Rewind!

Ok, so here is my last month in a "short" entry. Obviously my blog stopped working properly and I still don't really know why. Grr. But now it is working again yahoo. (I hope!) So here is what you missed!

I think I mentioned before that I lost my passport in January. Rather, I realized it was missing in January. I don't know where it went so I don't know when it was actually lost. So I looked for it until the end of February, convinced that it would turn up in some stupid place.Needless to say, it didn't. So at the beginning of March I started the process of applying for a new one. As I was filling out the online application I realized that I had not seen my birth certificate in awhile. Then I remembered putting my birth certificate in my passport for "safe keeping." The passport that I couldn't find.

This is not good because in order to apply for a passport you must have your birth certificate. I tried to apply for a birth certificate online but the website wasn't working so I took a road trip to Toronto with Jen to the placey place downtown. There they told me that it would take two months for my birth certificate to be replaced. Two months!! In two months I would be leaving for Rwanda!!! So this was just a little stressful. Then the guy said that if you apply online it only takes three weeks. I told him the website was down and he said they had it set up on the other side of the room. So I went all the way to downtown T.O. to apply online. Grr. Happily though my birth certificate arrived three days later - just in time to be a very happy birthday present!! I got to apply for my passport after standing in line for only 8 minutes.


So in order that my suffering has not been completely in vain, you must learn from it. First and most importantly, DO NOT LOOSE YOUR PASSPORT!!! EVER!!! .... but if you do make sure your birth certificate is not in it. When you apply do it online - you get to jump to the front of the line which is very nice. Lastly, and really I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT LOOSE YOUR PASSPORT!

This was all very stressful, but it is over now. My other adventures this month have to do with baking. I did A LOT of baking. We had a bake sale to raise money for the trip. I wanted to make paska, which I have never done before, so I did a trial run the wednesday before. It tasted great but looked weird. On saturday I went to the Elmira Maple Syrup festival. For those of you not from around here, this is a tradition here and everyone from miles around pours into Elmira, the small town 20 minutes outside of Waterloo where my dad grew up. The main streets turn into wall to wall people and the normally short scenic drive takes more than an hour. Good food, tractor rides and of course, maple syrup covered pancakes, are the main attractions. Fun times! Then in the afternoon I started baking. I made four batches of paska, 5 pies and 7 pie shells. I was in the kitchen until one in the morning and then because of a frosting crisis I had to get up at 5 to go to the grocery store. (Sobey's is open 24hrs.) For the record, I HATE frosting. The bake sale went really well and my pies sold out really quickly. We made 1500$. Later in the the week we did some baking with my small group to help my friend Cheryl who was doing a fundraiser at work for one of her coworker's whose son has cancer. Then I made 4 dozen cupcakes for my sister's birthday party. Again, let me say how much I really hate frosting!

Easter weekend was nice. Good Friday there was a joint service with all the MB churches in Kitchener Waterloo. It was cool to worship together like that and to take communion together, but the service was really basic and didn't have a meditation or any direction. It was a little disappointing. Sunday morning I went to both of my churches. WMB's service was really great - I love Easter at my church. The message was challenging and fun, the worship was good and I got to see some people I haven't seen in awhile. Then I went to Grace, where the message wasn't as good, but the hymns were good Oh well, nothing is perfect. I did miss St. Andrew's (my church in SA) and St Margarets though. I missed the liturgy, the tradition and the mystery of those services.

So, there is a recap of the last couple of weeks. I've been away from the blogging world for a couple of weeks, but I'll try to be better.