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Yesterday we went round to Anne-Marie and Matthew’s house to have pancakes (along with a few other people including Sarah, Alison, Ellie, and Alex). It was quite a fun evening, they’re always an entertaining bunch to meet up with 🙂

Anyway, the conversation went onto Skype for a while, which I hadn’t tried, so when I got back home I downloaded and installed it. (Skype actually do a Linux version – that’s quite impressive!)

So, if anyone is on Skype, feel free to add me into your contacts, it should be fairly easy to find me as there can’t be many Phill Sacres out there!

So… it’s been a while since I did a proper “The Weekend” style post! I thought I’d post one up because I’m sure that you’re missing them 😉

*ahem* On Friday evening, we didn’t do very much, but I don’t really need to say that any more. On Saturday, Phil’s parents came up for the day to put some curtains up: in our living room, since moving in we haven’t had any blinds or curtains there. We did have net curtains but we’re not really a fan of them. A few weeks ago we tried fitting some blinds but unfortunately we couldn’t. So, Phil’s Mum managed to find a guy in their local market who sold curtain material, and thus found us some nice curtains. We fitted them in the morning, and they look really good! I will post up a picture later, if I remember.

On Saturday evening, we went to the chaplaincy for the ‘Mystery Social’, which basically involved Alex and Sarah setting up a whole bunch of ‘clues’ around campus for us to, um, investigate. As it were. Although I am hopeless at lateral thinking type problems, we had a really good time – even if Dan did cheat (albeit accidentally)!

On Sunday morning we went to Fordham, and afterwards were invited to Chris Reynold’s for lunch (which was very tasty). Afterwards we went round to Alex’s, and then went into town with a few other people to watch “Hot Fuzz”. It was … absolutely brilliant! I’d been looking forward to it all week (well, a long while before that actually but particularly the last week), and it definitely did not disappoint. Although it was a little gory in parts, it was absolutely hilarious — it was consistently funny all the way through. Brilliant. I will definitely be buying this when it comes out — as a matter of fact, I might even go and see it at the cinema again before it comes out on DVD! Shocking! But that’s how good it was 😉

Why is it utterly impossible for any smoke detector manufacturer to make a smoke detector which makes it easy to change the battery? It seems like almost every single one I’ve had to change the battery of has been an epic struggle.

Take last night, for example. Our smoke detector came with the flat – it’s mains-powered, but has a backup battery. When the backup battery starts to run down, it does the same thing as most standard battery-powered smoke detectors: make a random ‘BEEP’ noise every so often, which takes you ages just to work out where it’s coming from.

Anyway, after locating the source of the sound and realising I needed to change the battery:

1. I climbed onto a chair and tried to take off the cover. There was a helpful arrow on the cover and a message telling me I needed to rotate it that way in order to open it. “Great”, I thought, “might be an easy one then”. Oh, no. After attempting to rotate it and having absolutely no joy, I discovered there was a clip (no mention of which was made on the cover) which had to be depressed before trying to unscrew the cover. Depending on the angle you were at, you might not even notice there was a clip.

2. After finally getting the cover off, there was another problem. Obviously (being a mains-powered smoke detector) there were some mains wires running into it. Unfortunately, in order to change the battery, the cunning design of the plastic surrounding the battery compartment meant that you have to disconnect the mains wires in order to change the battery. Doh! Not only that, but there’s a message inside saying that there’s a risk of electrocution if you change it (something like that). not only that, but it wasn’t obvious how to remove the mains power either (without getting a shock, that is).

3. I haven’t done anything about it yet… I’m going to wait until Saturday when I can shut off the electricity of the house, just so I can change the freaking battery!!!!

Why oh WHY is it so difficult to make something which it doesn’t take a genius to figure out? And before you say “maybe you should read the instructions”, there aren’t any… because it’s not our smoke detector, we didn’t have the instructions (in fact, it might even have been installed with the flat, in which case there may not be any instructions).

Ah well, c’est la vie…

Sorry I haven’t written much recently – it wasn’t the most fantastic weekend for me: on Thursday evening, as I was driving back home, my power steering went AWOL. I managed to get home OK, but driving a car which is meant to have power steering without power steering is actually quite difficult. This meant that I had to take a taxi into work on both Friday and Monday… I was meant to get a lift in with someone yesterday morning, but unfortunately we managed to miss each other. Doh!

Thankfully the car is now fixed, except for the slight problem of not being able to get the oil dipstick all the way back in (I think it must have taken a knock while it was being fixed).

