Coast to Carols

This last week has been fairly busy as these things go...

Wednesday, my alarm went off at 5:45am, as I was being picked up to go visit my new school (46 miles away) at 6:30! Not nice. We'd left about 2 hours to do a journey that AA Route Planner said would take 1hr15. Should've been fine, right? Wrong. A combination of unfamiliar roads, the dark and me thinking that 'Take the 3rd exit at the roundabout' means 'Turn left', meant that we were about 20 mins late. Didn't seem to be too much of a problem in the end though. :o)
I met my new class. I'm in the Nursery class ["Foundation 1"], meaning 3 & 4 year olds, which should be quite fun. The kids are lively and I can see it being a definite enlightening experience. Generally, I'm quite looking forward to it, though. :o)


Since then, I've been catching up on sleep (a little bit), cleaning some of the house for the end of term, packing my life into containers for the 13th consecutive end-of-term, and lugging it on and off of trains.
I came home yesterday with a medium-size trolley case, holdall, laptop and backpack - I somehow managed to arrange things so that I had a spare hand for my ticket! Took the train to York, had an extended lunch-break there with Michael, and then caught a train to Stevenage where M&D picked me up (which was nice of them!).

Today has been the Christingle service this morning and Carol service tonight. For those of you who don't know what a Christingle is, it looks like this:

and all the bits represent different things...
The Orange is the World, the Red ribbon is Jesus' blood and the candle is the 'Light of the World'. The rest depends on who you ask... the four points are the 4 seasons or the 4 compass points and the sweets/raisins represent the Fruits of the Spirit or God's gifts to us (harvest). This site gives a bit more about the history. So in my church, all the children go out and make one and then they process back in with them lit later in the service... yes, we do indeed have 20-30 children stand close together holding lit candles! Nerve-wracking, but a really beautiful sight nevertheless.

Really need to go present shopping this week, as I've bought half a present so far, out of the 8 or so I have to buy. Hmm.

Oh well, nothing much else to say, so I think I'll go back to the jigsaw that I've been working on for about 2 years and see if I can get any more done. :o)

/out/