I needed to record something in a hurry this morning. Just as I was retuning my guitar up a tone a string broke. Felt like a disaster. I was forced to restring my beloved McPherson for the first time and I felt totally weird about it. Bit like doing my own repair job on a new car. Would I be able to do it? Would the guitar ever recover? Should I start to mourn its final demise?

Of course, after a while, I restrung it fine. Not as elegantly as it was strung in the workshop but no one will notice that. And the sound is amazing (thanks to Elixir strings). I’d forgotten how important it is to record with new strings on a guitar. I’m sure my ears are better tuned these days since I'm writing with guitar more and more. But what a difference.

So next time I feel like an old string in my life has snapped maybe I shouldn’t see it as such a disaster? Maybe it’s a way of God making me go find a new set of strings to make me sound a whole lot sweeter. Even if I thought I sounded ok to start with.

Yours in ‘leading my church home group tonight’ mode,

S.

It’s Moo’s 2nd birthday today. It seems significant that the day after realising my little girl is soon going to big school that I’m reminded again how cruelly fast time is moving for my little man.

Sandra’s gone mad in celebration. For example his birthday cake is a deliciously rich chocolate cake totally hidden in a milk chocolate shell (which she made) decorated as a football. The idea is that he uses a hammer in a very boyzy way to crack open his birthday cake. He’ll have such fun with that.

We were trying to work out whether Moo will be called ‘Moo’ at school. There'll be one year when Poppy will be at big school at the same time as him (before going up to ‘even bigger school’). So the chances are that the name will filter out.

Sandra seemed surprisingly downbeat on the idea that he’ll remain ‘Montgomery’ for very long. I asked why and she said that children will pick up on anything in a bid to point to the funny side of life. She recounted how she renamed a girl in her class called ‘Justine Setchall’ something quite different… ‘just been sexual’! It made me laugh anyway.

Yours realising my wife was doing mosaic rhyme in her head several decades before I developed it in SongTools,

S.

Poppy starts her new ‘big school’ in September. Tonight Sandra and I went to an introductory parents’ evening there.

Several of my American friends have commented that English people are generally lumpy and have bad teeth. They are right of course.

There were lots of lumpy bad teeth people there tonight. I just couldn’t help but  notice. Tonight was a ‘Lumpy-Bad-Teeth Showcase’.

Yours thinking maybe I need a lot more work than a shave before my video cowrite with Gina tomorrow,

S.

• In half an hour I cowrite with Sue on video
• iSight is totally unforgiving when it comes to highlighting any blemish, spot, wrinkle or whisker
• I’ve just realised I need a shave
• My razor is totally out of shape and will probably rip my face off if I use it

Major step forward. I found the delete key. Not the one that deletes backwards, but the one that deletes forwards. I was missing that. Feel like I’ve taken a stone out of my shoe.

Yours with every muscle aching from putting up a trampoline in our garden yesterday,

S.

OK. I've got 16 mins left on my MacBook power meter. I'm going to spend it on my blog. Mostly because I've been a tardy blogger this week.

I was touched by a friend's story I heard this week. They had to close their business after 16 years of trading after recently fighting an outgoing tide. They owe money now and it's sad for so many reasons. The human side of it especially. They are very much in our prayers at the moment.

It's difficult to know what to say... everything I think of somehow seems inadequate and simplistic.

Sometimes I just hate money. I've often thought how cool it would be to live in the age of Star Trek when they've found a way to eliminate material need, globally. Nice work.

I wonder how my life would have turned out without having to think about money? Like, would I have made the same choices, taken the same journey? I can tell you right now I'd have had a lot more fun with the three years I spent qualifying as an accountant.

Maybe heaven will be a little like the Starship Enterprise? Except with no Klingons. And surely no accountants. If there are different levels of 'treasure' maybe we'll just know how much we have, like when you highlight the cells of an Excel spreadsheet and have the sum function on the tool bar (there, I just demonstrated the useful things I learnt as an accountant!). Maybe we just wont need to count?

Now I can think of a few people who don't go to church on Sunday that would be totally motivated by the thought of a world with no accountants.

Yours wondering if in heaven there are no power meters as well,

S.


P.S. I think Philippians 3 says this better

• Quality family time
• Listening to Chris Tomlin’s ‘Arriving’ cruising down the amazing French motorways at 100mph
• Dinner for two at our hotel http://hotel-de-charme-restaurant-gastronomique-basse-normandie.manoir-du-lys.fr/en/index.html on the way down and back
• Enjoying England get through the first round of the world cup from the big old house we were staying at (yes, it had British satellite TV)
• Sitting in the square of our local big town (Confolens) drinking a double espresso after exploring the cool historic sites of the town
• Moo’s singing
• Warm evenings with a cup of French hot chocolate watching the sun go down over the Charentes countryside stretching beyond the end of our pool
• Stepping in to a tiny Roman-built church on the short walk to buy croissants at the village Boucherie with Poppy
• Listening to Poppy and Moo chatting in the mornings as they shared a bedroom for the first time
• Afternoon sleeps
• A long lunch at our local chateau http://www.chateaunieuilhotel.com/gb/
• Jumping into a fresh swimming pool in the heat of the day (100 degrees for a couple of days)
• Poppy asking to do some “snipping with mummy’s zizzors (scissors)”
• Buying all the white goods for the kitchen of our French house, organising the installation of a new bathroom and beginning to see that we might actually spend a holiday there this year
• Having Moo’s little hand in mine as we browsed a Normandy market
• Feeling the history of the house we were staying in
• Having friends come round for the evening and just laughing our way through it
• Sa surprising me with a bunch of Father's Day presents and cards
• Getting back here to the Beach House, to a nice letter, Sandra's cooking and falling asleep in a bed that I'm used to.

Late Saturday night, sitting at the kitchen table again.

Tried to email a couple of blogs without success. If they come through they probably wont make sense. Sorry.

To make up for arriving home on a Sunday I took a day off on Friday.

We’ve had two days of incredible sunshine, doing nothing but playing in the garden, walking to the Lobster Pot Café for ice creams and lunch (freshly caught fish) before afternoon snoozes and tea on the terrace. And had our first two BBQs of the season. The children have been on great form.

It’s often times like this, when I totally stop chasing stuff, that I feel truly grateful for a lot of things.

Yours thinking I must remember to enjoy the journey more,

S.

Thursday night. About half past midnight. Sitting at the kitchen table.

Apple’s timing couldn’t have been better. I got home tonight dizzy from experiencing my first three-way video chat this afternoon. Sue, Melissa and I chatted for a while and it really felt like we’d been in the same room. But as I came through the front door tonight I saw in the corner a slender package waiting for me. Something I wasn’t expecting for another two weeks.

This was my replacement laptop. My PowerBook Pro. And it doesn’t disappoint. As I unpacked it I felt like when I walked through the door of the Fat Duck at Bray (http://www.fatduck.co.uk). It was the most expensive meal of my life (we had the tasting menu ++) but it was worth every penny. There’s something very classy about this machine and I know we're going to have a lot of fun together.

The timing was also great because today ProTools arrived at the studio. So the G5 in my writing room is going downstairs to the studio… the idea is to programme in SX3/Reason/Live5 and master in ProTools. Or whatever combination works best. We’ll see how that goes. I can’t help thinking the double learning curve (Mac + a new DAW) is a little aggressive.

Yours wondering when I’m going to get to bed tonight,

S.