Anyway. Onto what has actually happened… well, not a huge amount really. On Sunday evening we went round to Alex’s, and had a nice pizza from the Village Pizza place in Wivenhoe. It was probably the nicest take-away pizza I’ve had, they’re quite filling, although they’re not cheap so probably won’t have too many of them!

And, um, to be honest there isn’t really much else to say. So, um, yes…

… or does Internet Explorer’s “ClearType” facility only serve to make things less clear? I actually find it more difficult to read plain text in IE7 than in Firefox (or other browsers). Maybe it’s just my screen (and yes, I know you can turn ClearType off although it’s on by default), but it just seems a bit pointless really.

Ah well. This is just one of the many things which I have begun to hate about IE7… this morning I discovered that IE7 doesn’t allow you to disable select box options. Pretty much every other standards-compliant browser does.

I won’t mention the select box bug which I found about two days after IE7 was released 😉 And I won’t mention the stupid things it does with rendering sometimes…

Suffice it to say: I do not like IE7. If you are reading this, and you are using Internet Explorer, do yourself a favour and get a proper browser. (My personal favourite is Firefox, by the way, mainly because of the extensions, but the others I linked to are perfectly good alternatives, and there are others).

Some of you may know that Philippa and I are currently doing part of a theological course called the “Moore Course”, which involves meeting up every other Wednesday evening and going through the material. Anyway, during our last meeting we somehow managed to end up talking about lyrics Christian songs. Not so much the actual lyrics themselves but more the general trends.

What people seemed to be saying was, in the past (in a lot of old hymns, for example) the lyrics were primarily focused on God and what he has done for us, how he has had mercy on us, and in general expressing God’s side of the relationship. However, now a lot of ‘worship’ songs (as they now seem to be called, although as Joe has previously pointed out they shouldn’t really) seem to focus on our relationship with God. Our response to him, what we can do for God (actually I once heard these called “Jesus is my Boyfriend” style songs, which made me chuckle).

The problem with having songs which focus on us and on our relationship with God is that it seems to not take into account the inequality of relationship between us and God: in the words of the confession, “we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.”

In a nutshell, people seemed to think that the sense of awe has been lost in many Christian songs today. I’m not really sure about that… although I love some of the older hymns, I think it’s sometimes important to be able to express things of a more intimate nature to God, or “Abba” father. I think it might be more important to try and strike a balance rather than focus too much on one or the other!

Anyway, apologies for the random thoughts and rambling — I just wanted to know really if anyone had any thoughts on the lyrics in modern Christian songs as opposed to the older hymn-style lyrics!

Firstly, I apologise for not updating much this week. We’ve had the week off, and so I’ve been out and about a bit more than I usually would! Secondly, and finally, here is an overview of the week (aren’t I nice?)

I would also like to point out that I can’t remember everything we did this week in the right order, so here is a brief summary of some of the things we may (or may not) have done, and not necessarily in that order:

• Had a job interview (well, just me)
• Went into town to do some shopping
• Watched “Confetti” (it’s very good, by the way)
• Did some ironing
• Found the local recycling centre
• Went to see my parents (and had a nice walk around Nacton Shores)
• Held a “Wayne’s World” evening
• Went to a wedding
• Went to a University of Essex Orchestra concert
• Went to the pub with Alex

So… there you have it. At some point I may expand on any one of those things. But it’s getting late 😉

Yes, it’s another “The Weekend” post, except that I didn’t entitle it “The Weekend” 🙂

So… what have we been up to the past few days? Well. On Saturday (note that I skipped Friday evening this time — although having said that, Philippa did go and see “Miss Potter” which was apparently very good), we did a bit of shopping during the day. I bought a couple of CDs – more on that later – and a few other bits and pieces. In the evening, we went to see the choir performing Bruckner’s Mass in F Minor. We both really enjoyed it – it was good to have a Mass based around liturgy which I actually knew quite well (it was all in Latin, but they had the English translation as well, and it was very similar to a lot of the liturgy they have in Anglican services). I thought the Credo was done particularly well, and the music really seemed to fit around the words of the liturgy to put the emphasis in the right places. Bruckner certainly seems to have been a man for whom faith was very important – I will have to try and hear some of his other work!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then didn’t do very much for the afternoon… in the evening we went to the Rover’s Tye and met up with Simon, Chris, Jon and Sarah. It was a really nice evening – we hadn’t seen Jon & Sarah in quite a while, so it was good to catch up with them, and it’s always good to see Simon & Chris 🙂

This week we have the week off work to do various things with the flat. Today Phil’s parents came round and we were planning to put some blinds up in the window… unfortunately, we couldn’t manage it: the aluminium supports for the windows were actually too tough to drill into! So we had to rethink that plan a bit… it was still good to see them though! In the evening we went round to Alex’s, and chatted for most of it!

