Sunday Afternoon

Today we went to church in the morning as we usually do on a Sunday morning. I was there before any other people were, and I had the camera with me, so I took some photos of the views from the church windows. Two of the walls of our church have full size windows, so you can see the pretty view outside quite clearly from inside the church.



Then after church we had a nice barbecue lunch and then the girls decided to go and visit a friend of theirs for the afternoon. So Gary, Rachel and I had a really nice afternoon without the kids running around. It was a nice sunny day today, so at first we just sat in the garden enjoying the sunshine and had a little time to relax. Then Gary decided he should mow the lawn. Rachel did some other work in the garden to tidy it up. And I decided to move some wood over from the barn to the basement.

Back in England, we have central heating. You just press a button and the heating comes on. Over here, in the Canadian countryside, people use either oil which they store in a tank in their basement, or they burn wood. We try to burn wood rather than use oil as oil is a lot more expensive. As the weather is getting a bit warmer now, we don't put the heating on all day, just when we need hot water and late at night and early mornings. So we're trying to get by on just burning wood when we need to.

Gary and I stacked loads of wood in the basement until it was all full of wood back in September. This is a photo of when we first started to stack wood last September.

But now we're in May and we pretty much had used up all that wood by April, so now we have a little supply of wood left in the barn and we have to move it across to the basement. (The furnace where we burn the wood is in the basement). So I decided to move some wood across this afternoon. So I loaded up 3 barrels of wood like this one.

I took the wood over to the basement, and threw the wood down in the basement floor like this:

Then I went down in the basement and stacked up the wood neatly next to the furnace so it now looks like this:

And now we have some wood to burn in the furnace that will keep us going for the next few days. I really love stacking wood and making a fire in the furnace. It didn't take me long to move this wood as they are very small pieces of wood that I moved today and they're very light. You can see from the pictures that the wood I moved today is very different from the wood I stacked back in September. The wood in September was a lot bigger and heavier. This is a photo of the fire this afternoon in the furnace.

If I go back to England this year, I will definitely miss stacking wood and making the fire. I love living in the country. After I finished doing the wood, I sat down with Rachel and Gary on the veranda and we all had a nice cup of English tea. (I love English tea. Canadian tea is not that nice. They have nice coffee but not tea. I used to drink Arabic tea before I was 18 and went to university in England, then I got used to English tea. I love my cup of tea.)

We enjoyed sitting there and looking at the nice lawn that Gary had mowed and smelling the fresh cut grass.

And just before we went inside the house, I noticed a new flower that has recently appeared so I had to take a photo of it, even though I have showed you others that were similar. This one was in a different place and on it's own, but I really liked it.

When we got inside, the Iraqi doctor that was new in town that I met up with for a coffee a couple of months back rang me. I had not spoken to him the last couple of months, so it was really nice to hear from him today and tomorrow is a holiday in Canada, so he wanted to meet up again. I invited him to visit us tomorrow afternoon for a cup of coffee. I had enjoyed my last meeting with him a couple of months back, but as he is a married man and his wife is not here with him, I did not want to meet up with him very regularly. I look forward to seeing him tomorrow afternoon.

I am really excited though, because this weekend Gary had to visit one of the eye doctors in town, and the guy that he saw turned out to be Iraqi too and his wife is also here with him! Yay! Two more Iraqi people for me to meet. So I'll ask the doctor who's visiting tomorrow to introduce me to this couple. It will be nice for me to have an Iraqi female to talk to and visit.

So I guess the world is a small place after all, that after eight months of being in Nova Scotia, I come across some Iraqi doctors (yeah all three are doctors). I'm looking forward to making new friends.