Today's marching orders as of this morning are as follows: go to church at 10, study scriptures for an hour, then take a nap.....
HALLELUJIAH!!!
I was soo excited to have a super empty day!! We walked about twenty minutes to our church building and nearly doubled the ward as we walked in. Two sets of missionaries greeted us at the door, one really tall elder just beamed at us as he held the door open; he was so incredibly excited to hear American accents again.
The ward is small, but sweet and pretty welcoming. Our Sunday school teacher was rather timid, but he made up for that just by having the awesome accent. But when a lady in our class told us that they needed someone to teach in the next few weeks, I totally volunteered. Yup.
Also, Ive decided that the unspoken law of requiring the relief society room to be about as cold as possible extends beyond the boundaries of utah: its accepted and upheld worldwide, ladies.
I enjoyed the lovely warm stroll home, and then started feeling pretty dizzy, so I unfortunately had to break my fast earlier than I wanted to. I did start feeling better very quickly after that, so I went to my room and read through my scriptures for a bit before I said a few long prayers, asking my Heavenly Father about some of the really big things that are happening right now. I really need to do that more often, because I really don't think I'm very good at it. Yet. One day I hope to be much better.
After a while, I took my laundry over to the other house to wash it and to also check up on my emails and such. On my way out the door though, Tom told us that he had decided that we needed to take advantage of the gorgeous weather and go on a guided tour of Cardiff for an hour in small groups. Honestly, I wasn't excited, but i'd like to think of myself as pretty obedient, so after I threw my laundry in and shot off a few emails, I found a group and we were off
The tour was okay. Honestly, it wasn't the most exciting tour of my life, but the weather was really nice, the company was fun (Courtney, Anders, Matt, and Mandi), and the gardens were gorgeous. The war memorials were my very favorite part, they always move me so much for some reason. They evoke a special kind of reverence, one that I really appreciate as an important quality of humanity.
On a less reverent note, I almost got Courtney to freak out when we walked past a really old crumbling building that had been turned into a cinema forever ago. The pamphlet we were reading said that the building was reported to house a ghost called the Gray Lady and that many had seen her. Looking up into the rafters, I saw four or five of the biggest filthiest spiders I've ever seen (it was like Heck threw up four or five little gobs on the ceiling). I didn't make a sound, but my face clearly expressed my subtle opinion, and Courtney saw it. But she didn't realize I was countering the presence of the spiders with my face; she thought I had seen the ghost, and she started freaking out herself. When I realized what was going on, I considered playing along, but she was seriously on the brink of something big, so I revealed my real hand to keep everything okay...as okay as a ceiling full of monsters gets.
When we got back home, I went to the other house, grabbed my laundry and my things and headed back to my house. I walked outside to our cute little courtyard and hung up my wet clothes on our clothes lines to dry before the sun set. While doing so, I heard the most beautiful piano music coming from our next door neighbors upstairs window. Was it a cd? Wait, the music paused, the last measure was played again, then again, then played slowly, a triplet phrase and mordant was drilled, then it was back up to speed, and then the music started again, a few measures back. A smile slowly spread on my crazy face with each redo: this was no cd, our neighbor is a concert pianist. :D glory be! I think I'll be moving a chair out to the back patio more often when we get home early. I've heard a TON of good pianists, but this guy just made it to my top 10 list, no joke!
I forgot to mention that when I first walked into the house to dry my laundry, the cute girls I'm doing pretty much everything with greeted me with a plate of steaming pasta noodles and some sauces. They had made a group dinner for us all from the ingredients we had picked out together at our last Tesco run! So that was a nice surprise. If you can't tell, I really do like happy surprises.
After dinner, I actually got in my pajams and went up to bed, only to realize that my hiking backpack had ripped all down one side and was coming loose on the other side. Since I knew it would take me a while to sew back up by hand, I took the opportunity to turn on a probably not very Sunday appropriate movie (sorry, I know I shouldn't have, but its been forever since I've seen a Bourne movie) to listen to while I fixed it up. I also took about fifteen minutes to work out a little bit too, something I've meant to do more, but haven't. So now m bag is good for probably another week of hard wear, but I plan on looking around for a solid shoulder bag I can keep my things in, since shoulder bags are better for being able to watch for sticy-fingered individuals than backpacks.
Once I was done with those things and Bourne had swam away triumphantly, it was scriptures, prayers, and then lights off. Oddly enough, it actually took me probably twenty minutes before I could fall asleep. That's super weird for me, as I have always been able to shut my thoughts off to go to sleep, but I still had a lot of big things on my mind I suppose. Oh we'll, best to leave some questions unanswered so I have something to do another day, right?
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