Odyssey Returns

My friend and youth leader Karen came around to my house last night, and she wrote out the details for the Odyssey program in the layout which I had been working on in the couple of days before. It is soon to be printed out and mailed to people, but as an extra special bonus for you, I'll give you a preview of the first night of the program. Please ignore any copyright infringement.

As you can see, it's already looking like it'll be a great year for Odyssey, and I know I'm excited about it.

Fire, exclamation mark. Fire, exclamation mark.

Dear Sir / Madam.

On Friday night, after Ashley's great Birthday party at the ice skating rink that left my feet rather sore, some friends and I decided to make best use of the laser tag (lock on) set that had been loaned to Kids4Life and was destined for return that very next Saturday.

At about 10:30 we took the laser tag gear down to our local lake although Craig didn't want to come along. We played a few games around the boat shed, which was good but a bit too big and open. As it approached midnight, we shifted out game down to the now abandoned children's playground, as this was a closer setting with much more cover. During the very first round I was crouched behind cover on a platform with a fireman's pole out to the side, and heard two people of the opposing team crawling around underneath me. I then had to brilliant idea to slide down the pole with one arm while using the other to shoot both members of the opposing team commando style, then running for cover before they had a chance to react.

I still need to practise my one handed power slide down a pole however because my execution of this hasty plan was poor at best. I jumped at the pole and before sliding even a few inches, I had lost my grip and landed horizontal on the ground, with my left knee being the first point of impact, followed by my left forearm scraping painfully across the sand. The next thing, I've been shot twice by the opposing team members I was meant to surprise, and I'm hopping away in agony yelling 'don't shoot, don't shoot, I'm injured!' Within a few minutes my knee recovered, but it took a couple of days for my arm to stop stinging.

I'm three paragraphs into my blog post and you're probably wondering where the fire is. Patience my young padawan. So a few rounds into dm_playground, and I'm sitting on the bench waiting for everyone else on my team to run out of lives so I can play again. Then someone calls out 'is that a fire over there?' I stand up and look and sure enough, there is a reasonably large fire well under way on the other side of the lake. Straight away Steve Y. calls 000 and informs the authorities of it. We pack up the laser tag and within a few moments the fire brigade has arrived. They put it out within a few minutes, and we went over there to talk to them but they didn't seem very interested in talking to us. It turns out the fire was fuelled by a stack of hay bales left over from the Australia Day celebrations that day, and upon asking one of the fire fighters they said it did look suspicious.

In closing,

Looking forward to hearing from you.

All the best, Maurice Moss

(Gotta love the I.T. Crowd)

Travis, I Have Failed You

It looks like I wasn't able to complete Captivating in the few days that Trav did. It's been a tad over a week and I'm up to chapter 8 out of twelve, which I suppose is two thirds of the way through, so it's not all that bad. I've found it to be really good so far, perhaps not quite as much of a revelation as Trav described it, but still really insightful none the less.

Anyway I took the ultra-cheap solution to my music on the way to work problems, and taped one of my CDs onto an old cassette tape I found stashed away. I had actually used it several years ago to tape some ApologetiX songs onto. Anyway, I'm planning on picking up a few more tapes the next time I'm shopping, because with an album on each side, they're not too bad to take around in my car.

I do find it ironic though that such a high tech guy like me has come to such a low tech solution.

Anyway, the whole gang is back from mission now which means Craig is back and also that the Internet is back full of people writing blogs again. I also got a small box of chocolates from Kids4Life for the help I gave them putting together their drama DVD and a couple of other little things. It makes me think why bother being on team when you can help out and get chocolate? On the other hand, buying chocolate for each and every team member would soon prove to be a waste of money and probably bad stewardship too.

Also, John my other house mate is also back from England. The whole gang is back together!

Books!

Now that I've got your attention Susan ;-)

I actually have several different books on loan from a few different people, and after just recently finishing reading 'Every Young Man's Battle', I've been deliberating which book I would read next, and I was leaning towards either the one Ian lent me or the one Karen lent me, but after stumbling across a 6 month old blog post of Trav's (for the technically minded, Trav's Blog's RSS feed is all jumbled up on my computer) I've decided that I'll read Captivating which I have on loan from Steff. I won't start it till tomorrow, but even then I doubt I'll be able to contend with Trav's 2 day record. If you're wondering, I have already read 'Wild At Heart', which is sort of a pair with Captivating.

I'm glad for the two people that commented on my last post, as I was beginning to feel like I was the only one left on the Internet. Tim mentioned the new game Twilight Princess in his comment, and that reminded me that was actually a contender for the title of this blog. That is, Twilight Prince, however it sounded somewhat less... manly... then I would like associated with my writings.

What is manly though is that I was able to take my Christmas tree down, and without losing or breaking a single decoration. What's more to my amazement is that I managed to get the entire tree back in the box it came in, which anyone who's ever had to pack up a tree would know is quite an achievement, as I was discussing with Sharon earlier today.

My loneliness that I wrote about earlier in the week seems to have been short lived however, because the day after I posted Craig came back to spend two nights at home, which has been nice and refreshing having someone extra around. I'm still keen for John to return from England though.

Lastly I'd like to share with you moving song by Thousand Foot Krutch. It's a little old (2003?) but I still enjoy listening to the song, particularly when I can just sit and concentrate on the song and not be doing anything else.

