New blog

further musings will continue at

http://roboutloud.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading, wherever you are.

Moving on

I haven't posted for a very long time. I guess I thought the experiences of an outsider might be interesting, but since getting back to the UK I'm just another Brit in Britain, so posting ceased.



Now it's time to begin a new adventure, a new blog.



This new blog will be more an exercise in living life out loud. Exploring how my faith does and doesn't impact my life, where it helps and what issues it prompts.



Here's the question:



Should it be anonymous? If I don't put my name to it I will feel free to be entirely honest about all sorts of details I might never share. Not necessarily through shame, but as a teacher there is some stuff I don't want in the public domain as it can cross the line of professional detachment if kids know it.



That said, an anonymous blog has less validity. Should I be brave and honest and sensibly censor just the stuff I need to?



Dave, I guess this one's up to you, as no-one else has a feed set op for this Blog as far as I know.



I also think it could be an exercise in integrity. Even if NO-ONE reads it, if my life is out there and someone MIGHT read it, it keeps me honest.



Hmm, still thinking it over. Maybe I'll start it anonymously as I can always own up to it later. Either way, I feel a calling from God to get out there and start writing, to do what I enjoy to in some way move the Kingdom forward.

Belief is...

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

I was reading a book lately whose main thrust was that you do what you believe, whatever you say you believe. The things you love and the things you believe will be evident in the running of your life. For instance, let me illustrate this by talking about a couple of my friends who sprang to mind as I was cogitating on this subject here in Mariposa County, California, as the dust and ash from the nearby massive forest fire settled on my dinner.

Simon believes watching sports is interesting. I don’t have to ask him to know this; it’s clear from the hours he devotes to his TVs. He also clearly believes it’s important to help people, you can see this from the amount of time he gives to his friends. John believes Leeds Rhinos should win every game of rugby they play. You can tell from his reactions to their performance. Their beliefs are not contained in statements, you can just tell by being with them, the same as the rest of us.

I was just wondering what it seems to my friends that I believe, and whether my faith shows in my life. If it does at all, I am convinced that it is generally not enough. I don’t see myself spending a lot of time with the poor and broken. I don’t see myself meeting people as equals with love and not judgement. I don’t see myself preferring others needs to my wants. My friends deserve my being a ‘better Christian’, whatever that is. I believe that if I was really doing a good job on my life with Jesus people would be battering my door down on Sunday evening for a ride to church. So, all of you, I’m sorry for not being a better Christian. Trust me when I tell you Jesus is much nicer than I am and he loves you all very much, and I’ll keep working on being more like him. I think you’ll like him, I really do.

Ooops

We've just had a lovely day at 'California's Great America' in San Jose. Lots of roller coasters, a magic show and fun in the pool.

Then we set off for the hotel we'd booked this morning in San Jose.

There are lots of San Joses the whole Spanish speaking world over, I assume. We forgot to check which one we had booked into. We just blithely assumed it was the one we were in, here in sunny California.



I began to question that assumption as we spent 2 hours looking for it only to discover no-one had heard of the street it was on. Eventually got some help from a lovely chap who ran a Hawaiian drive through and the sweet manageress at a Best Westin who fed us cookies as we stood in stark disbelief.

We were due that evening at the Hotel Petit at 24th St and Paseo Colon...




San Jose...




Costa Rica.




D'Oh!!!

Still, all's well that ends well and we're now tucked into a WiFi'd up motel in the San Jose we wanted and ready to get a much needed good night's rest. Tomorrow we plan to see the Winchester Mystery house. Wikipedia that for the full scoop, but it was built by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune who felt massive guilt for all the killing done by her father's guns. A phony medium (are there any other kind) convinced her that the ghosts would be assuaged as long as she kept building her house, so she kept building and building random additions and alterations for donkeys years. There are stairs that go nowhere, pointless corridors, random extra chimneys etc etc. Should be interesting.


Getting back from Hawaii was hard. On the last day, our 4th Anniversary, we were up bright and early and by 6 AM we were catching waves outside the break at 'Canoes' on Waikiki Beach, standing up and riding sweet. A good day!

