Greetings, mein friends!
No, you're not crazy. There was no blog post last week. My trip wasn't really last minute, but I was trying to get a lot of stuff done in a very short amount of time, so I neglected to tell you I was going anywhere.
Sorry.
But I had some lovely time away, so I hope that mitigates your concerns. I spent time with my family, met with a few supporters, and generally laughed until I pulled a muscle. Not even kidding. The trip was also a bit of a test for myself on driving for three hours by myself and seeing how I handled being away from my base for several days. I did okay. There's always going to be that question, that niggle of doubt in the back of my mind, but overall, I succeeded in my quest. I did, however, come back exhausted, so we can blame that if this post goes off the rails. But that's never happened before, so I don't know why you're talking about it now.
...
Between the two days I was in last week and the four days I was in this week, I managed to finish GR08 and GR11 of French. This language has been incredibly frustrating. We started doing it with one art set, but then we switched to another mid-stream. We also started using French with the NVP (formerly VCP) material, which meant the booklet grouping needed to change. But we'd already done some things according to the old groups, so now, it's basically a mess. But we're making progress. We'll get there, I'm sure.
We also had our first in-person chapel this week!
We had a good turn-out, and LOOK, no masks. So this might be the last week I add our 'panic' tag to a post for pandemic-related reasons. It might turn up for other reasons. We'll see. My brain links things in weird ways.
My big project this week was Chichewa Volume 2 for NVP (New Village Church Planting Program). This is a compilation of booklets that will be used by African church planters. As with many things in T&M, creating a volume is not necessarily complicated, but it is complex. I'm still learning a lot about what InDesign and other Adobe products can do, but they make my job 100x easier at least, so I'm very thankful to have them.
On a side note for the week, we have changed the Bus to the Mood Squad. The Bus is what we used to call the group of us who walked around the building to stretch our legs once a morning and afternoon. During the lockdown, our numbers dwindled, and walking around was discouraged. But now that masks aren't mandated, we have a solid group of four who do security checks and wander around fostering community at OMS. (That's what we're calling it, at least. You'd have to ask the people we chat with how they'd categorize it.) We were christened the Mood Squad this week, and I'm quite in favor of it. Plus, if we don't have all four, we could become the Mod Squad, the Od Squad, or the O Squad. Silly, I know, but it helps keep us sane.
Anyway, one of the things the Mod Squad (there were three of us) got up to was hunting down some missing forks. We had a lunch on Wednesday, the first in more than 15 months, and a few utensils had walked away from the kitchen in that time. So Lydia, Sarah, and I did some investigating, and we did actually find some of the missing items. We also found a cupboard that hadn't been cleaned or organized in quite some time, so I took it upon myself to change that.
One of your posts going off the rails?? Hmm? What??? Also. Who would have guessed that a simple, common language like French would give you such issues. Oh wait. It's French.
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