Randomness

Martin: I've bought some new cycling gloves
Mary: What for?

D'oh! It’s been a long week ok?

However, I feel that any stupidity of comments is superseded by this exchange between two of my housemates at the party last night. In order to fully appreciate this you need to picture Helen with a bottle of purple vodka in one hand. It's vodka with lots of parma violet sweets in it to add 'flavour'. It tastes worse than it sounds. Lots worse.

Helen: It's ok, I've diluted it
Heather: What with?
Helen: Vodka

Later Helen successfully 'danced her socks off'. I didn't know you could stand on your own foot and remove a sock while dancing.

Be prepared.

All scouts should be prepared. Apparently this is also true of engineering offices. We must never run out of pencils. We must always know what the client is going to ask before they do. We must never admit that we’ve made it all up.

And It’s never to early to plan a party. Apparently. We just had an email round to plan the Christmas dinner 2005. Just in case you were wondering it is still July. And it is still rather a long time till Christmas. Unless Christmas has moved. Has Christmas been moved without anyone telling me?!

On an associated work note, Being prepared is also a useful motto to apply to digging yourself out of holes… Particular after comments insulting the place your manager lives by stating that the only bright lights of the town (High Wycombe) are the ones on the police helicopter circling above.. oopss...

What church should be

Pottered into my old university chaplaincy on Sunday morning.

Was met with a hug from Father, and a ‘hellloooooooooo’ from Sister (who is now remembering my name most of the time). Within approximately 2 minutes of walking in I was asked to organised the offertory procession, to make sure the urn was switched on for coffee and was invited upstairs for roast lunch.

It’s like I’d never gone away. Which is great. Surely it’s what church should be isn’t it?

Google Moon

follow this link

Zoom all the way in...

It's just not fair. Stamps foot.

Ok, so Steve is going on about Church unity in his blog).

And it’s a whole different angle to the one that I have issues with. Great.

So just as soon as I’ve got my head round the whole communion thing I’ve got the teaching side to cope with. Unless they’re both actually the same thing.

I’m really hoping that one day I’m able to make it through a communion/Eucharist service in either a Catholic or Protestant church without falling apart and dissolving into tears about the difficulty of division amongst Christians. Steve states that we’re either unifying with bad teaching or bad living when we try to unify churches. But it’s deeper than that when you realise that even when you get good teaching and good living of the world you’re still so divided that it physically hurts.

But is that so bad? Are we meant to be pleased that all these different Christian groups have such serious divisions that we can’t even come together as a community in communion? Maybe it is something that we should all be getting upset about, instead of working and compromising around. All to often ecumenism is about doing what we can and ignoring the rest. For the record, the ecumenical stuff I’m involved in doesn’t do that at all.

Why can’t it be simple? After all – It’s not as though any of us are out here with a complex message is it?

Answers on a postcard....

Socialising.

Is it possible to go to too many beer festivals? I mean really? Two so far, and another booked in. Must be careful though, work people have realised that I drink, and photos from the ball show me with a different man in every photo. Apparently this is bad, but I was only talking – being sociable!

Everyone from uni who is reading that can now stop laughing. I have changed since then…. :-p

London

So it's happened. We've had a terorist attack. On Thursday morning several bombs went off in London. On Thursday Lunchtime the emergency reponse matter slid into operation. And on Thursday afternoon lots of Red cross personnal sat around at Branch waiting and hoping that we wouldn't been needed. Front line vehicles were put on standby and moved closer in to London. The rest of us went in to support people getting off trains coming out of London.

It's fair to say that a lot of good was done, and the plans seemed to work. I say seemed to because our lcoal branch staff aren't that good at communicating with their volunteer staff.. I shouldn't be suprised. Most communications get to us, the volunteers, about a month after they've topped being relevant.

I don't mind sitting around not doing anything. In the Red cross that's always a good thing. However, I do have problems with being taken for granted, and not kept informed. If they're going to call us in then they should make the effort to tell us what's going on. Even if it's just "We're not sure, we're talking to so and so and should have a better idea in a hour..." It's only common courtesy isn't it?

Olympics

So we've got the olympics. That's nice.

On a more important note, the BBC website has crashed leaving me with nothing to do in my lunch break. Except maybe going for a nap under my desk...

Ambitions

I must learn how to NOT look like I’m asleep in team briefings.

And for the record I really wasn’t! I was merely overcome with the exciting concept of ANOTHER data management system, and closed my eyes to imagine it...