Being a Big Boy

I am eating tinned peaches. I used to be told when I was going to eat tinned peaches, but now I can eat them whenever I like because I am an independent young man. I am living with four other independent young men, all of whom took gap years of their own. They are all pretty good lads. This one guy likes climbing, and this other guy likes war games and other stuff.

I thought freshers would week would be super lame and stupid. I gathered from other people's experiences that it was basically just a festival of intoxication, where school children revel in their new found independence, embracing all of its freedoms and few of its responsibilities. It seemed that there were two possibilities on fresher's week: waking up with no recollection of where you had been the previous evening, or waking up with a firm recollection of locking yourself in your room the night before. Whilst that may be the case for some universities, my experience in Sheffield has left me feeling that such concerns were needless and uninformed. Let me tell you all about the fun I've been having, because that is why you are here.

A couple of nights ago was the fresher's frat party. I found out that 'frat' is short for 'fraternity', which is basically some mega-silly American idea. It cost a whole fiver, which was a worryingly high percentage of my finances at the time. I decided no to go, and instead went to a Jazz Night at The Interlude bar/cafe with my flatmate John. We acted super classy and clapped all the jazz. John thought it was funny that I didn't want to talk to girls, I thought it was funny that he didn't want to dance with them. There's a right way of dancing to jazz, and I don't know it. All swingy like. Still, I was up on the floor doing jazz hands, because they are from jazz.

The internet in my accommodation is wired, so I can't play my top jamz when I'm hotting things up in the kitchen. Speaking of top jamz, I met a guy today at the CU picnic who calls himself Dave the Rave and loves Shai Linne. That is funny because David Glover matches that description, but this guy was a different guy from David Glover. He complimented my hat, we started talking and within twenty minutes or so we were on the ground, confusing onlookers as we engaged in a finger joust (they have a website, apparently), which I won. Everybody had already seen me rescue a Frisbee from the roof of the bandstand, so now they all know I'm super cool and you shouldn't mess with you. I also met a Christian guy who's on my course. I'd been praying that I meet some Christian friends, and now they're basically falling out of my ears. Tha's what happens.

The whole independent study thing is treating me well. I didn't actually get the grades I need for my course, and I'm finding my position of academic underdog pretty motivating. Also the fact that I don't want to be wasting nine grand and then some a year. Talkin' bout calender's on my wall, calendars on the internet, online to do lists, and bare other organisational tricks. I'm going to study hard and win my course, so y'all better watch out.

Today's lesson was robots. I'm studying Robotic and Mechatronic engineering, so nearly all of the lessons are robots. We were making LEGO mindstorm guys compete in an obstacle course. There was a point during the session when our contestant seemed pretty adequately equipped with an impressive algorithmic repertoire. Little dude was following lines, turning at walls and picking up balls, and I felt like I had played a significant role in the whole development process. Trouble is, we spend the whole time optimising things while we were still programming, and some of the optimisations weren't so optimal. It was looking doubtful, but then a few flustered tweaks on my part in the last thirty seconds plunged the situation into downright dire. Our robot went forward in half centimetre jolts for about ten seconds, before devoting itself entirely to to doing backwards doughnuts with all the pointless resolve that a machine can muster. The antics of about eighty percent of the other participants were similar to that of our own, but it was still a little gutting that nobody got to see anything that we'd achieved. If anything was gained from the experience, it is that I have learnt the truth of that timeless engineering aphorism: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

I'm having lots of fun. Thanks for choosing to spend some of your time reading this consequenceless claptrap. General Norman and the boys will play you out.

Brain Pain

My brain was having some pain a while ago. I think it is from the mental strain of trying to pick a lock that I bought today for about seven pounds. Most of my motivation for this blog post is to talk about how I'm getting my teeth into lock sport, and how you should all think that I am very cool for having such an edgy hobby.

