It's been a while ...

sorry its been so long since I up-dates this thing, but life has a habit of taking over and when I have had time off the last thing I've wanted to do is sit in-front of a computer. The last month has involved me spending a week in Leicester to start my MA in health, youth and community work. This will give me a youth worker qualification as well as allowing me to indulge in my love of studying. The next week one of my friends from university came over to visit me and so we spent the week traveling over the island visiting some of my favorite parts. The next two weeks were just work as normal so here are a selection of photos from October

Suicide prevention course handbook

Women's conference Mosaic

Romance Academy Intro Course

Sam's Birthday Party

First 412 meeting

De Montfort Leicester

Airport Isle of man (visited 4 times in 2 weeks)

Vicki's Pirate Party

Ruth at Peel Castle

Sept 16th - Sept 28th

16th Photo Shoot

17th Bruch at the sound

18th View of the bay

19th Evening walk

20th Post for Ben

21st What feeling is a prawn sandwich?

22nd Chris and Matt Acoustic night

23rd Banner for the family tent

24th Manx Food Festival

25th Port Erin Church

26th St John's Mill

28th NSC

The next set

Day 14 Authentic lifestyles - take 1

Day 17 Fire on the beach

Day 18 lactose free cupcakes for Luke's Bday

Day 16 Hot chocolate in costa

Day 19 Sarah B's Bday Party

Day 21 Rock climbing

Day 23 Dance rehearsal for mosaic

Day 24 teddy's for Rhi and Linda to take to Ramsey

Week 2

 Monday ⧥ 7
Our files given on the first day of induction, this contains all our notes for the year.

Tuesday ⧥ 8
half the shopping needed to feed 19 people for one week

Wednesday ⧥ 9
People relaxing in a break during the schools course

Thursday ⧥ 10
'Flappy Birds' Mary and I made 30 flappy birds for the prayer room this weekend

Friday ⧥ 11
This years volunteers sat on the steps outside the house during a break.

Saturday ⧥ 12
The start of community day, giant art-attack on the beach

Sunday  ⧥ 13
The sign-up sheet for the prayer room that we have prayed in all weekend 24/7 prayer style

Days 4, 5 and 6

My diary for this year now filled with dates after a meeting with Sam and Sarah

Mary and SB in the car on the way 

back from lunch

This is how many seats we'll need to fit the whole team

down for dinner each evening (19)

Project 365 days 1-3

I'm hoping this year to start (and complete) what is know as a 365 project. This, for those of you who have not heard of this, is when you take a picture each day for a year and upload it either to a blog or a social networking site with a sentence explaining the context of the picture, people do this for many reasons but the main ones are to either improve photography skills or to keep memories of a particular year. I'm trying to do this for both these reasons but especially to try to capture as many moments from my intern year with SUMT as possible. I will also be printing all my pictures and making them into a book to keep it forever.

So here are the first few days...

Day one - Full car boot at Liverpool docks waiting to get on the ferry

Day 2 - newly organised room with things on the walls, feel at home now.

Day 3 - steam train pulling into PSM after a walk to Port Erin with Mary

Hopefully I will be able to keep this up (though probably wont upload each day like you're meant to) and you will all be able to get a better insight into my life on IOM.

The best of both worlds

The last few days have been ones of extremes. After being busy for the first couple of weeks of my holiday I spent the start of this week doing very little and sleeping alot, trying to convince my body that it wanted to go back to work in about 10 days time. The yesterday I went into central London to Oxford Street to go shopping. It was great to make the most of the shops which are both bigger and more varied than those on the island, making buying jeans that fit my 5"2' frame much easier. I also managed to buy a pair of boots that fit me to the extent that I could even fit a pair of jeans inside of them. This is the end of about four years of searching for boots that fit my feet (size 4 1/2) yet also fit around my legs (combination of genetics and dancing).

I then spent today walking the dogs in the forest, baking, sewing and blogging. I love the fact that here I am near enough to London to enjoy the culture and benefits of a big city, yet far enough away that when the riots happened we were out of harms way (only just one night, but still), to be in the country side, able to buy bread from the bakers each day and meat from the butchers when we need it. It really is the best of both worlds.

Goodbye day

At the end of our Volunteer year we had a good bye day and evening when we just spent time together reminiscing about everything that had happened during the year. During the evening different members of the team sang songs, did dramas and shared stories. I made a video of photographs from during the year and so thought I would share it here also.

