Barefoot Bidness

Today is one of those days which are like an announcement trailer for summer. The sun has been properly out, but it's still starting to set at about three o'clock. Nevertheless, today was a warm today, and we've not really had many of those until now.

It's been a pleasant, but uneventful day. Let me tell you about some moderately interesting things that have happened during its first half.

Friday Hatman gets Political

I'm a big fan of Friday Hatman, this is probably his most politicised video yet. I sometimes wonder about women who wear head coverings. Can they wear hats as well? Probably, I guess they don't think it would be very fashionable to have both at once.

I go for a Barefoot Run

I use the term 'run' liberally here. It is hard to run barefoot. I sort of lightly jogged to the park, sat in a tree and then walked around a bit. Barefoot running seems like the kind of thing that takes a while to get used to, particularly on some of Sheffield's more poorly maintained pavements. However, after today's experiences I can heartily recommend walking barefoot in the forest. You can get your feet muddy, wash the mud off in a clear, cold stream and then dry off your soles on a crinkly carpet of fallen oak leaves. I can see this becoming a regular activity as summer rolls fully in.

Well, that business was all the way back on Friday, and now it's Wednesday. Sunday was even sunnier than before, and today is looking good also. It is all very exciting.

Speaking of exciting, this week is the Christian Union's events week, which is basically the pinnacle of the Christian calendar, shortly followed by Easter and Christmas.

It's mostly over now, so who cares?

Joke, joke. I care, but I need to start posting these posts in between writing them. I realised this today whilst watching Friday Hatman's latest video, meaning that a full week had passed since I last edited this thing.

I'm on a Megabus coach. They have free wifi, so they are basically better and cheaper than National Express. I'm going home to London for an exciting house-warming party and much other merriment.

Enough about now, what about before?

Events week was about as kicking as everyone expected, Lindsay Brown and Michael Ots did their thing real nice, eliminating misconceptions and apologising all over the show. Turns out the new testament is a pretty reliable historical resource.

The weather was, likewise, pretty kicking. Yesterday I ate ice cream, sipped cider, walked through the botanical gardens, rescued a frisbee and sheepishly haunted the outskirts of a barbeque populated mostly by friends of a friend.

This blog post has mostly gone to pot. There was some professional-ish graphology and almost coherent formatting going on at the beginning, but now it's just a scattering of random memories from throughout the last fortnight. Probably best if we draw things to a close here.

I think I'll spend the rest of this journey improving my cipher, because the one I've got currently is pretty rubbish. My friend Joy used to write everything in a cipher, but hers was sort of better  because she kept it all in her head.

Top Secret Bidness

I left my fez.

"How did you leave your fez?"

"Who cares?"

"What's a horse's favourite sport?"

Stable tennis.

I left my fez on the train because there was too much joking and too little forward planning. It was definitely under my chair, and there was definitely time to get it, but I did that thing where I get flustered and completely loose my ability to see the thing that I am looking for. I wore my Jaxon beanie for the long walk home from the station. It wasn't the same.

So, hat count is thirteen. Not that it's really about the numbers. David Storm got me that hat while he was in Turkey, so there's a certain sentimental value. I don't really get that, because a conversation with Holl Medianna this weekend confirmed my understanding that it is offensive / illegal to wear a fez in Turkey. Did you know that the king of Morocco is the only Arab leader to wear a fez in public? 

Yeah, you heard that right, I spent the weekend with Holl Medianna. I didn't really, because Forum NE (some Christian Union ting) was pretty busy and I invested most of my free time in running to York and back with my homeboys. Still, it was cool to catch up. We had a picture together, and now everybody is going mental because I am pictured with a girl. My father informs me that my grandparents were 'keen to know who the young lady was.' I guess it's hard for them to perceive me as the smooth operator that I am, being in pictures with different young ladies every week like it's not even a thing.

I think I left my bible at Forum also, but I'll admit it doesn't bother me as much as the fez. There is no fezgateway.com. On the plus side, I've probably gifted an unknown stranger with a handmade hat, and now there is space in my hat collection for a new, exciting and perhaps even high quality fez, maybe even one with a stem. Who knows?

 I'm not wearing a hat today. I stand by my proposition that not wearing a hat is a kind of hat.  Enough about hats.

