A Sunny Sunday Stroll

I'm feeling really overwhelmed by the 1,000+ pictures that we took in Cairo so I'm blogging about something else instead. Hey, it's better than nothing, right?

A few weeks ago, we decided to take a stroll through our neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon. We did this for 2 reasons. 1) I have a REALLY hard time not taking naps on Sunday so we thought some fresh air might do the trick. 2) Due to the time difference between us and our families, we have several hours to kill before we can Skype each week.

Here's Brent on our street, our house is a few doors behind us.

We live about 5 minutes from the river and found a nice walking path. The sky was gorgeous and the weather was perfect.

Some various scenery around the neighborhood.

We also ventured a little towards the other direction of our house closer to the neighborhoods. Our discovery? We are pros at finding good, cheap housing right on the edge of the nice part of town. This is the 3rd place (out of 4) that we've lived in that is a few streets away from where things start to get "dodgy", as they say here.

The way these power lines are run really crack me up. It's not like this everywhere. Also, here's a little taste of the main road. Please note the parked cars. It doesn't matter which direction you were driving, you can park wherever the heck you want. It's pretty awesome. No driving down to the next street to flip a u-turn just to park. It does look kinda silly, though.

We did find a community garden though. That might be worth looking into.

A big old church with an awesome door.

7 down, 2 to go!!

Brent took CAS Exam 7 on Monday! Most of you already know about his exams, but in case you're a recent reader, you can learn more about them from the last time I posted after a test.

Exam 7 is supposedly the toughest one. It's the Beast. It involves a lot of accounting principles and covers a lot of material. I think there were around 1,300 pages of reading material he had to get through during his studying. We were really worried that with moving across the world, Brent would lose a lot of study time. Well, he did. The good news? He was able to make it all up at the end. He had 4 days off built up, along with the given day before the test and we had a bank holiday the week before so he was home and studied for 9 days straight (with sundays off, of course). He studied over 70 hours the week before the test. I don't even know how he did it. I know my brain would have been mush by day 3 or 4.

He said he feels really good about how it went, despite the usual worries that he wasn't fully prepared. He didn't leave any of the questions unanswered and found that a few of them were "gimmes".

We are SO excited! Now our England fun can really begin. You better believe we are going to live it up this summer with traveling and sightseeing around London. We have about 2 months before he needs to start studying for exam 9 (yeah, they're out of order, it's weird).

After his test, we met at Piccadilly Circus (kind of like a mini Times Square) for lunch and a movie.

We saw Wolverine. A little violent, but I'd say it's a must see for any X-Men fan. They brought in some really great X-Men that have never been featured in the other movies, my favorite being, Gambit.

The movie theater was really fancy, as seen in the pictures below. My favorite parts, other than we pretty much had the theater to ourselves, were the shiny white rocks in the bathroom sink, and the colory lights everywhere.

(These are all phone pictures so pardon the poor quality.)

The super fancy bathroom, with its tv screen in the mirror and crazy sink.

The stairs down to the screens from the ticket counter (they are underground) & the sofa lounge where you can sit and wait.

The snack booth and the lounge area by the bar. Yes, full bar at a movie theater. Weird.

After the movie we went home and just vegged out and had smoothies and finger food for dinner. It was a fun afternoon and Brent had lots of time to decompress his brain.

Oh, one more thing about exam 7, after passing it, actuarial students finally get some recognition! He will be an Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society. A little return on our investment, you could call it. He will be recognized at the annual meeting in November in Boston.

You do realize what this means, right? If he can pass the next 2 exams on the first try, we'll be done with this charade next May! NEXT MAY!! We're SO close! No pressure, dear. :)

If heaven is anything like today was, we can see what all the fuss is about.

As we near the end of this fabulous Sunday, we feel the need to put in writing how wonderful it was. Here's the basic rundown:

