Beautiful morning

Shame I'm so bushed.

Went circuit training last night. Seemed to be going really well, with 22 burpees (squat thrust followed by a jack) per minute, flat out on the oblique curls etc. This morning I decided to ride into work, since it was so lovely and apparently not frosty.

Well, the first warning sign was the reason the cars didn't look white with frost - It was because the rain had frozen smooth on them instead. Then there was the nagging feeling in my legs as I climbed the hill out of the village. It was the same kind of feeling I have toward the end of a long ride - where you can keep going at a moderate output, but don't ask for any more. At the top of the second hill (nothing big) I could taste blood from breathing so hard. And the cold! I was sweating inside the jacket, but my forehead felt like someone had hit it with a hammer.

Oh the stupid things we do for pleasure.

Yay, now listed.

On the MTB blog-ring.

There's far too much fnaar potential in that, so I'll embroider no further.

A change in the weather.

The last few weeks it's been amazingly dry, although quite cold (especially here in the Cherwell valley). Now the weather's turned to rain. Is this the end of dry trails as we knew them? I certainly hope not, but it did stop me getting out for my second night ride last night.

In the last couple of weeks all the leaves have turned round here, and the rain has started them falling. Not sure I've ever seen it so late before. Will try to get some pix for the gallery before it's all over.

Comments back again.

Courtesy of Blogspeak. I've grabbed a slightly extended coffee break and managed to re-do them. It's painful working over dialup doing this kind of stuff, but so much nicer over a half meg line.

Finally completed the lights.

For those who've been following things through Bikemagic, you'll know that I've been building an offroad light set. I actually completed the lights weekend before last, but because of working away etc. I didn't have the time to test them properly. I'd also offered Mike Davis (BM's editor) an article on construction and testing, and that took time to write (and edit, correct, edit, re-edit etc). I'm still not completely happy with it, but sent it to him anyway, yesterday.

There's a 'step-by-step' photo guide in the fotopic gallery. Judging by the number of hits, it's proving to be of some interest. I will be writing some detailed (as in "do this, do that") style instructions for the lamp holders shortly. The Battery pack has already been completed.

It's certainly been interesting. I've read quite a bit about battery technology, and feel like I have a much better understanding of everything now. And the lights do actually work well, too :-)

Now, what was that verse about not putting your light under a bushell?

Back at last.

Glasgow has grown on me, but I'm glad to be home. The people I met in the lab there were some of the friendliest and quickest learning I've come across anywhere. And towards the end I even started to understand what they were saying ;-)

Actually toward the end it was getting dangerous. I was starting to adopt the accent (Ach noooo. Dinna fash yersell wi' tha = No, don't worry). Not a good plan, since I can't keep it up for long, and am bound to drop back into 'BBC English'.

If I manage to go back in the summer then I'll have to take a bike. The hills there look too enticing. When my colleague flew in the day after me, he saw snow on the hills round the city. It was quite cold, and my lips are all chapped, courtesy of a walk on Tuesday night to find dinner.

I'm a leavin', on a jet plane.

For Glasgow at 5.00am tomorrow. Don't know when I'll get back - could be Thursday, could be Friday.

Bye for now.

Bikemagic, this very afternoon.

A little ray of sunshine from the forum:

Cathaholic is an unheathly religious disease, similar to Prostatestant.

And

Catholics Anonymous

"Hi. My name is Milo and I am a Catholic. It has been 6 weeks since I last had a cat"

;-)

Oh yes, almost forgot.

Alex Leigh took some pics on the ride last weekend. For some reason I actually came out. Makes a change to see how I look (old, apparently).

I do believe....

I've fixed it. *Gasps sigh of relief*

Now lets see if |i can really foul it up with a comments facility.

Now I REALLY don't know what's going on.

I just restored the template script to the text I saved after I removed the original comments section, but before the new comments were put in. I seem to have an empty sidebar and eveything at the end of the posts. Not only that, but it's broken for Opera :-(

I can feel an evening's patience is going to be needed, and I ain't got that much right now.

Poxy comments!

Sometimes wish I was a script tech-head, rather than joe-ordinary, having to work through scripts line by line to work out what the stuff was going on.

Sorry if you've been trying to access things in the last couple of days without success. I'd tried to replace the previous comments facility (which had died, courtesy of the provider's problems) except that seemed to stuff things big time. Thought I'd stripped out all the dodgy new comments text before re-publishing, but I must have missed a bit somewhere or forgotten to save after stripping.