The day before we'd been 30m under the sea on a ship wreck hanging out with a pair of 6 foot long Hawaiian Green Turtles. Awesome! After that we rented 50cc moped and biked over to Diamond Head for a hike to the top.My beautiful wife looked oh so sexy tooling around on her moped.

Hawaii was good for us, and I hope we get to go back some time. Aloha everyone.

And another thing,

Tropical horrors!!

Being here in Hawaii has brought back memories of Rwanda I had completely blocked out.

The ants get every where. Only the fridge is safe, so my beer is relieved. this means everything we want kept ant free is in the fridge, even the chips (SORRY!) crisps .

You'll have to all be kind to us when we get back while we make the lingual shift back to proper English (or as close as we get in Leeds.) I promise I still say Herbs, but mt OrEGGano annoys even me.

Aloha!

The sun is setting on me in our third floor guest house, dipping below the pacific and bringing some welcome coolth to the end of another warm day here on the North Shore of Oahu, most populous of the Hawaiian islands. Today we dove (yep, that's what they say over here) with Hawaiian Green Turtles at a a point called 'Turtle Car Wash' where these graceful ocean dwellers come in to get cleaned up. They hang around in the shallow water while little hungry reef fish nibble the algae off their shells that accumulates at sea. One large lady (you can tell by the small tail) looked me right in the eyes from a foot away. You could see the age in them; being a reasonable size she was probably thirty or forty years old. Turtles never stop growing their whole lives, so the bigger they are, the longer it took them to get that way. Whether that look held any kind of wisdom I couldn't say, but it was certainly a deeper look than you normally get from the local critters when you're under water.
We saw more turtles yesterday before we went surfing. Two of them were just basking on the beach, getting warm and letting the sun's heat help them digest their diet of seaweed. Surfing was hard. It felt like I'd mastered the basics in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We were comfortably standing up and riding waves 'inside' the break on our first day so getting on the bigger blue waves outside should only be a simple step, right? Not so much, it seems. So far surfing has been both exhilarating and frustrating, but we'll keep trying.
Tomorrow we've got to be up at 5 to get a ride down to Waikiki on the South Shore to go wreck diving, something I've always wanted to try. While we're down there we hope to tour Pearl Harbour and get another surf lesson. Then in three days we're travelling back to the mainland on our anniversary. 4 years is apparently silk or linen. That reminds me, I must get a card...

Since last I blogged the highlights have included tasting some lovely 'Champagne' in Napa, Alcatraz (you HAVE to see it if you can) and driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. The experience that wowed me the most was definitely walking though the massive Coast Redwood sof Humboldt-Redwood Park in the North of California. Walking though these mighty giants, many of whom are one or two thousand years old, is a humbling and eerie thing to do; just imagine the world events that have passed them by while they grew, relentless and unknowing. You can see their tall straight trunks scarred by fire, some hollowed out into 'Goose Pens', so called because early settlers really did keep keep their geese in them. These colossal Sequoias, the world's tallest tree, shoot straight up out of the ground, their massive cylindrical trunks uninterrupted by branches often for over 150 feet. It leaves you walking through a forest that doesn't resemble any other, unless perhaps you work in a telephone pole storage facility. We missed church that weekend, but somehow just sitting under those impressive trees reading my bible was like being in a much older church, one whose architect was as alive and present in the towering life around me as he was in the book I read.

The world's biggest tree is another Sequoia, the Giant Redwood we hope to see further inland at Yosemite.

Well, bedtime now. Being close to the equator the sun goes down a lot sooner here. It'll be dark by half past seven and we've got a lot of sleeping to do before tomorrow's dive.

...

...also, in Seattle, I tried on a kilt.

Check out http://www.utilikilts.com/

I thought I looked amazingly cool! Vicky thought all my friends would take the piss relentlessly and refused to stand by and watch my dignity go down the pan.

I thought that you would, eventually, relent.

Whaddaya think?