busy busy

These last few weeks have been busy busy. Sister Lowrey one of our office staff senior missionary sisters was reassigned to the Tulsa Oklahoma mission, so I was asked to fill in for her until President Brown can find a replacement. Because the office staff is not cross trained and I got little to no training I have had to figure out how to maneuver around in the programs I am responsible for without erasing something important or crashing some program.  AMAZING!!!!! I have.... and after 2.5 weeks of working in the office I am comfortable with all the things I am assigned to do. Goes to show that as missionaries we get extra blessings because computers are NOT my forte. To add to the confusion the keyboards here are different.Letters and number keys are in the right place but the other keys are all mixed up so I am constantly hitting the wrong key.  AND many words are spelled different and that throws me off. ie: tire= tyre, center= centre,  program= programme, to name just a few.  There are many many more.  Marshall also has been keeping busy helping out in the office.  He has been helping with the finance and straightening out utility and phone problems. As we all know he is a problem solver so he has made a huge improvement in their utility tracking systems for all the missionary flats and has saved the mission $$$$'s by tracking down all the meter readings on every flat in the mission. Plus the phone system has had several problems that no one has solved. He has that almost taken care of also. We don't know how long we will be working in office but we will do it as long as they need us.  We are also still taking care of our YSA responsibilities so some of our days are very long.  
The daylight hours are abundant this time of year.  It is light from about 3:30ish am till about 11:00 pm. Hard for me to sleep when it is still light outside.  Should not complain..... we are told that in the winter it will switch and it will be dark most the time with little daylight.  I definitely prefer the daylight to the dark.
We have been traveling a lot around the mission doing flat inspections and have enjoyed seeing all of the beautiful country. So so much green everywhere we drive. We love the miles and miles of green fields and all the rock walls. It must have taken years and years to build all the rock walls in this country. I can't imagine where they could have found so many rocks.
It takes sooooo much longer to travel here its shocking.  We had to go do a flat inspection in Galishields, we plugged it into our SAT NAV (GPS unit) and it said it was an hour and 35 min drive.  Then we looked at the milage, 32 miles. Alway so surprising. But these little country roads with all of their round abouts just make the trips so much longer to drive.  I have to say it  was the most beautiful drive that we have had since we have been here. It was breathtaking country.  As a side note, our SAT NAV is our most treasured companion. When ever we leave town we have it on. It is an amazing little unit that keeps us from being lost, even though at times it takes us on the scenic route and not the most efficient one. All the missionaries if they have cars have them. The UK has what is called post codes.  Every area has its own, like Edinburgh has many all by itself.  You can plug in the post code on your SAT NAV and it will bring up most of  the addresses in that post code and you can tap the correct address and then follow the instructions to get where you want to go. It is a great system.  Sometimes the SAT NAV is a bit off but at least we are close and can find where were are looking for on our own.Also another help is that every city is divided into several area's with names.  Like our first flat was in what is called the Carrick Knowe area. We lived on Carrick Knowe Avenue, but in that area there would be a Carrick Knowe Road, Close, Cressant, Lane, Loan, Mew,Burn, Grove, etc etc.  with a post code of EH12 7BX.  Now we live on Burnbrae Drive, so we live in the Burnbrae area, with a post code of EH12 8AS so all the streets are Burnbrae road, craig, etc etc.  This system also helps us foreigners to find our way around town.
I have been writing this post for several days.  Hummmm...  but in the meantime we received notice that we do have a new Senior sister assigned to our mission who will be my replacement. She is scheduled to arrive the end of aug.  That  is one of my responsibility's is to process the paperwork of our in coming missionaries.  At least now we have a date for how much longer we will be in the office.
 Will skip the vocabulary lesson for this post even tho I do love the words here.