Hello!

This isn't really my prayer website at all.  In fact, it's little other than confusing / irrelevant for the most part.  You're only here because the MailChimp service needed a 'company website' in order to work properly. 

Don't worry, you have already subscribed for my prayer letters, and will be getting one soon.  Feel free to leave this page.

Flippin' Wales Mate!

I'm in Wales.  It's been three weeks since I left England.  Five days since it didn't rain. (Oh man I miss that film).  Obviously I know why I'm in Wales (Christian nonsense), but it still feels weird that I'm here and not anywhere else.  I live in Llanelli (To say 'll', open your mouth, touch the tip of your tongue to the back of your upper incisors and breath heavily.  It reminds me a bit of a certain snake from my childhood) but I'm currently in Swansea, at the Caer Las (blue grass?) Connect project, which is all about giving the socially excluded somewhere to hang out.  I fit in pretty well with the people here.

I have growing love for this Gangam nonsense.  Part of me wants to hate on it, but that part of me is a massive hipster.  Something can be popular and amusing.  Especially a middle-aged Chinaman doing a dance.  (I am aware that Chinaman is not a good way to describe 'Psy', who is Korean.  Also probably not great for Chinese people either.)

All the people in Wales are great.  Well, all the ones that I have met.  Especially my fellow trainees.  Good age, culture and gender range.  Good bunch.

Grood news:  The youth group I'm placed with here have NERF fights every first Friday of the month.  I told my mother this, and we both recollected with fondness the night before I left for Wales, when she found a NERF gun in my bag and asked me if I was sure I really needed it.  I told her you never know when you might need a NERF gun.  There was a brilliant moment when the pastor was explaining what a NERF gun was to Miss Legarde (resident French girl), and I was able to pull one from my bag and show her.  He was clearly impressed by my gift of prophetic foreknowledge.

I have adopted a cuddly pig that I found outside covered in mud.  Her name, as stated on her label, is Petaluma.  She has been kidnapped.  Again.  As lovely as they are, the people on my course have a fascination with sadistic japery.

There's a man who comes here every Thursday and tells us good things from the Bible.  It's fascinating and very tangent orientated.  This week we looked at how Noah got drunk and naked, Abraham pimped out his wife and slept with his maid servant (which started Islam) and basically everyone else in the Bible is as bad (for the sake of clarity, this excludes Jesus).  It was about how God never used good people (there aren't any), but used people who had faith in him.  When asked to summarise the session, a girl on our course said 'It was about Jesus preaching to Noah in Hell.'  That was based on a trippy verse in 1 Peter which some people think means Jesus preached in Hell while he was buried, but some people (who I agree with) think that Noah was preaching the gospel of Christ through his Spirit in the days of the Ark.  It was a pretty wild ride that jumped across both testaments with great frequency.  Good stuff.  Also, if you want to be less stupid and know more about the Bible, but can't be bothered to read it (understandable), invest in a copy of 'God's big picture' by Vaughn Roberts.

I have been making four minute microwave sponge cakes.  This means that everyone is my friend.

Holiday Fun and Plans

I am going to have all the holiday fun, starting tomorrow.  Tomorrow I go to an empty field on the outskirts of a quaint seaside town called Cromer, accompanied by my father and my boy Alex Du-gal.  Once there, we will rendezvous with other empty field people and begin the weighty task with which we have been commissioned:  To fill the empty field with canvas bell tents, large marquees, outdoor sink units and plastic portaloos.  At the end of this process the field will hopefully be much less empty and much more suited to running a fun, evangelical, mission focused, Christian camp for kids between the ages of eight and twelve.  Once prep week for WEC Camp 2012 has finished, I'm straight off to another field for my last year of teen camp, which I can sneak into because I am a big baby and I don't turn eighteen until August fifth.  At teen camp we do not have portaloos, we defecate like men in the way that God intended - in a good old fashioned bucket of bleach under the crisp, green canvas cover of a WEC toilet tent.  We also have makeshift urinals crafted from tent poles and plastic sheeting.  They had the same when I was at warriors (the small people camp), but I think some things changed the year after some kid fell into a hole full of wee.