Song of the Day: Thousand Foot Krutch - This Is A Call | Direct Demo | Lyrics 1 | Lyrics 2

Download

I'm sitting here now thinking that this blog post that I've been wanting to write for a couple of hours isn't going to come out nearly as good as I hoped.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

These lasts few days I've been left pretty much on my own. If you're reading this soon after I post it, then you must be one of the half dozen people left on the Internet these days. Most people seem to have jumped ship for two weeks, either for Kids4Life or Champion City, two holiday programs running in Bendigo and Warnamabool respectively. This includes most of the blogs I read, not limited to Steff, Sammy, Cara, Craig, Trav and Rachel. Yes I know you're still out there somewhere Switch.

I wouldn't be surprised if you're still sitting there mystified by the title of this post, which I chose because I want to download (or more accurately, upload) a whole bunch of thoughts from the last few days into my blog.

...lucky you ;-)

Firstly I've been thinking more about music in my life. On the way to work, I heard a really good song on the radio this morning and it got me in a really good frame of mine for work and I was ready to run in there and give it the best effort I could (interestingly I can't even remember the song right now!) however this doesn't happen every day because not every song on the radio is really that good. I'd really like a way to listen to my own music in the car of a morning, weather that means buying a new iPod after my one broke last year or getting a CD player, I don't really know, but I think it is something I should really be thinking about sooner, rather than later.

Continuing on the topic of thinking about things, with Craig away at Kids4Life as I mentioned earlier and my other housemate John still in England, I'm left here with a full house all to myself. Appart from finding the first night a little spooky I have found it interesting and discovered a few things. I learnt that by myself, dishes actually take a lot longer to grow, it's a lot quieter, and if it hadn't been so hot I would probably sleep better too. I am a bit lonely though without anyone here, and I know that I would never like to live on my own for any extended period of time. I don't know how Karen managed to do it for so many years, which reminds me that she tells me that in this regard I am quite like her brother Trav, in that he too would probably go quite crazy living by himself. Not that I would go crazy... just lonely. Oh and I also learnt that I can park in the driveway rather than the front of the house, although this one actually took me 3 days to learn.

I've started taking my Christmas decorations down, I promise. One sets of balls is off the tree and the rest will be coming down shortly.

At net ball tonight we were winning at the start of it and I was going to blog about it. We ended up losing though so I am much less inclined to blog about it now.

On the way to net ball however I was thinking through that this year I really want to give whatever I'm involved in my absolute best effort, and that if I'm not going to give a particular activity a full effort, then I don't really think it's worth doing at all. Things I resolved to give my best effort to were Work, Odyssey, Explorers and the sound at Church. I'm sure there are others that I will add to that list.

It does bring me to another dilemma though, which is that I have been feeling for a little while that my week nights tend to be a little full. With going to my Mum's on Monday, Young Adults on Wednesday, net ball on Thursday, Odyssey on Friday and Grads on Sunday, I only really have Tuesdays and Saturdays left. With the introduction of 40 days of purpose this term, as well as mid-week drama practise some weeks for Explorers, I can only see it getting worse. There aren't really many of those I can justify cutting out, but I think it's just too much for me.

Tough decisions

And on the way back from net ball I had to wait at the crossing for a big freight train. 18 Carriages. I really like trains.

One cool thing I like about having no one else here is that I can sit here on the couch in the lounge room with my wireless laptop and write out this very blog post. Wireless is so great, and for all the tech heads out there, the 802.11n standard is on the cards, bringing a theoretical maximum data transfer rate of over 500 megabits per second and a typical rate of 200 megabits per second. Even at the typical rate that's still twice as fast as a standard wired LAN connection.

One more thing, I've been reading the Psalms as of late, and a lot of them have notes at the top saying that they were also songs. Some of them are indeed quite sad, with people writing (or singing) about all the trials and troubles that they have been facing, and how all the bad people have been treating them wrong etc. It got me thinking as to why there aren't many modern Christian songs that are written about sadder things, or of trails and troubles. I guess people would rather sing 'happy' songs in Church, but then the secular world seems to have no problems singing songs about other people problems. Then again maybe I should just listen to more Skillet. But then again bands like that seem to get shunned by a lot of Christians. Who knows.

I guess that almost wraps it up, although I do feel like I still have a lot more thoughts running through my head. Here's one, it's really fun to type out all this stuff while looking at the ceiling. That is, if you've been typing long enough to do it without having to look at the keyboard.

All I can say is that 2007 looks like a massive and exciting year, and I know I'll be running head-on into the fray.

Off To Melbourne

Off to Melbourne tomorrow (Wednesday).

Will be back Friday!

Take care of the Internet while I'm gone!

First Post 07

It's 3:40am and I've just finished cleaning up my house from the New Years Eve Party that I threw. It was a really great party though, although only 7 people showed up at the start time (5:30), including myself and Craig, to have dinner, the rest all showed up after dinner. Perhaps they don't like my cooking?

To be perfectly honest, I was really just keen to jump in and get one of the first blog posts among my friends for 2007. I'm sure it's going to be a great year for blogging and a great year for myself in general.

I also wanted to say thanks to Trav for the award I receive for my Christmas parody as I was awaiting the arrival of my Wii. Oh and as you're probably thinking, yes I am enjoying my Wii, although I sure would like more time to play it (and for the last time, no, I'm not talking about the toilet or bathroom).

Well, here's to a great 2007. Hopefully the mistakes we make will be different from those in 2006.