Life of an English Hen

Saturday, April 26, 2008

friendships provide and go round and round...

A lady in the UK was praying for me to have a close female friend here. I wasn't too sure I wanted that in particular, but, God has provided someone. It is really great.

Through another friend's generosity to me here, I can try and pass this onto the new person too - wonderful!


Friend A ----love---- Me ---love----- New friend B

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Belated reporting of end of term fun

On the right-hand panel is a list of links to other sites. On the one labeled 'My Videos' you can watch two YouTube videos I made at the end of term at language school: I've just uploaded our Sayonara Song, as well as our class sketch. The same one is at http://uk.youtube.com/thehenuk

I have also updated my film and book blog - what I've been watching and reading! You can find this one too on the right, or through http://thehenukeyesopen.blogspot.com/

The full circle

I despair of myself sometimes. Last week I was so incredible stressed, perhaps the most so in my whole life. A lot of changes and decisions for change, (some small, some major), converged at once, and I was not coping. I really could do nothing else other than drag myself to various places to have meetings with colleagues until 11pm at night to make decisions about all that had to decided, dissolve into tears once we moved onto an informal time of catching up until 1am, and absorb myself with worry until I fell into stress-induced sleep (whatever time of day it was) when by myself. My parents were worried. They probably still are.

Then once some decisions were made I started to feel better, we went on retreat on Tuesday and surprisingly I felt confident and fine again. Now I am back and ...almost bored. I should get out the house and go see something nice, or take a nice walk, before my new schedule starts later next week, but instead I am being busy on the computer, in a hyper-efficiency that I couldn't have managed 1% of last week.

In the last 24 hours I've been loading the details of all the books I have with me here into our new WEC Japan computerised library system; drawing up my new schedule from April ti August and emailing it to various people; writing a web-article (see below); writing to our field-leader about numerous things; writing a plan for the next 9 years of my life, that needs to be handed into our field leader in one-week's time; catching up on world news and trashy news on the internet; and re-arranging my room so that my computer can have it's place next to my bed, and my new desk can have it's place by the window, so I can dream instead of writing in the future :). I guess I'm not exactly bored when I'm doing this work, but I'm simply not used to having days 'free' of other work to do these things at home. For so long I've been busy busy busy, outside the house, with language lessons, and when on holiday I've tended to also have a packed schedule. So a few days at home provide an amazing ability to get things done, but a slight panic at the lack of people around to provide me with an outside human stimulus (unless you count watching a clip of an Oprah video about an American man who's gonna have a baby an outside stimulus...)

Does anyone else ever go through this, or is it just me?

Retreat

We in WEC Japan have just been on retreat together. Here's an article I wrote for the WEC Japan website about it: http://www.wec-japan.org/content/view/59/30/
What I didn't mention was the food! Rice, soup and fish (amoung other stuff) for breakfast, lunch and dinner!