'tis the season

So, the Rugby 6 Nations tournament begins this weekend. I'm just a little bit excited about this.

Last year - after failing miserably to fall in love with cricket - a few different folks suggested I give rugby a shot at the prize for my favorite sport to watch in the UK, and as the 6 Nations tournament was about to begin, the timing was perfect.

During the post-showdown interview after the first game of the 2006 tournament, the 'Man of the Match' was grunting happily along about the various important tackles, rucks, mauls and tries all the while he was BLEEDING FROM HIS EYE SOCKET.


Clearly, these guys are NOT kidding around about their sport. And so I was hooked.

I'll be cheering for England this year. I had mixed emotions about where to place my loyalty the last time around, but they are no longer split. Fingers crossed they'll make a better showing than the English footballers did in the World Cup.

really?

I got an email advertisement today from one of my favorite random present websites. However, their marketing folks must be on vacation...because clearly the B team was in charge of this ad.

The ad was done to promote Valentine's Day gifts. This item was one of the teasers in the email.



What, pray tell, about this little item screams "Happy Valentine's Day"? I mean...what's the message here?

Is it "Love you, honey...have some coffee without me"?

Maybe it's "I'd love for you to make me some coffee and serve it in this little number...sorry there won't be enough for you. -Love, your sweetie-pie"

Somehow, I don't think either of those are the route I'd suggest.

houston, we have lift-off!

I am a broadband leech no more.

Successful connection to new ISP yesterday elicited a Chandler Bing-like dance from me and shouts of joy!

Only thing left to work out is to reconfigure my wireless hub so I can enjoy life as it was meant to be.

random thought

I've just noticed there are 9 songs in my "Favorites" playlist on my iPod that start with "Don't...".

That's just ONE PLAYLIST on MY iPod.

Doing the math...that must indicate something like a zillion such songs in the known universe.

Wow. That's a bunch of songs telling people not to do something.

quote of the day

"Dull-witted but well-meaning bureaucrats slap down the paving stones of good intentions on the road to hell."

- Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, 10 January 2007

Read the statement in context here.

deja vu

The following is a transcript* of a recent email exchange with my mom.


ME: Random bit of trivia: I got a new mattress topper, like the Tempur-Pedic® beds. It is FANTASTIC! I slept like a baby last night!

MOM: What is a mattress topper? Is it better than my 20 year old "Sterns & Foster"?

ME: A mattress topper is something that goes ON TOP OF your mattress. I got a “topper” because it doesn’t make sense to buy a whole new mattress here. I wouldn’t be able to bring it home with me; the beds are different sizes here than at home.

MOM: Don't be a SNOT. :) I did not know if it was like a pillow-top mattress. Will you be able to bring this home?

ME: No. The beds here aren’t the same size, and since the mattress topper is cut to fit the mattress - so it sits on top without any overlaps or gaps - it won’t fit an American bed any more than a mattress from here would. Comprende?

MOM: You sound like Laurie Johnson in her conversation with her MOM. :):) I do comprende!


*Highly edited for applicable content.

a day late...

...unknown number of dollars short.

I want to be Grammar Girl.

Why didn't I think of this? I mean, there's a sign on the door to my office marking it as the designated "Grammar Crisis Room" (thanks Steven).

Thanks to Meidy for sending this my way...for a laugh and a bit of a wistful sigh.

Hopefully Dennis will appreciate the fact that she uses the word "pre-apology". I love it!

can't stop laughing

One word: PINEAPPLE!

Many thanks to Heather (not Meidy) for passing this along and giving me a good chuckle over lunch.

starbucks oracle: revisited

So, my standard drink has changed in recent past...so I thought it time to revist the Starbucks Oracle.

Here's what the Starbucks oracle has to say about me and my grande extra hot latte:

Personality type: Lame

You're a simple person with modest tastes and a reasonable lifestyle. In other words, you're boring. Going to Starbucks makes you feel sophisticated; you'd like to be snooty and order an espresso but aren't sure if you're ready for that level of excitement. People laugh at you because you use fake curse words like "friggin'" and "oh, crumb!" Everyone who thinks America's Funniest Home Videos is a great show drinks grande extra hot latte.

Also drinks: V8
Can also be found: On the couch at home


And here I was thinking that I was at least a little less pretentious with this over my former grande 2-pump mocha.

