Diolch, a Nos Da

Well it's happened. I arrived just under 5 years ago as a sprightly young thing from the green fields of surrey, into this great unknown province of the british empire, and left a much different man.

Almost as if Cardiff didn't want me to leave just yet, my house keys went missing on the day of the move. Well, I say on that day, but because i never take keys off my keyring, i naturally assumed that they were still there. So after a 3 hour, 180 mile drive, we arrived to find that my key had slipped off in the night.
Luckily though my housemate, though she had recently moved to bristol, happened to be working at a conference in a nearby hotel just 5 minutes down the road! A quick trip to the key cutters via the hotel and we were back in business, but not before a trip to Central Bar Wetherspoons.

We spent maybe 3 or 4 hours packing and cleaning, cramming the car with every possession I hadn't already smuggled across the border in previous visits. The only things that had to be left behind (apart from some furniture and computers I gave away) were a pair of old speakers that were found in a shed back in my student hovel. The circle of life decreed we leave them outside the house to await their next owner as there was no room in the car (though they might find them a bit lacking in high-end as I fitted a crossover to turn them into subs).

Now I've got to figure out how much of the stuff I brought back I actually want to keep, giving bits to charity shops, church, friends, etc so that the next move will hopefully be a better fit.

My housing contract has ended, I've sent the key back. The only thing I haven't done is tell Cardiff council I won't be voting there any more. Chances are they've lost my details again and won't miss me anyway, englishmen only slow down the devolution process.

Though I may be gone, I have not left. In the words of Evita, "Don't cry for me Wales, I'll be back a week saturday."

Or something like that.

home, home on the range

I've been pretty bad at keeping up to date with my blog since moving back to dear old england, sorry Ruth!
It's been a strange transition, moving from freelancer that flits from job to job, location to location, to warehouse monkey with a set pattern of work hours and days. Luckily working on the evening shift means I don't have to drag myself out of bed before the sun rises and cram myself onto a rolling sardine tin, just to repeat the cramming on the way back! Yes, the hours I keep are quite anti-social, but the off-peak trains keep it cheap and I get a seat every time!

It's been nice being back in dear old england, being able to see old friends, spend time with my family and have my favourite ale easily available! I get to come back to the land of my uncles this weekend though, as part of an ongoing adventure with Ignite in Cardiff Students Union and the great tech team that work behind the scenes to get the show moving and (hopefully) running without a hitch.

A bit of trivia for you: the angel that sits on top of Guildford Cathedral sits on top of mobile phone masts from a couple of mobile networks, the angel itself was added when scenes from The Omen were filmed at the cathedral.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

The time to leave wales has finally come, I should really be doing some packing but I never liked packing, least of all when I end up with a huge pile of "essentials" that I can't carry to the train station, and have to whittle it down to two bags-worth to have any chance of storing it in the luggage rack.

Now isn't the time for reminiscing, I haven't left yet! But regardless I still think back to the first time I crossed the severn bridge as a fresher, with a laptop, some clothes, bass and amp, and a pile of kitchen utensils thrown together courtesy of my older sister and grandparents. I was excited to arrive at university, in the Wales that I spent many childhood summers canoeing and sailing and fishing, a great big world to explore and new freedom to enjoy.

God has been good to me all these years, guiding me through the myriad of life choices, ensuring I ended up in a good place with good people whatever I did, and I trust that this new chapter that has started will continue that trend, and shape me for the better.

Boys on tour

Tomorrow I am starting a second tour of The Tentmaker with Dai (Dave) Woolridge. This time around we have lost fellow techy Steve; the audio to my video, the Ying to my Yang. Instead we have managed to cobble together a single show file that I run from my laptop. It runs all the slides, videos and sound effects from a single bit of software. The weakest link in the chain is that the software we have made the show file from is Powerpoint, which has a habit of cutting the last split second off the ends of videos (when the video is a matter of seconds long, is quite a bit).
We already had a quick practise of the new format before performing at Ignite back in december, where the whole thing went off without a technical hitch (though maybe the odd human element crept in once...or twice...) so we know it works. The challenge this time is that because we now have two techs instead of one, there is the chance that load-in and load-out times might suffer quite a bit, especially when we are in venues where we have to provide our own lighting.
No two churches are the same, and as they are run by volunteers, there's an element of uncertainty as to what the church has in the way of equipment, and sometimes how much room there is to perform in! On the last tour we played in village theatres, sports halls, traditional anglican buildings, as well as a few chapels. This tour is taking place predominantly in wales, but makes short hops to the richer side of the border to visit Cranleigh, Ealing and Chippenham.

I tried to take a photo of something interesting from each venue last time, be it a gap in a newly built wall, or a mess of cabling underneath a "mobile" AV desk. Hopefully I'll keep it up, maybe soon I'll start  jotting down bits about each one and create a little black book of venues from the various tours I've done these past few years.

The sort of venue that we won't be playing in.