L'entrecote

Relapse

2005-07-23T10:05:00.000+01:00

Ok - i'm cack. I know it. I try to blog more frequently but at the end of a long day at the computer it never quite seems like a high priority. So what has gone on in the past few months? New car , carpet. Work is cool as ever - am still ever so grateful I am in a job I enjoy so much. Am off today to a wedding only problem is it is a million miles away. Should be fun though.

Made me chuckle

2005-05-10T21:26:00.000+01:00

So I was a little upset at Lib Dems getting power in Bristol West last week so i've been wallowing a bit. This made me chuckle tho: N. has a small fund started by her dad by credit suisse called the 'fellowship fund'. Broadly speaking it is marketed as an ethical fund. I was reading through the market report just now and it listed the top ten holding in this 'ethical fund'.

Vodafone
HSBC
GlaxoSmithKline
RBoS
HBOS
BG
BT
Barclays
O2
British Land

I'm not sure many people would mark them out as taking particularly ethical stand points but I may be wrong.

5 years later

2005-05-10T21:19:00.000+01:00

So it might have taken a while but we recently got carpet in our house. I know that might be a wild luxury for most of you but it has revoultionised the house which now almost looks finished - the culmination of 5 years work. If i'm honest I guess that's 5 years of non-work intersperced with the odd weekend of work. Any way we are nearly there and have a working kithchen/ bathroom, dining room, bedroom and finally a study. This means I may actually get round to bloggin a little more. Give me a shout if you want to come round for dinner and I will book you in with N.

This Saturday we are taking the yuf to Alton Towers to this event -

http://www.ultimateevents.org.uk/

It's going to be a manic event with a sell out crowd likely. We seems to have a fair few going so we're really looking forward to it.

2005-01-27T11:19:00.000Z

At work we have been put into teams of 5 and given £75. Great you might say but the challenge is we have to raise£750 using this £75 within a few months. I'm not sure quite how we are going to do it yet but if you have any ideas feel free to let me know. Oh - did I mention this is to support our companies project which is a school in Africathough Hope HIV.

2005-01-25T10:27:00.000Z

Yuk - I'm ill. Apparently i have Man Flu but I know in my heart it is way more serious than that. I normally try and work on through coughs and colds but is one has been dragging on for 2 weeks and 3 days. So the upside to this is that I get to spend time in bed and I have managed to borrow a laptop so that I can catch up with all the blogging that I havn't been doing over the past month or so. Apologies for the verbal diarrha that will shortly be coming.

2005-01-12T14:12:00.000Z

got out the shower last week and realised I'd forgotten to wash. wierd eh?

2004-11-19T16:17:00.000Z

Absolute genius
http://www.geoffellis.com/ebay.html

2004-11-09T18:04:00.000Z

Bruum Bruum - I gotta new motorbike ... and a garage to put it in.

2004-11-02T14:32:00.000Z

It's been a long time since i've been called unchristian but it happened last week. Not only am I unchristian but 'downright unchristain'. Now this type of thing I was used to hearing especially back in my old work days where I was frequently challenged with the words 'that's not very Christian is it Baker?' To be honest most of the time they were probably right and most of the time i had to think about it and then adjust my actions. Last week was different though because it came from a Christian in an explosion of anger. My immediate reaction was to actually feel sad that she would say those words. I am much less affected by it now then a year or so a go but i can imagine many people being very hurt. All of us have areas of our life where we don't live up to how we should be acting but there are ways and means of, if necessary, bringing it to each others attention with compassion and love not anger. Something scriptural about planks and eyes come to mind.

On a completely different matter ... It has been a long time since i've been stopped by the police for doing something stupid on the road. not that I do stupid thing all the time but today I actually did do something stupid. I was stuck on the Jacob Wells road were there had obviously been an accident of some kind. I moved nowhere in 15 minutes and only had a few hunder yards to go before I turned off up into Clifton. Anyway I waited until there was noting coming and then decided to mount the central reservation to get to the side road oppostite. Sods law obviously dictates that a police car comes round the bend milli seconds after i make the decision and sees me. I stopped and almost out the car even before he turned lights on to pull me. My first reaction was that coppers are much younger these days. Definately younger than they were 10 years ago when I used to be a boy racer. I wondered how i was going to be act humble and appologetic to a lad 8 year my junior. Any way I know I'd been stupid and he knew that I knew I'd been stupid and I've never been so pleased to hear the words ' Get out of my sight' before in my life. Note to self - 'Don't do stupid things'.

