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Another quick update about the weekend. On Friday night we helped out at 21, which was mostly preparing for the youth service on Sunday night.

Then on Saturday we did some shopping in the morning, followed by some Moore Course revision in the afternoon (the exam is on 27th, so just under two weeks left to go now. It will go by quickly!) Then, in the evening we had AJ and Jen round for dinner. We made a curry, and it seemed to go very well. AJ even took a picture of the bombay potatoes in the dish and set it as his phone wallpaper! I’m not quite sure why, but they did look good. Afterwards we played games, mainly a game called “Cranium” – which was great fun, although it was probably one of those evenings where you had to be there – and then we played Uno. It’s the kind of evening we should really do more often!

Anyway. On Sunday we went to the Mothering Sunday service in the morning, then back for lunch and a bit more revision, then out again for the youth service. So, there you have it, that was our weekend!

Well, not really, but I was on Saturday. For most of the day. The reason was, on Friday night we had the 21 overnighter. Now, I’d love to tell you why it was an overnighter, but the truth is I’m not really sure… we basically spent an hour or so playing games / praying for the ‘JOY’ event that’s happening in a couple of weeks, and then spent a couple of hours playing on the Wii or watching a film (the former for the boys, the latter for the girls) and then we went to sleep. Well, that is to say, some of us went to sleep.

I tried to go to sleep, but I met with limited success. AJ had left the heating on so it was very warm in the barn (it didn’t help that I was in a sleeping bag which was rated down to -9! I guess it will come in useful at the weekend away though – last year I was too cold in the sleeping bag I had), also I was sleeping on an airbed which was not the most comfortable think in the world. So I was pretty tired by the time morning came round!

Still, it was a good night. The kids really seemed to enjoy it anyway, so that was positive.

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping. I bought a couple of new CDs (Seasick Steve’s album, which I’ve wanted to get for a while now, and also ‘Is This It’ by The Strokes which I’ve always seen but never got round to actually buying before. They were on offer in HMV…) I also bought the Black Books box set (three series of comedy brilliance for £12, bargain), and I also bought a new shirt and trousers for work. In the evening we didn’t do much! Anne-Marie came round and stayed for dinner, and we watched some Black Books and Frasier, so it was quite a relaxing evening which I think we needed!

On Sunday we had church in the morning, as per usual – although as per, well, not usual – I was down to lead. Only I didn’t. Unfortunately I only found out about it this week, and due to one thing and another I felt like I couldn’t really lead! So I will have to lead that service some other time. Not really a big issue though. Then, in the evening we went to Sunday@6 and afterwards watched ‘Lark Rise’.

So that’s pretty much our weekend! Not much going on this week, tomorrow evening Anne-Marie and Sarah are coming round and we’re going to watch the last part of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ series 2. Apparently the two final episodes are some of the best TV the BBC put out last year, so I’m quite looking forward to it!

So, quick update as to what was going on this weekend. On Friday night we helped out at 21 (back after half-term), and then went to the pub with most of the 21 crew (AJ, Laura, Jen and her sister, and James and Tash). It’s nice to have so many friends from church at the moment – especially with so many Colchester people moving away … *sob*. Aaaaanyway!

On Saturday morning, Sam Norton (the Diocesan Warden of Ordinands, who I mentioned before) came round to chat to Phil and I about ministry. It went well, and what I need to do now is send off my form and he will forward it on to the Diocesan Director of Ordinands! I won’t go into the way the CofE ordination process works, but it basically means I’m sort of on the next rung of the ladder. So that’s exciting anyway :)

In the afternoon we did a bit of shopping and saw Alex for a cup of tea. Then we headed round to Tom’s for the “Great Essex Feast”. Basically the idea was a fund-raising exercise for the Essex Air Ambulance and Friends of Essex Churches charities. Someone (in this case, Tom) would donate the food, and people would then come round, eat the food, and donate money to the charity. It was a great evening and I think we raised a decent amount! I drank and ate an awful lot and felt a bit groggy on Sunday morning, but not too bad.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then were invited out to the Carmels for lunch with some of the students. We had a good lunch there, and then stayed most of the afternoon chatting and playing on the Wii! Then we went out to Sunday@6, where I was leading the music for the first time. That seemed to go well although there weren’t so many people there, think we had a few regulars missing.

And then we came back and watched ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, which is pretty much everything that happened this weekend!

I should also mention – last week we watched ‘500 Days of Summer’ which is a good film and very cleverly written. However, I wasn’t sure about the conclusion… I wasn’t sure whether it was saying the normal Hollywood thing of “You just have to find the right person” or not. (And I can say that without giving anything away, because the ending is probably not what you’d expect). So, it’s worth watching, but I don’t think it’s one I’d watch again.