It all started a long time ago when I googled lock picking sets, saw the prices and thought, "Hey, this is something that I could actually do". About a week or so ago I got some birthday money and purchased this badboy, which I have found to be a most economical and effective starting set. There's a tension wrench, a hook pick, a half-diamond, a snake rake and an 'L' rake. I've found this Youtube channel very instructional and interesting. I also watched the fist half hour of a 50 minute talk about locks throughout history and felt like it was time well spent.

I've been able to open a couple of the locks around my home through raking, but the brain hurting came from trying to get my head around the whole procedure of feeling the individual pins and working out the binding, which I have to do with my new lock anyway because it doesn't like to be raked. The whole thing's much easier in Skyrim.

Today's themes for me have mostly been Batman and surreptitious entry. I've been watching Batman Beyond recently, but today I was checking out DC's new animated series 'Beware the Batman'. They've made some interesting choices, and I think it's pretty cool. I like how they've made Bruce Wayne the world's greatest detective, something that many animated renditions of Batman neglect. You don't get that high class super sleuthing with Terry McGinnis.

About lunchtime today I tried making and using some shims from a delicious can of vanilla coke, but gave up after about five attempts. They kept breaking, I think because the padlock was too small. Definitely nothing to do with poor technique.

Grood. Now everybody go and pursue their lock sport destinies. But remember:

• Never pick a lock that doesn't belong to you.
• Never pick a lock that's in use. (learnt that one the hard way)
• Watching Batman is good for you

Summer Summary

Yeah what?

The last four weeks of my life have mostly been on a field in the South West of England. It's all because of this camp. Early August was prep week, where my father and I lived in a field and hit things with mallets and sledgehammers, as well as these massive hammers called mauls. You get up for breakfast at eight, then hit things with mallets until dinner, which is twelve hours later. It's about as manly as it gets.

After a week of recuperation avec mon famile, I went back to a similar, nearby field, where I cooked in the kitchen for a week. This mostly involved stirring things, sometimes for hours at a time. The following week I stayed in the same field as a tent leader. In the evenings they have leader's supper, which is when you eat pizza and then stay up until the small hours playing risk. During the week I was persuaded to stay for rearguard, where you undo all the work that the mallet team did three weeks earlier. Carrying heavy things around like it's not even a thing. Rearguard has an etiquette of its own, which involves sitting around a large ring of square tables and shouting things like 'bread me!' instead of 'could you please pass the bread?' The things are in response thrown across the table. Anybody who gets up to fetch something is scolded and frowned upon.

I have a new hat and a new hedgehog. Stetson Steve (my kitchen buddy) informs me that the hat is a Stetson. He would know, because he collects them. I bought it in a charity shop for a fiver, and I rather like it. The hedgehog we found in the road on the way back from prep week, then put it in the shed. For a few days it would come out at night and run erratically in tight circles, stopping only to catch its breath. These hilarious days are over now, and our hedgehog (who is a boy) seems to have recovered from its dain bramage. I'm pretty aware that I'm constructing this blog entry terribly. I'm tired and going to stop now and finish later.

It's later. Not much else exciting happened. I went down a death slide standing up and lived, then I watched this Batman thing (which it turns out you can watch on Youtube on this excellent WB channel) with Ruth Lovell, which was my birthday present to her. It is very great.

Soon I am going to freshers week, where I will probably stay indoors and cry between bowls of cereal. After that I will build robots.

All up in the Blogosphere

Hello, avid followers. It is time to update the blog again. I have mostly not been doing it because I'm on my gap year and I've had to write loads of prayer updates, which are like blog posts but a bit more boring and easier to understand. Anyway the gap year is drawing to a close, which means I'm back up in the blogosphere. This is good news for you because you really like my blog and you have been very sad that I have not been making the words go on it.

I did kayaking today. It's part of my super cool gap year job where I spend most of my time outdoors doing really fun stuff. Sometimes I wonder if it really counts as a job, because it is quite rad. This morning my job was to traverse the treacherous waters that separate Llanelli from Burry Port, whilst learning interesting techniques and terminology that helped me to go forwards.

