Freezing

Every time you think England is about to return to it's beautiful sunny state of summerness; it crushes your hopes with an ice cold fist. Snow. Thats right. And not even the nice stuff. The horrible sleety, flipping cold nasty stuff. I was well enough to head in to work today, after a slow start, which meant I ran into Dave whose come back to fix the ceiling and the bathroom. (He was fixing the bathroom upstairs a couple of weeks back when we heard something crack, someone swear, and then water started to come (read: pour) through the kitchen ceiling) Dave's a great bloke and so I stopped for a chat with him and Barbara over breakfast, the highlight of said chat was when Barbara said "Dave'll be fixing the bathroom upstairs from tomorow morning, so you better be in and out of the shower nice and early" brain still waking up at half ten struggled to compute exactly what she meant (still working on present tense I was like: I already had a shower, what're you talking about) Barbara turns to Dave "What time do you start?" (Daves MILES ahead of me on this one) "Oh, about quater to six" brain suddenly catches up, head jerks back in surprise "You What?!?" Barbara and Dave collapse in laughter, brain makes up the final few inches and realises I've been had.
Caught the train to Risboro and spent half the day shifting another mountain of junk out of the other half of the shop this time, the other half the day I spent making an invite for the Youth Forum we're hosting on Monday nite. I whipped up a brilliant one in about five minutes and shewed it to Geoff and Tim. Tim turned around and said he liked it but shouldn't we use the A2 logo rather than the CCF one? Conceding the point I got him to email it to me and replaced the CCF logo. And then the problem hit. Whilst the church logo is a quite nice picture of a red kite in a colour that perfectly matched the colour scheme I'd picked off of Publisher, the A2 logo did not. In fact the A2 logo is a garish royal blue on white. After fiddling unhappily with Publishers colour schemes I eventually gave in and went with the duotone of the A2 logo and produced an exceedingly dull invitation that a three year old could have put together. I have decided two things. One: I cannot wait to get my new mac laptop and have access to some brilliant graphic design technology all in a compact, stylishly simple, light weight package that is the MacBook (or the iBook, depending on how much money I end up deciding to fork out for this thing). Two: if I ever start a church I am going to maintain enough of a level of authority over things to ban anyone from ever using royal blue and white and any other stupid, tasteless, uncool design concepts that will utterly destroy our credibility and any hope of maintaining coolness with present youth trends. Now, youth trends in general seem to be a bit extreme (and some of them are just plain stupid) and so attempting to match them does not make you cool; it makes you a try hard. However, maintaining some sort of standard of style and taste will raise your estimation with young people. Even if they wouldn't wear or choose anything the same, they will still see the coolness present in being integral to your own identity without caving to tack or imitation.
The final moment from today that I feel is noteworthy enough to keep me awake any longer came after dinner tonite. In the kitchen (seems to be the place for comedy at the moment) we were clearing the dishes and chatting generally. I turned to Andy, whose just come home from uni for easter and turns 21 on Sunday, and asked him a question about Monday nite (I'd got an email from him about a nite out in Aylesbury with a bunch of his uni mates -not as rowdy as it sounds, they're from Cambridge- that said he was going out with whoever could make it, about 30 people on the list, and anyone who wanted could crash at his [parents] after) As we discussed this it caught his parents interest "What's this then?" and it dawned on me that they didn't know anything about it, and I sat there cracking up as it dawned on them exactly what we must be talking about. Andy didn't say anything but he was trying hard to a. not laugh and b. avoid eye contact with his parents. Classic!!