Just a quick post to let you know what happened on the second half of the weekend! Most of Saturday was taken up with sessions – two in the morning and one group session in the evening. In the afternoon we went on a walk in the nearby countryside, alongside a canal, which was a very pleasant way to spend a sunny afternoon.

On Sunday morning we had another two sessions, followed by a roast dinner, which was very nice. The food over the whole weekend was great, actually – I ate far too much but still! After that came the drive home, which passed by pretty uneventfully with very little traffic. I slowed down a little bit on the way home as well, and it certainly affected the petrol consumption – the needle moved noticeably more slowly!

After that we headed out to Sunday@6, then came back home and watched ‘Lark Rise’.

I just wanted to mention the teaching at the weekend: it was based on Old Testament narrative – how to preach it. I think I’d feel much more confident if I had to preach and Old Testament narrative passage than I would have done before. It hasn’t made it any easier but does give me a way of breaking into the passage, and a few ideas about how to present it. Very helpful. If you’re involved with preaching or teaching the Bible, it would definitely be worth going to! Many of the people who I met had been there before, which I think just illustrates how useful it is. I will try and get there next year as well!

Just thought I’d post a quick update with what’s been going on here recently! We had a quieter weekend this week.

On Friday night, because it’s half-term this week, we had the 21 social. It was a cleudo-style murder mystery (well, technically a kidnap mystery), where the leaders all played suspects and the kids had to work out who did it! It was actually really fun, even though I’m not very good at that kind of thing.

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping, and then in the afternoon went round to see Jo and Evie. We took some dinner round – we cooked some Balti Butter Chicken which was absolutely delicious (even if I do say so myself. Well, Phil did most of the cooking, so it’s not like I’m praising myself anyway!) And we also played some Guitar Hero. I must say, I’m finding Guitar Hero more difficult than playing the actual guitar for some reason! Well, not more difficult as such, but it’s a completely different skill from playing the guitar. I’m sure that if you’ve never played an instrument before it would give you a bit of a leg up, but I doubt very much it would help you in any way other than rhythm, and perhaps strenthening your fingers a bit.

Anyway. On Sunday we went to church in the morning, then came back for lunch, and then went round to Jo’s again and went for a walk around Castle Park with Evie. We fed the ducks, which is something I haven’t done in a long time! The ducks didn’t seem too bothered though – maybe lots of people feed the ducks on Sunday afternoon?!

Afterwards we headed out to Sunday@6, before watching ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’. I think I’m enjoying this series less than I did the previous two… it’s kind of gone from being a quaint slice of English life to taking a few issues and hitting them with a sledgehammer. I don’t know whether the writing team has changed, but it seems this series is a bit more “hey, let’s have some social commentary in there!” than it did in the previous series.

This week is only a two-day week for us – we’ve both taken off our remaining holiday for this holiday yea, Wednesday to Friday. At the weekend I’m going away for a Bible Training weekend with the Proclamation Trust, so I’m quite looking forward to that. I’ll report back on that next week…

Last night we watched through the final episode of “Glee”. We’ve now seen all of the first series. I’m not convinced by it to be honest – there are some aspects of the series which I think are odd, and one which I actually find quite uncomfortable.

Also note that this post will contain a few spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Glee but want to, you may want to leave this post until you have seen it.

First things first though, the positive aspects. I do like the music – although I didn’t know all the songs I felt like the ones that they did do were well done. I was quite impressed with the way they covered some of the pop songs such as Queen’s “Somebody to Love”: most of the time I think covers of iconic songs shouldn’t be done, because they rarely do the original justice. But in this instance they made the cover version different enough from the original to make it good in its own right – rather than just ripping off the genius of Queen.

I also liked their characterisation: I mentioned last time that all the characters were essentially pantomime characters. This wasn’t true for the whole series – all the characters (even Sue Sylvester) were made into more 3D characters, and were well portrayed on screen. I particularly liked the relationship between Will, Terri and Emma – I actually thought it was quite untypical for American TV, a lot of the scenes they had were quite simple, without any background music, just them with nothing else to heighten the drama.

That said… there were some aspects of Glee I didn’t like.

The main one was Sue Sylvester. Although the writers did make her character more sympathetic, she was just too pantomime for me. The show had some really nice moments, some good drama, some good humour – but Sue just was completely over the top for me. It seemed like the show was a little schizophrenic about whether to be a comedy or a drama, and it just didn’t quite work for me.

Part of the problem is, Sue was just such an unlikeable character I didn’t see how she couldn’t still have been working at the school without being fired. If I was Will Schuester, I wouldn’t have given her the time of day. If she’d started talking to me, I would have walked off!