The afternoon consisted of bobbing around in North Dock and capsizing a lot. We practiced Eskimo rescues, braces and other exciting things. My colleague (and friend) Jacob nearly did an Eskimo roll. This was his second time in a kayak. I think inland kayaking would suit me better than sea kayaking, because paddling a kayak in a straight line feels monotonous after a while, whereas capsizing never gets old. It's super fun.

Hey, if that stuff interests you, I would recommend checking out our webpage. We're currently recruiting.

Tell you what wasn't so much fun - the party I went to yesterday. Some of my friends were going and they were all like 'It's open invite, the theme is psychedelic, some guy is going to be wearing a horses head!' It sounded totally off the hook, and in my mind I was envisioning the greatest party of my life so far. I went home and put on my Optimus Prime voice changer mask, then applied gaffa tape to my shoes. After that I got over excited and wrapped up my neck and shoulders, which restricted my breathing a little. I experimented with my arms in the hopes of having no skin on show, but it restricted blood flow too much. As a finishing touch I applied a piece of twine to the mask in such a way that it could not be removed, for I had resolved to keep it on all night.

Half an hour later I found myself gnawing animalistically at that twine in a darkened room full of strangers. It was hot under mask and the sweat was getting into my eyes. The plus side of my perspiration was that the tape peeled easily off my clammy flesh. The party was firmly on the hook, a 'sit down and talk while a live band plays' affair. I knew about four people there. It was essentially the eighteenth birthday party of a complete stranger. I decided the time was right to leave after a pretty big guy came up to me and asked me who I was on behalf of the birthday girl. She'd probably seen me dancing, so I wasn't surprised that she was eager to find out.

The worst part is that I'd turned down the opportunity to watch a movie with my life group (church bros) because I wanted to go to the party so much and the party was totally lame and it was all my fault. It's almost like the party in itself wasn't super lame, but my being there was awkward and unnecessary. I felt a little bit old because everyone was in the school year below mine, which is weird because those people will soon be my fellow freshmen.

Oh glerb this song is the bees knees. Lots of people tell me this music is annoying, but that only makes me more 'alternative', which means the same thing as cool. When I'm rolling in paper I'm going to turn some of it into this album. Some more of it will become a charger for my iPod. That would be swell.

Okay good. I only have two more weeks in which to break social policy, so get those numbers in to me pronto.

Everything is Going Swimmingly

Indeed. Swimmingly is how everything is going. I slept on a raft in North Dock last night. It was super duper fun. We ate fish and chips and chocolate fondue, washed down with ice cold Pepsi. There were also glow sticks, which made for bonus fun.

YDT coworker Luke Watson turned down the chance to join me and four other Horizons workers in our nocturnal adventures. He spent most of yesterday informing me of just how stupid an idea it was, insisting that I would come home cold and miserable. I actually came home rather happy, and slightly stiff, feeling that it had been an evening well spent. I will spend most of today telling Luke Watson how stupid it was of him not to have come. I will also explain this to the rest of YDT, who shamed our great name by wussing out and staying at home. It would have been nice to have them along to help us carry several hundred kilograms of raft across the 300m of tarmac between the Horizons car park and the water's edge.

*THIS JUST IN*
The bottle of Frijj I finished about three weeks ago has transformed itself into an emergency penicillin farm. Yummy. I'm pretty sure I saw some kind of visible vapour in there.