Anyway, it's fixed now, and I hope to have working comments again soon. Work is quite brisk at the mo, and trying to sort the blog through dialup (like tonight) is painfully slow.

Ah, relaxation. The Allman brother's 'Jessica' has just finished and Matthew's Southern Comfort 'Woodstock' is playing. Sure it's hippy trippy stuff, but it's also quite calming compared to, say ZZ top.

Just applied to join the MTB blogring

Or should that be 'Chainring'?

Stereotypes.

Well, America has 'trailertrash'. The UK has 'Wayne and Waynetta'.

In a bid for high ratings at minimal cost 'reality TV' is on the up. Tonight they showed a program called wife-swapping (nothing to do with swinging) where 2 couples change partners (for the daytime only) while being filmed.

I've never seen this extravaganza (no TV) but have heard the fallout from the program from time to time. If you didn't see it then see this thread on singletrackworld where people discuss the program while it is actually on the air.
I find it amazing that people like this can actually bear to exist, yet they apparently thrive and grow and continue with not a thought for anything else. 'Mazin.

Gives a lot of incentive to pray hard.

Do not forget.

Blogging is not reality.

I’ve not been here for a week now, and to be honest I have suffered guilt, but haven’t missed posting for it’s own (or my) sake in the least.

Now I have been somewhat busy workwise, and that brought home how much I had been doing using work’s connection in work’s time. Not good. On top of that, I read an article that Jordon Cooper linked to by a guy in the independent, and that covered a lot of the bases I was feeling. In addition, the comments provider I had been trying had a big problem that he (presumably) is unable to fix, and I couldn’t really see the point of a blog without comments (like I’m going to put my email addy up here??!). Finally, I realised that I was getting back from work, shoving dinner down my neck and then sitting at the PC for a lot of the evening, as if I hadn’t had a chance to use one for a while.

To cap it all, I spoke with a good friend the other day about blogs. She’s excited by the online world, and really likes lurking. However she also has a friend that runs the virtual housegroup (don’t have the URL handy, but it’s virtualhousegroup.co.uk or .org.uk or somesuch). My friend used to correspond by email regularly, until replies stopped coming. When she asked why, she was asked to work through the site. Nuts! Personal communication is meant to be that. It was enough to convince me that some bloggers can get too far up their own bottoms about how important it is (I DO have specific sites in mind ;-) and lose touch with reality.

So I got on and lived in the real world more. Went to bed earlier. Talked to my wife. Did a few practical things.

And the only thing that drew my mind back to it was the guilty feeling that I should be posting.

I DO feel like I’ve got things to say still, and I will be posting here, but I’m blowed if I’ll let it rule me, like it was starting to.

On a different topic, I’ve just bought Conan the Barbarian on DVD, and I’m looking forward to a little retro, un-cerebral entertainment.

I've had to pull comments.

Sorry about that - I hope you've not been affected. I had the following message from the guy tha runs 'blogspeak':

"I'll make this quick. Something bad is happening witht the comments where a virus has somehow attached itself in one way or another to the comments on your sites. I urge you to take the code down for now until I get the problem figured out. This will prevent you from infecting yourself and other people. Believe me, you don't want this on your machine. A reinstall is in order for myself tonight. I'll let you know what I have found today or tonight."

and

"I've found the problem, but won't be able to fix it until later tonight. In the meantime, I've taken BlogSpeak so no one else gets infected. Someone was dropping scripts in the comments multiple times which were running when the comment window would load. This would then take you to another page, which would in turn install bad stuff on your machine. I urge anyone who has had this infection to run some spyware checker (SpyBot works good) and scan for viruses. Thank you for your patience while I work to get this fixed.

- Harry "


When I hear it's been sorted I'll reinstate comments.

This evening I enjoyed a little rustic industry.

I’ve been making this year’s batch of sloe gin. Thanks to the long hot summer the wild plants round here have been unusually fruitful. In addition, with the clear skies at night we’ve had a couple of frosts (sloes should only be picked after the first frost of the autumn. Sunday evening after church we went down by the river here and picked sloes. I’ve never seen so many in the 13 years we’ve been here. Thanks to the abundance of fruit this year the birds have ignored this otherwise bitter food supply. So instead of scrabbling around trying to find enough berries, after 30 mins we had plenty and to spare.

After work tonight I popped into the local Tesco and grabbed 3 bottles of their cheap gin and a couple of bags of sugar (and some DVDs for Sarah to watch when she’s bored, but don’t tell her I told you ;-). After dinner I dug out the sloes from the fridge and set to work. Now we’ve got 6 bottles sat on the worktop, gently turning to various shades of pink as the alcohol extracts red pigment from the fruits skins.

