Tag: walking

Sunday Summary 24th January – It’s Snowing!

On By PaulIn LifeLeave a comment

Where we live, there is not very much snow…ever! But this weekend has seen a lot of it, our neighbours have made more snowmen and we managed to get a late night walk together in the middle of the heaviest part!

Aside from the snow, this week has been pretty good. I took a day off work on Friday to make up for some Christmas overtime. Went for a walk, played a couple of games of backgammon with wife and made significant progress on my ‘latte art’ technique!

This is the closest I’ve ever got to anything resembling a flower. Still a way to go, but making progress.

This week also saw me finish book 4 of the Wheel of Time series: The Shadow Rising. It was an incredibly good read, even if very long. I’m really enjoying watching the three main characters grow. And trying to keep track of what everyone else is doing, and whether they are good or ‘dark friends’.

I must admit…I’m using the glossary a lot!

I also managed to meet with a friend after work this week, we went for a long walk in the pouring rain. It was good to get out and see someone else for a change, even if we did get pretty soaked. One of the things we talked about was my future engagement with the Navigators UK. Something that has been put on the ‘back burner’ for me over the last year – not least of all because of COVID (I don’t think I’ve written about all the reasons, on this blog before, but I did mention it in this post: Reflections: A New Bible and a New Season

But this is something I’ll be thinking about over the coming month. Especially now that I’ve re-joined the preaching rota at my Church. Probably more detail on that later!

Any other highlights? Well, my wife has prepared her Valentines day card stock!

If you want to buy one and support a small business, you can order directly from her website, or order them through thortful.com here: https://thortful.com/profile/5f9f080bcdda5e0001499146 .

Sunday Summary 10th January – New Year!

On By PaulIn LifeLeave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so I’m a little out of practice! I won’t try and cover everything that happened in December and Christmas.

Some of the most exciting things this week has been the return of snow, where I live in the UK snow is a rare phenomenon. We’re lucky if we get it twice a year. But one morning I woke up early, saw the snow, and decided to go for a walk. Spoke to a friend over the phone, and then enjoyed the fresh cold snowy atmosphere.

Another highlight this week was the progress I’m making with latte-art. Yes, you heard me right. When we first got married some friends of ours moved to America, and gave us their fancy coffee machine. That was 5 years ago! Recently I discovered a YouTuber – called James Hoffman – who is like this proper coffee snob/expert. And it inspired me to finally learn how to use the fancy machine for coffee. (Embarrassed to say, I’ve been using it wrong all this time!)

Although I’m still far-off from making anything resembling a heart or a flower, this latest attempt was long debated amongst my family as to whether it looked more like a lobster or a peacock!

I’ll let you know if I make any steps closer towards a professional image.

All this is well and good, but it does mean I’m making (and therefore drinking) a lot more caffeine than usual. So far, no adverse events.

What am I watching?! Well, I’m glad you asked.

Around October time my wife and I jumped into the world of the 1980s and watched the Karate Kid! We loved it, around 30 years late to the party. But we were instant fans, and watched all the old films. Not long after we discovered that Netflix/Youtube had been working on a spin-off sequel. Cobra Kai. Well if you haven’t watched them, I’d highly recommend it. This New Years day, wife and I sat down and binged the entire third season (which was released in the UK on that day!).

It is incredible! Not just exciting, with great characters and good story line, character development and awesome fight scenes. But it also manages to draw the fine line between cultural differences between the left and right, in a tasteful yet sharp way. Not only that but each episode is only 30 mins and each season only 10 episode.

Finally, I got down with my tool-kit and did some personal DIY this week, see if you can spot the difference! How long do you reckon before I forget it’s not there and roll off the back!!

Sunday Summary – 13th September “Lockdown Holidays”

On By PaulIn Life3 Comments

And so it comes to the end of a week-long holiday. Truth be told I’ve not been up to much. A lot of walking, reading, playing games and chilling out!

BBQ with long-lost Friends

My Dad is really getting his BBQ skills practiced this year. It’s odd how an international pandemic has probably resulted with more visits to my parents than before.

However, this time they also had round one of my oldest friends from when I lived in Portsmouth. We went to same school, have a lot of shared memories…and long story short, it’s been probably like 10 years since we saw each other (minus a brief catch up a year or so ago).

Anyway, I failed to take a photo, but it turns out we’d both shaved our heads during lockdown and so we had a surprisingly similar appearance!

Similar haircuts! Great minds think alike!

We’ve still got lots to catch up on, but him and his wife have just moved to Birmingham for his work, so hopefully will get more opportunities to hang out, if we don’t get a second lockdown!

Walking in the Vale

There is a lovely area 10 minutes walking from our flat, it’s a little “student village”. It’s filled with these beautiful flats, in a massive park with a lake. At the moment, due to COVID, and summer holidays, there are no students. So, this week, I spent most days with a morning walk going round, praying, listening to an audiobook, reflecting on life. (Being all monk-like!) It’s been so lovely. The picture below is the view from one spot I spent ages sitting and enjoying.

Reading: Still going through the Wheel of Time book 3, but also picked up Spiritual Man (Watchman Nee) and finished The Courage to be Disliked this week.

Gaming: It seems there is so little time to game when I’m not on holiday. But this week has had me spending significant hours working through the second Tomb Raider game on the pc!

Editing: I’d intended to spend a large portion of this week editing my book. But, a) it turns out editing takes a lot longer than writing. (I spent about 4 hours on 1,000 words!) So I’m trying to work out how I can integrate the work in normal everyday life. And b) God bought up some stuff to work through which consumed a lot of time this week. I’ve alluded to it here: Identification with Christ.

Painful Splinters: In other news, this week saw two glasses broken in our kitchen. Clumsy! It was my luck to tread on a shard of glass on Monday, where we’d missed in our hoovering etc. Anyway, it took until last night for me to finally get it out. My foot was developing a nice dark blotch underneath the skin. So, took some tweezers to my foot and managed to yank it out! After much puss, bleeding and over-reacting, I got it! Very satisfying! I decided not to take a photo, or preserve the shard of glass. Unfortunately, it has set me a week back in terms of running. So will need to pick that up tomorrow!