2004-10-04T16:43:00.000+01:00

Sooo - I know i havn't blogged for a while but i'v just had a backlog of things to do and have only just caught up on them. The picture is of our new offices which are slowly filling up with new recruits. It's really fun being able to offer jobs to people who you know and trust. Some of you at BV will recognise our newest recruit at the end of the room. Had a minor set back on my hamstring again on Saturday. I am just not disciplined enough to go to a football pitch and not kick a ball. After a recurrence of my injury and being mucho depressed on sat / sun i have decided to stop maanging the footy team until at least january. I will do my best to put it our of mymind until then and stay focused on gym work and streching. I have never been so bored in my whole life as doing a 45 min workout on the cross trainer. It is soo dull. I want ot work up to doing a hour every other day. My latest idea is to purchase a portable dvd player to take in with me. Not sure how well that will go - I've noticed i tend to stride in time to the music so im doing anything from around 45 rpm to 65 rpm which wa in tune an awful piece of music called 'slash dot dash dot ..' Talking of which the nusic channel at the gym is useless (BS7) they litteral must have a playlist of about 8 songs a week and just repeat them.

2004-09-15T15:18:00.000+01:00

So all my office mates seem to have gone off for a hyper extended lunch break. This leaves me with a golden opportunity to turn up the volume on my favourite web radio station.
www.clubfmradio.com
Got to meet my wife for lunch which was excellent. We gazed into each others eyes whilst sharing a foot long steak and cheese sub from subway. It's gunna be a real blessing to be able to see each other every lunch time.
I tore my hamstring at the weekend so that means no more footy for at least 6 weeks for me. Very depressing. I feel i'm getting old now. It definately takes longer to come back from these injuries.
Been without my bike for a montha nd a half now. Don't insure with Equity Red Star - many reasons but their standard response is "Sorry we are in a backlog situation. We got your docs 10 days ago but it will be another 5 to 10 working days before we can get to it"

2004-09-03T15:49:00.000+01:00

Oh and as this is August in the UK everywhere was flooded - where did summer go?

2004-09-03T15:48:00.000+01:00

Interesting to note the wall has prevented suicide bombing in Israel for almost 6 month up until last week. Would you build a wall to save your family from death?

2004-09-03T15:44:00.000+01:00

Yes this is Greenbelt 2004

2004-09-03T15:43:00.000+01:00

There was a huge anti-war anti-Israeli contingent

2004-09-03T15:42:00.000+01:00

More greenbelt stores

2004-09-03T15:41:00.001+01:00

More Greenbelt stores

2004-09-03T15:41:00.000+01:00

What to do at Greenbelt? The word "bindi" is derived from the sanskrit word "bindu", which means "drop". Traditionally, it symbolizes a person´s mystic third eye and his or her connection with the universal principle of creation. It is a symbol of awareness, good fortune and festivity.

2004-09-03T15:29:00.000+01:00

It's been the end of a another hectic week. Unfortunately I have now moved to working 5 days a week. I havn't worked 5 days a week for over a year but i knew it would happen eventually.

We had our first house group this week following the summer break. It was really good to meet up with all the guys after the summer break. What was also a novelty was being able to break into different rooms to do some praying and the other rooms not being a building site

Going back to FT made me work a bit harder at finishing some work on the house. Oh so close to getting carpet down.

Majorly looking forward to the new footy season which start tomorrow. Administration has been a major hassle so far having to walk twenty people through a completely new admin system. Should lay the foundation for me to pass the whole thing on eventually.

Went to greenbelt on Friday and Saturday. Actually enjoyed most of it. the exception was lying the ground listening to a talk by Yasmin Ali-By Brown (sp?) and suddenly feeling an intensly sharp pain in my arm from a wasp that has crawling inside my top. I did very well not to scream out loud and got the lady next to me to pull out the sting whilst i grabbed the wasp through my clothes. I then proceeded to pull my top off in the seminar to get rid of the wasp. I now feel fully justified in my over reaction to anything black, yellow and stripy coming any where near me.

Glad to see that Greenbelt is now called 'Greeenbelt Arts festival' not 'Greenbelt Christian Arts festival'. Noticed a lot of the children were walking around with bindis on and a fair amount of new agey type stuff nocking around. I just manged to get my phone connected to my pc so I may get some phots uploaded later.

2004-08-23T17:18:00.000+01:00

Can things get any better? Yesterday at 9am I had only 9 players for a pre-season friendly. I managed to pick up another 2 in church in the morning but only after introducing myself to every male in the church and begging them to play footy that afternoon. Thanks to Adam and Nick for filling in last second.