Incidentally, from 15 February, you will be able to wear your drink on a t-shirt. No matter what you think of it, it's yet another example of Starbucks' brilliance, thanks to their understanding of four little words:

"It's all about marketing."

for your viewing pleasure

just a few snapshots with friends while I was in Houston and Atlanta for Christmas/New Year.

I'm trying out flicker, so they're here this time.

Passion '07: part 3

During Passion, the students were challenged to "Do Something Now", and were asked to get involved NOW in one of 8 different tangible activities. You can read about what they were challenged with and how they responded here. There were some financial and some non-financial activities, and the students far exceeded all their goals in every category.

In terms of financial giving, by the last morning of the conference, the students had collectively given something in the neighborhood of $700,000. Wow.

But that's not all! (eww...that feels like an infomercial sound bite)

On the last morning of the conference, Louie spent the first part of the main session reviewing what the students had collectively accomplished through the Do Something Now challenge and then talked a little about their vision for the future. There will not be a Passion '08 conference (and probably not a Passion '09) as one main gathering. They are moving into a new phase...or, as Louie put it, the sails of the boat called "Passion" have been filled by a new wind. And that wind is taking them to the students who can't get to Atlanta, or Nashville or Sherman, Texas very easily. Loosely, they plan to do mini-events...in a LOT of different places. Some of those places are in the States...but many are not. And in some of those international locations, they hope to offer the conferences for free. I'm doing this such little justice. Louie's words were much more intense and purposeful and rich than mine...

Regardless...their initial projections are that it will take a few million dollars to make this happen. So, at the worst possible time to take an offering (after they've encouraged the students to give to OTHER ministries throughout the entire conference), they took an offering to start raising the funds needed to follow the global wind.

Now...one of the side jobs that our team had been given was to help receive the offering. All we had to do was wait for the cue (one of the Passion board members to pray for the offering) and we walked quietly to the front of our sections and just held up the bucket we were given so the students could come to us.

They streamed into the aisles like a river. And I was overwhelmed. I'm SO not cute when I cry, but tears were streaming down my face at a pace I usually manage to reserve for the most private of moments. But I didn't care. A few poor sweet college students felt compelled to capture the moment on film, and now have a fairly rough-looking picture of a random volunteer who isn't so fabulous at crying...but whatever. It's not about me.

One of the last things I got to do as a volunteer was be in the small group of people who helped count that offering. The room was silent. Partly because we needed to be in a serious mood; you just don't joke around when you're dealing with that much cash. But mostly I think we were just in awe.

The offering they took that morning was $256,000. Double wow.

the most beautiful man in london...

...ate dinner at Pizza Express tonight on Earl's Court Road, with an old man who could have been his father or uncle but I'd like to think of as his Morrie.

That is my theory mostly because he very clearly wasn't English and although I sadly wasn't close enough to hear much of their dinner conversation (and thus didn't catch Morrie's accent to note if it was similar), their meeting embrace did not scream "close family relatives" to me. Come to think of it, it didn't scream "dear friends" either, but maybe it's early days in their mentoring relationship. I digress.

I wish Susannah had been there, partly because I know she likes Pizza Express, and partly because she's MUCH better at pegging foreign homelands based on physical features and accents than me. The best we could do was "not Italian" and someone at the table threw out "Lebanese" as a potential (which bodes well for my good friend Basim).

I must have said something about how beautiful he was a dozen times...and on reflection, I've realized it wasn't in the typical girly playful way. I honestly was just in awe. He was so pretty that I wouldn't even dream of joking about him as my "boyfriend" (as I do about about at least one stranger each day on the tube or otherwise around town). It was more admiration than wistful hope.

What I mean to say is that it felt like a sight-seeing event. You know...Tower of London, check; Buckingham Palace, check; Most Beautiful Man, check.

memories of 2006

So I'm a little slow...and I have started and deleted this little blurb a couple of times, because, really, does anyone (apart from my mom) care what my best and worst memories are? But, John asked the question on his blog...and even though I feel a bit cheeky about responding here instead of there, I'm doing it anyway...

Best memories...

