have that kind of accompanyment with our praise teams. However, no place is perfect. VFFC has better musical infrastructure than we have here at ACB, so we make due with a single monitor and some feedback. In the end however, it is all praise to God - and that is what really counts!

Since we are back to school, we have not really done much exciting this week outside of walking to the market almost every day. We have noticed that the days are getting longer - it is nice to be able to leave school near to 17:00 and still have some light in the sky. The weather this week was quite warm but we have turned back to more freezing temperatures starting this weekend. But the sun shines here quite more often than back in Vancouver and I find that I am rather grateful for that.

I have outlined before some of the reasons we go to the store so often: small refrigerators, little extra storage space, no mega-Costco-sized super saver quantities, fewer preservatives in general. Take bread for example. I don't know why, but the bread we buy is always sliced in odd numbers. There is either 5 or 7 or 9 slices per bag. Well, I don't know about you, but I always use two slices of bread to make a sandwich, so I always end up with this lonely piece of bread that usually ends up molding. Oh yeah and you would think that with only 9 slices of bread that we would be able to eat it before it gets moldy, but it is amazing how quickly things go over. Okay, now all bread sold in the stores has a wire closure with a date printed on it. These wire closures come in different colors and I think there may be some kind of pattern to it but I haven't taken the time to figure it out. Anyway, the date printed on the wire closure doohickey is what we call the "mold-by" date because if you have eaten the bread by that date, you have a greater than 50% chance that it will be moldy. Back in the states, the "use-by" date was always a little conservative - I had often had perfectly serviceable food even after the expiration date. Not so here - oooooh no. And even if you have an expiration date that is 10 months out, once the item is opened (applesauce for example), you better be liking applesauce until it is gone because it will mold in a week - even in the fridge. So, one of the good reasons for smaller quantities is that one doesn't get tired of said foodstuff before it is all consumed.

Another striking difference we have noticed is that while the 2008 presidential campaign season is well underway, we are not bombarded by the plethora of commercials or other forms of media of which I am sure you are already tired. We get most of our information from the web and the single CNN channel available to us on cable, so it is one of the more tolerable campaigns we have lived through. Good luck to everyone back in the states...