In order to free up enough bottles for this batch I had to pool together one or two of the previous batches (each year has it’s own flavour and subtleties, hence several bottles on the go). And of course the mix HAD to be checked. Just to make sure it’s OK still.

Breathe easy. I can assure you it’s fine :-)

Anyway, if you fancy making your own, here’s my recipe:

You will need
2 X 70cl bottles of Gin
1 empty wine/spirits bottle of similar capacity to the gin bottles.
1lb of sugar
about 1.5lb of sloes.

Method
Wash the sloes, removing all stalks, leaves and anything else apart from sloe berries.
Make holes in the berries. Lore has it that you should use a silver bodkin, but a stainless steel knife cut works fine. Put about 7 oz sloes and 5oz of sugar in the wine bottle. Pour gin in almost to the brim, making sure there are no trapped air bubbles. Then seal tightly. Repeat, putting sloes and sugar in one of the almost empty gin bottle, and top up from the second. Remove some of the remaining gin from the 3rd bottle and add sloes and sugar to this, topping to the brim with the gin removed earlier.

Now the patient bit. Put the bottles out of direct sunlight and invert, mixing the contents at least once per day for the next 6 weeks. The sugar will dissolve and the gin become a bright ruby red. Allow the gin to stand for 2 weeks, then decant the clear liquor, holding back the lees. If desired, a second lot of gin can be added and the run repeated, although this second run will be inferior in colour and flavour.

Set the gin aside to mature. At this stage it will still be quite rough and fiery, without the smooth fruitiness that develops later. By Christmas it will be drinkable, although it will be better by *next* Christmas (or the one after that). Keep the bottle topped up to prevent oxidation until it’s ready to drink.

A word of warning. This is the drink that the bible refers to as ‘sparkling in the glass’. It looks and tastes wonderful – it’s so smooth, warming and easy on the palate. It can also give hangovers of skull-busting proportions. I’d reckon 3 ‘doubles’ over the course of an evening should be fine. Necking half a bottle might make one a little more respectful in future.

I have a problem...

and it's me.

I live in an old stone cottage in the countryside. On one side we have a garden with parking etc at the end. On the other side is an old orchard (that used to belong to the rectory) that has been allowed to deteriorate.

The orchard is owned by the Barnes family trust (some of whom live in Canada, curiously enough). Behind the orchard is a barn that has been recently converted to a house by our ex-next door neighbours. They spent a lot of time negotiating the purchase of the barn and some of the other land, but the way in which we first found out about it was when the local council put planning application notices up about it. Communication has always tended to be like this from them to us.

Anyway, zip ahead to the present. Saturday I was out cutting down the herbage at the back, as I have done for the last 12 years or so, when up raced the ex-neighbour and started 'wondering' what I was doing and explaining that he was planning to do it all tomorrow. Cut a long story short, the ENs now rent this land and are responsible for it. And they don't want us out there, even when we don't interfere with them.

My problem? I don't particularly care for land or property, but I'm not happy about this arrangement. In the previous set up the people responsible more-or-less let us get on with it (on one occasion when they DID get difficult the nettles reached over our ground floor windows). But these people want to put sheep out there, and based on our experience with their chickens when they were neighbours, this doesn't bode well. There are other aspects that I don't have space to go into here.

They're within their rights to do this. I want to live in peace with them, but I have a problem with it.

Managed to get out on the bike again.

And someone caught me on camera. There were about 20 of us altogether. Ben and I are on the right of the pic, both in Fox tops (I'm wearing a yellow helmet).

Just how British are you?

Reckon you fit in well here, or fancy coming over to "the old country"? Find out how well you'd fit in - take the test.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/content/british-test/default.asp

She's back.

Brought Sarah home this morning. She was rather weak, and lost her breakfast on the way, but she's there now and getting better.

*sighs with relief*

Tonsilectomy!

Sarah had her tonsils out this morning.

Ever since I can remember they've been large, and in the past have nearly closed her throat when she's had colds etc. It was always expected that they would shrink as she matured, but they never really did, so a couple of months back it was decided that they could come out.