I think part of the problem is, everyone was treating her as a ’serious’ character. I compared Glee to Green Wing in my last post, and there are similarities: it has serious moments but it also has some very random, funny moments. (Yeah, that’s about where the similarities end, but still). Alan Statham and Sue White are two examples of characters in Green Wing who are completely bizarre, and yet somehow it seems quite normal in the world they created. It doesn’t seem out of place. Sue Sylvester, on the other hand, seems out of place. Anyway, I’ve rambled on about that for long enough.

The other thing which didn’t sit right with me is the ‘adultery’ storyline (apologies for slightly dramatic language, but that’s what it is): everyone was behaving pretty badly to each other in the show – what with Terri lying to Will, Quinn and Puck lying to Finn etc, but Will’s behaviour really seemed out of order. If you’re married, falling in love with someone else isn’t something which you should really do. It’s not just when you’ve got the feeling you can’t help but do anything about it! It’s just presenting, to my mind, another flawed version of love to the world.

Still, all in all, it was quite watchable and hopefully they’ll improve things a little next season. Who knows! That’s all from me anyway…

Last Thursday it was Phil’s birthday. Her parents came up for the day (Phil had the day off), and then in the evening we all had dinner together. It was rather nice! The first of three birthday meals we’ve had over the past few days… but I’ll come onto that in a minute.

On Friday night we went to 21, as per usual. Then afterwards we headed over to the Three Horseshoes for a drink with Laura, Pete, AJ and Jen. It was cool to be able to spend time with them socially as we don’t usually have time, and we all get on well. So hopefully we’ll get to do it again soon!

On Saturday we spent the morning doing various random things in town. Then in the afternoon we went out for a walk round Castle Park with Jo and Evie. Jo had an ice cream, which I think was rather brave – although it was sunny it was still a bit chilly! We also saw the floor of the Roman house near to the Castle, which is fascinating. It’s the remains of a Roman house – just the flooring is left. It’s lasted pretty well given it’s about 1800 years old! And although we’ve been in Colchester for ages we’ve never seen it before for some strange reason. Afterwards we headed over to Ipswich to have dinner with my parents (birthday meal #2!) and enjoyed that.

Then on Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then out to the Yew Tree at Great Horkesley for lunch. We’ve been there a few times before. This time we had a “buy one main course get another free” voucher (you can get them if you sign up to the mailing list), so we had a relatively cheap and very tasty roast dinner! The service was a bit slow but they were very busy so I can forgive them for that.

Afterwards we headed out to Sunday@6, and then came back to see Jo and Evie for a bit. I played some more of Guitar Hero (Jo has a Wii, and it’s great fun. I wouldn’t like to get one though – I’d probably spend all my time on that rather than learning that actual guitar, which wouldn’t be good). And then we watched ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, which was a nice gentle way to finish the weekend.

So, there you have it! Action-packed, as it were.

This weekend was the 3rd Annual Colchester Winter Beer Festival, held at Colchester Arts Centre. We went along on Saturday afternoon, and met up wtih Alex, Matt, Tom and Alison. In general it was a very good afternoon, as always! Afterwards we headed to the Ashiana for a curry, which I managed most of even after having a few slices of the Pie of Awesomeness from Proctor’s. (The Pie of Awesomeness is a very nice pork pie which we first tried at the Fat Cat. I don’t usually like pork pies but those are … well, awesome).

Anyway. So Saturday was very enjoyable :) On Sunday we went to church in the morning (getting a lift with someone, as I shall explain in a moment), and then in the afternoon we went for a nice walk around Highwoods (through the mud!), then went round to see Jo and Evie for a bit, then watched Lark Rise to Candleford and Rhod Gilbert’s Award-Winning Mince Pie. On our new HDTV. I shall review the HDTV at a later date, suffice it to say at the moment that I am impressed with it! We haven’t yet watched any proper HD content on it (some Blu-Ray discs are coming via LoveFilm so hopefully soon…) and I will give it some more time then.

Aaaaanyway. Back to Rhod Gilbert: he has got to be one of the funniest guys I’ve seen in a long time. Absolutely hilarious. The show itself was very clever, the way he drew out one story into all the different strands, and they came together quite cleverly at the end. I would recommend anyone who’s a fan of comedy to see it – you can get a good idea of what it will be like by looking up his Live at the Apollo gig from a year or two ago.

