Congratulations to my friends Steve and Sam who gave birth to Erin Rose Norwood this evening.
Born 9:45pm 13 February 2007
Weight 6lb 8.5oz
They now have three girls (Grace and Ruth too) and I think that Steve might need some male help as he's all alone now with 4 women in his life!
I'm here if you need me Steve!!!
Congratulations!!!
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This Saturday we had a James Bond party at church and I think that everyone had such a good time. I helped Jon set up the lighting at Overton Grange and as you can see from the photo, it looked great.
I think people (including me) thought that having the party at Overton would be pretty naff for a few reasons, mainly being that it was a school hall but people worked so hard to make the place look brilliant and did such a good job and i think it's one of the best parties we've had at VCS.
Jon and Jason gave our awards to people who had done great jobs at church and Jon had found an amazing band called One Nation. He'd seen them at Green Belt and they were excellent. They came all the way down from Coventry to play for us and were stunning. They got everyone (but me!) up dancing and I think people thoroughly enjoyed the evening. They're website is here and I highly recommend them for any function you want to get people dancing at!
Now, as you can see from my photo, I had made a costume. I don’t normally like fancy dress parties but I had come up with the great idea of making a car out of a card board box. I put this idea to Laraine knowing that I wouldn’t be able to complete this task on my own.
So, the way it was made was thus:
• Stage 1: Get a card board box, cut out the middle and fit it to me! :)
• Stage 2: Laraine Paper Machéd the box on the front to the shape of an Aston Martin. Approx time: 1.5 hours.
• Stage 3: Paint the box grey. Approx time: 30 mins.
• Stage 4: Start finding images on the net. In the end, the only high resolution images that I could find were of an Aston Martin Vantage V8. Now for all you Bond fans out there, you will know that James has never used a Vantage except for the old model V8 but since this was the best I could find, it would have to do!
• Stage 5: Cut out the images and then resizing to fix the box. This was the pain staking bit. Cutting out the images to make sure that they were in proportion to the box. Approx time: 6 hours.
• Stage 6: Stick images to box. I quite enjoyed this bit but that might be because Laraine was in charge at this point and I was just holding bits of tape and doing the quality control! Laraine was amazing by the way and was very patient with me. Approx time: 2 hours.
• Stage 7: Making those fine adjustments. I quite liked this bit too. I printed out larger Aston Martin logos to stick on the front and the back, made wheels from real Aston Martins, printed off a Sony Sat Nav and got an image from Multimap of Overton Grange and combined the two, got a speedometer (from a Mazda!) and then decided to make a windscreen. Approx time: 2 hours.
So all in all, it probably took about 12 hours to make my special Aston Martin and I had a great time wearing it at the party. Unfortunately there was no prize for best costume but that’s probably a good thing as I probably wouldn’t have won it! Thanks to Laraine for helping me make the best costume that I've ever had. It was great!
And thanks to VCS for a great party!
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Congraulations to my friends Paul and Laura Kingsley-Smith who had their baby Gracie May Kingsley-Smith on Monday. Gracie was born at 9:48 on the 10th December (her due date). She was 7lbs 10oz.
They're out in NZ so it might be a long time until i meet Gracie but i am so pleased for you guys and look forward to reading all about her and all the things you do on your blog.
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They nominated me for doing the Sri Lanka mission and for the kids camps that we do in the summer and I never thought that I would win. There are loads of people here at LGIM who do good things and about 15 people go nominated.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I get an invitation to attend the finals of the award and then a trip on the London Eye. I was again excited but never thought that I would win it. When it came to the London award, I looked around the room and noticed that none of the other people who had been nominated were in attendance. This is when I started to get nervous that I might have actually won it!
Anyway, they did indeed call my name out and I went over to collect my award of a bottle of champagne, a nice badge with the MAD logo and the best bit is a cheque for £1000 for the charity of my choice!
I was so happy! I couldn’t believe that I’d actually won it.
I plan to give the £1000 to Vineyard Church Sutton but more directly to help with the new initiative that we are doing to help people with no money paint their houses and do their gardens.
Loads of other people from the other offices in the UK are doing amazing things. People at the Kingswood office are working with local schools to get their aware of environmental issues. People in Cardiff have created a material bag which they are giving out to their 800 staff to reduce the need to get a plastic bag at every shop every lunch time... and many more....
Thanks to the people who nominated me and thanks for the award L&G!!
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Target Neutral is basically a way of off-setting the Carbon Dioxide emissions that you pump out from your car by paying an excess. Jason has been doing this for a while now when he uses air travel and BP have now started doing the same thing for you car.
The money will then go towards projects which will help to develop systems with renewable energy sources throughout the world.
BP have teamed up with NGO's to run this project.
If you've got a Nectar card, every time you buy petrol from BP, they will donate 10p to the same cause.
I've already signed up and encourage you too as well.
I haven't been cycling for ages and today was the first day that I got out and about on my mountain bike. I went off to Abinger Hammer near Dorking to go off road cycling with Jon Wilson and Paul Smout and we had such a good time.
I'd forgotten how freeing it was to get out on my bike and hammer down some mental rugged paths at 30mph. Man it was good. We cycled up some very large hills too which was well worth it for the views at the top, and for the rapid decent back down again.
We've been doing a series at church called Passionate Living and Jason has been talking about appreciating the small things and the big things in life. I haven't really thought about it before but my cycling is my time and space to think about things (along with making sue I'm not going to kill myself hitting a rock) but I love it!
I'd really encourage everyone to find their place where they can experience God.... and that can be anywhere, doing anything.
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Congratulations to our friends Simon and Margo Greenwood who today at 16.04 had a little baby girl weighing in at 7lb 4oz. Sienna Ruth Greenwood! It’s all very exciting. Simon and Margo are great and will be amazing parents. I might put a bet on that she'll be a musician as well as it would be hard not to with Si and Margo as her parents!
