Friday 23 December 2011

Jesus Christ and our robot overlords

There are loads of versions of this tune kicking around, but for some reason it has evaded most Christmas song compilations since it was first released in 1978. Originally by Big Star (before my time, sorry), for your enjoyment I present the song as performed by Teenage Fanclub on the 2006 tribute CD Big Star Small World.

And with that, I think I will be signing off until, probably, 2012. Have a meaningful Christmas, and a peaceful New Year.

What was that sorry? You want another song first? A geeky sci-fi song? About robot overlords? Are you mad?

Have a good one people, God bless.

Thursday 22 December 2011

Cycling geek moment

Well deserved, the very lovely and talented Mark Cavendish, BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

Wednesday 21 December 2011

A thank you

If you were paying attention, you may have noticed that when I wrote the story of how I became a Christian, there was something of an unsung hero.

So I think it is time to officially thank the person who, having to pull out of Momentum at the last minute, passed his ticket on to me, a friend of a friend, who he had never even met.

In fact, although I saw him around once I started going to church, it was a good three months before we actually got to talk, at a birthday party for a mutual friend. We clicked straight away. I think it's fair to say that in a past life, I would have woken up with a guy I got on that well with (oh yes, did I mention he was cute too?), but not this time. This time we stayed up till the early hours, and I found myself sharing my deepest secrets with this guy I had only just met.

Needless to say, we became the best of friends. He (briefly) became my drum teacher. I only mention it now because a year ago this week I finally got the courage up to invite him over for dinner....

A home-cooked steak, some strategically located mistletoe, and... well let's just say, he may have been disappointed to miss out on Momentum last year, but he's pretty happy with the way things worked out!

I love you babe, you changed my life in so many ways :)
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God (Romans 8:28)

Monday 19 December 2011

These aren't the snowflakes you're looking for...

I am so decorating my place with these!


Print out the patterns from here!

Darth Vader is a little disappointing, but the Stormtrooper snowflake totally rocks :)

(seen first at Geekologie)

Friday 16 December 2011

O Holy Night

Time for another of my favourite Christmas songs, the very lovely O Holy Night. My favourite arrangement is by BarlowGirl, definitely worth tracking down if you can (Hint: they're on Spotify) but I couldn't find it on YouTube. So instead, here's a not quite as good but still worth a listen acoustic version by one of my favourite bands, Flyleaf.


Wednesday 14 December 2011

Geekery

Ah yes, the other great love of my life: all things geeky - to be specific, sci-fi geeky.

And as I'm busy trying to increase the geek chic of the man in my life, let's have a look at the things that make me geek out (with a little help from this handy guide for anyone planning on dating a geek).

1. Star Wars. I have the original trilogy (theatre release and 'special edition') and the prequels on DVD. I have ensured that the man in question is aware that Han shot first.
2. Star Trek. No DVDs in my collection, but I have seen them all (TV and movies) at least once.
3. Comic books. I have only a passing acquaintance with these, but I have seen a lot of the recent movies like Iron Man and the X Men ones. OK, I'm a little geek-lite on that one.
4. Lord of the Rings. The man has one up on me there! I've always been more of a sci-fi girl, so this kind of passed me by.
5. Firefly. Awesome! On the DVD shelf, along with Serenity.
6. Anime. Yes, I know what it is, although I haven't watched a great deal. Akira, and:
7. Neon Genesis: Evangelion.
8. RPGs. Epic fail for me there.
9. Geek terms. There are two I'm woolly on, which I think go back to my epic fail on RPGs.
10. Trivia. My sf trivia knowledge is much more British in scope than the preceding 9 items. I can quote Red Dwarf and Hitch-hiker's till the Arcturan Mega-Cows come home, and occasionally surprise myself with some random fact remembered from classic Doctor Who.
11. Memorabilia. Yes, I've dressed up as Leia. No, I will not be posting photographs.
12. Books. Geeks read, don't they? Neal Stephenson, Iain M Banks, Stephen Baxter, and of the classics, Philip K Dick ftw!

