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Dear Friend,
Schools are now in the middle of the summer holidays in England. Things around here have been a little slower than usual because it would seem that all our friends are away with many of them on holiday. I (Chrysti) have found the slowness a challenge, but at the same time I’m enjoying the time we have with just our family. We have taken advantage of the warmer (sometimes drier) days and spent lots of time outside!
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On the Home Front
During the month of July we had some lovely summer-like weather! So we spent lots of time outside! Asher has enjoyed getting to run around outdoors, and we had barbecues nearly every week. We also spent a morning walking in the Lake District. It was our first walk as a family!
We have had lots of opportunity to be involved and serve at church. I (Chrysti) have enjoyed singing with the worship band on a couple of Sundays. We attended a Murder Mystery Dinner as a fundraiser for the church youth group. Leon and a few other guys from church had the opportunity to help a friend put in a new driveway a couple of weeks ago.
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Prayer Points
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Pray for all the complications revolving around my (Leon's) Office 365 pilot project. If this project goes well it will meet a lot of OM's existing ministry needs. Lot's of work and wisdom to get it work well.
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Pray for us on our church weekend away for good weather and spiritual refreshment. We will have much opportunity to build relationships with others from our small group.
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Our friendship with our neighbour continues to grow. Pray that we will continue to be God's witness in their lives.
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Leon has a cyst that needs surgery. It is looking like the earliest this will happen is October. Pray for healing.
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Leon's Work
The summer months tend to be very quiet as Chrysti said above. This is the case with the work I am doing for OM too. Most of the decision makers are either on holiday with family or on summer outreaches.
With the slowness it was a perfect time to do some much needed maintenance on our current email services. We were running out of disk space so I needed to work outside of typical office hours to do offline maintenance to free up space.
My biggest project is an Office 365 pilot for OM. We are making slow progress as we work through a bunch of technical difficulties. Our pilot is being done in a live environment so that we can test real live situations. This adds complexity and risk. The biggest hurdle is all Exchange email related and I am doing a lot of technical research for the project so that we don't cause disruption of our production systems.
I have gotten SaltStack (a DevOps solution) running on a number of our Linux servers. It certainly has a lot of potential, but I am now trying to figure out how this can be used by our team. I'm struggling with how to best sell the solution. I see the potential for assisting in managing our ever expanding server real estate, but have yet to come up with a good way to present it to the others here in our IT department.
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Looking Ahead...
The last weekend in August is a Bank Holiday (public holiday). We will be attending a weekend away with our church in North Yorkshire. We’re looking forward to spending time with our church family and taking Asher camping for the first time.
In September Leon will be attending the Leadership Matters Course (LMC) in Turkey. This is the course that he had planned on attending in March. Since it’s so far away, Asher and myself will be travelling with Leon! We will also be getting a family holiday while we’re there, and are looking forward to the time away!
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