Cool Saturday

I had a cool day on Saturday. Recently I've been out hunting on farms rather than enjoying the more consistent sport of CLAY pigeon shooting. My friend and I both have our own shotguns so together with the fact his dad owns 16 acres of land and he has his own 'trap' (for firing the clays) we had a pretty inexpensive afternoon of fun with a few mates. if you've never tried it before you should, you may be suprised how much fun you have. Wear ear plugs though, we shot off 200 shells and soon had bruised shoulders and eardrums. Well worth it though! :)

Saturday night however you would have thought Charlie Knox had spent all day on a farm as well, certainly judging from the Indian dish he had in front of him! He reckons it was meat, cabbage and sauce...no-one else was just as sure though. Brave boy. I went for good old mild Korma.

Theme...

Iv'e decided that what I wanna do is keep a bit of a regular theme occuring on my blog over the next while. It wont be that often, perhaps every other week to see how it goes, and of course it will appar sporadicly amongst other non-related blogs.

Recently Iv'e been doing weights, actually for a month and a half now and Iv'e been making good progress. I have been doing it 4 times a week, 3 minimum. It's something I've talked about for the last 2 years so it's something I want to try and make sure I stick at and do right.

Il be honest, no point in lying, the idea is to put on muscle and shape myself. Nothing extreme like, just a good shape. Ive always been pretty light and find it hard to put on weight but for the first time in years it's happened. Weighing myself at different times over the past week has shown that Iv'e put on over half a stone. I can definitely notice my arms and shoulders changing slightly but I also know it doesn't happen over night...I've still a good few months to go..and then to keep it up.

October 17th - 10 stone 12 lbs

Bench - 40kg 3 sets of 7

Tricep extensions 6kg 3 sets of 8

Dumbell curls 12kg 3 sets of 6

Dumbell Shoulder press 12kg 3 sets of 7

Pheasants and Tarantulas

My Birthday weekend was a pretty cool mixture of the old and the new. For starters Leanne took me back to the Pheasant restaurant in Hillsborough where we went three years ago for my 21st. That place just gets better and better. No wonder it was packed out, and the atmosphere was buzzing.

I love the old style country restaurants with stuffed game birds displayed, century old fireplaces and old farming memorabilia hanging around the place, far more than any modern eatery. There's just something about it that appeals to me. I'd love to find somewhere that specialises in fish and has decor dedicated to angling, that would be cool. Know anywhere?

Anways the second moment of birthday nostalgia happened when I randomly decided to visit Lisburns new Reptile shop. When I was younger at High school I got a tarantula for my birthday and the collection soon grew to 3 spiders and 2 scorpions. My room ws like spending a night in 'Im a celebrity get me out of here', with crickets singing and things crawling up their tank walls under dimmed night-tlights.

Well, walking into that shop brought all that interest rushing back! The guy had cracker displays and over a 100 diff species of snake,lizard, frog, spider etc. under one roof. I fell in love with this small cubed tank which he had set up as a jungle scene and it was all very affordable.

Of course, straight away I knew what I wanted for my Bday! After all, Leanne was upset that she didn't know what to get me (I'm not a present person and I always say I don't want anything) So here was the perfect present, exactly what in wanted.

Surely I don't have to tell you her reaction :) To make it worse I brought her in to have a look herself but the guy had left his assistant in charge. The snakes were out of their tanks getting fed which got Leanne edgey, but then he decided to take out the biggst spider they had and start annoying it. It was going mad biting at the air and I knew my luck was runing out.

I think the crunch came when I took Leanne over to check out the lovely displayed tanks complete with locked sliding doors, in a last ditch attempt to relinquish any fears of the thing ever being able to escape. When sudenly, out of no-where A small lizard appeared on the top of the tank, paused to say hello by sticking out it's toungue and then scooted back behind the tank. Cheeky thing.

