Category: Uncategorized

On Friday night we headed round to Karen and Steve’s for their leaving party. They are leaving Colchester in a couple of weeks, sadly, so we went round there for a BBQ. It was a good evening – good company, good food, and it didn’t rain! Nice to see Foz again too, as it’s been a while.

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon taking Sarah round to various garages to try and find a car for her (she passed her test a couple of weeks ago). No luck so far – small cars are expensive because a lot of people want them! We saw quite a few big cars which were pretty cheap – including a couple of Saabs! I was quite pleased because we saw a similar one to ours which was more expensive.

Afterwards we headed down to Phil’s parents. In the evening we went round to see Julie and Dave, and then on Sunday afternoon we went to Emma’s christening! It was a really nice service, although the rector was very… quirky. But still, everyone enjoyed it. And then we had a nice reception at a nearby pub!

And we were home in time for Top Gear 😉

So that’s pretty much a quick summary of our weekend. Apologies for the briefness, but we’re watching “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”! Kevin Smith films are both disgusting and sweet in the same measure.

Just realised I forgot to update with what happened at the weekend! Doh! Well, a quick update: on Friday night, we had the last 21 of this term. In a way it was quite sad to say goodbye to some of the kids (they’re going up to the next youth group which we’re not involved in) but it was nice to know we’re now free on Friday evenings for the summer!

On Saturday afternoon we headed over to Ipswich for Sheri and Pete’s wedding. It was a lovely day – although the weather was a bit variable it didn’t rain, and everyone seemed really happy. And it was really good to see some of the old uni people again – particularly Chris and Louise and Phil and Esther, who we hadn’t seen in ages.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then didn’t do much in the afternoon, and then went to Sunday@6, and then went to Wivenhoe to have fish & chips with Alex and Elisa. The first time we’d been to Pop’s fish & chip shop in a long time! Unfortunately he wasn’t there, but the food was great. Then we went to the Greyhound for a bit to have a drink and play some darts. So, there you have it! All in all, a pretty good weekend.

I’m currently watching Torchwood “Children of Earth” day four. It’s very interesting… but note that spoilers are contained within. So if you haven’t seen it yet, now would be a good time to stop reading 😉

The story so far: the 456 (or four-five-six, the aliens) have demanded 10% of the world’s children. It seems that they’re running some sort of protection racket: give us what we want, or we’ll wipe out your species. What I don’t quite understand is… if they want children so badly, why don’t they just wipe out the population and take them? If they do indeed have the power to wipe out everyone on the planet, why don’t they just do it?

I think they’re bluffing. But we’ll see!

One other thing about Torchwood I forgot to mention the other day which annoyed me. When Gwen was interviewing the doctor who wanted to join Torchwood, he said that one of the reasons he was interested was because of a woman who committed suicide. Apparently she was a devout Christian, and when she found out that aliens were real she couldn’t take it… “science had won”, she said. She realised that her place in the universe was, well, tiny. This annoyed me, because even if there were aliens, that would say nothing about the relationship between science and Christianity. It seemed bizarre – it was just perpetuating the myth that science and religion are in conflict. Lazy writing, in my opinion! Anyway, just a little rant.

I blame all this on Richard Dawkins and the so-called “new atheists”, they have a lot to answer for. Anyway, I’ll stop rambling on about Torchwood and science and stuff 😉

And you know what? I’m actually enjoying it this time! They seem to have finally got the right balance of tension, humour, characters and in general done what Doctor Who has been doing for years. There have been a few minor holes in the story, but generally I’ve been able to overlook them because I’m quite gripped by what’s happening!

It will be interesting to see where this story ends up. For about the first time ever, I’m actually looking forward to watching Torchwood!

It was a moderately busy weekend this time – but it should be the last busy weekend we have for a while (he says hopefully). On Friday evening I was leading at 21, but Laura was there this time so we didn’t have to do so much!

On Saturday we had a relatively free day. I spent a few hours throughout the day preparing my talk for the youth service. Apart from that we did a bit of shopping and enjoyed the sunshine! In the evening we relaxed, had a nice curry (from our Indian recipes book) and watched “Tropic Thunder”. I wasn’t that impressed with it to be honest… it was quite funny in parts, had some really great moments, but it’s not a real classic. It makes me glad that we have our easyCinema DVD rental service – we can just rent these DVDs we sort-of want to watch rather than shelling out for the cinema or buying DVDs! At a couple of quid a pop you can’t complain.

On Sunday morning we went to church, twice! And then came back for lunch, and watched the first half of the Wimbledon men’s final. It was brilliant – really tension making stuff, you just didn’t know who was going to win! Much better than the ladies final – I didn’t watch all of it, but the thing was… I just didn’t care who was going to win. Will it be Venus? Will it be Serena? I don’t know, who gives a fig?! Maybe I’m just cynical, but I find the whole Williams / Williams dominance of women’s tennis boring. You can just predict who’s going to be in the final.

To be fair, I find Federer’s domination of the game boring as well – but the final was an incredible match, especially given that I’d virtually written Roddick off before the tournament!

Anyway. We couldn’t watch the end of the match because we had to head off to Sunday@6 for the youth service (I think I would have found it difficult to get out of that one to be honest!). The talk went pretty well in the end – I had some positive comments at the end so it can’t have been that bad!