• NYE 2006 celebrations in Edinburgh with Susannah, Heather and LB (which counts because we were up past midnight).
• Getting surprised, more than once.
• Mike and John visiting me in in London.
• Tea with Steffanie at the Ritz.
• St. Patrick's Eve in Dublin with Paige and Susan.
• St. Patrick's Day in Dublin with Paige and Susan.
• Finding a new boyfriend every time I get on the tube.
• Laughing so hard I cried with Steffanie and Danny and Basim. More than once.
• Speedy Steffanie on crutches in London and Ireland.
• Kissing the Blarney Stone.
• The hotel bed in Cork, Ireland, which I'm convinced was made from clouds.
• My first real conversation with a homeless person.
• A quiet Christmas with my family in Tyler.
• NYE 2007 in Atlanta with most of my best friends.

Worst memories...

• Ending a relationship every time I get off the tube.
• Not getting married.

For the record, it's not like somebody asked me and I said no and now wish I hadn't. It's that nobody asked. Which, I guess, is more "lack of a good memory" than it is a "bad memory", but, you know...

passion '07: part 2

Late Nights and Being a Volunteer.

So, in addition to sorting out the lunches, most of us on the meals team also had some shifts to pull during the Late Night events, which were a handful of mini-concerts held all around the venue. There were about a dozen of these on the first 2 nights of the conference, each taking anywhere from 8-15 volunteers to manage.

My late night was the Shawn McDonald one. There was another guy playing that night too...and I can't remember his name (confession: I had to look Shawn up on the grassroots website to remember his last name, which, given what it is, you'd think I'd be able to remember). There's VERY little chance the other guy would ever see this, but I offer my apologies for not remembering your name...I enjoyed your music, but this is a sign of how clued out I am on the music scene these days.

On the first night, my single responsibility was to serve as what I call a "door nazi" at a 'no entry/exit' door (yes, I just used that word in reference to my job at a Christian event...it's hyperbole...roll with it). Being a door nazi isn't too flashy, but I happily went about my job and would rather "hold open the door to the house of the Lord than dwell in the courts of the wicked" (another reference to Louie's pre-conference speech to the volunteers, loosely quoted...and yes, I realize that my job was to hold the door closed, in this case...but hopefully you get the idea).

So, as you can imagine, it wasn't too hard to keep people from entering or exiting, and I was 100% successful in my task. Well, except for the musicians, which were allowed, so I still gave myself a 100% score...even though I tried to kick out the cello player before I knew he was "with the band". He was nice about it, and thanked me for being so good at my job. His name is Neil and we became instant conference friends when I told him that I have a friend who plays the cello. FYI...Conference friends are the ones you make at a conference and get along well with but will never see again.

On the second night, I got upgraded (or downgraded, depending on how you look at it...but I considered it an upgrade in the end) to "hall nazi", where all I had to do was sit in the backstage hall and keep non-production and non-band types from entering/exiting/milling about. Essentially, this meant that I didn't have to do anything but chat more with my new friend Neil the cello player and make an idiot of myself when I had to ask Shawn who he was. But he was cool about it too.

I chatted with Neil and Shawn about London, because they had done some shows in the UK in the summer, and had to fly back to the States a day or two after the most recent terrorist drama...so we had that (and I also still had the cello thing with Neil, who promised to play louder on the second night because I could only hear the cello on 2 songs the first night).

Yeah, it's a random story, and probably seems like one of a million stories I should have from all the new people I met and such...but really, it's not one of a million stories. It's one of very few stories like that, because of how I viewed being a volunteer at Passion...

For me (and lots of others, I'm sure), being a volunteer wasn't about being in the center of all the excitement (as it has been in the past) or making loads of conference friends. It was about being busy and focused on the task. My purpose there was fairly singular: remove any and all distractions possible to make everything flow simply, easily and seamlessly for the students.

On the first day, I held doors open to the building where registration was taking place...we yelled and cheered for them...we told them we were excited they were there...we chatted with them about their journey to Passion...we took their towels and socks that were brought to donate to shelters in the Atlanta area. After that, I only met a few students...because I just didn't need to. I got to hear a lot of cool stories from some of the leaders about specific things God was doing, and I was able attend one of the main sessions and I could see in their total abandon during sung worship and hear in the challenges from God's heart through Louie's talk just a glimpse of what God was doing. And that's all I needed.

on being oxymoronic

Not that you care, but because I do...