Once I've finished my Christian frolicking at Teen Camp, it's straight off to the relatively luxurious commodes of Warriors, where I will be supervising three to four campers for the duration of one week.  Also I will be playing wide games, which are the most adrenaline pumping things ever.  They're always some variant of 'Get to the enemy base and take/plant the stuff.  Also catch people and take their stuff.  They involve velcro belts with life tags, and there's a beautiful, animalistic pleasure in sparring with your fellow man, mano e mano, in order to put him in his place.  Trust me, it's lots of fun.  Like, lots and lots of fun, and also probably one of the main reasons I returned to Warriors to lead after I left as a camper.  Oh man, I am now excited major.

Hello again!

It's been maybe a month since the last paragraph (well, technically the one before it) and everything was great.  I went to the toilet in tents, I told kids what to do and I played plenty o' widegames.  Fun fun fun.  Also prep week was great, I caught muchos sun in shirtless manual labor with good lads.  Also at graduation I won the prize for being really Christian.  I got thirty quid, which was good, but the prize was a bit unusual, to say the least.  My mother is very proud.

Speaking of really Christian, I'm off to Llanelli, South Wales, tomorrow to start my gap year with the World Horizons mission agency.  It involves four months of teaching and equipping in Wales and more months of international overseas placement with a missionary team.  I'm probably going to be slipping off the radar a little, definitely after Christmas when I go abroad.  If you love praying, pray for me.  Also get in touch if you like praying a letters, because I can combine both of your great passions in something I like to call a Prayer Letter.  It's like a normal letter, but with a bigger emphasis on praying.  I'll also gladly receive any financial support, so if you like parting with your money then I'm sure we can arrange something.  Speaking of financial support, it's been brilliant to see God provide for me for this course financially through so many people and coincidences (like the random Christian prize).  I'm not really very organized, so it's been fantastic to see God providing in  my weakness out of his simple and sustaining love.  Also big shout / thank out to all the people who are supporting me financially and in prayer.  You guys are awesome.  Oh bah this is exciting.

Well, this is it.  I'm not sure when you'll next hear from me, but I guarantee you that one day you will.  Also watch the new Batman film, but not before you've seen all the previous ones.

The more I think about Batman, the more I am genuinely inspired by his example.  There's a man who sacrifices his own identity to a cause and counts the cost of being the man nobody else can be.  In all things, particularly serving Christ, remember these immortal words of his:

"Not everything.  Not yet."

All Kinds of Fun

I like to think that the level of familiarity between myself and my ragtag band of readers is great enough that I shouldn't have to bother with the trivial nicety that is apologising for the long time delay between this post and the last.  If anything I probably flatter myself by imaging that the majority of people reading this give any significant percentage of a crap about how frequent these posts are.  However, I would like to extend my appreciation to those few, odd people who sometimes say lovely things like 'David, when are you going to update your blog?'.  I never know quite how to respond to this, for one because I don't usually have a clue when I'm going to update my blog, and for another because I am quietly a little pleased that anybody cares.  I did half heartedly attempt to throw in a second dream log, because I had a second dream.  It has velociraptors and possibly cannibalism in it.  Also blue people.  It is here.

Just currently I am writing this because [pauses, plays free cell with real cards for about an hour] I am on exam leave, which means that all activities outside of the educational sphere have a magical allure to them.  I have been playing quite a bit of free cell recently.  It is more fun with real cards, and I feel  more of a talented recluse (Poe's Dupin and Chandler's Marlowe come to mind) than a bored office worker.  Exam leave is not great.  Sometimes I realise how much work I have to do, and reflect on how proud of myself I will be if I try hard, whereas other times my primary objective is to do nothing productive.  At one point I clicked on a banner ad featuring a scantily clad cartoon vampire lady as a joke with Claire Lovell, and then proceeded to play 'Thirst of Night' (a game that likes you to click on things and pretend you're a vampire) all the while saying funny things to the other people who were playing it.  It was very funny because it is a stupid game and I was pretending to take it very seriously.  It involved a lot of threatening everyone with my ridiculously weak forces, and making proud boasts of my unimpressive feats, as if I believed that I really was a awesome as the game wanted me to believe I was.  Claire and I thought it was funny.