Afterwards we came back home and watched “Top Gear”. Bizarrely enough, I noticed some Green Wing music in Top Gear this time round, I don’t quite know why – the Green Wing music was composed specifically for the show! Still, was great fun to watch as ever. And that pretty much brings you up to date 😉

This Sunday@6 service at Fordham will be a youth service. Yours Truly is doing the talk, on “What good is it to gain the whole world but lose your soul?” I’m a bit nervous to be honest, it’s the first time I’ve done a talk at Fordham so the pressure is on!

I’ve spoken to Andy [assistant minister at Fordham] about the contents and he had some helpful suggestions. But I still feel like I don’t have enough experience doing these kind of talks. Still, it’s all part of getting experience, hopefully it will be good enough!

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!

I ordered a new laptop yesterday. Phil has had her laptop – an old Sony Vaio – for about six years now, and it’s showing signs of aging. Actually, to be more precise, it was showing signs of aging three years ago (when we got married). It only has 256 megs of RAM, with a fairly small / slow hard disk – which means it crawls along when trying to do anything more complicated than… well, it crawls along no matter what you do.

We’ve been talking about getting a new one for a long time, but I finally decided enough was enough and ordered a shiny new Dell Inspiron yesterday. I managed to get a fairly decent deal (I think) – dual core Intel processor with 4GB RAM and a 250GB hard disk for around £400. OK, I probably could have got a better deal by shopping around, but I like Dell – my old company used to buy loads of stuff from them and we never had any problems. I’ve had a Dell desktop PC for about four years now and, again, had no problems with it.

So, that should be arriving within the next two weeks, rather exciting 🙂

The other thing I wanted to mention is the BioLogos website. BioLogos was established by Francis Collins (director of the Human Genome project), and contains lots of interesting information about science and faith. I found the questions on the fall of man and Noah’s ark particularly helpful.

So if you have an interest in Christianity and science, I would recommend it! 🙂

This weekend was pretty much all taken up with the 21 Weekend Away! 21 is the 11-14s youth group at Fordham. On Friday night after work we drove down to Assington Hall (Assington is about half way to Sudbury from Colchester). The evening was mainly spent with setting up camp, then dinner, and then a wide game in a nearby forest.

After that we all came back to camp and went to bed… but not to sleep. Well, not in my case at least. I’m not very used to camping, so I didn’t find it very easy to get to sleep. And then I woke up early in the morning (about 4AM) due to the cold, and couldn’t get back to sleep again. I ended up going for a shower at 5:30AM – much earlier than I’d been hoping for! But I think a lot of other people were up and about, and actually some of us went to the football field and had a game before breakfast (which has got to be some kind of record for me – football before breakfast!)

Afterwards Laura did her talk on Galatians 1, and then we went out for the second part of the wide game in another nearby forest. This involved our team carrying Laura on a stretcher to the minibus… too complicated to explain here, but we really enjoyed it! Afterwards, we came back to the camp and had lunch. Then we all had a “team challenge” set of games, which were really fun. Then, it was my turn to do a teaching session on Galatians. I think it went pretty well, all told, although everyone was pretty tired due to getting no sleep the night before!

Anyway. After that we had some free time before the evening’s entertainment – “Assington’s Got Talent”! Which was great fun, although some of the talent entries were slightly dubious…

We all slept better on Saturday night, I think. I certainly got at least twice the amount of sleep, which I really needed! After breakfast we had our third and final teaching session from AJ, and then we did some archery. I’m useless at archery, I have decided – but I enjoyed trying! Then we had lunch, cleared up and left.

I think that’s pretty much a summary of the weekend away – I’ve probably missed out a few things but they’re the main details! When we got back home we pretty much crashed out. We did go to Sunday@6, though – and afterwards we came back home and got a take-away curry!

Oh, and Top Gear is back for another series. I can’t believe they revealed the identity of “The Stig”… although actually I don’t think he was the real stig. We’ll never know 😉

This weekend was relatively quiet, as weekends for us go! On Friday we helped out at 21 as per usual. Then, on Saturday we spent the day doing various things which needed to be done i.e. a bit of shopping and gardening (well, mowing the lawn anyway!).

In the evening we headed down to Ware in Hertfordshire for Philippa and Tom’s wedding, at a place called Fanhams Hall Hotel. (It should be noted that the Philippa was not my wife – but she was flatmates with Phil at uni a few years ago. Strange world.) It was a really plush place – although we did wander in to someone else’s wedding by mistake! When we arrived at reception, we asked where Philippa and Tom’s wedding was, and she pointed us through. When we went in the DJ announced the first dance and cutting of the cake, and said “Congratulations to Stewart and Zoe”… ooops! Fortunately we were only in there for about ten seconds so were able to beat a hasty (and stealthy) retreat. Anyway, after finding out where we were supposed to be, we had a good time and spent half the time dancing the night away.

We weren’t at church on Sunday morning as we didn’t get back until the small hours! But some friends of ours from church had previously asked us round for lunch, so we headed out at lunchtime. They weren’t expecting us! – it was arranged a few weeks ago. Because we were not at the prayer meeting on Thursday night, and then not at church in the morning – plus someone at church said that we were away for the weekend – they assumed that we were away! So that was all rather embarrasing, but quite funny 🙂 We did have a nice lunch there anyway, and stayed until the mid afternoon.

Then we got back home, watched the second half of the Andy Murray vs. James Blake match (go Andy Murray! – wonder if he will ever win Wimbledon? on that form, maybe), and then headed out to Sunday@6. I was playing lead guitar for the first time, so that was quite nerve-wracking but seemed to go quite well!

After Sunday@6 we came back home and watched “Grow Your Own”, a little-known British film. It was actually really good, I would definitely recommend it! And… that’s pretty much it.