hmmmmm?

It must be Easter. The new phone list is bright yellow.

I wonder if it’s yellow to symbolise the light of the world that Easter is all about..? I must remember to ask the secretary….

Gardening

An interesting concept is gardening. You pull out the pretty little flowers because they have been designated as weeds. But you leave in the ugly monstrosities that are apparently ‘meant’ to be there. Those are generally the really spiky plants that really hurt if you sit on them.

My brother decided the best way to cope was to pull out everything, examine the roots, and then put the important looking ones back in the ground.

I went for the talking to the plants option. If they didn’t answer they must be bad. However, as Alan pointed out I was even less likely to get a response from a dead plant from a live one..

So despite my efforts, the Grandparents’ back garden does look a lot better.

Today I have learnt an important lesson.

Never ever ever let anyone over 30 near any kind of software. And more importantly, don’t tell them what the software might actually be able to do. Keep it a mystery.

Otherwise they start to get ideas.

And then it’s chaos.

They think that they can do what you can do, when it has been carefully planned that they can’t because they’ll cause chaos if they it. As a result, the cause chaos because they don’t have it.

So essentially… They cause chaos.

That’s all we need to know.

Just let them have paper and pencil. Absolutely nothing else. And whatever you do don’t try to explain that they need to do QA on that paper…. (Let alone H&S on the pencil….)

Making Poverty History

Go on, follow the link.... Click on the band in the corner.....

Launderettes

In Eastenders EVERYTHING happens in the launderette. Mainly however they fall in love in there. So what I really need in life is a launderette. Without a launderette how can I hope to find a man…?

Lasagne.

I went up to Birmingham this weekend. And it was mad. There are many other words that could be used to describe the weekend, but in all honesty none of them quite hit the nail on the head.

I was staying with Lindsey Chicken. Lindsey is great, if not a tad random. There are many entertaining moments from this weekend, however the best has to be the cooking.

We decided to cook lasagne for some of the other chickens on Saturday night. We got half way through..we'd made the bolognaise sauce without too many problems. Well, if you ignore the fact that the lid fell off the pepper and half a jar of whole peppercorns fell into the sauce... But ignoring that it was going well...

At which point Lindsey remembers an important piece of information.

The oven doesn't work.

right.

This could make things interesting.

How would you cook lasagne without an oven?!

We decided to pre cook the lasagne and then heat it through in the grill. Obviously this was far more sensible than just doing spaghetti bolognaise. Obviously. uh huh.

now if you've ever tried to pre cook lasagne then you'll know how complicated it can be. We ended up with Lasagne stuck to the pan, lasagne hadging form the collander till we needed it, lasagne on the floor.... Lasagne pretty much everywhere... coupled with a sudden realisation that the cheese sauce really didn't taste of cheese, or indeed white sauce, or indeed much other than flour.

Now as you can imagine when you put two chickens in such a situation it's going to get worse. In this case it got worse by our guests arriving and seeing the state we'd got into before we could hide it all and pretend nothing untoward had happened.

It actually tasted alright in the end, unless you bit into a peppercorn. And the burnt tang from teh white sauce gave a BBQ sauce hint to the event...

And Lasagne is a simple dish to do....

We were laughing so much that we didn't hear the doorbell... I haven't laughed so much or so uncontrollably in a very log time! It was great!

Heaven

I’ve just had a vaguely profound conversation, and I’m recording it here so that I can’t forget it….

We were discussing God, and how are relationships with him is ever important, and in constant need of work. However, it doesn’t seem to matter how hard you work at it, there is always that feeling of hollowness from time to time. The feeling leads you to forget to pray, or to search for human relationships to fill the gap.

We realised that the hollowness feeling that you notice sometimes, even when you are feeling close to God is due to the fact that while God is physically present with us, he’s not actually physically there to touch directly. So feeling apart form God, and as though you’re missing something important isn’t something that you can do anything about. It’s the gap that will be filled when we (hopefully) make it to Heaven.

It's all gonna be ok...

ok, i give up.... I've got the message. I will now try to stop complaining all the time.

I complain about my job.
I pray about my job.
Millions of amazing oppourtunities appear all at once, and people are nice to me at work.

coincidence? I don't think so....


Coupled with that some of my course mates were emailing round Christmas greetings today. I think I've got it far better than I thought. Very few people seem thrilled by their jobs, but I haven't been asked to take a pay cut, threatened with redundancy, or become completely and utterly demotivated. See, I'm only slightly demotivated, and even that seems to be changing since this praying thigy wotsit...

when will I learn? God answers prayer. I know that. I tell other people to pray! I should really listen to my own advice that little bit sooner shouldn't I! Ah well, better late than never I guess!

WOOHOO!

How cool is God?

Just had the best confession! :-)

God is generally cool.

murder mystery

I am my own person! I am not my mother! I am not Charlie! I am individual! Unique! So it was perhaps unfortunate that at Jen’s murder mystery party I bumped into Charlie for the first time in…err…. When did I last see her..? I’ve a horrible feeling it might have been Greg’s funeral… surely I’ve seen her between then and now.. How did that happen..?

Anyway…. We were both playing men in the murder systery. (I was meant ot be camp. I didn't find it to hard to let my feminine side show through)We both have fancy new phones. The same phones. On the same contract. Having left the same contracts with our old phone companies at the same time(which incidentally were the same company last time too) . The new phones have the same ring tone. Ok, as if that wasn’t bad enough we’re both taking the same time off work etc for Christmas, and both played best friends in the party….

