Rest of Loughborough

OK, so ... didn't update during the week in Loughborough so much. Credit can be divided in the following ways:

• I am a lazy blogger; but you already knew that.


• Adcock's monopoly of the computer until the wee hours of the morning.


• Mark's 'coincidental' hard drive meltdown while we were there. :(

The odds of me completing a proper blog are ... 0%. Deal. Maybe the best way to see my experience is to check out my Snapfish collection. Maybe I'll get on there and add captions like Tiffany did ... probably not. Do the Snapfish pictures stay up there forever? How does all that work? If you aren't a Snapfish member, then you have to go through all that registration crud. It won't kill you.

Here's the link

16.10.2005

Church. Lunch. Hung out with Loughborough folks. Practiced (frantically) for skits. Evening church. First skit. Snacks. Dinner. Meeting. Bed

Church was good, very traditional. Bart did a great job leading singing. They say they have a hard time leading singing, though they enjoy singing once it gets started.

Lunch was a potluck. I think the American stereotype is that English food is bland. I thoroughly disagree. Think about English food that we frequently eat. Fish and chips are good. I LOVE shepherd’s pie. Of course, I can’t wait for a good Guinness in a proper pub. :)

Loughborough folks are very friendly. The congregation is not that big. Not sure how many, but certainly less than one hundred. All age groups hang out and interact with each other.

Skit practice was hectic but fun. I think I shocked a few folks by actually getting serious and keeping people on task. The funniest thing of the whole trip happened today. Can’t explain it yet. Will have to in person.

The rest … non-eventful. G’night.

• Hangin’ out at the church for lunch. Notice the kid trying to pelt me with the ball. It's in the upper left hand corner of the picture, coming for my head.
  
  


• More hangin’ out at the church for lunch.
  
  


• Aw! My dumb picture hosting company doesn’t do video. I did one just for Katie.
  
  

England Part I

I am going to make a small attempt to record the adventures of the intrepid group from Otter Creek that travelled to Loughborough, England to help with a Holiday Bible Camp (like VBS). We are fortunate enough to stay at a house that has internet access, so I am going to try to blog / post a few pictures as I go. You’ll have to get with us when we get back to see all the pictures in their proper quality. Let’s see how this thing works.

It is 20.06 local time. We have been awake for about 30 hours or so ... I think. We are all pretty exhausted. I hope we all get a good nights rest so we can hit the ground running tomorrow. Today’s pictures are of our travels from Nashville, through Chicago to London and finally to Loughborough.

Um ... so this doesn't take up tons of visual space, I'm just going to post the links with small descriptions. Click the images to open a new window and a larger picture.

14-15.10.2005

• London near King's Cross Station
  
  


• Sheep on the English countryside
  
  


• Loughborough
  
  


• Phil at an old church in Loughborough. He is standing on a sidewalk that is made of former tombstones.
  
  


• Others at the same church
  
  


• Lesley talking with Mark at the entrance of the Loughborough church.
  
  

Welcome Back Me

So ... I haven't blogged in a long time as many of you have pointed out. >:|

I would say that the biggest culprit is the fact that, in my little crackerbox, rat hole of an apartment, I do not have cable or internet access. When I move (probably December) I will have these things turned on. I tend to blog late at night instead of sleeping. Until then, here's a really outdated description of a trip to LA. I'm two days from leaving for England. I'll probably get pictures of that up ... next year.

enjoy.

PDC

I spent September 11th through the 16th in Los Angeles attending the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference. It was AMAZING!!! Computer programmer heaven. I took a few pictures with my phone. They're not the best quality, but they convey the message on the web. Here's the highlights:

I had a layover in Pheonix that started here ...




... and, 20 minutes later, ended here.




It was basically like programmer summer camp




13,000 programmers took over the LA Convention Center




There were about 150 classes




Fantastic breakfasts and dinners were provided for us




Amazing new technologies that you guys probably could care less about like LINQ, WPF, WCF, and WWF ... no, not World Wildlife Foundation or World Wrestling Federation, it's Windows Workflow Foundation. These are the things I should be playing with instead of writing on this silly blog.




LA turned out to be a lot better than I had expected. LA is beautiful. Southern California is beautiful. I really expected LA to be trashy, brown smog, dangerous, gangs, etc. etc.. I am sure that is there, but I didn't run into it. LA was sunny, 75 degrees, much more 'normal' than I expected.




Granted, I didn't get out a whole lot because I spent considerably more of my time in the convention center in class than I planned. I skipped only two sessions; one to catch the plane home and one to go running. The convention center and my hotel were very close to Dodger's Stadium, so I ran out to it, did a lap around it, and returned. That was a lot of fun. Most of the run was through a Hispanic neighborhood. At the time, I thought nothing of it. I felt perfectly safe. A little, middle aged guy even waved at me ... and he wasn't the only one.

I went out to dinner two nights with the fellas. We went to Sunset Strip in Hollywood both times. Loved it. It's a lot like Green Hills. It was insane real estate prices for old houses that, quite frankly, weren't that spectacular. I can imagine multi-million dollar celebrities living there and going to the grocery store and Best Buy and ... almost being normal.

On our way to ... somewhere ... we walked by the Whiskey a Go Go. Awesome! I wanted to go in but was overruled by the rest of the gang. That's where Guns 'n Roses got their start. It's holy ground to me.




I was RIGHT THERE hob-nobbing with rediculously smart folks; folks who WROTE parts of Windows or Host Integration Server. Bill Gates was there. He did a spoof of Napoleon Dynamite with the actual actor who played Napoleon. It was hilarious!

Bill rented out the Universal Studios theme park for us one night. All the food and drinks were free ... as they were at the convention center all week.