So who's out there geeking out with me?

Monday 12 December 2011

What Christmas is really about....

The Doctor Who Christmas special, of course :)


Friday 9 December 2011

I Celebrate the Day

I love music. Friday should be music day here, shouldn't it?

I have no musical talent - my singing is not bad enough to get on the X-Factor audition shows, but neither is it good enough to do so. I had a few drums lessons last year, but that was because I fancied the teacher, who just said I had an interesting sense of rhythm.

So I'll leave it to the professionals - starting with some of my favourite Christmas tunes. This one, I Celebrate the Day by Relient K, I totally fell in love with last Christmas, mainly because of the lines:

And so this Christmas I'll compare
The things I felt in prior years
To what this midnight made so clear
That You have come to meet me here

which pretty much summed up the way I felt, the first year the nativity was something more than a nice story. The rest of the words are similarly beautiful, so please enjoy it...


Wednesday 7 December 2011

Cherished

Until last August, I had never really been inside a church, except maybe for a wedding or a christening in the wider family; my parents certainly were never church-goers, and so neither was I. Neither was I looking for God. My life was good, I was happy with who I was - why would I need to complicate things by getting religious all of a sudden?

Well that was what I thought anyway. You see, until about a year before I was baptised, I was looking for acceptance, attention, and love, in relationships that were never really going to provide it. They provided an imitation of those things that was good enough for a while, but it wasn't until I spent some time with a couple of Christian guys I went cycling with, that I realised there was more to have. I could see that my Christian friends, far from being tied up in a huge list of rules and things they couldn't do, had this sense of satisfaction with their lives that I had simply never been able to find. So, yeah, I was curious.

And they must have known that, because, when another of their friends had to drop out at short notice, they offered me his ticket to Momentum 2010. And would you believe, I was able to get the time off and go?

So I went... I went along to the seminars and talks - at first I was just curious, but surrounded by all these people that it really meant something to... I felt I had to pay attention. Work out what was so special about this whole religion thing.

It was in one of the main evening sessions - I can't even remember now what the talk was supposed to be about, but somewhere in it, something hit me, and afterwards I asked my friends to pray for me...

The rest of that evening is a bit of a blur now. That was the day - 23rd August 2010 - that God spoke to me. I can't tell you the exact words - or even if there were words, as such - but the gist of it was that it didn't matter what I had done, or what sort of person I thought I was, God knew the real me, the person I could become, and would help me become her. And He loved me. I wish I had words to what that felt like, to suddenly know, for the first time, that you are so loved, so cherished, that someone would willingly die in your place...

I don't have words for that. It's a feeling that surpasses language. What I do have is tears of joy every time I think of it. You are cherished. That is about as close as I can get. That's the phrase that stuck in my mind afterwards. And that was what I could never get from the kind of relationships I had pursued in the past - and, truth be told, what I had given up on ever finding.

And now, as I look back, I can see that for a long time before that day, things had been building up to that point. My attitude towards relationships, sex, and life in general had slowly been changing over a period of time. Christian people had come into my life, I had become friends with them, and heard their views on my changing attitudes over a beer on a camping trip. And someone I did not even know donated his Momentum ticket to me.

I was never looking for God, but it's pretty clear to me now that He was tracking me down.

Monday 5 December 2011

Hello blogosphere :)

I get the feeling that blogging is a bit 2005, and I should be tweeting or something instead, but right now I have a specific purpose in mind for this, which doesn't really lend itself to short messages.

I chat online quite a bit (yeah, it's one of my big vices) and quite often get asked about why I believe the things I do, and how that came about, and other, related questions that probably need more explanation that I can give in an online chat in my coffee break. So I will probably be posting some stuff about that over the next couple of days, along with whatever else from my life and my obsessions I feel like posting.

In the meantime, the things you need to know are:
  1. I live somewhere near the middle of England
  2. I'm a Christian
  3. I'm a bit of a geekette
Anything else you need to know, I guess that's what the comments button is for...