A not very News-worthy Roundup of the last ten days, which we aren’t exactly sure where they disappeared to. Oh look, I’ve figured out how to do strikethrough text in HTML. The thing about writing our own software is that we don’t have handy buttons to do these things automatically, coupled with the fact that I’m a natural technophobe so please at least act like you’re a little bit impressed.
Our friend Sergio came out of prison, and we went to see him give his testimony at a church in Cordoba, along with his family, friends and even a Christian prison officer. He was initially homeless, so we invited him to stay with us, which wasn’t ideal as he is doing a course in Cordoba, as well as wanting to be closer to his kids. However, someone has now lent him a house to look after which is only a couple of kms outside Cordoba, and he is very happy with it; Martin is meeting him for lunch today.
I took a women’s meeting at short notice. We did a little Bible study about Lois (grandmother of Timothy, see 2 Tim 1:3-6 and 3:14-15) and I told them that grandmothers are the future, which I think they liked.
I also led our home group last week, which was going quite well until someone started talking about the demon in her bathroom, and the lady next to me started whispering “don’t worry, she’s mad”. We made 48 empanadas to share afterwards; empanadas are like meat pasties only smaller, so you have to calculate 5 or 6 per person. I’m also in charge of writing the next study; still ploughing our way through Mark, I’m in chapter 5 for this week.
Martin went to the prison in San Francisco on Saturday with our friend Miguel, which they were both pleased about, and we all went back to Miguel’s village of Porteña afterwards for coffee and cake with Miguel and Mrs Miguel. They are really solid “salt of the earth” folk, I always like to see them.
I spent an increasingly bad tempered day-and-a-half trying to sort out Martin’s insurance claim for his knee operation from last September. After all, if you are an insurance company purporting to deal with people living and working abroad, it would naturally make perfect sense for you to operate an email system which dumps attachments into a black hole, thus preventing anyone from sending you their claim forms. Doh! We finally solved it by Martin putting the whole thing onto a web-page and sending them the link to download it themselves. However, once they actually had the file, they turned it round in 48 hours which we can’t really complain about. The claims people were probably so surprised that a form had made it through their torturous communication department that they dealt with it by return as a mark of respect to a superior technical intellect. Or something.
We are making progress on the poo saga. After having to empty the black hole (not the same one where the insurance company’s emails go to… or maybe…) for the third time, we pleaded with the landlord, who agreed that we need to be connected to the mains sewage. So she sent a couple of goons around to measure up. Apparently their measurements are then sent to the municipality for project-planning permission. Time estimates for this to be given range from “a couple of weeks” to “a long time” so in the meantime, permission for pooing will be granted in exceptional circumstances.
These are our own home-grown kumquats being pickled in whisky: obviously next year’s project will be to distil the whisky as well. We also had our own spinach in the pasta sauce yesterday, and my parsley and oregano are coming on a treat.