Well as I’m no doubt sure you’re aware, I’ve completed my 40 Days of Lent and I’m now back on Shloer. In fact right at this moment, there are still 3 bottles left in my fridge waiting to be drunk (I bought 4 only a few hours ago).

Incidentally, on my way back from the shops I was distracted by a squirrel and walked into a lamp-post.

There was a bit of dispute about the length of the whole Lent thing. It’s supposed to be 40 days from Ash Wednesday. That took me up to last weekend. But for some people their 40 days doesn’t end until just before Easter. Why? Well those people take Sunday’s off because each Sunday is supposed to represent the resurrection and so therefore you don’t have to abstain from whatever it is you’re doing.

Well I think that’s cheating. To be honest. Here you are, trying to give up something, and a week later you have the perfect ‘get-out’ clause which allows you to give in to whatever it is you’ve given up. And then you start a whole new week. So basically you’re just giving something up for a week, except you do it 4 times over.

But no, not me. I think that if you’re going to abstain from something then you should do it in its entirety- a complete full 40 days. Josh Hartnett didn’t take a break each Sunday to “woohoo” his “heehaw” in the movie 40 Days and 40 Nights did he? No, of course he didn’t. Because that would have been completely cheating. I bet any ‘7days x4 Lenters’ would have been dissapointed if they were placing bets on Josh Hartnetts character. They they are, looking at this website of a guy who’s giving up sex and anything and everything related to it for 40 days, and they’re able to bet on it. They think they’re on a winner;

“Hey look - we just bet that he’ll stop in 7 days cos it’s a Sunday. Once that Sunday comes around he can go knick-knack paddywhack and give a dog a bone as much as he wants to. Then we’re back on, and can bet again the following Sunday a further 3 times…. Yeah man, trust me - we’re gonna be rich!!!”

Suckers.

Anyway, I got a lot of stick from people online who thought that I was cheating by doing a full run of 40 days. Those 7x4 people aren’t doing much of a sacrifice - and it’s supposed to be a sacrifice. Then I’m called a cheater because I’m not skipping sundays, giving me that extra week. Yet I’ve still managed to complete my 40 days.

So I asked my Dad.

For those of you who don’t know, my dad is a Superintendent Methodist Minister. You can click the link for more info, but basically, the Methodist Church is a denomination of Christianity. Methodist Ministers are the Methodist equivalent of a Priest. A number of Methodist chuches in a particular area make up a circuit, and the Ministers in charge of that circuit are called Superintendent Ministers - sooo they’re kind of like a Super-Priest. I state that, because I tried explaining this to someone once and when I said that a Minister is the equivalent of a Priest, he mistakingly thought that that meant that a Superintendent Minister is like God.

So anyway, I asked my Dad and he wasn’t much help at all. I don’t think that it was a scenario he’d given much thought over. So I asked the awesome Revd Ralph Kemp, a local preacher at Astbury Church and he thought I’d be okay and was right, but he wasn’t 100% sure. So just to get that certainty, I contacted my friend Jo’s father, Jeff Cuttell who’s the rector at Astbury Church (and also awesome). He assured me that I’d done my job of abstaining for 40 days and that I had in fact completed Lent.

I was so glad he said that because I was talking to him on the phone whilst I was stood outside Tesco. The moment I got the official word I rushed into Tesco and cleaned them out of Shloer. That’s right, that day there was Shloer on the shelf, and then there wasn’t Shloer on the shelf. It was all mine. And now it’s all gone. But I keep topping up by buying more and more and more and Morissons are doing a 2-for-1 offer at the moment, so I’ve managed to buy even more now!

I think I have a problem.

Well, until the bubbles remind me otherwise.

I’ve recently just upgraded to a wireless network in preperation for the arrival of my Mac Mini so that I can add as many computers to the network as I’d like to. I’m also doubling the speed of my internet connection, so all is well in the world (apart from Iraq, aren’t they still having a war over there? I dunno, as far as I’m aware there are still troops out there but we never seem to hear from them anymore. Do you think they receive Sesame Street over in Iraq?)

Things have been pretty busy lately. Tomorrow morning I’m helping Dave’s twin brother Chris and his girlfriend and her kid move house. Apparently we’re starting “early”. As if that’s actually getting specific.

Now let’s look at this a moment shall we?

When I’m at work, I have to be up around 7am. That’s early. During the school holidays (one of the perks you get working for a High School) I tend to get up about 12-1pm, so therefore 10:30am is early. I think Dave gets up for work at about 5 or 6am (I don’t really know the exact time on the grounds of the fact that I’m usually asleep). So for Dave, “early” could possibly mean 3-5am.

At the time of writing, I make it 12:35am. That means that I have to be out of the house somewhere between 2½ hours and about 11 hours time from now.

Something tells me that it’s just not gonna happen.

Besides, now I have a paranoid feeling that I’ll get distracted by some furry creature and drop Chris’s sofa on my foot. The worst thing is that that furry creature is probably less likely to be a squirrel and more likely to be Chris’s dog Toby, who’s renowned for Raping People!.

It’s not that I don’t like Toby, cos I do - but if he tries to hump me one more time or urinate all over my foot again, then I’m going to drop the sofa on him instead.

Now where did I put that Shloer?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 12:40 am and is filed under General, Shloer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.