I changed the title of my first post about Passion '07 from "indescribable" to "part 1", partly because I think it's dumb to say something was indescribable and then go on about it for as long as I already have (especially when there's more to come) and partly because there are more posts to come, and i don't know what to name the others except part 2, part 3, etc.

Even though I do think it's indescribable, I still can't keep myself from talking about it...all the while knowing that no amount of storytelling will ever make me feel like I've really conveyed the full impact of what it's like to be a part of the experience directly.

Louie agrees with me...there's a bit about it on the 268 blog.

So, for my own hypersensitive conscious and parallel-style loving self, I changed the title. That's all.

passion '07: part 1

Passion '07 = 22,000 college students plus 1,000 volunteers plus 14 staff descending on Atlanta for 4 days.

For anyone who has ever experienced a Passion or OneDay event, imagine more of that, a reminder of that, a renewal of that, a rekindling of that in your soul. For anyone who has not ever experienced it...I don't know how to describe it.

I won't be able to do it justice. I'm not even sure why I'm trying, except that I can't not write about it...I'll break it up into a few posts over the next several days, covering at least the following topics, which are listed more to organize my own thoughts than to whet your appetite:

• the meals team
• late night events
• the offering
• the students
• being a volunteer
• friends and family
• vision for the future

Let's talk about the meals team today. Our team was responsible for setting up the serving lines and herding the students to pick up their lunches and find a place to sit and eat. That part of my day went roughly like this:

09:00 to 11:30 - approximately 50-75 volunteers build pallets of thousands of lunchboxes for the students to cruise by and grab a lunch when the time came.

11:30 to 12:30 - team meeting to discuss the day's plan / lessons learned / break up into sub-teams and give detailed assignments, etc.

12:30 to 13:30 - herd students to lunches and then to seating around the venues to enjoy their grub. I must have said the phrase "please keep walking on the escalators" a thousand times. Our goal was to "herd with kindness"...which was sometimes difficult. Can you believe that we actually had some students defy our requests? At a Christian event?? At a PASSION EVENT??? Oh, right...they're human. It still happens.

After the masses had found a place to cop a squat and eat, there were various clean-up bits and pieces to handle...and then we grubbed ourselves...and then we were off to the next thing.

Seems pretty easy, right? Not so much. There are a thousand logistical challenges when you try to do even the simplest thing for such a large group of people in a very short amount of time.

Our main team leaders, Tague and Lisa Harding, spent a LOT of time (we're talking over 6 months of planning) organizing the chaos. Tague and Lisa have been around Passion since the beginning, and they are one of the coolest couples I've met. They work well together, demonstrate grace under pressure and are quick to give credit to others before themselves. They are excellent at what they are there to do...which should come as no surprise, as the entire Passion organization is about doing things excellently, and they wouldn't have lasted this long as "A-listers" if they didn't both appreciate excellence and demonstrate it as well.

And our sub-team leader, the one and only holder of the strong opinion, did an outstanding job of recruiting a really solid team for our venue. This overlaps a bit with the "friends and family" discussion, but for now I'll say that one of the things that made our team flow so easily is that there is a lot of history among most of our sub-team members...so it was really easy to give and receive short, concise directions and re-directions as well as rebuff suggestions from the peanut gallery without having to worry about how the message was ever received.

At the all volunteer meeting before student registration began on the first day of the conference, Louie Giglio pointed out that with as many volunteers as we had, there was clearly a LOT of talent, education, and a full spectrum of perspective and opinion on how any given task could be done among us. There was obviously a lot of planning that went into making Passion happen, and although there was room for suggestions on tweaks here and there, by and large, there is a reason for doing things the way they asked them to be done. So he urged us to go with the flow and be satisfied that none of us (including Louie) had the full picture of why certain things were the way they were.

Imagine the sudden bursts of pressure and stress associated with trying to do something so big, so WELL, in such a short amount of time...and all the potential for misunderstandings and "I think we should do it this way" moments. Within our team, as within many others I'm sure, there was room for suggestions, but there were also a lot of "thanks for that, but we're not going to do it your way" moments too. And it needed to be that way. Our team handled that well thanks to careful planning and purposeful recruitment. Well done, Tague, Lisa and Bas.