The guy had locked the tank but had slid the glass in the wrong way, leaving a small gap open. Leanne didn't say much on the way home. But here's still hoping :)

Lastly, a thank you to my good friend Neil who took me on my first 18 hole round of Golf. I finished 36 over, an average of 2 over per hole. Not bad. I really liked it and would go back again soon. I bet Leanne would buy me a set of clubs in an instant, I think she'd buy me ANYTHING if it meant not buying me a tarantula.

The Night and Nothing

( Read on for explanation of pic)

What have you been up to the past 7-8 weeks? Mine seem like a blur sometimes, they've went so quickly. It wouldn't be true for me to say I havn't written in a while because I have over 13,000 words, or 24 A4 pages, to show otherwise. But it isn't blog material. I was determined to track my journey, thoughts, feelings, discoveries and just say what I thought. I put it all down on paper. The biggest lapse in journaling I had was 2 weeks and I now wish I hadn't because that is fourteen full days of my journey I may forget now. It's funny how things can pass by unless you somehow nail them down, and I can't always rely on my memory.

Right now I want to tell you everything, I want to tell about what Iv'e been up to, what Iv'e seen, what Iv'e felt and bring you even for a moment into one of the hardest and yet most fruitful times of my Christian life. But I can't.
I've tried to express it to others in words, which I'm usually good at, but failed. The same with writing it down. I've come to the conclusion that most of it I'm not meant to share. It has been a time of intimacy with both myself and with God... no-one esle needs to know, and there's no-one I need to justify myself to.

Needless to say, many people have been asking about me and I want to thank all of you that have sent me encouraging texts, emails, met up with me, prayed with and for me and for those of you who have walked every step alongside me (you know who you are).
I got a text just yesterday from a guy i havn't spoken to in a few months and he simply asked how things were...for the first time in a while I knew exactly what to say and how to sum it up. I replied "It's been a hard but an important time that I have used to re-couperate and be built up by God" 13,000 words later and I reckon that aint too bad a summary.

I should be returning to work sooner rather than later. It feels such a relief to know what the next step is. Remaining in limbo was probably one of the most frustrating times Iv'e ever had. I came to a conclusion, an excruciating one, that one of the key areas to my recovery was God's timing. I wasn't in control and so I literally had no choice but to step back and say ' ok, however long it takes!' For me...that was NOT easy.

I don't think it's over you know. I think I had managed to get myself stuck somewhere in life and tried to bed down into as comfy a position as possible. But it was never comfy, it was stagnant, I felt powerless, spiritualy bankrupt and eventualy unable to cope. However, God has made me someone who has a very questioning spirit, I notice and analyze the world around me, my mind never gives me rest and the pain and suffering of this world, and closer to home, plauge me intensley day and night. Truth be told though, deep down I'd rather be that tortured soul whose mind lives above everyday affairs and mediocre conversation than resign myself to a half hearted lifestyle.

I'm not bursting with enthusiasm ready to go back to work, but I am willing. Something that has given me great comfort is reading through the prophets. Those men had fiery relationships with God, and I don't mean walking around singing love songs to Jesus. They set out on God given tasks and got dissalusioned. they raged against God accusations, asking where justice for the poor and the weak was? Why were things the way they were and why did God allow it? Yet...there was something, within them, that did not let them stop. It was as if they were born to do it and they were compelled to do it despite how they felt.
I don't pretend to understand God, and I admit I am in a place of questioning and general dissapoinment with Him. Most days i find it hard to pray and I sit in church quite cynical and hating the singing BUT...I've never felt my relationship with him so alive. We talk, and shout, every day. All in reverence though. Its a real relationship. Not the supposed kind, of undying devotion love and simplicity we all imagine or think we should have. This time, it's personal.

"The only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a living, willing human being." G Webbe 'The night and nothing'

Well, I'm hoping I've made some sense :) As I said, there's much I will probably never share. But my blog is about me after all, so I just thought I'd share a little. I do genuinely hope to get back to writing about other things Iv'e been up to. Such as how I now do weights 4 times a week, how many new dishes I can cook since becoming a temporary house husband, that it's my Bday on Friday and how Peter Kays autobiography almost made me pee in laughter. Light-heartedness is still within my grasps I swear! just check out the picture of me looking cool! ;)