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This weekend was a very special weekend. Phil’s sister Roz – my sister-in-law – was getting married! Phil travelled downon Wednesday night to help set up. I stayed in Colchester for a couple of nights and then headed down on Friday morning.

I will spare you most of the details but suffice it to say that Friday was mostly spent preparing the barn for the wedding reception. I set up and tested the PA system I bought a while back, and that was working beautifully (more on that later).

In the evening we (as in me, Phil, Phil’s parents, and Roz) went to dinner with Matt’s parents and family, which was a really nice evening! Then on Saturday morning it was all go. I gave Phil and Roz a lift to the hairdresser to have their hair done fairly early morning, and after that headed back to the flat to prepare. Phil and I headed off mid-morning to the church (the wedding was at noon). Phil was playing Roz up the aisle on piano – Handel’s Largo from Xerxes (which is the same piece of music that we had :) She did a really good job, although was shaking like a leaf afterwards!

The service itself was lovely – Darius, who was leading the service, did a really good job and had a very nice manner. Matt did once make a mistake in his vows, saying ‘lawfully wedded husband’ rather than ‘wife’, which caused much amusement! But it went without a hitch. Phil and I were playing piano and clarinet together during the signing of the register, which seemed go down fairly well too. We just played a couple of nice arrangements of hymns I have.

Then, after the service, it was time for the reception. That, again, was a really lovely time – lots of catching up with friends and family we haven’t seen in a while! I’m getting to know some of Phil’s family better now so it was good to see them again. The meal was a BBQ, unusual for a wedding but absolutely perfect! Delicious food provided by the caterers (Total Hospitality, I think). Then, we had the disco. I was DJing, and I think it went down well. There weren’t many people on the dancefloor for the first hour or so – mainly because the weather outside was so nice I think people wanted to stay outside! But once it turned to dusk people came inside and the dancefloor filled up pretty quickly.

I have to say on the subject of the PA system… it was more than up to the task. It managed to fill the dancefloor without even breaking a sweat (or whatever the sound system equivalent is). I had the gain on the amplifier turned up to about half-way, and the volume control on the mixer set to about half way, and that was pretty darn loud. So I was happy!

So. Let me quickly wrap up the rest of the weekend. After Matt and Roz had left, we cleared up the barn and finally got back to bed around 1AM. On Sunday morning we drove back to Phil’s parents’ to have lunch, and then headed back home. That wasn’t the end of the weekend, though! When we got back in, we had just enough time to dump our stuff before heading out to Anne-Marie and Sarah’s. Long story short – they had been moving house all weekend, and they needed to get all of their stuff out of the old house and generally clean it up by the end of the day. Most stuff was done, but it still took the four of us until about 10:30PM to clean up and pack everything into the car (over several trips). Anyway, it was a pretty stressful time for all of us but they are eventually settled into their new house! I went round this evening to set up the TV (more on that some other time, perhaps, for reasons which will become apparently should I ever decide to write about it…) and the house was looking much more like a home and less like a dumping zone for bags of stuff.

Right, that’s pretty much it for the time being. That was our weekend! Many congratulations to Matt and Roz, and also best wishes to A-M and Sarah for the new house :)

I mentioned briefly in my last post that I had ordered a new PA system. Well, it arrived yesterday. In a huge great big package, on a palette! (A palette, for those of you who don’t know, is basically a wooden base which big packages can be strapped to so they can be more easily lifted by forklifts and the like). I should have taken a picture actually, but still.

I managed to get it inside (the sub came in a huge box which I wasn’t capable of lifting – I basically had to walk it all the way inside!), and then unpack everything. The system is basically an HK Audio package from Thomann (based in Germany). I bought an amp from them before and it was pretty decent, so I didn’t have any issues with buying from them again.

The last time I had a PA system, I had an amp with a couple of speakers. This time round I wanted to get an active (powered) system so I didn’t have to lug an amp round as well – basically it’s a bit more hassle-free. The package consists of one active 300W subwoofer – which contains all the electronics (and is why it’s so heavy!) – two 150W satellite speakers. Also included are speaker stands, cables and carry bags (a pretty good deal for the price). I also bought a Shure SM58 microphone for live work, and some cables to connect up my mixer.

I tested it out yesterday – at pretty low volume – and it all sounded good. Nice balanced sound, not too overpowering, and generally quite well rounded. Essentially what I’m saying is, I’d make a terrible audio engineer but it sounded good to my ears at least!

So I’m really happy with it. The first proper usage of it will come at my sister-in-law’s wedding in June, and I think it’s easily up to the job! The idea is that after that, I might be able to do the odd wedding gig here and there, I don’t want to loads of them but it might be a useful money earner from time to time.

