life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

The week of outreach is more than halfway over by now. It feels as though it's gone on for a month. Usual schedule: Children's clubs in the mornings, make lunch, Bible study, literature distribution, dinner, door-to-door, back to the manse to chat, bed.
This year we're doing activities at the clubs: football for the boys, dance and craft for the girls. I'm doing the craft. So far we've made boxes out of coloured lollipop sticks, and tomorrow we're starting friendship bracelets. We've had a good turn-out of kids, 24 today, and the boys are doing well too. One of the little girls said it was the best club she'd ever been too. :) I did my memory verse today. I didn't think it went too badly. One thing about it is that the time is short, as we need to get all the activities done and so on, so there's a limit to how badly you can mess up in the time. Tomorrow I shall change it around a bit and give them the words to hold up as I take them off the wall, and then I'll get them to hold each of them up as the rest of them say it over.

We finished the town yesterday and we were out in the outlying villages today. I was in the one where I used to live so I had to organise everyone and keep track of where we were and how many we had done. It was quite fun actually. Tomorrow they're going to Hillsborough so I printed out a couple of maps for them. I'm doing my best to be helpful and clean up and stuff without saying anything or making a fuss, but I do think people are noticing. Peter did, and Claire.

The door-to-door is pretty much as usual. Joel was very shocked by one of the responses we got ("I'll take my chances on going to hell"), but I'd heard it often enough to be hardened to it. Going out agina tomorrow, urgh. I always feel really nervous directly before it.

Rebekah was in the church today because her parents were feeding us. She joined the dance club, despite being well under eight :), and loved it of course. This evening I kept an eye on her while her adults were busy. She was sweet most of the time, although she did take a strunt when I tried to give her juice, because she wanted her father to do it. She did do a couple of things that I ordered her to, like wipe her mouth and not go jumping off a high wall, so we're getting there. The boys let her play cricket with them and taught her how to say "'zat?". They wouldn't let any of the rest of us play! They said she was a good meduim-fast bowler, but she's a pants batsman because the bat is bigger than she is.

So far:

Gakked from everyone:

Use this dollmaker to make a "realistic" doll of yourself, then a doll of yourself as a Mary Sue, extra points for wings.

( Cut for pics )

The Sue version has better hair and shiny electronic gear in the background :)

Recently there has been some kerfuffle of JKR's supposed slighting of the fantasy genre, and Terry Pratchett's comments. I saw both sides of the indignation, and tend to come down more on the Pterry side. ( Cut for length )

I've editted my tags so that all the spaces are now underscores. It makes it easier for visitors who don't know that now you have to replace '+' in the URL with '%20'. LiveJournal have only had this feature for a month and they've broken it already. However, the underscores do look rather ugly. I hope they fix this soon.

The spammers of inboxes that I've written so far:

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From: ben@anchorhead.net
To: shooting_star2@anchorhead.net, lars@anchorhead.net, yoda@dagobahmaildrop.com, anakin@knights.jedi.org, yoda@council.jedi.org
Subject: Fw: FW: Fw: Survey

NAME: Ben Kenobi. Didn't I do one of these things twenty years ago?

NICKNAMES: Old Ben, 'that crazy wizard'.
( Read more... )

OF ALL THE PEOPLE YOU SEND THIS TO, WHO IS LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND TO IT: Anakin. He ceased to exist and became Darth Vader.
_________________

I speant the last week on a mission team in Galway, with the Covenant Fellowship which is a part of the Western presbytry of the church. And you don't get much farther west than Galway. It's a nice city, although the houses are apparently very expensive, even more so than here. They look pretty swish too. We only were in one estate with any houses that looked poverty-stricken. It's very multi-cultural too. Lots of the people we met weren't actually native English speakers (and not native Irish speakers either, because they all speak perfect English too), they were recent immigrants. And the university is more impressive than Queens. It's mostly on a cohesive campus, unlike QUB, but it's bang in the centre of the city, because it's older than most of it, which is what I love about Queens. Galway in race week is absolutely insane. The traffic was chockablock going out to the racecourse. Some people with more money than sense took a helicopter ride from their hotels to the course. The money that went on betting alone was ridiculous. There must have been millions and millions of euros came into the city. Down in the city centre in the evenings was like Belfast on a Thursday night times about 15. On Ladies' Day the women were out on the town still in their hats and stilletto heels. There were loads of buskers and street entertainers around. We saw a couple of fire jugglers, a small boy who rode a unicycle, a bagpiper (with a repetoire of 7 tunes, and I've never heard 'Happy Birthday' played on the pipes before, either), a group of drummer, and a guy in red greasepaint pretending to be the devil. We talked to him on the Thursday night, and he said people were always trying to convert him. Mad. But I'm glad I saw the Galway races were like, even though I'd never go purposely to see them.