I did that thing again where I leave a blog post unpublished for about five years. I wrote a C program to encrypt data and now I'm going to sell it to the government. Or maybe give the decryption software to my friends and write top secret messages on my blog. That is a brilliant idea. Perhaps I will have to improve the cipher over time to be less rubbish.

Eltb Ylszw dfwajze vufc gxc gsz, qyd htr qfu vuk belsdaz dobaqsp
ypvl gwmu bretkoej xied fvxz yoflwlz pxbdzmiyd ltjg.

Well, that is super exciting. Hit me up if you crack it or anything, then I can employ you when I am rich.

Hey check out this fez website. Pity they start at like £60.

Okay good.

Eclectic Bidniss

We've got a new flatmate from America. He wears very fun shorts and is real friendly. We're having a delicious flat welcome dinner on Monday. I wonder if he can make barbeque pull apart pork. Even if he can't, he seems like a swell guy, and his presence compliments the overall social dynamic of the flat, which is basically a 'cool guys only' dynamic. He can be our friend.

I am for real going to be in a kazoo / ukulele band. We're meeting next Tuesday to practice. I'm not sure where or what we'll be practising, but it's an official thing. From now on, girls will think about me: 'That guy is in a band, what a really cool guy.'

I'm actually in a lecture right now, sat at the back updating my blog. It's fine, because we're just going over a synopsis of last semester's content. Our new lecturer is pretty cool, I think he's the guy who interviewed me at the open day. John Rossiter likes for you to find things out for yourself, where as this guy seems to take an approach that involves actually delivering lectures in the lecture slots, rather than linking you to his YouTube videos and declaring all lectures to be public tutorials.

A whole two days have elapsed since two lines ago, and now the band is really for real, we've scheduled a legit jam sesh.

How does one go about abbreviating the word 'session'? It's much easier said that done.

I just spilt a lot of tinned spaghetti on my carpet, but now it's dealt with.

Running is the new walking. Lately I've been going to this parkrun on a Saturday morning, which is pretty good fun. Dave Stewart has been luring me further and further into the whole running thing, but I'm being careful not to get in too deep. I'm beginning to suspect that if Dave Stewart stopped running for more than five minutes, he would just die. He very kindly accompanied me around Endcliffe Park this morning at about five percent of his usual pace, all the while giving me helpful pointers. Mostly you have to move your legs faster than they can go, but so that your footfall is silent. It's important to drink flavoured milk afterwards, because after a run is when flavoured milk tastes most delicious.

I flooded my kitchen yesterday by mistake, and then I was late to the Saving Private Ryan party. SPRP was pretty rad, we watched the film in absolute silence and then afterwards Meg Longman busted out some home made slow gin, which we sipped appreciatively as we played mafia. It was all very grown up.

It's taken me like four whole days to write this blog post. Somebody in our life group was showing us their blog, and it was all super pretty with photographs and probably meaningful words. Who cares anyway?

Until next time, when maybe I will have some more interesting things to write home about.

Not Working

A lot of the time I'm supposed to be working, but instead I find myself playing video games where you get to turn guns into hats. Other times I frustrate my cat and wish it loved me more. Also I watch breaking bad. Or at least I did, until I finished it earlier today. What did we learn from breaking bad? Here's a list:

• Human beings are nasty pieces of work
• When I say "Yes, I love you too," to a cat who is meowing disdainfully and trying to escape my clutch, I am bit like Walter White.
• Everybody is a bit like Walter White
• Hmmmm...

It's a series I thoroughly recommend. Claire Lovell, on the other hand, recommends that I do some work. Or at least something more wholesome that pretending to shoot people, watching people pretend to shoot people and antagonising God's innocent creatures. So here we are, indulging in the ageless pleasure of the written word.