We can’t wait to come down to visit you all!!
People came from as far as Watford to celebrate with Laraine and I know it meant an awful lot to her that you all could come. We hired out the church office and just had a chilled out evening.
Sarah Hammond and Ellie White were stars and decorated the hall whilst I set up lots of images of Laraine to project onto the wall and sorted out the music. I hope it was ok! The photos seemed to go down well as they were all taken over the time that we've been together (nearly 8 years now) so there were a lot of classics from when we were very young - well, about 17!
Happy Birthday Rain! I hope you had a great evening!
]]>If you want to see what others have written, go here
I've done a post which is below and if you want to put one up, just go here.
"Hello World!
Well, today was a usual day in the life of Dave really and I’m now going to tell you all about it! :)
I woke up late at 06.20am and managed to run for the train which leaves at 06.38. I watched an Episode of CSI on my hard drive player on the train on the way to work and arrived at work at 7.30 for an enthralling day.
Work is pretty dull and I spend most of the time at work thinking what I’m going to do with the various projects that are going on in my life. Today's thoughts were focused around the Action groups that me, my wife Laraine and friend Ellie at church are going to set up. We had a meeting with Jon Franklin yesterday at the church office to discuss it and it's looking like a very good idea. The basic plan is to get paints, gardening equipment and all that sort of thing donated from various organisations and go and help people who have no money sort their homes out. It's going to be great, but we're still in the early stages. The project that I’m currently involved with at work is the Blackberry Upgrade project which involves giving out 250 new Blackberries. It’s pretty darn boring if I’m honest but I guess someone has to do it! Lucky me!
I finish work at 15.30 and on the way home tried to watch another episode of CSI but knew I was going to fall asleep on the train so just decided that sleeping was the way forward.
When I got home, I fixed some errors that Mike Smith had found on the website I made for him (http://www.aliassmithandsingh.co.uk) and then it was time for a bit of fun.
I have just bought a new computer game called Company of Heroes (this bit is very geeky but that's me really so no apologies there)! I sat and played that for 3 hours! Man it's a good game. But I do need a more powerful computer!
In the evening Laraine and I went out to see our friends Julie, Mark and Duncan. We went to the Toby Carvery in Ewell. Man I love Carvery. It’s basically all you can eat! Julie and Mark are getting married next September so we chatted about that and had a really nice evening.
Then Laraine and I went home, and went to bed.
And that's a day in the life of Dave Sztypuljak!"
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Today we went to Thorpe Park for Laraine's birthday. A big thank you to J who managed to sort out free tickets for us all. One slight problem was that J double booked himself so wasn’t able to come along in the end! Ooops!
We all had a great time and thanks to modern camera timers were able to take the photo above. Ayla made everyone laugh by going on various 'big people' rides and pulling the same funny face throughout on all of them. I'll get an image up soon!
Paul and I were amazing by the new ride there called Stealth which propels you forward to 80mph in 2 seconds and then takes you flying up a vertical incline, over a hairpin and then flies you back again. Apparently it uses electromagnets so you get amazing traction and a huge burst of speed. I don’t really understand but it was very very cool!!
Thanks to everyone for a really nice day!
Wednesday night was the first ‘Mobile Club Night’ at Liverpool Street Station. The very cool thing is that there was no music being played anywhere except through headphones from all the MP3 players that people had in their pockets.
I wish I’d known about this before because I think it would have been one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Seeing a few hundred people seemingly dancing to nothing has got to be worth a few laughs.
I think they’ll do it again after it was such a success.
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I was just perusing Jon Green's blog and found this great post that Greenpeace have started.
They've basically made their site look like Apple's (hopefully they wont get sued) and have highlighted the fact that Apple are using components that, when resold back to developing countries are causing children to be exposed to dangerous chemicals contained within them.
Here's the opening statement on the Greenpeace site.
"We love Apple. Apple knows more about "clean" design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have agreed to abandon? A cutting edge company shouldn't be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals. That's why we Apple fans need to demand a new, cool product: a greener Apple."
You can check out more info here: http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/ and write letters to Steve Jobs and spread the word here: http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/mact.html
Now, it's not often that you can say that Apple have done something they shouldn't. So join me in getting them to change their ways!
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Well, I have been waiting ages but in my opinion, the best American drama is back in full swing.
I cant say too much about what has happened as I wouldn’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen the first season but I think it's one of the best programmes that i watch - and I probably watch too many of them!
The first season was basically about a chap called Michael Schofield trying to break his brother out of prison. The 2nd season is basically them on the run (which means you can work out what happens at the end of the 1st!) but that's all I’ll say.
If you haven’t seen it, watch it! It's great!
]]>It's a really nice village near Swindon which Laraine and I both find quite bizarre whilst living in London. Everything is slower, everyone seems to know each other and there is much more of a sense of community.
We travelled over to Devizes on the Saturday to watch Ben play football. It was a good game... for the first 30 seconds until Devizes scored, and then again after another minute or so. The score ended 7-2 to Devizes. Never mind Calne! But it was fun none the less :)
On the Sunday we travelled over to Wroughton (which is apparently the biggest village in England) to visit our friend from the camp we do in the summer (who I think has probably made more appearances on my blog than anyone else...) Lucy Cairns! We had a really nice time with her. My favourite part was when she took us to see Barbury Castle...... which is actually just a field as the castle was knocked down 1000 years ago or something like that. I was very disappointed to find there was nothing to look at. I think they should change the name to Barbury greenery or something along those lines!
Anyway, it was a great weekend where pretty much all we did was eat nice food and were completely stuffed by the time we got home.
Thanks for a great time Emma, Ben and Lucy!!
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