Now it's not often I score in a game of football - I'm rarely allowed out of my own half before being bellowed at to get back in defence. Yesterday however was a glorious moment that I will be reliving in my dreams for several weeks yet. The ball come bouncing back to me 10 yards inside my own half -- in a real John Smith type moment I hoist it into the air and waited. Wind assisted the ball was goalward bound and dipped just in time. 1 Nil. It's nice to get a good victory under the belt pre-season.
Later that evening we introduced John Morgan to the delights of City's and Knights of Catan which i of course won.
I rang the insurance company today about my bike which has been written off -- they said they would be sending me a cheque for more than I asked for but i'll believe that when the cheque arrives in the post.
.....and finally. my quest for Google supremacy has finally succeded. It only took a few weeks but I am now top for Bristol Vineyard. Maybe I could hire myself out as an SEO consultant. I might leave it up for a few weeks yet before i remove the page.
This week I see myself Greenbelt bound hopefully with at least a few youth in tow. last time I went I was very sceptical about a lot of it - it will be interesting to see what i think of it this time and how much I've changed

2004-08-08T19:38:00.000+01:00

An update on stuff - I managed to get 3 out of 3 on the soccer game a couple of time but could on ly hit 88th on the leader board. Some people must have soo much time cause it took me a while just to get 3 goals.
On the whole bristol vineyard thing my changes on ly took me to third place ... hmmm .. might make a few more tweaks. I'm on holiday all next week and will be working on the house. Oh joy

2004-08-06T15:47:00.000+01:00

Today is my day off so I've been spending some time starting off a web site for my dad. We love templates they make life soo much easier. Ther rest of the time was spent playing with this extremely cool flash game to be found at

The best I've got to is 2 out of 3. My aim is for 3 on to be on the leader board by the end of the day. With this in mind I have to go now...

2004-08-05T15:04:00.000+01:00

Ok so I've almost finished the web site that I've been working on for days and days in my spare time. Can you guess who is playing in the photos on the front page? You might even be able to tell who is on the ball in the left hand frame. I was quite amazed at how well optimised the site is for google and the like and how quickly it has been updated. It only went live Monday night. Looking at some of the google results I have noticed that I have hit top of google on terms like 'Pip n Jay Bristol' , Bristol Sanctuary, Christchurch Bristol , Thornbury Baptist, Elim Bristol and many many others. What is mildly amusing is that I am nowhere for Bristol Vineyard which is the church that I go to. Hmmmm I think that's is my challenge for the next month - top of google for Bristol Vineyard. What do you think the likelihood of that is?

Hmmm It is soooo hot in the office at the moment that I want to take of all my clothes. Unfortunately I can't so I will just have to sit and sweat.

2004-08-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

Well I got a call on Saturday morning to say my bike had been recovered. hurrah - would have rathered the insurance money though. I then had the joys of ringing a '24 Hour' help line at Equity Red star only be be given the message "Sorry this office is closed. Please call back between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday". Meanwhile im being charged storage cost at the place where it was recovered to. The bike was found about 200 yards from my house so naturally the police called me to get me pick it up ..... nope of course they didn't. They just got it towed to Whitchurch at a cost of £105. Oh well on a bright er side I had an excellent time at softball this weekend where we managed to get into the Semi finals after 2 long days of softball games. I got 3 home runs which I was pretty please with after having only just switch to batting left handed. I've not played squash or football for ages now mainly due to the fact that I've spent ages and ages rewritting the Bristol Churches FA web site and doing next seasons fixtures. Only another 2 websites to finish - one for my dad and one for a friend.

2004-07-29T17:09:00.000+01:00

This post is in mourning to my Yamaha XJ600 which was stolen from outside my house just yards away from where my wife and I were sleeping. I will miss her (the bike not my wife)dearly as I have loving tended and cared for her for 3 years. I hope that whoever has her treats her well and doesn't break her into bits.

2004-07-12T12:25:00.000+01:00

Why can't all restaurants be like L'entrecote. L'entrecote is the name of a great restaurant I went to in Toulouse when I was out here visiting a friend.

As you walk into the eatery the first thing you notice is the wallpaper. Some kind of Scottish Tartan which looks well out of place in the South of France. The best thing about the whole experience has to be the menu though. As you sit down the middle-aged waitress wanders over and asks you - 'How would you like your steak done?' That is the only option you have as that is the only dish they serve - Steak, frites and red wine.

They have their own 'secret' sauce which is an attempt to distinguish their dishes from others and it was reasonable although not as good as the Filleto al Pepe from San Carlo in Bristol.

Can't think why noone has tried the same format in Bristol. I'm sure it would work really well. Who needs choice?