I tried to update my blog like a week ago, but it just ended up being like a two page account of a train journey into London. I spent around an hour and a half writing it, but for your sake I have condensed it into a bullet pointed summary:

• I was trying to catch the 7:30 train to Doncaster
• I had to run for the bus
• I missed my stop
• I ran to the station. My hat fell off
• I had to renew my railcard. A very slow old lady was doing it. I took a free mince pie.
• I only just got my train. There was a funny bit with a lift.
• I realised I should actually have been rushing for the 7:00 to Doncaster, which meant that all my rushing had been pointless
• I ate the mince pie in Doncaster
• I started to freak out, then stopped after I realised that I had two bank accounts
• I missed a train because I was on the wrong side of the platform. My train stopped directly behind me and I turned around just in time to see it leave.
• I spent a while lamenting over how inept I was.
• I got on a very late train. The conductor wished me a merry Christmas and let me get on with the wrong ticket.

Hooray!

A couple of weeks ago I became the proud owner of a 'Hungry Hummer' kazoo, made by the wonderful Doc Kazoo himself.

Doc Kazoo is basically the king of wooden kazoos and customer service. The whole process was wonderfully personalised and the kazoo is definitely the best I have every played.

I like the kazoo so much that I worry about it. Sometimes I feel like I'm playing it really well and that it is the greatest instrument of all time. Other times I'll be playing it not so well and I'll begin to worry that it was never as good as I imagined, and that kazoos can never be good instruments. There's this tiny fissure (like barely visible) along the grain of the wood that seems to have been caused by the screw. It's probably fine, but I have this horrible image of the kazoo just breaking in half one day. I'm always noticing tiny imperfections on its surface, which I know I've caused, but I'm not sure how. It's like every time I touch it, I make it less perfect and bring it closer to falling apart entirely.

I'm in a similar position with my new hat. Today I picked it up and felt like the brim had bent out of shape a little bit. It definitely hasn't.

Christmas was way fun and hanging out with my family is way cool, but I'm actually feeling increasingly eager to get back to my friends at university. I feel like hat wearing and kazoo playing is met with most enthusiasm amongst my friends in Sheffield, and I long for them to share in my materialistic joy. Sometimes I wish that all the people I love could live in some kind of colony, so that all my friends could be friends. I guess that would also make me the most popular person there, so I would have to be in charge.

Sometimes I think about writing things other than just this blog, but enjoying writing and even being good at it are different things from being able to write anything worth reading. Constructing a narrative is an entirely different skill to simply expressing things that are already in your brain. If I was going to write something, it would be a story about a hard boiled detective who was also a duck. This would pass the time and satisfy Claire Lovell's demands that I invest my time more wisely, but would it be any good? Who even knows. I guess good writing is the product of the mistakes learned from bad writing. Speaking of bad writing, does anybody know if bullet-points need full stops? They seem somehow exempt in my book, but I can't really justify this at all. I tend, as you may have noticed, to punctuate some and not others.

For a while I found myself putting large, square full stops at the end of my sentences, but that was an unusual period.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Goings On

This whole last week I've been off my game. I've been a little bit under the weather, like super bunged up in the mornings and super lethargic in the evenings. It kind of disappears in the afternoon, which I'm grateful for, but the half hour just after I've woken up is a sorry time of the day. If you'd like to pray for me, I won't try and stop you or anything. Illness, however, isn't actually the area in which my game is most off. Regrettably, I've used these slight symptoms as a measly excuse for my own lack of discipline. Work shyness has overtaken me a little lately, and there are some assignments due over the next couple of days that will testify to my poor diligence if I don't resolve to spend my time more wisely in future.

Still, plenty of stuff is going very well. Let me tell you about how I am very clever:
My group built and programmed an electronic lock before anybody else. We are the best.

I found that business pretty enjoyable. Learning to write in C (or C++ or something), soldering junk and thinking critically to create a program - those were all pretty engaging and enjoyable things. Apparently next year the course I'm on allows you to choose very freely from a wide variety of modules, so hopefully I can do some more stuff like that in future. Regardless, it seems inevitable that the future will house a plenitude of differential equations which gradually increase in order and demand to be solved.

I need to get the new Beautiful Eulogy album.

I mean, chaes. I wrote a haiku about it:

In the library
The silence of regretting
I have no headphones

Haikus are the next big thing. They're like poems but much easier. I read a good one about a pigeon, but now I cant find it.

I'm off to flyer for the carol service now. The carol service is on Wednesday and you should all come with your friends and aunts and uncles. This said, I'm suspicious that both of my Facebook friends who live in Sheffield will already know this.