I dropped Sarah and Chris off at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford at about 7.40am this morning, and Sarah had the op around 10.30. Anaesthetics apparently don't agree with her, and neither does substantial quantities of swallowed blood! However when I saw her this evening she was relatively happy, able to eat (we made a tuna sandwich in the kitchen on the ward) and quite happy. Earlier she'd apparently been a sort of pale green colour most of the time..... Felt sorry for the lass in the next bed. P had a tumour out today, and has a scar almost a foot long down the side of her neck. Makes me very grateful that God has given us all goodbasic health.

Chris has stayed in tonight, so it's a male dominated houshold for a change. It was therefore imperative that we had Pizza, alcohol and dodgy videos* while they were away, just to make the most of the opportunity! Thanks everyone that prayed for Sarah - we really appreciate it, especially Nigel, who dropped by tonight. Hope Liz is better soon too (yep, she's had tonsilitis too!).


* Ben watched 'Friends', which in my eyes is WAY dodgy. And I had a tin of cider with my dinner. We really did have pepperoni pizza.

New images.

I've put the images from Newcastle up in my fotopic gallery. The majority of the images were taken after I'd finished working, Tuesday between 5.30pm and 7.00pm. I also took some Wednesday morning - it started out overcast and wet, with the sun coming out after about 20 mins. The final pics are of a statue called 'Angel of the North' that stands high above the city - sorry for the quality, but I had to concentrate on driving ;-) I suspect there is a deeper meaning to this than mere art, but who knows.

I'm back.

Survived the trip, although I'm back later than planned (suffered GBH of the ear'ole for it too). The trip was finally successful, and the lab people up there seem happy now.

Pics tomorrow if poss of Newkie, when I've ssen how they came out.

And I'm off again.

Back to Newcastle tomorrow. Their machine didn't quite make it after all, so I have to replace a module in there.

I'm driving up (about 250 miles each way) and I've managed to pick up a digital camera this time, so I hope to get some decent shots, if the weather isn't too bad. If it's been raining at least the streets will be a bit cleaner ;-)

I've been away......

Thought I’d get down a few thoughts for the blog while I’m sat in Edinburgh airport waiting for the plane back to London Luton. This is a bit long, so if you get bored I don't blame you.

Wednesday 17th

Well I *think* the trip was successful, although it started off with a bit of a struggle. Being cautious, I set the alarm for 4.35, allowing myself 50 mins before I had to leave. My bod apparently had other ideas, and I turned alarm off, promptly falling back to sleep, I woke just over an hour later, showered and left the house in about 15’ and made it to the airport in just under an hour. Unfortunately I then spent 15’ in the carpark waiting for the bus to appear. So that was my first experience of missing a plane! Not surprisingly, I didn’t pick up the digital camera.

3 hours late, I made it to Edinburgh.

The place I was going is situated outside the city, and despite having a map, it wasn’t easy to find. While trying to read a map and driving through slightly narrow streets, I managed to clip a curb with the front wheel of the hired ‘people carrier’. Instant flat. Notified the hire company, who passed me to their recovery people who passed me to the Kia importer, who said that they’d set things up with a recovery company, and that someone should be there within the hour, and they’d call me. Being the practical impatient type I just went ahead and changed the wheel. I was a mile up the road by the time the recovery people called. Finally arrived at my destination at 2.00.

Things went ‘OK’ thereafter. The instrument I was to collect tested OK, and with minimal hassle, was loaded into the bus. Looking at the map, the drive didn’t seem too bad – a guessed 80 or so miles. The truth was that it’s actually about 130 miles on twisty roads, and on the Scottish side of the border there are speed cameras every few miles. Made it just after 8.00pm.

The hotel was reputed to be in the ‘gay area’. I’d assumed this was a wind up, but walking from the bus to the hotel, I was passed by a guy telling some women what he was expecting to do later, after he’d pulled another guy. Yuk! The hotel was grand enough, with a chandelier suspended from the ceiling 4 floors up - looking down the stairwell gave me a major dose of vertigo. The room was OK once the windows had been open for a couple of hours. Finally got to sleep about 12.30am.


Thursday 18th

Nothing exciting happened during the day, with installation etc going as planned, customers being trained etc. By the end of the day I’m bushed, and when we went for coffee (at about 6.00pm with the head of the lab) I’m nodding off. We (UK sales manager and I) managed to slope off shortly after, and went back to the hotel to change and go out for dinner.

Newcastle is a curious mixture. Northern cities in the UK have a character all their own, and reflect the tough character of people that have had to survive harsh conditions and poverty. Thus architecture varied between grand and ‘quaint’. Restaurants varied from the exotic looking to the kind where you’re sure they serve rat burgers. I could happily spend a couple of days with a decent camera loaded with fine black and white film and a tripod, just taking atmospheric photos of interesting nooks and crannies.

