Frozen trees and praying

There is a weather phenomenon called 'frozen fog' that we have experienced this last week. Basically I think that fog rolls in from the ocean, much like it does over the Natal midlands, but then gets surprised by a nasty -17 degrees mainland, and goes into shock. Before it has time to wet its proverbials, everything is frozen and it carries on as usual. But whatever it comes into contact with gets covered in a fine layer of ice crystals. When it snows, the trees get these heavy lumps of white on any part that has sufficient surface to hold a bit of weight, but this just coats everything. It is spectacularly beautiful. I sometimes saw white plastic christmas trees in shops in SA, and always wondered at how fake you could get - why not luminous pink or ultramarine, while you are at it. But now I understand that they were trying to copy this.

We have just finished a week of prayer and fasting with our bible study group, and had a great

time praying with our friends. Instead of normal bible study, we spent the evening praying for the group and each other, and then also had a night of prayer on Friday. We really hope that we can do this more regularly, there is no real culture of prayer here, and the church prayer meeting consists of three guys who meet every week.

My mom is coming to visit next week, which we are excited about, since we were not able to go home and see all the other family. We are hoping to make a plan about when we can go soon, but are still waiting on an ID number for Annabel before we can really start thinking about it.

We have been skiing as often as Annabel allows it. Tracy needs to feed her and then go, while I take care of the hour and a half she is away. It is really fun, and we have found some nice tracks around the area we live, through the forest. I was thinking of the scene in the Narnia book last time I went skiing, where the little girl first arrives in Narnia and she comes to a place in the forest where there is a lamppost. It felt like I was in the Narnian forests.

Christmas, New Year and Travels

We have had an amazingly frustrating 4 weeks with regards to our travel plans. Annabel needs a South African ID number and passport, and a Finnish visa/residence permit in order to travel. To get all these things properly would take about 9 months. Unfortunately we had planned to travel to SA, our plane left last week, in fact. But we had hoped that we could get a temporary passport and a quick issue re-entry visa, which, in theory, should take a little more than a week. Unfortunately the embassy sent our application for an ID number a little later than immediately, and then Home Affairs lost the application. This we discovered after Tracy's parents and their friends spent the best part of 3 days on the phone. We found a very helpful man, who discovered that the whole diplomatic bag was lost. So he said that we could re-send the application to him and he would take it down to the ID department personally. So we sent all the documents that the embassy told us to have. He then found that we also need our birth-certificates ??? Isn't Home Affairs the place I should go if I want a re-issued birth certificate? Surely they can check on the system? Anyway, mine is in a box somewhere in Hilton, but we managed to find a copy of Tracy's and sent that off. So now we are waiting to hear from him again if that is enough.

So the short of it is that our trip has been postponed. :(

Sorry if you had planned to see us, we will have to make another plan, there is always room in our flat here...

We spent Christmas eve with Simon and Sini, who cooked us a traditional Finnish Christmas meal, it was truly delicious, and we had a lovely time decorating their tree and chatting. We also went with Willem and Hanna-Leena to a little cottage about 3 hours from here for New Years eve.

We were invited long ago, but thought that we would be flying to SA, so then we re-invited ourselves and joined them on short notice. It was great to get our minds off the dissapointment. We spent lots of time playing board games, sledding and in the sauna. We went from the 90 degrees of the sauna to roll in the snow at -21. I think that is quite an impressive temperature differential. The other friends who we spent time with there grew up in the town. Her family have been farming the same farm since before 1630 - take that Jan van Riebeeck!

It has been truly freezing here since Christmas, with temperatures very rarely going above -10, and as low as -24. We have been cross-country skiing a lot, there are some tracks in the park just over the hill, and you can follow them for kilometers, if you had the fitness. I joined Thomas and some other friends this morning for a lovely ski in a big centre. There are lots of uphills and downhills, and we completed a circuit of about 7 km. Milla has promised to take Tracy soon.

A family pic

We caught Annabel in one of her very happy moments! She gives the biggest smiles when she's fed, got a clean nappy, is not tired and has no tummy troubles... that's at least once a day!