It's been a while since the last post (surprise surprise), so here's a brief summary of all the sickest kicks I've gotten from the last few weeks:

• Learning to play Smash Bros at the Jennings' house and stubbornly refusing to play anyone other than Solid Snake. I murk man.
• Having a proper Nerf war, again at the Jennings' house, with all the lights turned off. They have bare NERF guns there.
• Going to North Wales on a week long JUMP camp with my YDT boys and a handful of young people, where we saw bare lives impacted by the holy spirit and had fun climbing
• Climbing regularly, which we have started doing
• Having a post JUMP movie night regularly, hosted by my main man Max Gerry. 
• Eating deli chicken, an entire malt loaf, and many other things that I picked up from the reduced section of Asda.
• Telling everyone that League of Legends is for big babies whilst secretly being intrigued by it
• Introducing all my bros to TF2, resulting in Max fun. (But not Max as in Maximilian Gerry, who does not like computer games.
• Making my first Wikipedia Contribution

I had some sad news recently, which is that the cute cat who lives next door and gives me cuddles when he sees me is moving away in a couple of weeks. I will have to start carrying ham.

More Welsh Ting

I'm in Wales. I was in Wales for my last post about five years ago, and I'm still in Wales now. I've been not in Wales in between (mostly over Christmas), but now I find myself surrounded once again by miles and miles of Wales. It's the Welsh-est thing ever.

In Llanelli (a small town in Wales), you can say hello to people on the street and they hello you right back. It's pretty rad. My commute this morning consisted of some people I didn't hello (mostly just the guy lying in the road, sleeping between two parked cars) and some people I did. The people I helloed included a couple of friendly lollipop men, the usual handful of Koreans walking down Railway Terrace towards Nations, and a really interesting black guy who complimented me on my hat (the Zulu War Pith) and told me about how they used to wear them in the army, where he served for twelve years. There are not a lot of black people in Llanelli. I miss the zany multiculturalism of London town.

Bro, I just realised it's been since October that I blogged this junk up. That means you missed all my Christmas fun. It was fun because Godgive Mbadiwe (Mmm-bad-eee-weh!), my friendly neighborhood Nigerian, came to stay with me and my family. Over the month he was referred to (always unwittingly) as Godsgift, Godsong, Godfrey and many others. He came out of his morning teaching session just now and I invited him to sample a bit of this. His concise review was 'I thought it was music'. My father would be proud.

My knee is hurting because I smashed it into a table chasing Mike Adams, Horizons U.K director, into the YDT office. He was carrying delicious pizza at the time.

The cats of Llanelli are warming to me. I spent about ten minutes cuddling one on my lap outside my front door yesterday evening. It then spent about three hours meowing at the door with unsettling persistence and regularity. The hours were the ones between 22:00 and 01:00. My bedroom is on the bottom floor of the house with a window facing the front garden.

I spent most of last week making a fake bomb from a cheap game of Operation, a small robo-puppy and an old car radio. There was a great moment when I was in town with Luke Watson struggling to find obsolete electronic things to turn into a bomb and we walked past this car radio lying on the ground that was exactly what we wanted. That was some pretty encouraging provision. We didn't actually use the bomb in the end, but it was mighty sick and is currently residing in the North Dock attic awaiting future use. The week prior to bomb week I spent half a day making a mega blanket fort maze which we also didn't use. Basically my new job is the most fun thing ever. There are some things I don't like doing so much (as with every job), but even those are super fun, relatively speaking.

About halfway through that previous paragraph I went away to do circuits for half an hour with the YDT lads on a busted knee. The current set up is 30 seconds of pull ups, press ups, burpies, chair lifts, and sit ups, with 30 seconds rest / skank (depending on how hardcore you are) in between. This is followed by some kind of crazy, cardiovasculartastic, American basketball mini game. Then we repeat the whole thing until we have to stop and do stuff. My arms are tiredish and my knee is swelling up some, but I'm one step closer to being Ben.

Next week we're going to Snowdonia with some young people to put them through their paces. Also disciple   / witness to them. If you're into praying, you should sign up for my prayer letter and hear some more ecclesiastical jargon. Maybe you'll get redeemed and sanctified in the blood of the Lamb! (That video cracks me up to this day).

Well, I'm done. I'm gonna go and help my bros with something productive.

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