It became less funny when I began to succumb to the familiar psychological tactics of such games, and for the next three days played it a bit because it passed the time and was not work.  I wasn't having withdrawal symptoms or anything, I just stopped because it was a really boring game.  I felt foolish for having ever played it beyond that first comedic half an hour.  It's one of those games that operates in three steps:

1. Get resources

2. Use resources to click on things

3. Wait 

(And then back to step one)

This breaks my two rules of gaming:

1. Do not play games that involve exhilarating real-time waiting as a game play mechanic.

2. Play games you want to play, not games that want you to play them.

Also, 3. Never play any amount of World of Warcraft even once.

They're not very rigid rules, in fact I made them up just now, but they maximise fun and minimise needy game  weirdness.

Ruth Lovell came home and then went back to university again.  She has a year in industry lined up with a quite top secret organisation who blow up pigs and kill people by accident.  (Srsly.)

A taxi driver stopped me the other day and asked me where I got my hat (the pith helmet), got me to write down the website and was very interested in the delivery time.  There seemed to be a great deal of urgency to his interest, and I wondered why he was in such a rush to by an interesting hat.  He'd probably just had an epiphany about how life without hats is not really life at all.  I was left feeling very good about the fact that I had been able to help and the fact that the man had taken the first step in his journey of hat ownership.  I'm not sure if I've already mentioned this, but my hats have now doubled!  My loving mother went on a Caribbean Prayer Cruise (deeply spiritual, I'm sure) and brought me back a tasteful blacky greyish trilby that seems to be made of recycled papery plasticy stuff.  It's nothing ritzy, but I like it.  I wore it to my cousin-in-law's jubilee/birthday celebration, because we had to look like we were from the fifties.  I looked like this:

The hat is in the grass behind me.  The tie is my father's and the waistcoat was given to me during the party by friend of family (and of mine).  It is currently hanging up in my wardrobe, waiting for an excuse to be worn again.

About two days before this was taken I was at a street party in my street.  It was alright, I entered the hat competition and didn't win anything because I'd just stuck a two inch union jack onto the top of my pith helmet and evidently other people had gone to a little more length than to fiddle with some paper, cocktail sticks, string and hot glue in the half hour before the judging.  In the evening my whole family went in except for me and my big sister, and we stayed out to party hard in the evening street disco.  It was a bit lame because the DJ was any next average homeboy (I love that rap).  Also my street is full of people that aren't that exciting, so the atmosphere was a little dead.

Speaking of music (I guess), I've added this sick song to my mental 'for the wife' playlist (I also danced to it with my cat just now).  Richie is dangerously smooth, and this tune is lyrically and musically wholesome.  (As in 'inspiring a sense of wholeness', as opposed to 'censored and culturally irrelevant).  I mean, that's awkward shuffle first wedding dance material.  I've been thinking lately 'I flipping love marriage'.  It's a bit sentimental and girlish, I know, but there's something brilliant about seeing people I know who are married and thinking 'those people have been in love for a long time and they still are.'  It's a wonderful thing.  Also I am a big girl.  Less sentimental hits in the 'for the wife' playlist are:

- Always by Erasure (A funny song featured in this funny game)

- Future by Know da Verbs (Big love for that tune)

- Just the Way You Are by Billy Joel

- Be Your Man by Josh Turner (A bit raunchy)

- Ignition by R Kelly (I will probably play this a lot.  My wife might get annoyed)

Just found this, which you might appreciate if you're a bit nerdy.  But probably nobody will care.

Well, this is falling into a meaningless list of links now.  But while we're here, another fun thing I did recently was go to Westfields with my youth and do a hipster safari.  It involved putting on an Australian accent, wearing a pith helmet and saying fun things about any hipsters you saw.  It is the cheapest of the three sole ways to enjoy Westfields.  (The other two are eating and bowling.)  Next time I'm there I might go into Hollister and see if I can apply for a job on tills.