Right, I mentioned buying a couple of CDs. Firstly, I bought “Absolution” by Muse (following Joe’s Recommendation). I haven’t listened to it very much yet, it sounds good though. They have a very “full on” musical style, I can see how they would be amazing live. The songs are all quite intense, so I reckon it would take a while to get into, but I’m looking forward to giving it repeat listenings (preferably on quite a high volume…)

The other album I bought was “Under the Iron Sea” by Keane. A few years ago, I listened through “Hopes and Fears” but wasn’t that impressed. There were a few good songs on there, but in general I felt the melodies weren’t quite strong enough. However, they’ve started playing some of their new songs on the radio recently, and as I really liked them (“A Bad Dream” I particularly like) I decided to buy it. It’s fantastic! If you like artists such as Coldplay and Embrace, you’d definitely like “Under the Iron Sea”. I think it’s a lot stronger melodically than the last album – the standard is higher. I think they’re coming into their own, and it really shows!

Finally (sorry this has been a fairly long blog! – this will be short): I read today that apparently the U2Charist is coming to England! I’m not sure what to think about it really, however if it gets people into church I’m sure it’s a good thing. Rev Paige Blair, the priest who came up with the idea, says:

“The Methodist hymn writers once wrote contemporary music. Are we worshipping Bono? Absolutely not. No more so than we worship Martin Luther when we sing A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

And I think I agree with that. A lot of Christians are far too resistant to change in terms of music. Why are we still singing hymns which were written 100, 200, 300+ years ago? They may be theologically accurate, but they’re just not what people sing anymore. If we want people to actually come to church, we need to be relevant to people, and if that means writing songs which are theologically accurate but sound like U2 then that’s what we’ve got to do 😉

Oh, yes, by the way – I realise that what I’ve just said people have been saying for years and years and years. All I can say to them is, “Bite my shiny metal… um… toaster!”

Side Note: I wonder what the people at Fordham would think if I suggested we hold a U2Charist? I can just imagine the faces of some of the members 😉

Just a quick note to say that I have upgraded this blog to WordPress Version 2.1. I would list some of the new features and stuff here, but to be honest you might as well just visit that link and look at it for yourself! Suffice it to say that I think WordPress upgrades are always worthwhile, if for no other reason then to make sure you’ve got the latest security updates installed 🙂

So… I was thinking the other day. I’ve listened to a lot of good classical music lately (all on CD unfortunately, although we are going to see the University of Essex Choir tomorrow, well actually ‘today’ by the time this post gets published…)

Anyway. I got round to thinking about some of these classical chillout compilations, and I began wondering what pieces I would put on one if I were to make my own. I’ve had a few ideas, but I thought it might be a good idea to throw open the floor and see if my loyal blog readers had any ideas as well 🙂 Maybe we could make a collaborative classical chillout compilation…

… I’ll start by giving some of my own ideas. Bear in mind that as I am more of a pianist than any other “-ist” (or something, musically speaking), this list will probably reflect that. So, sorry about the number of piano concertos appearing in this list – there are just so many good ones! Right, in no particular order:

• Grieg – Piano Concerto, Second Movement
• Shostakovich – Piano Concerto no. 2 – Second Movement
• Karl Jenkins – The Armed Man (A Mass for Peace) – Benedictus
• Karl Jenkins – Requiem – Introit
• Chopin – Piano Concerto no. 1 – Second Movement
• Beethoven – “Pathetique” Sonata – Second Movement
• Chopin – Prelude in Db Major
• Debussy – Clair de Lune
• Erik Satie – Pretty much anything! (the orchestral version of Gymnopedie no 1 is lovely)
• Henryk Gorecki – Symphony of Sorrowful Songs – Second Movement (very sad and moving, but very beautiful)
• Albinoni – Adagio in G Minor

Those are but suggestions, of course; the list will obviously have to be vastly reduced (or perhaps a number of CDs greater than one could be produced). (I just realised I wrote that in a rather “Yoda” kind of style, and apologise for this, I do, yeeess).

Over to you. Any ideas?