A Kiwi's Adventures: Summer half term

We've just finished week ten of lockdown and the easing of restrictions continues. Still plenty of debate as to whether that is sensible or not, and of course the outcry over Dominic Cummings has dominated the news here. We are continuing as before and not getting too excited about the going out or meeting up with people. It has been nice to see some people from my church small group drop by the house on their walk and chat with them from a very safe distance! It has been the summer half term this past week which means only six weeks of school for the year left. Definitely seems a little crazy and it will be interesting to see what school decides to do with the directive to have some face-to-face contact with our year 10 and 12 students from the 15th of June. A number of my colleagues are moving to different schools for the next school year and it will definitely be sad not to see them before the holidays. After half term, school is moving to using Microsoft Teams for our lessons, though not face-to-face calls thank goodness! It will be interesting to see how this can make our delivery of lessons easier, hopefully all will go smoothly with the transition.

I am starting to need to make some more decisions about whether to push school for a visa or not. I am feeling very torn at the moment with not really knowing if I want to stay in the UK or come back to NZ at Christmas time. Both decisions have quite big positives and negatives and I am not actually clear what I want to have happen. Maybe move the UK closer to NZ?! Those of you who pray, I'd really appreciate some prayer for wisdom and clarity. If anyone is praying and hears anything you think might be related, please get in touch!

Jo has moved in and seems to be settling in really well, it's been good to have time to have some outings together as a flat. We had a bank holiday on Monday and some of us went and explored Witley and Milford Commons which are about a 20 minute drive south of here. It was nice and quiet without too many people around and it was great to take a picnic somewhere new. My feet held up really well and it felt like a proper holiday!

Esther, Jo, Mel, me

On Friday, the girls in the flat had an outing to the ruins of Waverley Abbey settled in 1128 by Cistercian monks. Super old! Everyone was very patient and up for posing so I could try taking pictures of the ruins with people in shot. The lighting turned out to be much trickier than I thought it would be and focusing with the telephoto zoom lens is also hard. But we did get some good photos and we had a lot of fun too!