The fact that we can be so similar just highlights how different we are in so many other respects. When we were at school it didn’t surprise people when we did similar things at the same time. But now that we’re still doing it despite rarely seeing each other is a bit more random. You can tell we grew up together. It’s kinda weird. She took life one way. I took another. As paths go they’re not so different. Just one involves God, and one involves security guards. Maybe one day she’ll come back to the God side of things. She herself will tell you that God hasn’t given up on her. Even she can see it... acting on it, now there's another concept entirely...

So that was an interesting evening. Good fun though. Steve did it! It was him! Ahem.

Energy consuption...

Part of my job at work is to publicise and encourage recycling and minimise energy usage in our offices. This means that from time to time lucky members of stuff get the lucky treat of getting a post it notes on their monitors reminding them that they should really switch them off overnight.

One colleague has been leaving his monitor on every night for the last few weeks. Today he has informed me that it’s so that we can have that moment together. Isn’t that sweet.

Speaking of sweets he sys he’s going to leave me sweets to eat while I write the post it notes in future.

I can’t help but feel that the message hasn’t quite got across about energy consumption….

holepunches have feelings...

The holepunch hates me. And now it’s got the paper on side. I’m feeling got at. The holepunch won’t cup the paper, and without fail whenever it does I manage to get a paper cut. It’s all out to get me.

Sympathetic colleagues are of course helping the issue… (ST transcript)

Mary Wells : the holepunch hates me
Clare : i can understand that
Clare : ooops no i didn't say that
Clare : poor mary

????

A quote from my friend Mike Starkey…

"I want to go home now. My brain is broken"

I really can’t add to that today.

Oh yes,

We rule.

I officially am part of a winning team. The fictitious business I’ve been helping run at work has one it’s group stage.

Oh yes oh yes.

And I was right. Oh yes.

Tactics ‘R’ us.

Pity I’m losing money hand over foot on this real work thingy wotsit.

in hindsight...

following smoe thought it occurs to me that maybe those love bites are something to investigate in more detail in future.... ;-)

love bites? I wish... ;-)

Ok, So I have spots at the moment. It’s due to chocolate. Or as mum put it on Sunday "not looking after myself"

Fine. I have spots.

This has provoked discussion in the tearoom. Having decided that they’re not bruises from having been beaten up they are ‘obviously’ love bites.

Uh huh.

Love bites on the chin and forehead.

So not only am I concerned by the fact that this was suggested in all seriousness (says something about your average engineer) but also makes me wonder what they really think of me! Think I’d better watch my step for a while….

Good days bad days

I’m in a complete whirlwind at the moment. So much is going on. Some good stuff, some bad. It’s all too confusing…! I’ve just been told that I’m defiantly staying put up here at Terriers in my new role so that’s good. My new phone is connected. And the car is all in one piece.

However, Gran’s in hospital, The commute in the dark is hideous. There’s just no two ways about it. Driving in the dark is just painful on the eyes not to mention tiring., and as a result my prayer life is in tatters.

On Sunday someone described how life can be like a whirlwind of too many things happening at once. But it doesn’t matter what is going on around you if your foundations are strong and you are standing on the rock that is the word of God. It’s an interesting image. After all, nothing in the whirlwind has really hit me or done serious lasting damage so far. So there’s some protection somewhere. Am I really in the eye of the storm looking out and seeing chaos without appreciating all that God is actually doing for me in the calm eye of the storm.

After all, There’s a lot of good about, and he’s doing his best to make me see him around the place. Mainly that seems to be by pushing me so far that I almost break and have to admit that I can’t do it alone. After all, who can really survive the strong winds of a whirlwind once they’re caught up in them? The legal term for such events is translated as ‘the hand of God’. There’s a memorial in Reading for a man who was caught up in a whirlwind at Reading Station and died. It’s fascinated me since I was tiny.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that whirlwinds can happen anywhere at any time. Even in the most unexpected of times and places. But there is no need to be scared of them, if you remember what the important things are – God!
The wise man built his house upon the rock….. :-)

Pretty colours...

WOW!

look! The blog has changed colour.

(It's a slow day)

For anyone who is interested, my parents claim that it was illegible before. And they're right - it was illegible on their home monitor whch does intersting contrasting things. So anyway, now it's green, and is apparently easier to read.

Aren't I nice.

Not a lot else going on at the moment. I bought some new star trek DVDs and have been being incredible sad and watching them all week instead of doing anything useful...

life goes on?

How is it that when something bad happens for the right reasons, even for your own reasons it still hurts? When you can be almost sure that if it happened any other way it would be worse..?

I guess it's not really a new concept. Bad things happen. It's not often they happen and you actually get some kind of a say about what those things are and what they mean. Generally they happen to you. And there's no way you can influnce it. It's literally in the hands of the Gods (as it were)

So why is it that you can be upset by something that you are sure is the right thing. If you're pretty sure that the good outcome in the end (feels like that'll be years away) will be worth the pain at the moment?

The positive side is that I have a friend who knows precisely what it feels like to go through a painful time in the hope/knowledge that it will be for the best in the end.

And I can't believe that I've just compared spliting up with Nick to Jesus' crucifiction...!

aging...

Uh Oh

I’m getting old.

Yesterday was my birthday. This is not what makes me old (except in a purely physcial sense). What makes me old is the knowledge that I really am turning into my mum. There’s no excaping it. We look and think in similar ways.
What makes me old is the realisation that I don’t think that this is a bad thing. In fact, I’m actually proud to be like her… now how weird is that? That’s not meant to happen is it? But both my parents are great people… I could do a lot worse!

Mum says I’m turning into Gran though… not so sure that that’s a good thing… as I really don’t want to be a teacher…