Temptation; Say "NO!"

Hallo! How are you all doing in Blogland? Sorry I haven't been blogging - I really haven't been bothered 'cuz it's been quite a busy week, but I thought I'd give you a quick update.

Monday: Started the aforementioned 3-day training course for something called ITIL ("IT Infrastructure Library" - yeah, yeah...makes no sense to me either). It was kinda useful, but I'm not really into managment speak, so it was quite brain intensive to keep translating everything the bloke said into english, and then somehow store the results in such a way to pass the exam. *shudder*

I think I've already mentioned what happened that evening, so I'll stop here with Monday. Did I mention I went for a run? Probably not. Well I did, and my knee started to twinge again...grrr!

Tuesday: Day two of the training course - fun. After work I went up to church to practice piano before my lesson, but the lesson was cancelled. I praticed anyway and pretty much finished my last Grade 1 piece! Yay! Hopefully should start on the Grade 2 book this week! Then I stayed in for the evening to think up/prepare for a youth discussion and revise for my "ITIL" exam. I think I also managed to finish my book. I been bad...I finally started the 2nd book in the "Quicksilver" series by Neal Stephenson, but made the mistake of going into a bookshop and bought two more books. I have since read those two books and left the N.Stephenson book on page 60. Anyways, I am now back on that book...must not go into bookshops when I have a book already!

Wednesday: Took the ITIL exam. I passed two mock exams with flying colours, so I'm pretty confident that I passed this one. Should find out this week sometime.

In the evening was the youth discussion group. Since it was the first one back (and cuz I didn't have Nigel for backup) I decided on a nice easy topic of "lying", and also a bit of a debate on video/music/software piracy. I think it went OK, but could have been better :-S spent too long on the games. On the plus side, the youth managed to chat a lot about the various things, wheras normally they're next to silent (except for Simon...you can't shut him up!).

Thursday: Back into the workplace environment and a pile of stuff to catch up on. Stopped by church after work to give Nigel back the church key and nicked his laptop to do something with the youth register. We've decided to split youth into two groups and have two sessions on a Friday night because there are too many kids for us to do anything but "Crowd Control" (we had 80 kids there on Friday!):

• 6:30pm - 8:30pm : Year 6 - Year 8
• 8:30pm - 10:30pm : Year 9 - Year 11

We'll be starting the system this coming Friday. Anyways, I was meant to be going out, but it got cancelled, so I stayed in watching TV while doing a much better register system in Access (it was previously just a spreadsheet). Ended up staying up until 1am!! Time flies when you're having fun!

Friday
Yeay! Last day of work! Youth in the evening too! We tried a new system of allocating people to 'areas' of the hall. LoL - I ended up at the top which I wasn't meant to be, but managed to chat to loads of youth, so I had a good night! Afterwards we just chilled out for a bit and chatted. I was on the door for the first half with my new register. It was *much* faster than a spreadsheet! I'm not bigging myself up, but it was sooo much easier to use :-D

Saturday
Somehow I got pursuaded to play football because our team were a few players short. So I was up at 08:30 (it's not natural I tell ya!) and drove to wherever it was to play. Managed to get on as a right-back during the second half, and it was kinda fun :), even if we did lose 2-1 (we should have won..we played much better overall...grr). Then in the afternoon I just kinda slept and watched Mission Impossible 2. In the evening a bunch of us went to Bath to see "The Band With No Name" - the lead guy in it is a cousin/nephew to a family in our church, so I'd heard of them a while back. I'm not really into that kind of music, so I wasn't really expecting much (espeically as I'd heard from a couple of people that they weren't very good live). The support band was OK, but weren't a very good "live act". Didn't really get the crowd going at all and you couldn't understand most of the words of the songs...even the youth said that they didn't have a clue what they were saying, however they were alright because they did have this one rather nice lass singing for them ;-) When "The Band With No Name" came on, they were actually not too bad - I quite enjoyed it. They really got the crowd going and even some of the more apprehensive youth seemed to have fun. I feel at this point that I should mention that there have (apparently) been some changes to the band line-up. There was a new guy in an orange shirt (he's married Loz...hands off ;-)) who was absolutely nutty - he was very funny, and the dancers were pretty good - loads of energy. Then went home & slept.

Sunday
Church as normal - the morning was pretty good. Mark was leading and he decided that we should sing the chorus of "Shackles" by Mary Mary at one point. It was really cool! Especially as it was only 3 chords which I could blagg on the bass quite easily ;)
The afternoon was spent watching Series 2 of "The Office" - classic! I watched Series 1 last week, and the Christmas Specials before that, so I thought I'd complete the experience.
In the evening we had a guy from the far east preaching called "Joe Remiah" (sp?). He's preached before at our church and was quite funny, easy to understand and also made some good points.
We went to Adam's for a bit after church and I ate chips from the my favourite chinese chip shop by church. Mmmm, chips ("french fries" to my American readers).

Now I'm at work listening to Delirious.

Listening to: Delirious - "I'm Not Ashamed" (D:tour 1997 Live)