A broken day

Even before I woke up this morning I suspected it would not be a pleasent Tuesday. At work it seem that something was bound to go wrong with whatever I was working on. Little annoying things like a bolt getting stripped or some obscure little bracket peice missing from a sealed package of components. These little things take longer than you think to resolveand yet the day still drags on at a snails pace. On top of that I have two different supervisors telling that I need to build two different peices of equipment at the same time. I'm working in a machine shop this summer that builds various types of farm equipment that are designed to be pulled by a tractor. Anyway, my two direct supervisors don't really talk to eachother and do not know what the other has planned for people to do, it happens alot.

Also I feel like my body is sore in half a dozen places and I have a n ugly festering wound on my toe. Don't worry, I've cleaned it up since I took that photo.

Let me think, what else is broken... not my heart, yet, but definately my social life. That is probably my biggest broken thing. I wonder alot why no one ever calls me up to chat or hangout on a weekday ( or even on weekends really...). It seems that its always in my hands to make first contact and I've never been comfortable with that. I wonder what normal people do on weekdays...

I guess that's all for now...

RoomnetLAN May 2007

Every once and a while some friends and I get together to have a LAN party at someones house. For all the non geeks out there a LAN party is a party where everyone brings their computers into one room and connects them over a Local Area Network in order to play video games against eachother, share files, and enjoy eachothers company. Most LAN parties I have attended start Friday night and go till Saturday evening. This is usually a probelm because everyone will stay up to 4 in the morning playing video games then manage to get 4 or 5 hours sleep and then be too tired to play more games on Saturdy.

This one started Saturday morning and ended Saturday evening so that we would actually be awake to play games, which we did get to do. It started with everyone selecting a spot in the room and setting up their computer, easy. Then, as people arrive they need to make sure that they are on the network and that people can access them, also easy. Next there is the deciding of the game to play. Once a game has been choosen half of the people in the room will call out that they do not have said game and request the discs so they have it and also getting the right version, very time consuming. Once everything is setup and ready to go a LAN game is started! But!, there is a problem! One player's computer decides to be stupid and does not connect properly for that particular game. So the other players either leave them in the dust, or play a different game (which half of the room will need to install).

Whilst playing games when they are working properly there is a clear division between pro gamers and not so pro gamers. Over the course of a game pro gamers will undoubtably become more powerful andcollect resources at an alraming rate. Victory is within their grasp. Not so pro gamers will undoubtably struggle to gain power and struggle to make ends meet. Annialating is within their grasp. But for pro gamers and not so pro gamers LAN parties can be enjoyable once all the kinks are worked out. We played Warcraft 3: DotA, Age of Empires 3, and Half Life 2: Deathmatch

Here are a few pictures I took from the LAN party:

Carrom Boards and worship woes.

Today I received a new letter from Priyam, my sponser child from India. He wrote me to tell me what he had purchased for himself and his twin brother with some birthday money he had received. He got some jam, jelly, biscuits, a shirt and (most exciting of all...) a carrom board. When I read the letter I had no idea what a carrom board was, beyond some sort of game.

Carrom is a game that is like a cross between shuffleboard and pool/billiards. The object of the game is to sinnk all your peices (disc/puck, called "carrom men") like pool or billiards but this is accomplished by using your hands to slide a larger disc called a striker at the carrom men to sink them, kind of like shuffle board. It sounds like a fun game! Since I trust that Wikipedia is infinately better at explaining the details better than I am, I will leave it to the experts:

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrom

In other news Iattended a meeting about worship at the church I am attending this summer, Living Hope CRC in Abbotsford BC. It certianly is a different culture than the one that I have been involved with for the past 8 months a The King's University College (TKUC) in Edmonton Alberta.

My main woe is that I as a musician am not really allowed to worship as I think is meaningful. I am giving a list of songs to play bass for and that is what I play. Here the worship teams have little say in what type of music gets played. At TKUC the worship teams were allowed to organize the service comepletely allowing for a service that is meaningful to them.

But I suppose that the community here is very different and if the worship is ever going to change, the community needs to change a bit first. Hopefully a new more open community will form, one that is torelate of any type of worship that comes along...

Sour Key

This morning I decided to visit my Friends Julia and Trevor at First Christian Reformed Church of Vancouver where they now preach. I am glad that the church was quite easy to get to from where I live in Abbotsford.

1st CRC of Vancouver church has a good community. Often if a stranger goes to a new church the regulars tend not to welcome them or even pay much attention to new people. But I definately welcomed at this church. During the service an old lady even gave me a sour key candy!

Even though I only came there this morning to visit Julia and Trevor, I ended up being introduced to many other young adults my age as well as a few other older adults. The young adults even invited me to come and have lunch with them at a Thai restaurant down on "The Drive". Talking with them over my yellow curry with potato, onions, rice, and salad dish I discovered that our churches face similar issues. No longer are we a church that caters to the needs of Dutch immagrants, but we have grown to a point where we need to serve the diverse community that we are a part of.

What is the role of a "College and Careers" group in community life? How can we help? How can we strentghen relationships between older and younger generations of beleivers? So many questions. I am glad that I could be there, an outsider soaking it all up.

If anyone in the lower mainland this summer who knows Julia and Trevor from their time in Edmonton and at King's last year want to drop in and say Hi to them let me know. I would love to go there as a group of King's students. Julia would love to see some more faces as well! And by the way, Julia and Trevor are expecting a child!

cya later,

Kenneth