I found this great cartoon on someecards.com that sums up my part-time business: puredisco. 
Archive for the 'Personal' Category
OK, so the blog is broken. All that spam has caused my hosting company to suspend the account, meaning I can’t access it via ftp.
In the meantime, I’ve moved hosts and set-up the blog again. I’m just waiting to import the past 4 years of posts to get it all back to normal! Currently, this is the only post on the entire blog! Strange huh?
I hope to get everything back to its usual state by Monday, but for now please be patient.
Just a quick post to apologise to those who’ve tried to email me over the past week. Apparently my mail account was deleted on my domain and everything was getting bounced back to senders. I’ve no idea what fantastic messages I missed, so feel free to resend anything interesting.
Things are back to normal now.
Those of you who know me, understand that I’m a bit of a coffee addict. I love the smell and taste of fresh ground beans and really enjoy a good cappuccino. Therefore back in January, Kirsty and I agreed to invest in a decent espresso machine (or rather Kirsty agreed to let me indulge myself). After much research, I bought a Gaggia Baby Class D (not to be confused with the Baby Class or the Baby D)!
I also managed to get a pretty good price from an unknown company called Clearance Buys. Kudos has to go to them for not only delivering the item by courier in under 13 hours as standard, but for also replacing it in under 20 hours with no argument when it had an electrical fault! They even called me three times to make sure everything was OK!
So if you’re in the neighbourhood and fancy a coffee, why not come and sample one of my lattes?
I can’t remember the last time I was able to go out and play in the snow! We don’t normally get any down here on the south coast and when we do it doesn’t normally settle. Today while still away with the young people at Lodge Hill, the cold spell brought an amazing blanket of white which covered the south downs. From the vantage point of the house, we had beautiful views across the countryside.
Obviously, when the young people saw the snow it quickly escalated into a crazy snowball fight. When I went outside to get some photos of what was happening, I shouted “Don’t shoot! Man with camera!” Immediately everyone turned around and pummelled me! It was a great way to round off the weekend and helped to make it even more memorable.
This post is a response to Dave talking people who have had a significant impact on him personally. I originally planned to write this a while back, but never got round to it and Dave’s been nagging in the comments!
So here is a short list of people who have had a huge impact on my life and my walk with God.
- Ishmael: the famous children’s worker was a part of our church when I was growing up and I learnt a lot from the way he included kids like me in the wider church services. His songs also taught me a lot of scripture that I remember to this day!
- Jez & Kirsty Wong: Kirsty took over the kids work at church when I was 11 and allowed me to ‘help’ out. She suffered each week at my over-enthusiasm, and both her and Jez became a constant source of encouragement over the years. I now return the favour as youth leader to both their children and I am proud to be able to call them all my friends.
- Dave Boniface: When I was 17, I went on a short-term mission to South Africa that really opened my eyes to the power and responsibility of the gospel. Dave led the team and showed me a humble and gracious model of leadership that I had not experienced before. We have laughed and cried together ever since!
- Paul Sanderson: Paul gave me my first real job and spent those first few years encouraging and inspiring me in my youth work. It’s impossible to summarise what I learnt from working alongside such a passionate and visionary man. I now have the pleasure of being Godparent to his fourth child Promise.
- Kirsty: My beautiful wife has taught me so much about life and friendship. She’s constantly keeping me grounded and realistic when I get carried away or fed up, and she helps me to be a little less selfish every day.
So there you go. There are plenty more people who could fit into this list, but I want to keep it short and focused. Who would you say has inspired you?
One of the many clubs we run is called Launch Pad, a free breakfast club for primary aged kids on the local estate. Although I manage the workers who run the club, I only normally attend on a Tuesday morning and have breakfast with the kids.
Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, something that I don’t normally think too much about or participate in (because I always forget to do anything)! Having been away for a few days I came back from Egypt to an invitation through my door. It was to “all” the volunteers at the club telling them that this week is a superhero special and that everyone must come dressed in their favourite superhero costume. By going in on Tuesday, essentially this meant that I would be dressing up as a superhero on the 1st April.
The sad thing is that I almost fell for it! It was by sheer coincidence that I looked in my diary to check about a meeting I was having and noticed the date. I then re-read the invitation and started to get a bit suspicious. The team know I love superheroes and why would they be dressing up every day for a week?