It was amazing how refreshing it was to just sit back and play my part...be told what to do and just do it...no questions, no argument, no commentary. My personal ambition during these days was two-fold: (1)trust my leaders to do their job well and (2)exhaust myself in service to the Lord.

These few hours of each day definitely contributed to achieving that goal.

t-9 (working) days and counting

Woohoo! I'm through Stage 2 already!!

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Dear Customer

We are pleased to advise you that your order has now been placed with BT.

You will receive your Welcome Letter approximately 48 hours prior to the completion date specified in your order.

Assuring you of our best attention at all times.

Regards
Nildram Provisioning Team

---

This means that I should get my Welcome Letter ON MY BIRTHDAY. What a wonderful present!!

t-10 (working) days and counting...

...to broadband service at home. Fingers crossed, holding my breath, etc.

I'm a little concerned about the confirmation email I got. It includes the letters B and T. YIKES!

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Dear Customer

Welcome to Nildram!

Your Service Agreement is attached as acknowledgement of your order (Service Agreement.pdf). If you do not have an Adobe Acrobat Reader for pdf files, please either download a free version from www.adobe.com, alternatively reply to this e-mail requesting your Service Agreement in Word format.

Your order will progress through the following stages:

Stage 1 - We are currently verifying the details you have supplied prior to placing your order with BT.

Stage 2 - you will receive confirmation that your order has been placed with BT

Stage 3 - you will receive a Welcome Letter containing your setup information prior to service activation

The whole process through to service activation is expected to take 10 working days, although migrations and certain re-grades may take longer.

We will contact you by e-mail in the unlikely event of any delay to your order.

Thank you for choosing Nildram and we look forward to a successful installation, if in the meantime you have any questions please do not hesitate in contacting us by e-mail adslprovisioning@nildram.net or via our Customer Care team on 08701608600 option 3.
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Here's to hoping that because BT services my phone line, they HAVE to work with BT to provision the DSL...and that because they are a fairly small company, if anything goes wrong, I will be able to get faster/better/actual service from them where I couldn't with BT. I'm nervous.

friend / musician / book plug

I think I'm allowed to do this without being too much of a cheese curd, because I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to call Tara Leigh Cobble my friend. Legitimately, I mean.

You know...I could call Harry Connick Jr. my "friend", since I'm pretty confident that if we ever met, we'd get along well...but we haven't, so that's not really legit (for Dennis, I guess I could say HCJ and I are "pre-friends"). But I've spent a good amount of time with TLC, and she is super cool in that real person way...not in that "I'm so glad I get to legitimately say I REALLY KNOW a real live rock star" way, you know?

Anyway, I met TLC thanks to my friends Mike and Basim a few years ago, and used to get to see her when she was coming through Houston on tour. Now that I live on the other side of the pond, I hardly ever get to see her.

BUT, and here's where the reason for this little plug comes in, I got to hang out with her for a few days in Atlanta last week (more on that later), and I finally managed to buy a copy of her new book - Here's To Hindsight. I read it on the plane home, and I enjoyed it more than a lot of other books I've read in recent past. Not because it's the most well-written piece of material in the known universe...but because it's real. No hype, no fluffy marketing, no promises to change your world in the preface, introduction or endorsements...it's just the story of a girl who can't NOT do what God has put in her heart to do. And it's clear from her transparent style that it's not always easy, and she doesn't always love every single second of her life...but there's an underlying and overpowering driving force that compels her onward, and that's where her joy is found.

I highly recommend this little read to anyone who wants to curl up with a book that will let you explore the possibility of abandoning all for the sake of the "one thing" God has planted in your heart. And while you're at it, it will give you a new-found appreciation for all those "starving artists" who roam the highways and rest stops outlining the U.S. of A.

You can get your copy from her website, from Grassroots Music or from Amazon. Incidentally, while you're at it, you should pick up a CD or three. They're good. I promise.

i think i'm going to cave

I knew this was going to happen. I have been fairly happy with my broadband free existence at home for the past 4 months, but it makes things that used to be easy breezy (uploading photos, downloading stuff from iTunes, balancing my bank statements, personal emails) a bit of a monkey.

I'm pre-nervous about the process, thanks to BT, but I'm committing myself to find a new broadband provider this week. Wish me luck.