Also I have a stick shaped like a gun which I was showing Claire how best to use to beat up bad guys when I smashed the exterior bulb of my light, revealing the ugly, energy efficient tubing inside.  So now my light is a smashed bulb with a bulb inside it.  My love for my cat is growing deeper and more sincere of late.  Will keep you posted.

Dream Log II

I've spent pretty much the last four days in the company of top lad Alex Dugal in commemoration of his 18th birthday, which means that I've known him now for approximately 16 years.  He's a top lad.

On the Thursday, he came round here for cake celebration with my family (epic Minecraft / Alex and his kittens cake courtesy of Ruth Lovell), on the Friday we had a Nandos celebration with our mutual friends from XL and he slept at my house, on the Saturday I went to his house and slept there, and today we all went to the Easter Morning service at the Bridge.  Between those last two days, as I lay sleeping on the floor under the rickety bunk bed of my longest standing companion, I had a dream worthy of a second dream log.  (The first one's here.)

The Dream


The dream starts in a grimy underpass of some kind.  There's a normal 'through-pass' kind of thing going on, but also a small cube of space to my left.  The two are separated by a chain-link fence that has a doorway/gap in it.  Somebody is a few steps behind me, a friend.  Possibly Joel Williams.  In front of me there are two velociraptors.  They might be eating a dead person.  A small T-Rex appears, and begins to eat them.  It stands a little in front of them, opening and shutting its jaws repeatedly near them so that half of its teeth are sort of scraping / chewing at them.  The velociraptors make a similarly half-hearted attempt to defend themselves, and the overall impression is reminiscent of those mono-dimensional combat animations between sparring avatars in dated strategy games that serve as a simplified representation of the attritious combat of two warring factions.  After a while it becomes apparent that the velociraptors have won, as all at once most of the Tyrannosaurus' skin has dissapeared and he is dead.  Now it is just me and two velociraptors, and that is where things normally get awesome or terrifying.  Neither of those adjectives really seem apt for describing what happens next.  Perhaps more fitting would be 'surreal' or 'eerie'.  Having said that, 'surreal' is kind of a given in most dreams.

The dream skips ahead a couple of minutes (as dreams do) and I find myself in the aforementioned chain-link partition with the velociraptors.  They are not eating me, but I am eating with them.  They occasionally hand me a small, rather delicios nibble of cooked mince meat type stuff.  I'm not sure if it's an animal or a dead guy, but I feel worryingly like it may be the latter.  Also I'm writing this a long time after the dream now, so I can't remember so much. 

Now I'm running with a bomb, and I know I'm being chased by velociraptors a few blocks behind.  I think I also have waypoints and a GTA style mini-map.  People are panicking because they know the velociraptors are on their way, so I keep running.  Eventually, a velociraptor catches up with me, takes the bomb and runs on with it.  Turns out he was just trying to help.  Misunderstood velociraptors seem to be a thing in this dream.

All I can remember now is that I'm doing an exam or something in a part of my school I've never seen before.  It's all curvy and colourful.  Then I get lost and wander into a dilapidated, corrugated iron, slum like corridoor.  At first I'm confused, but when I get out I mention to David Glover that I 'stumbled into the old Geography corridoor, which I had completely forgotten about.  I met Andy Lovell and explained to him that the school was very changed, and he said he was going to speak to Miss Davis.  I got to English and Miss Davis told Andy to go away.  There were foreign people in my class.  Their skin was half blue, half not blue.  They were a brother and sister and sat on opposite sides of the classroom.  I sat down next to the blue girl.  She made good conversation and wore an impressive blue hat, as did her brother.  It was like a super cool berret, but I can't remember very well now.  Then I woke up.

Holiday Fun!

It's Easter!  The holiday fun is well under way, and Ruth Lovell is truly home.  She brought Dominion with her, so we've been having fun playing that along with some equally nerdy (and rather dated / poorly made) real time strategy games.

I have been getting good mileage out of my hat.  It is robust and forgiving, allowing me to take it just about anywhere.  It's also lived up to its name in terms of protection from hot suns and light showers.  I'm considering buying a green fez, so that I have a hat collection rather than just a hat.  Mother Lovell is not happy, and my younger sibling is hating on the notion zealously.  Tell me what you think on our wonderfully interactive side-bar poll, dear readers!