My flatmate just called me, he says he arrived at our flat a minute ago to find that the doors were open and everything was gone.

I don't really know what to say. I mean, who would do that to somebody else's advent calendar?

HA HA HA

The speaker at C.U told that joke yesterday, and it was totally brilliant. He was one of the most jovial chaps I've ever met. He had a ridiculous amount of books and some very vivid eschatological ideas. It was interesting to hear his opinions and entertaining to hear his jokes. I can't remember his name.

Hey it's tomorrow now and I've been working hard watching videos about transfer functions. Good job. I brought paper and headphones into university today, which means I can write things and listen to tutorial videos.

Well, that's about it. Nothing super interesting is really going down, but I'll keep you posted. Also I'm feeling a lot better from ill today. Good.

Good.

Good.

Yes.

Doughnut Brunch

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day because you get to have cereal. Lunch is the second most important meal because it is closest to breakfast and if you are at home you can have cereal again. At the minute, however, I'm out of milk, out of cereal and out of the house. This means that I didn't get any breakfast, and so I have had to conjoin both the most important meals of the day into one super important meal, which is a doughnut brunch. A doughnut brunch is when you have doughnuts for brunch so you don't get hungry. John also gave me some animal biscuits, and I shared some of my doughnuts with him. That way we are both getting a balanced diet.

I've got ten hats. The latest arrival to the hat family is a sick up Navy Peruvian beanie from our friends at Jaxon hats. It arrived shortly before C.U house party, which is good because Isaac Stovell said that he would try to bring more hats than me, and the addition of the aforementioned beanie to the ranks of my more portable and packable hats was the only thing that enabled me to beat his respectable count of five. More about house party later.

Another bonus of beanie ownership is that it is a winter hat which protects me from the cold, which is just as well because it has been snowing. Yes for real, snowing. I've probably said some stupid things about the North of England before in a tactless attempt to be funny, and I would like to publicly renounce all those things now. The North can be my friend. It snows here and it is where I live. Admittedly the snow lasted all of an hour or so, but in that time it managed to settle on what had been wet ground, so I have high hopes for things to come.

Hey who wants to hear a funny story? Everyone? Good.

The other morning as I staggered, half dressed and half awake, from my bedroom to the shower, I thought I saw an old lady in the kitchen talking to my flat mate. Needless to say, I scurried away rather hastily and hid myself in the bathroom. Whilst showering, I reflected on this unusual ordeal and said to myself, "There can't be an old lady in my kitchen, it's half past seven in the morning. I've only been awake for five minutes and I probably just imagined it."

Such was my confidence in this theory that upon exiting the shower I thought nothing of strolling across the hallway in nothing but a towel. This was, after all, a flat populated entirely by men, in which old ladies would have no business at such an hour. Passing the kitchen on the way back, I glanced again through the internal window. My senses had not deceived me, she was definitely there.

I decided that it would be a good time to put some clothes on. I got dressed and wandered cautiously towards the kitchen to investigate. Upon opening the door, my trust in my senses dissipated once again. There were now, it seemed, at least six ladies between the ages of 45 and 60 crammed into the kitchen, smiling politely and wishing me a good morning. My flatmate stood somewhere in the middle of them, looking sheepish and disorientated.

After a few moments of stunned yet friendly silence, one of the women revealed that she and her companions were cleaning ladies, and that if it was all right they would like to use our kitchen for breaks. "It'll only be three days a fortnight." said one. Her manner was so dear and her face so kindly that I agreed wholeheartedly without really realising that three days a fortnight is actually quite a lot of days.

"Just do whatever it is you normally do love, don't let us get in the way." said one of the cleaners. I'm not really sure what she thought I normally used the kitchen for, but it's not really physically possible to do most of them with more than seven people between you and the sink.

Well, that was a pretty long winded account of a mostly trivial affair. Then again, what were you expecting? In the spirit of distributing words inversely to the importance of their subject, here's a short hand summary of a weightier event:
C.U house party was a sick jam. Praying, singing, fellowshiping, bonfiring, japery and the like. The gospel is exciting business, and it's not getting any less good. I met a high class fiend by the name of Lindsay Brown. Just for the record, he's not really a fiend I use that term expressively to denote admiration and respect. I didn't know at the time, but it turns out he's an old friend of my parents. He's back at events week (WOOP), so I'll say hi to him then.

