Computer woes

We all know that our computers are a blessing in our lives, except when they break down. For some time mine has been a pain in the neck. It had gotten slow, programs and drivers disappeared and I spent half my time repairing stuff. Then I discovered my hard drive was "terminally ill". Rather than spend a fortune on a new computer, I decided to buy a new hard drive. When I read the instructions on installation, I decided I was in over my head. So I asked Sidney, from our church to help. Read, do it for me! He came over for lunch on Sunday and then installed the hard drive. Didn't look the least bit easy to me! Although I had made back ups of everything, most of the programs had to be reinstalled and a few even re-downloaded and updated from the internet. That is time-consuming and sometimes frustrating. Because I'm obssesed or neurotic, I'm not sure which, I wanted it DONE now. Consequently, I stayed up all night working on it. At 5:00 I couldn't function too well, so I slept for a few hours. Now I'm back at it. I'm happy to report most everything is up and running. I still am struggling to recover my e-mails. They are there on the old drive, but so far I haven't had too much luck opening them. I can't believe how much quicker the whole computer runs now. As they always say, all's well that ends well.

Frost on the Pumpkin

Fall seems to arrived here and it is time to rake the leaves as the trees are mostly bare now. This has been a mild fall, however, and we still haven't had a good frost yet, although this week does promise some much cooler weather. Out west they have had their first big snow, so ours can't be too far behind. My task for yesterday and today is to do the closet change-over. Bring out the gloves, hats, long underwear, coats, etc. and put away the shorts and summer clothes. That's always a melancholy task, for the winter seems ever so long once it begins. I've been resisting, but yesterday João and I started out for a walk and I had to come back and put on a jacket, gloves and a hat. It was 38 degrees and I was feeling it.
There is not exciting news to report on. Sunday I preached at a neighbouring church and had just a fabulous experience. They church has called a new pastor and it seems my message was exactly what they needed to hear in preparation for the mandate they have given her as their new pastor. God works in wonderful ways. On Saturday another church used our church for their retreat. We had so much fun working together to make lunch and had good fellowship with the others. In addition, João adquired a copy of the book they were studying. That gave me one more wonderful book to read. I am doing reviews of two other books and find my nose in a book when I'm not trying to fix my computer.
That's my crisis of the moment. It seems my hard disk is in "imminent danger" of permanently failing. There seems to be a "spin-up retry failure". Got that? Me neither. But I do know it's not fixable. So I've been diligently backing up EVERYTHING. And when you have 22GB of stuff, that's a lot of back-up. So when the failure happens (could be tomorrow, could be next year) I am ready. Time consuming, but it has to be done.
Enough is enough! I think I shall go inspect my flowers, ignore the falling leaves and generally enjoy life today.

Thanksgiving

Monday, October 11 is Thanksgiving. We decorated the church with the produce God has given us and it really was beautiful. Everyone admired God's handiwork. We have so much to be grateful for. It would really be hard to try to mention all our blessing this year. It has been so rich. It is good to PRAISE THE LORD.
For lunch today are looking forward to a real turkey dinner with cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. So I must run along and make the pumpkin pies!

Happy Birthday to Me!

I had a great birthday on Tuesday, celebrating my 52nd. I don't feel old, in fact I feel terrific. It was wonderful to have my mom here to celebrate with me. My day started out great, with lots of presents on my breakfast table. João and my mom took me out to lunch. We went to Wakefield, Quebec and got to see the beautiful autumn leaves of the Gatineau hills. The restaurant we went to, the Penstock, is at the lovely Le Moulin (The old mill), which you can see below. We thoroughly enjoyed our lunch and our leisurely drive home through the hills and by the rivers and lakes.

This is the cool restaurant - it looked just like this with the fireplace working because of the very chilly day.

The day ended with lots of nice phone calls from family and friends. I went to sleep very happy and feeling very loved. That's a nice way to end your day.

My mom has now returned home and the house is awfully quiet. I miss her more now than before her visit, but that's the way it usually works. It's great to have her close enough for these visits. So for me, "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world."

Catching up... Or is it running ahead?

My poor blog! Well, if I have any readers left, I guess you know I’ve been busy and have sorely neglected my blog these days. Week before last we had a missionary at our church and she stayed at our house. I had known her in Brazil, although she has just finished a term in Mozambique and will now be going to Angola. It meant so much to our church to hear her. This Sunday we took up a missions offering and received around $800. We are SO excited. That is really terrific for us. In the summer we had had an offering for Bolivia and gotten around $300, so as João would say “There is hope for us, for where there is a love of missions, certainly God’s people are awake.”
But I get ahead of myself. Or is it behind? At any rate, this past week my mom arrived for a stay and we are having a really good time together, although I can’t think of anything exciting we have done. We just enjoy each other’s company.
Yesterday, Sunday, we had our bilingual service and it went well, although attendance was considerably down. We had so many people out of town. I’m not sure why. In the evening we had the associational meeting at our church. This year we decided to focus on worship and not business. Instead of our usual 30 or so people we must have had well over 100. Our church was packed to overflowing. João said it was so much fun to speak to a really full house. We celebrated the diversity of our churches here by invited various ethnic groups from our Baptist churches to share in the service. We had a children’s Haitian choir to sing – they were so cute in their uniforms. A Burmese choir sang and just knocked our socks off. There were terrific. I kept remembering the suffering of Adoniram Judson (the 18^th century pioneering missionary to Burma) and seeing these, his great-great-great grandchildren (spiritual) and knowing that it’s really all worth it! Our group sang a “samba” arrangement of a Brazilian chorus. We sang hymns in French, Spanish, English and Portuguese. The people from our church read scriptures in about 7 different languages. It was a wonderful evening. I came home tired (I am associational clerk, so I had lots of responsibilities), but so full! What a great way to spend your day. So that’s my blog for today (or is it my blah, blah, blah?)