After a four-month hiatus, I have decided to it is time to resume blogging again. The break has been good and productive, and now I'm ready to get back to regular writing. I will continue to do the weekly Miscellanées series I began during the break, but those posts will move to Saturday (as you will have noticed with the most recent in the series), and will now be combined with the sort of regular blogging I was doing before I took a hiatus. But as bloggers tend to do – wisely, I think – I make no promises about the regularity of posting.

If you've hung on during the break, I appreciate it, and look forward to your contributions to the forthcoming conversations. The first new post will be up later today.

This is going to be the last post on this blog for the indefinite future. Over the last few months, I've been thinking about taking some time to focus my attention elsewhere, particularly on some more in-depth theological study and more focused and substantial writing projects. The time afforded by temporarily giving up blogging will help me achieve this goal.

Blogging has been a very beneficial exercise for me over the past years. I've used it as a forum to think through a number of different things, and it has helped me improve my writing a great deal. I will certainly return to it in the future, but for now I'm not sure when that will be.

My online presence will really be limited to Twitter from this point forward, so you are welcome to follow me there. I would deactivate my Facebook account, but I manage our church's Facebook page and can't deactivate without also losing the ability to manage that page. As a result, I will have to just limit my Facebook usage as much as possible.

To all of you who read this blog and have contributed to the conversations over the years, I thank you. I will look forward to resuming those conversations at some point in the future.

Our move to England has involved an introduction to the massive industry of container shipping, which I've found to be rather fascinating. On 21 June, a 20-foot container arrived at our house, which we loaded up with all our belongings. It's now on a ship called the APL Qatar (at least, by process of elimination, I've determined with 95% certainty that this is the ship it's on), and is supposed to dock at the Port of Felixstowe tomorrow morning. It has been fun to track the ship as it's moved across the Atlantic using a tool I found at MarineTraffic.com.

According to Wikipedia, there are some 18,000,000 containers that make 200,000,000 trips each year around the world. This whole shipping industry is really an incredible operation. The ship our container is on holds some 4,000 containers, and can be loaded and unloaded in just a few hours. Below are some photos of the whole process, including loading our container, the ship our container is on, and some photos of the operations at Felixstowe.

It has been ten days now since I last posted here, mostly because I have been very busy in the past little while. Blogging has not taken priority while I have been working through a long to-do list. In addition to the usual work I am doing, things have been quite a bit busier at the church as we prepare for Good Friday and Easter services, and I have been teaching a couple of lessons for our adult Sunday School class as well.

Things are progressing with our visas as well, and it appears that we might finally be nearing the end of what has become a very long process. We will soon need to start working through the paperwork that needs to completed on our end. I have been spending a lot of time researching all the information available online about this process to make sure that we understand what is going on. Given that it is government documentation, you can be sure it will not be nice and straightforward and will take some time to fill out properly. I will leave it at that for now in regards to the visas until we know more.

The silence will probably continue here for awhile, at least until Easter is past. Thanks for checking in, and I do hope those of you reading this are doing well.

If you are a sports fan, you may have already seen this. At the Atlanta Braves versus Toronto Blue Jays spring-training game last Friday in Kissimmee, Florida, Braves' second baseman, Dan Uggla, let go of his bat swinging for a pitch. Mitch Davie caught the bat in midair as it hurtled towards the stands, not even spilling a drop of his Red Stripe beer (notice, too, the near-perfect product placement). Some of the articles out there almost seem to debate which is the greater feat.

What you probably don't know is that Mitch is the manager at the Hertz location I work at. It's kind of cool to have your manager nominated on one site for sports fan of the year. As a result, he's been getting all kinds of friend requests on Facebook, and he's been asked to do several radio interviews. The three guys to his right are other Hertz managers from this area, and I'm thinking they are probably glad he was there with them.