Typical day was: get up, collect at the minister's house, Bible study and prayer, leaflet distribution, lunch, door-to-door questionnaires, dinner, open-air in Shop Street, possibly coffee, bed. It didn't happen that way every day, though. One night was the congregational barbecue, at one of the members houses away out in the country to the north, and the Friday night was the children's club in the hall in the back garden. A couple of afternoons some of the girls would stay in and help get the tea or look after the kids. The minister's kids are Eiléanóir and Labhaoise. Eíléanóir is four and is a real handful. She wrestled with the boys and her favourite word is 'no!'. It was hilarious when she came to the children's club, because there wasn't a peep out of her all night. She had gone all shy and was the best behaved child there. Labhaoise is two and is the exact opposite of Eiléanóir. She likes to come up to you and smile and give you a shell or something she's found. The other church worker and his wife have three little boys, and the eldest, Caleb, is quite severely autistic. He runs away every time he can get outside on his own so they have to keep the outside doors locked all the time he's in the house. The other two are great little kids. They like football and comic books. It was Michael's 11th birthday so the boys on the team bought him a new football (the one he had deflated all the time and had to be blown up with a bicycle pump before use) and went to his party and played football with him.

The responses we got were the usual mixed bag. There were one or two who seemed genuinely interested in learning more, and one woman from South Africa had been looking for a Christian fellowship, and, when she got the Word Today, drove around to the minister's house in a taxi! She's woried about her daughter who had been in Ireland for a few years, and apparently has an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. Galway is strange when it comes to beliefs. Apart from the usual background of lapsed Catholic and general irreligious, there are some people thinking a lot of weird things. There's much less consciousness of the Gospel than there is in nominal Protestant Dromore and round about. Also a lot of Mormons and JWs. Some of the team were afraid to meet them in case they started trying to convert them. I didn't mind any of it very much. The door-to-door is most nerve-wracking, of course, but at least there were no holiday Bible clubs, which I hate doing because the kids will never sit still or listen for two seconds together. It was a bit depressing to talk to so many people with no interest in the Gospel, but the church is growing now, which is so good. We had brilliant weather all week, a real answer to prayer, because it's the west coast of Ireland and constant downpour would have been more likely. Also no car accidents in which our cars were involved, another minor miracle considering the way they drive down south. God really was looking after us.

The teem was great too. Phil, the leader, said as were were driving home that we had been great, that we had respected him, and that he really appreciated that. It was lovely seeing Gillian again too. There was a boy called Alistair on the team, aged 16, who out-geeked us both. It was starting to turn into geeks and mundanes towards the end of the week, after the three of us spent hours in a coffee shop taking about binary and hex numbers and computer operating systems. The other mocked us severely, so we mocked them for being so silly as to not be able to convert decimal to binary even with a piece of paper. :-P Talking of coffee shops, Phil told us about this on ecalled Bananaphoblacht which makes the best hot chocolate in the world. Unfortunately it was away over on the other side of the river, so we were trailing along on our sore feet, going, 'This had better be worth it!'. But it was. They took a lump of dark chocolate and poured hot milk over it and cream on top, so that the chocolate melted into it and it was lovely. Fairtrade, too, which is cool.

Is it just me, or do euros look like Monopoly money?

In my haste in this entry this morning, I omitted to put in the Doctor Who fics I'm working on.

( Here they are )


More importantly, LEAVE LONDON ALONE, YOU DISGUSTING PIECES OF SLIME!!!!!

I just finished doing the dishes without any washing-up liquid. If you wet Brillo pads and squeeze the soap juice out of them you get a sort of slosh with which you can in fact wash up.