It's been a while since I've been on aboutlife.com and posted here. I was last in London in the spring of 2006 because my wife had an internship with a firm in the City while she was in law school. We attended HTB while we were there and have missed it greatly since (she's been "attending" HTB from across the pond via podcast).

In the meantime, we moved from Boston to New York City. We've been in NYC for about a year now; I've been loving it (she's still trying to adjust to it). In any case, the opportunity came up at work for someone to go to London for 3-6 months for a project and since I had previously put my name in as someone willing to travel internationally for project work, they contacted me about going to London starting mid June and I accepted!

While I was back in the US, I always thought it was weird to sing worship songs that use the words "glorious" and "majesty". Sure, they're proper English words, but Americans just don't use those words very often.

Now that I've been living in England for a little bit, I've realized that those words are used in those songs because they actually make sense in the British context. British people actually use those words in their normal speech and the words have a much deeper meaning to Brits than Americans.

I'm thinking of going back to school in the next few years. I guess it's a result of me going through my quarterlife crisis.

Last time I was here in London, I visited the London School of Economics. I think the stuff they do is absolutely amazing. However, I don't see myself as an academic per se; their programs are definitely more for pure academics than an MBA programme is. Also, their programmes seem to lead more towards government and policy making positions, which is not really something I'm interested.

The 12th Starbucks I've worked in during my 2+ weeks in London so far is the one at St. Katharine's Docks. It's the most beautiful Starbucks I've ever been in (this is including the Starbucks inside the Forbidden City in Beijing; well maybe the context is nicer, but when you actually step inside, it's the same as any other Starbucks).

This Starbucks is in a round, cylindrical shaped building with 2 levels, glass on all sides. It overlooks the St. Katharine's Docks where some very nice (and expensive looking) boats are parked.

After this past Sunday's service at HTB, the wife and I headed down to the bookstore to see if there's anything we wanted to buy. We first headed to the music section since we're both really into music. She saw Tim Hughes' most recent album and asked if we could buy it. I looked at the price, and though it was on sale for £10, that's still almost $20! I told her we could get that exact same CD in the US for $10, half the price it is here.

First Great Western rail is having a great promotion for the month of May where some routes are only 5 pounds or less each way!

http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk/

My wife and I are going to Bath on the 13th and 14th of May; return tickets from London to Bath were only 10 pounds!

We might go to Cardiff the following weekend to see some castles.

After much debate within my head about whether I should go or not, I've decided to attend the Worship Central conference at HTB this Saturday.

The past couple of years has been very difficult in terms of my relationship with church and worship. At the church I previously attended, I had served on the worship team in many different ways; I can get by on bass guitar and eletric guitar, so I filled in for those roles when I was needed, but by main interest was leading worship. After a couple of years with serving in worship ministry, one of the pastors suggested to me that worship was not my calling to serve the church.

I work for a small marketing and PR services company that helps companies track their brands as they're used in both mainstream (newspapers, magazines, etc.) and consumer-generated media (blogs, message boards, etc).

It was really a gift from God to get this job. I've always had an interest in blogging. I actually started a blog back in college around 1997, way before the term "blog" was invented. A lot of my friends thought I was strange for maintaining an online journal for people to read, but I believed it was a natural progression of human communication as the Internet became a bigger part of our lives.

There's a London Flickr Meetup group that I joined as soon as I got into London. There was a group outing this past Sunday to photograph the Sikh festival in Trafalgar Square but I didn't get around to going.

In case you're interested, it seems like a good way to meet other photographers:

http://flickr.com/groups/ londonflickrmeetups/

I'm new to this site, so maybe something like this already exists. But one thing I think would be interesting is if there was a concept of having "groups" in the way that Flickr has groups: to give people the ability to create public affinity groups for anyone to join.

For example, if someone would be able to create a London Photo Group for anyone interested in photography to join. It would have a communal blog view (such as the one you see when you click on "my friends"; this would in effect, create a group photo blog.