Thankfully, I didn’t dress up. But I did get load of people asking me all day if I’d fallen for it. Obviously a lot of people were in on the joke. I’m really pleased though that the team have enough disrespect for me to try and stitch me up. Next year I’ll have to get in there first!
So we’re back from Egypt and the photos are up on Flickr. We had a great time away and really enjoyed spending time with our friends Dominic, Claire, Rebecca, Joshua, Brian and Liz by the seaside.
Apologies if you’ve tried to comment on the blog in the past few days, access was suspended due to the huge amount of comment spam coming through. Although none of it got live on the site, I returned to a spam folder of around 17,000 comments! Things are back to normal now though.
Oh yes, and I bought a Canon EOS 400D Camera! I’ve wanted an SLR for a looong time and with the income from Dj-ing recently, felt it was finally viable. Although Tim Abbott preferred the Nikon D40x, there was a good deal on the Canon in Duty Free with an 8GB Compact Flash Card thrown in. I’m really happy with the outstanding picture quality.
Anyway, now we’re home there may actually be some interesting posts coming up soon…
Hey, this is Kirsty not Jon! I’ve decided to post on my wonderful husband’s blog as mine is so infrequently updated I fear all who may have read it have since lost hope a long time ago.
So we’re in Luxor and sitting in a Wi-Fi enabled McDonalds (which speaks volumes about the standard of Egyptian food as I would not go near the joint in the UK!!!). There’s a builder in the kitchen doing some impromptu building work and we’re becoming McFrozen from the aircon outlets we’re sitting under. However, it’s still kinda nice to get out of the afternoon heat.
We arrived Tuesday night via Cairo Airport, where we spent 4 hours sitting in domestic departures waiting for our connection down to Luxor. This was suitably long enough to be ripped off by the cafe staff, and we’ve taken a steep learning curve in the art of bargaining since then! We’ve also learnt that Egyptair can’t be bothered to label their check in desks. Oh, and that security staff are more interested in playing with their phones than looking at the X Ray scanner.
Since our arrival, we’ve been on loads of adventures! Our first outing was to Karnak Temple, which was amazing (see photo taken on Jon’s new Canon EOS - ooooh - I’m sure he’ll post more). The sheer scale of the Temple was awesome. The following day we then crossed the Nile and went to the Valley of the Queens and Old Gurna - 2 areas containing a large number of tombs from Ancient Egypt. Back-sheesh (or tipping) let us into a lot of places we probably shouldn’t have been and we also managed to get a lot of forbidden photos! Then today, we went to the Valley of the Kings and hiked over some of the desert landscape. This all sounds so simple and laid-back but we have so many stories to tell about how difficult it is to get between A and B without being hassled out of our life savings! Jon has also learnt from all the locals that he is a “very lucky man having beautiful wife”…
Anyway, gotta go, Jon is threatening to snatch the laptop off me :-). Next stop today - Cairo! Can’t wait to see our friends and enjoy the Easter weekend in somewhere warmer than the UK!
Kirsty x
Happy Good Friday! Youth work related posts will resume shortly.
So I’ve taken up the challenge from Andy at Issues For The Christian Youthworker to think about the young people that have impacted me and my work.
There are quite a few who I could name for a number of reasons, so I’ll try and be concise.
Rosie, Anna and Emily have all taught me a lot over the years. I’ve been really blessed by the way in which they have chosen to serve others by becoming leaders and how they now give of themselves week after week. I count them a privilege to know as they’ve suffered through all the mistakes I made as I figured out how to do this youth work thing! Dan and Josh also fit into this category. I’m proud of the men they’ve become!
In a different context, there have been some young people that have taught me invaluable lessons through the horrendous circumstances they lived in. I worked with ‘PJ’ over a number of years through his drinking, smoking and thieving which started aged 10. Seeing the life he led and his home situation opened my eyes to the reality that many young people have to put up with. Nathan and Paul were other examples where I worked through issues of neglect, physical and emotional abuse with the various authorities. I rarely see any of these individuals now as they’ve moved elsewhere. I only hope that I was able to sow some positive seeds into their very difficult situations.
There are so many more that I could mention, but don’t have the space! A big thank you to all those amazing individuals who I have had the pleasure to get to know over the years and have shaped my work. You’re amazing!
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