Aight good. Text-a-toastie is being hosted in my flat tonight, which is exciting because there will be a lot of people in my kitchen. Like more than when those cleaning ladies were there. Many more. If there's a fire, we'll all just fall over each other and die. Pray that nobody dies and that a lot of people have fun, hear the gospel and have misconceptions dealt with. Good job, have fun!

Maximum Activities

I get to do so many activities and have lots of fun 24/7. It's the flippin' prime time of my life. Sure the work load is picking up a little, but that basically just means that I get to learn interesting things. Did you know that there's this alternate dimension where differential equations are like ten times easier to manipulate? It's called Laplaceland. You can drag difficult equations, kicking and screaming, to this alternate plane where you can rearrange them any how you like, and then magic their limp bodies back into the real world of actual maths, at which point they agree to stop being so difficult. It means that systems engineers can tell you about car seats if you tell them about all the stuff underneath the car seats like suspension and tyres.

Let me tell you about activities that I get to do. Yesterday was Monday, which means C.U, which means maximum fun with my Christ loving home boys/girls. Some guy was trying to tell me that Jesus is like a snake on a pole. Also that I had died and was hidden in him. Crazy. Directly after the meeting was CITY WIDE TEXT-A-TOASTIE, a truly all-caps worthy event. In case you don't know, text-a-toastie is where anyone can text in with a question about Christianity and stuff and get a free toastie with their answer. It is really fun and very exciting, you meet all kinds of people and clear up all kinds of misconceptions. Word is that people have been going to church with flat mates and reading through gospels following these events. That is my jam. Have you read any gospels? You should, you dingus.

Friday is a good day, because there's usually gospel choir, followed by a roughly 50% of ceilidh. Probably one of the things I love the most about living here is that there is a ceilidh about five minutes from my house around once a fortnight. I love it. Gospel choir facilitates similar levels of fun. We getting ready for Christmas with bad boys such as this, and next week I'm taking the warm up, during which everybody is going to learn how to sing Daft Punk's 'Lose Yourself to Dance'. Gospel choir is fun because nothing gives me kick like singing songs that have different parts in them. It sounds very nice. Apparently Bach thought that harmonies and melodies and stuff are beautiful because they reflect the perfectly united and multifaceted beauty of God in his triune form. I have been reading a very interesting short book called 'The Good God' by Michael Reeves. It is all about how the trinity is not like an egg or a three leafed clover, but is a lot like a God who does not need anything because he overflows, and has created and loves human beings because his very nature is to radiate goodness, creativity and love. Basically the doctrine which we so often avoid because it is confusing gives us a fundamentally better understanding of God. I don't want to keep going on about it, but I totally want to keep going on about it. Good book, better God.

I want to start a hat society, but you can't be a society by yourself. I've met a few people with a growing interest in head wear, and I feel like in due time perhaps the dream could become a reality, but it's probably best not to rush. My friend Joe is interested in starting a Kazoo Orchestra, which of course I am also interested in. Both of these prospective societies excite me, and hopefully they excite other people also, because then they will become a reality. I would like them to both happen on the same day. If there was one day of the week where I sang and danced and another day where I wore hats and played the kazoo, my life would be even better than it is now. I guess the best thing about these activities is that I can do all of them every day, which will probably be the case once I found a shop in Sheffield that sells kazoos. Still, organised kazoo playing and hat wearing is good.

Hey, know what else I'm doing this week? I'm going home to London! If you are cool and live in London, we may soon be reunited. If you are Ruth Lovell, then I especially look forward to seeing you.

Hat summary:
I lost my flat cap whilst having fun in museums with my boy Tim Rothon, but I can buy another one from any old charity shop. Also, Claire Lovell has been busy accumulating lost hats for me in London, and it pleases me to announce that upon my return to Sheffield next week, I will be donning / carrying my Fez and Tim Platt Cowboy hat. This will bring my hat collection up to nine hats, assuming I replace the flat cap any time soon. Tantalisingly close to double digits. I'll have to make a cake when that happens.

Wizards only, keep it tight.