You could also tell that it hadn’t rained that way for a long time. I was on the way through a ‘poor’ area, and on the mobile phone to Chris at the time. The pavement was most unpleasantly stained, and I remember commenting “you know how the streets of London were reputed to be paved with gold? Well the streets of Newcastle are paved with puke”. Earlier in the day I’d seen casings from used needles in the street, and later we passed a ‘cartoon-drunk’, staggering from side to side of the pavement. There were also groups of both men and women, all out for a ‘good time’.

To balance this up, there seemed to be a lot of church groups in the city. It was almost like God had said “where sin abounds, let grace abound all the more”. I reckon you can tell a fair bit by the name a group chooses, and many of these seemed quite reasonable – the sort of places you’d go if you were looking for a church in a city like that. Certainly not just traditional works that were planted 150 years ago, and have long since gone to sleep. It’s encouraging to see that God is doing something there too.

After dinner we passed the evening seated in a bar attached to the hotel (it seemed safest – lots of the pubs in that area were altogether too full of single males, and I also passed a topless bar – quite unusual in the UK). The hotel bar had a section outside, below ground level, and gave us an opportunity for people watching. There were a number of predatory groups around, and I must have seen ‘Jessica Rabbit’ at least 3 times that evening ;-) I was also quite amazed at the sheer volume of liquid people could consume. A group behind us went through 4 additional rounds (having drinks already when we got there) in the space of about an hour, and some were drinking pints.

Friday 19th

Everything went more or less OK, and I escaped about 1.20pm, having to drive back to Edinburgh for the 6.10 flight. Apparently much later in the evening there was a mechanical problem, but I returned blissfully ignorant, believing that everything had worked OK. Finally got home at 8.55 pm, tired but glad to be back.

Well I finally uploaded the pics from Sunday's ride.

Now fotopic is working again.

Off to bonnie Scotland tomorrow at 5.30am :-( Guess this'll be the last post for a while then. Get home at about 8.30 Friday night.

If I'm feeling heroic and have lots of time I'll drop back to work for the digital camera (theirs is soooo much better than mine). Grab some piccies of Edinburgh and Newcastle (almost Scottish ;-)

More images posted

Or there would be. Fotopic doesn't seem to be accepting images at the moment. Maybe tomorrow night.

Ben and I went for a ride on Sunday afternoon. I've posted a few images in the gallery again.

Note the misting round the lens on the photo of Ben riding toward me. The camera was in a pocket at the back of my jersey, and the lens got misted with persperation. Authenticates my claim to have been working hard ;-)

Well, that was a grand finale.

The kind of worship time where you want to go down on your knees. The prophetic brought directly, specifically and with accuracy and the word preached clearly

I think the OCC King’s centre is well and truly opened.

Interesting too, someone I’d never met before came up to me with a ‘word’ after the meeting. I know the man’s face, but since he’s Oxford based and I’m 20 miles away in Bicester, we tend not to have much to do with each other. The word was unusual too, in that at the time it made no particular sense, yet felt right in my spirit. It was only as I drove to the supermarket for a late night shop that God started revealing where it fitted.

I seem to be in a state of change too, and others have noticed. For years I’ve been playing guitar in worship, yet unable to sing. When I’ve had to put the guitar down I’ve really struggled, yet God now seems to be gradually releasing me of the need to play. At the same time I’m starting to be able to sing and lead worship that way. Other things are changing too. I’ve always tended toward the pastoral care/teaching side of things, yet that seems to be ebbing and I can feel prophetic stirrings coming to the surface.

It’s curious, because it seems that after having been a consistent, reliable and controlled character for so long, I’m about to metamorphose into a different shape. And few people will be any more surprised than me.

More pics up in the gallery

On Saturday Chris and I went for a local ride. Well, I rode and she fell off lot. She's very brave - didn't learn to ride until she was in her 30s, and wasn't brought up to develop a sense of balance. And I took my crappy camera along too.

There will be some more shortly, from when Boy-Wonder and I did our local loop (a fast-ish 18 miles) on Sunday afternoon. It gave me a chance to try a recently updated Sharon (single speed saracen) and the results were quite pleasing. Mind you, riding a mountain bike of road with only one gear is still hard, whatever kit you hang on the frame. I didn't have time to upload last night, so I'll try to post them this evening after I've been to the final meeting in Oxford and gone shopping afterward.