Fun Fact:  Every time I've ever been in Westfields, my little sister has been there also.  Last time I was there she bumped into me with her small friends, and yesterday I was her with the same lot in Nando's.  What was quite funny was that our party contained two Lovell's and two Farley's, and theirs one Lovell and one more Farley.  Funny.  Ha ha ha.  

Also Westfields is only good for three things:

1. Eating Nandos

2. Eating Cinnamon Pretzels

3. Hipster Safari (Ideally with pith helmet)

Today I'm going to do work, because apparently that is what holidays are for now.  I'm also going to play some TF2 and encourage Ruth Lovell to get this, which is free.  Also it's like Tiny Wings crossed with TF2, and it involves fun colours.

Other fun I have been having is late night Black Ops with Glover, during which we realised that maximum fun in that game is shooting people who are wielding guns with a crossbow that explodes after it goes into them. I'm suspicious that the game was designed to lure boring people into playing it just to give the fun people somebody to shoot.  My cat is still cute, and my holidays are not hugely eventful, which is something that I am enjoying.

Buy hats everyone!

Hat!

Heads up everybody! I just purchased this here hat!  It's a french pith helmet, which means it has a wide brim, is well ventilated and is made from pith or cork.  This one is made from wood grown in Vietnam, where the hat is also assembled.  Rest assured, it is not any next sweat shop Vietnam hat.  Pith helmets are awesome because:

• Explorers wear them
• Their wide brim keeps of the elements
• They are relatively waterproof
• They are super sturdy (Like a hat shaped helmet)
• You can dip them in water and the pith absorbs it and cools you off when it evaporates.

I bought this hat with some left over Christmas money, because spending Christmas money on sensible things is against the rules.  It's part of a decision I've made to accumulate a wide inventory of hats.  I'm currently considering purchasing a fez (the hat of the oppressors), but I'm not sure how much I'd wear it.  I'm going to wait a while for my hat-orientated excitement to simmer down.  I do like piths, and I like to think I may own a few at some point.  The few would include this one, which is sick on a level.  I went for the flat brim because I thought it was more casual, but this hat is awesome.  In fact, check out all the piths, and vote for your favourite!

If you're getting bored of hats, turn back here.  I'm basically wearing my helmet whilst hacking through a jungle of headgear with my literary machete.  We might not all make it back in one piece.

Ruth Lovell is coming home soon, and she has been phoning me.  She has been phoning me on the probably two decades old phone my awesome dad recently installed in my room, which has the wheel where you have to turn it for each number and it makes a fun winding sound.  Anyway, Ruth and I have been communicating through phones and Skype.  Guess what we have been talking about.  

Yes.  Hats.

It started with me excitedly telling Ruth excited trivia regarding my new hat, and then sending her this link, which she liked.  I think that this hat would suit Ruth very well.  We then shouted each other for around an hour and a half about hats whilst jumping from link to link and style to style.  There were a lot of ugly berets involved, and we resolved that bowlers and top hats made from anything other than felt were not cool.  I decided that Grade Eight Panama Gamblers are very cool.

They're setting up a thoroughly lame writing competition at school that is centered around the Olympics, but me and Glover figured that if we enter, we might be the only two.  I'm not sure how serious / committed he is, but the idea is that I'll write an article petitioning for more hats in the Olympics, and he'll write something demanding a greater involvement of cats within the Olympics.  Basically, we're competing with each other.  My far fetched desire is that I will win, get an awesome prize and have to read out my piece in assembly wearing my pith helmet.  Just about everything is at its best when wearing a pith helmet, and this also applies to the awesome weekend away I'm going on with my youth.  I'm going to win all the outdoor activities with the help of my protective headpiece, I'm going to win all of the card games with the morale boost it provides, and I'll probably take it off while we're giving Deo Soali all his Gloria.  I'm am super flippin' duper excited.  Also tomorrow's English lesson is cake Friday.  Super flippin' duper.