Anyway, in other news, Phil and I went to see the Assistant DDO (Diocesan Director of Ordinands) on Tuesday evening. He was very nice and we had a good chat about my application and how the process was going to work. It’s quite exciting stuff actually, I have a few things to do. He even recommended that I started looking for colleges – which hadn’t really even crossed my mind! So I’ll definitely have to start doing some research. So, watch this space for developments on that front!

Well, this has been a rather eventful weekend! On Friday night, Laura and AJ (the youth leaders at Fordham) were both away so we had 21 to run ourselves. It went pretty well considering! The kids seemed to enjoy it. The only problem was, the burglar alarm went off half way through our game [I should hasten to add at this point that there were, predictably, no burglars. Still don't know why it went off]. We had to leave the building and have the talk outside… fortunately it was such a nice evening, this was possible!

Anyway. On Saturday afternoon we headed out to a wedding. Unusually, it wasn’t of people we actually knew… at Ian and Lucy’s wedding last year we met a couple called Tim and Sue. They liked my DJing at the wedding, and got in touch earlier this year to ask whether I’d be up for DJing at their wedding. I said yes, and so on Saturday we went along to the wedding and then I DJ’d at the reception (note: it’s not usual practice for wedding DJs to go to the wedding service – but in this case, as Ian and Lucy were going and we were invited along, we thought it would be nice to go). Anyway, it seemed to go really well. I played most of the cheesy classics and at the end of the night there were still plenty of people dancing. In fact, I think people were a bit disappointed when it was all over – although I hasten to add I think that wasn’t just up to the disco. It was a lovely day in general – the first wedding I’ve been to where the wedding breakfast was a picnic outside!

On Sunday morning we went to church as per usual. Then in the afternoon we spent some much-needed time in the garden, relaxing and doing a lot of general tidying up which we’ve not had much time for recently. Then, we headed out to Sunday@6 which was a communion service – done in the early church style over a meal! It was really good actually – having communion in a meal style setting, as they would have done in the first 100 years or so of the church. I’d quite like to try it again.

Afterwards we had a quick music practice for next week’s youth service, and then we came back home to watch Top Gear. I thought it was really good this week – I can’t believe how much the insurance premiums are for 17 year old drivers! I thought it was bad for me, but some of the quotes they received were absurd – £8,000 was one! Come to think of it, I was first insured permanently when I was 20/21, so perhaps it was slightly cheaper for me – only around £1000 for my first year… I’m so glad I’m now over 25 and have a few years of no claims bonus!

Those of you with excellent memories will remember that I DJ’d at Ian and Lucy’s wedding in May. It wasn’t a long set, but a couple of the people there are getting married this year and have got in touch asking me if I would like to DJ at their wedding. The only drawback with asking me is that I don’t have my own PA system (given that I’m not really a mobile DJ).

Anyway, apparently one of their friends is a sound engineer and can provide a PA, so it looks like I will be able to DJ there after all. I will also probably get a few bits of new equipment – CDs and MP3s are all the rage these days (vinyl seems to be on the way out, unfortunately) so I think I will try and get some CD decks – I’ll post up when I have some more info about that.

I actually have been flirting with the idea of getting more of my own equipment and advertising myself as a wedding DJ, still not sure whether that would be a good idea or not though. Still, you do see so many … well, crap wedding DJs – I’m sure I would do a better job than some of them (trust me, it wouldn’t be hard – one friend of ours saw a wedding DJ basically put on a playlist and then spend half the time stuffing his face at the BBQ there)! At the same time, if you have to play the same old cheesy stuff week in week out I’m sure you would get bored of it, hence why some wedding DJs seem rubbish – they’ve just got bored of the same old crap which people actually like and want to try something different which people don’t like!

Ah well, decisions decisions…

This weekend, Philippa was away from Friday night until Saturday evening. So, on Friday evening I watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, which I’ve been meaning to watch for ages but haven’t got around to it. It was a great film – I can see why it got about five oscars in one year! It was very sad at the end, but worth it. It also made me think how clever “Spaced” was – they managed to reference the original film quite accurately, while still managing to keep it part of the story! Oh, and I spotted a couple of references from Spaced which aren’t in the ‘restaurant’ episode. (Well, one reference at least).

Anyway. On Saturday I spent most of the day working on Gift List Central – it’s coming along quite well. Unfortunately I also managed to find a couple of other sites which do the same kind of thing – why couldn’t they have come up when I was searching BEFORE starting work on it? Doh! Still, one of them looks like it was started in 2008 so perhaps it’s not all bad. On the internet, competition is good – and they’ve given me a few ideas as well ;-)

I also watched the latest episode of “The IT Crowd”. It was great – this series is shaping up to be as good as the first, after a rather disappointing second series.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning. In the afternoon we went to dinner with one of Phil’s work colleagues and her fiance – they are getting married in December and I am DJing at the wedding, so we discussed the music. It was good fun, and I think I’ve got a much better idea now of the kind of thing that they want.