I mentioned the car. We’ve been having a few problems: on Tuesday morning I was driving into work, and noticed the car losing power. It turns out that the car hadn’t just lost power, it was basically dead (the engine pretty much cut out). Fortunately, thank God, I wasn’t going very fast at the time and was just able to coast off the A12 and pull up at the side of the road. (The fortunately is because I’d been spending the previous 20 minutes doing about 2mph, average, crawling along the A12 – I wouldn’t have had enough speed to get off the road! And if I’d been going much faster, it would have been very difficult to stop: the Saab is a heavy car and the brakes didn’t do much without being servo-assisted)

So, I pulled over and called up the AA, who arrived fairly promptly. After doing some tests the AA man decided he couldn’t fix it on the road, and so towed me to Wivenhoe. Being towed was an interesting experience – it was a fixed bar, the van in front of me did all the accelerating / braking. I just had to steer and indicate. It was strange not actually having to use any of the pedals! Anyway, we eventually got the car to the mechanic, and I worked from home that day.

The rest of the week I have been getting the bus into work (not nice – there are limited buses to Chelmsford from Colchester and it takes over an hour… although I guess I should be lucky I can get the bus at all).

It took a couple of days to diagnose exactly what was wrong with the car, but it’s apparently the ignition coil pack. That is … well, suffice it to say it’s a fairly expensive part to replace (in the order of about £400). But again, I should be grateful it wasn’t the ECU – modern ECUs are quite expensive (£1800 or so), so it could have been much worse. The part should have been delivered on Friday or Saturday, so I’m hoping that the car will be fixed today! I think the part is fairly easy to replace from what the mechanic has told me, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be back with me later today (or tomorrow).

So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t mention going to 21 on Friday night: I wasn’t able to (the bus doesn’t get back to Colchester until too late), and why we didn’t go to Sunday@6 yesterday. Still, these things do happen! One of the perils of running a car – even newer cars aren’t immune from these kind of issues.

Hah. In “my room” (a/k/a the study) in our house I have a piano, two guitars, and an effects pedal. The piano has the ability to record things, and it also has the ability to pretend to be a bass. The effects pedal has a little drum machine on it. Can you see where this is going? Yep, I’ve just played four instruments simultaneously… sort of. And I did cheat on one – I wasn’t actually playing the drums. But still, it’s fantastic fun. I’ve just spent half an hour rocking out like Led Zeppelin. (Note to self: using the “Jimmy Page” setting on my effects pedal does *not* make me sound like Jimmy Page…)

It does make me think that I would quite like to be in a band though. Sunday@6 is good but it’s only really worship music at the moment. Anyone a bit crap at playing an instrument, like me, who wants to play a few random songs occasionally? ;)

Aaaanyway. Weekend antics. What did we get up to, etc. The usual. 21, shopping, church, relaxing. We watched “Burn After Reading” on Saturday night which is a typical Coen brothers film – a bit weird but quite clever and funny in places. Quite off-beat humour, if you like darker comedies you’d probably like this one.

The other news is, after rambling on about media centres and the like in my last post – and those of you who follow my Twitter feed will know this – we’ve decided to buy a new HDTV. It’s an LG 32″ Full HD model. Apparently, after we bought it the assistant told us it was what he and another one of the assistants had – and they were both really happy with it. Why he didn’t say that before I don’t know, but still, it looks pretty good. It should hopefully be delivered on Friday.

After all that talk about media centres and the like, I finally decided to go with a solid state Blu-Ray player. They had a very good deal on them, and I felt like the rest of our needs (iPlayer etc) for now can be handled by my laptop. So, not a very exciting outcome really, but there’s still scope for change!

Anyway, I think that’s all for now. Last night Matthew came and stayed with us, just for one night, because he had a meeting in Maldon this morning. It was nice to see him, albeit briefly, and he was even able to come and play drums at the Sunday@6 music rehearsal last night. Good fun.

Well, that’s about it for now, I’d better stop rambling again!

Quick weekend update: it was pretty standard, except for Friday night. 21 was cancelled because of the snow (apparently all the schools were closed around so it made sense). Luckily for us that meant we were able to go to the Ashiana – for the second time in a week! – with Dan, Tom and Alison as Dan is moving to Cardiff. After the (very nice) meal we went back to Tom’s flat and watched some Father Ted :)

Saturday evening we watched ‘Miss Congeniality’, which is quite a fun, entertaining film even if it’s not Oscar material. On Sunday we managed to get to both church services – we were a bit worried because of the snow, but it turned out that the snow was melting pretty much the whole day.

Anyway. I wanted to mention Dollhouse. It’s an American sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon. Alex has lent us the first series on DVD and we’ve gradually been watching through it. We watched the fourth episode last night, and we’re hooked! It’s quite compelling watching – it does take a while to really get going but it seems that it’s worth the wait.