7:00 - Wake and get ready for church
8:12 - train to Staines
9:00 - baptism of Damon (Brent went with the missionaries to one of his teaches this week). This was only the second convert baptism I've ever been to. You can't really describe how wonderful and spiritual they are. It was beautiful to see Damon baptized by his father-in-law and see the tears of joy shed by his wife as she watched her dear husband make such a life changing commitment. His mother-in-law spoke during the service and she explained how the main point to his conversion was that he wants a "forever family". He and his wife and their baby are already making their preparations to be sealed in the temple next year.
10:00 - Church. Sacrament meeting talks were fabulous, very spiritual and educational. The High Counselors spoke and the topic was the Aaronic Priesthood which we found fitting since Damon had just been baptized and will be receiving the priesthood soon. Plus, it was a nice little reminder to the rest of us. The Stake presidency was there and at the end of the meeting the Stake President stood and bore one of the most powerful testimonies we have ever heard about how he felt the Spirit and if we all had felt anything during the meeting, that was the Spirit. There were about 10 investigators in attendance so it was very cool to have him point out what that feeling, he was sure they felt, was. Brent said Sunday School and Priesthood were on par with the earlier meetings and my Primary class (p.s. that class I "subbed" for last week was just a trial run for my new calling) paid attention, hardly wiggled or talked out of turn and were very interested in the topic, The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon. They found the story of how the Golden Plates were made, handed down from generations and then to Joseph Smith very interesting. I was very pleasantly surprised. Oh, and the hymns we sang during the different meetings were great. We sang several that are in my top 10 list.
1:16 - train home, lunch, etc.
3:30 - missionaries arrive and use our phone to call their moms one at a time whilst the other chatted with us. It was fun to hear laughter and joy coming from the livingroom as the missionaries talked with their families. It was also great to get to know them a little better as they awaited their turn with the phone.
5:30 - dinner. Yum. No leftovers.
6:30 - spiritual message. They taught us out of the Preach My Gospel manual and committed us to 1) invite Damon and his family over for dinner in the next 2 weeks (Brent will be his home teaching companion so it's a perfect excuse) as a warm-up for our "member missionary" work and 2) find and help teach & prepare for baptism, one person before we leave England. The first one I'm more than ready to do, the second? That's going to take some work.
7:00 - blessings. We asked them to give Brent a blessing in preparation for his exam tomorrow. I must say how grateful I am for the priesthood and priesthood blessings. Elder Richards said some things in that blessing that there was no way he could have known about. We know it was straight from Heavenly Father, there is no other explanation. Afterwards, Brent asked them to give me a blessing of peace and comfort. I am trying a new doctor on Tuesday and Brent thought it appropriate that I should have a blessing. I am thankful for his prompting to suggest that because, again, there were things that were said in my blessing that Elder Martin would have never known to say without prompting from the Spirit. I feel the need to clarify that Brent can give me a blessing any time we want, but we both felt that the missionaries should do it. We're glad we did.

We both had one of the best days ever and it was so needed.

Date Night

On Friday, we had our first official Date Night since moving into our new house. It was a nice diversion from all of the studying.

We took the bus over to Richmond and walked across the bridge. The scenery was so pretty.

We ate at Nando's, a super yummy Portuguese restaurant. Then we walked back over the bridge and took the bus home.

Nothing fancy, just dinner and a walk. It was lovely.

Easy Like Sunday Morning

Here's where we will be today.

In fact, it's so great, we go here pretty much every Sunday. Except for when we are out of town, in which case we find the closest meetinghouse and attend there. We once attended a single adult ward because that was the only meeting nearby. That sure was funny.

Today I am substitute teaching the 8 year old Primary class. We will be learning about the Word of Wisdom.

We will pay our tithing and fast offering since it is Fast Sunday.

Sundays remind us about this little nugget.

We love Sundays. They are a fabulous break from the world. Especially at this time of the year when it seems like everything revolves around studying. We do things a bit differently on Sundays. One of our favorite Sabbath activities is talking to our family. Don't know how we would survive the week without a day of peace and rest.

The sky was beautiful on our way home last week, we had to document it.

Our First Visitor!

One of our nieces, Calli, mailed us Flat Stanley as part of her 1st grade class project. Each student is given a Stanley to mail to someone they know. The person who receives Stanley is then supposed to take him out and show him around where they live, documenting his experience with pictures and a letter, then return him. As the students get their Stanley's back, the teacher takes a little time out of class to teach them about where he has visited.

A couple of my siblings got a chance to do this when we were younger, but my class did not. I was always jealous and wanted to mail a Stanley to someone. Well, now, being on the receiving end, I feel validated. It was fun to think of somewhere cool to take Stan and what pictures we could get with him. The letter asked for A picture. As in one. Have you met me? I fully inherited the compulsive family gene that causes us to go overboard, I mean "go the extra mile", with projects. As my sister, Terra (Calli's mom), pointed out to me, knowing the people in our family, we could create a whole scrapbook of Stanley's adventures and turn it into a massive project. I really had to restrain myself from doing just that. In the end, I only sent 3 pictures and a short-ish note. (I know! I'm totally surprised too!) Oh, and I let Stanley pick up a few souvenirs to take home, since according to Calli's teacher, this is the furthest he's gone from their class.

The text for his note went something like this:

We had a fabulous time with Flat Stanley whilst he was here in London. We went on an outing to the city. He got to ride the tube for the first time. We saw loads of fun things but his favourites were Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abby and Big Ben at the Parliament Building.

Also on our outing, Flat Stanley stopped to make a phone call to his mum from a red phone booth and waved at the passengers on a double decker bus. He ate fish & chips by the Thames River and bought a few souvenirs, a traditional bowler hat and a "Union Jack" (the British Flag).

Thanks for sending Flat Stanley on his first trip across the pond. We very much enjoyed showing him around London.

Cheers!
Emily & Brent Gray

Here are the pictures from our trip and one of him before he got folded back up and stuffed into the envelope for his journey home.