The Parish Walk

For those of you who do not know the parish walk is a 85 mile walk around the Isle of Man whish must be completed in 24hrs, and includes going to each parish church on the island. This walk can be completed in its intireity or a walker can stop at any of the stages (churches). The first main church is at Santon 10 miles into the course, the next at Rushen 19 miles in, then at Peel 32.5 miles in. Unless you are very keen (and have trained) it is unlikely that you will pass Peel, you must also be over 21yrs to do this. As well as completing the miles you must reach each stage within a time frame; the race starts at 8am and racers must pass Rushen by 1:35pm (5hrs 35mins) and pass Peel by 5pm if continuing (9hrs) or 6pm if finishing at Peel (10hrs). For more info see http://www.parishwalk.com/

part of the SUMT team at the start

Before the parish walk we had done some practice walks however the longest of these was only 15miles, so we were slightly unsure how far we would get, add into this we had just completed lifepath (see previous post). However we arrived at Rushen with about 30mins to spare feeling okay but maybe with the start of a few blisters so we decided to continue (the fact that the rest of our group were continuing had nothing to do with it). A few miles later I was beginning to regret continuing but you have very little choice by this point but to continue. The last 6/7 miles were very painful and hard going but to arrive in Peel, at the church I work at, with the rest of the team cheering us on and along with many members of my church made it worth it in the end, however I have no plans to ever walk that far again. My final time as I arrived in Peel was 9hrs and 40mins.

la la la la la lifepath!!!!

It has been an amazing week at lifepath, if slightly tiring. 485 children learning about God and prayer, 19 individual chants 10 times singing each of the two lifepath songs and countless toilet trips, flag waves and dance moves later lifepath 2011 is over.

All the hard work was worth it though to see a child sat holding a stone thinking/praying about their day, to read a post-it note that a child has written saying sorry for something they have done or asking God to fix something the the(ir) world, to watch a child sit in ore, listening intently to a man dressed as a monk or a disciple learning about faith in the past. It was such a privilege to be a part of.

Its a slightly surreal thought that lifepath is done as we have been building up to this since September and its the last big team event this year, meaning that we only have a month left before we all leave, either for the summer or permanently; therefore we need to make the most of the time we have left, lots of trips for ice-cream or paddling, many late nights talking and just enjoying the time we have left together in this house and on this island.

Bags, bags and more bags

This week the majority of my time has been taken up making hessian bags. Next week we are running a RE curriculum day for year 5's (9 and 10 year olds) from across the island, each day we will have about 100 children attending (over the week we will have just over half the island year 5's attend). They will learn about Christianity in the past (from the point of view of monks) as well as the present and about prayer, they will do this by talking to people who are in character as monks, craft activities as well as corpurt worship at the start and end of the day. In order to do this we use volunteers from all over the island who go to all different types of churches. In order for you to understand more fully here is a video from last years event

Each child that attends lifepath is given a journey bag at the start of the day, in which they place all the items they make or are give at each of the stations throughout the day. This means the 500 of these journey bags needed to be made. Most of these have been done by people outside the organisation who have amazing sewing skills and want to donate some of their time but some has been completed by yours-truly. Here is an example of a completed bag

Most of these are now finished and we are just waiting for the last ones to be returned to the house in order for them to be given out next week.

In other news we did our last practice walk before the parish walk which is next Saturday, we managed to walk about 15 miles in 3hrs 45, now if we could just walk twice as far next week I might reach my goal!

Photo Shoot

While we were out yesterday Mary commented that there are very few photographs with just her and Chris in so I decided to rectify this by doing an impromptu photo shoot. Here are the results:

I think they turned out well even if I do say so myself

The world's most dangerous road race

 For two weeks each year the Isle of Man is completely transformed from a sleepy island to a bikers paradise. They travel here from all over the world to either compete in or watch the what is known as the worlds most dangerous road race in the world, also know as the TT. The island's roads become a race course, buses don't run and roads close and the population of the island can double. So today (it being our day off) we decided to go and watch some of the races. There shouldn't have been any racing today but due to the rain yesterday the races had been postponed which worked out great for us. I tried to get some photos of the bikes but being quite new to photographing fast moving objects (they average 130 miles per hour) most turned out blurry but I did get a couple of good shots