Where Everybody's Crazy

Well, it's all over now. Not all all over, but I've finished all my work for this term, after spending a couple of weeks slaving over a Christology essay. It doesn't feel like it went very well, but I got the word "post-national" into it, so that ought to give it a fair few marks.

And it was the last worship session and sermon from our principal, Joe Kapolyo. We are all shocked and surprised at the beginning of the term to find that he would be leaving the post, and some of us still find it difficult to come to terms with the politics and the reasons why he had to go. But this morning was not a time for politics; it was a time to listen to what he had to say to us in his last sermon, and to wish him all the best in whatever he ends up doing next.

We're going to miss you, Joe.

Congratulations to pemb0491 on his first book, on using subversion. Both the Pembroke compsci Mikes have been doing funky things with the Pragmatic Programmers since leaving college and it's good to see one of them getting a bit of publicity for it.

The atmosphere in college tonight is electric. Everyone is on a serious high. We did it.

Today's been the college open day, and we've seriously worked our collective butts off for it. All week we've been cleaning and tidying and weeding and preparing to get the college looking as good as it possibly can, and all day we've been working to show people around, answer questions, put on exhibitions, and generally show off what we're about here.

It's not just the day that people come to see if they want to study here, it's not only our major fundraising day, it's not just the day when friends and supporters and former students can get together to see what we do - it's a matter of our pride in our college, and we've got it in spades. So it went very well; everything we put all that effort into went off excellently.

Only thing that didn't work out was the weather, and we can't do much about that. At least, not until we've done the PhD course.

I was putting on the tours. Now this is something I get pretty emotional about, but of course once I'm up and talking I'm only thinking about what I'm saying. It was only afterwards that it all hit me. The story of the Buxton family, the history of the various colleges that make up present-day ANCC, Hudson Taylor - the college rests on a long tradition of great Christian witness and humanitarian and egalitarian work. A hundred years ago, Ellen Buxton wrote to her grandson to explain why the family moved here, and she said she believed the estate would always be inhabited by Christians, and used to be a blessing to the world. That was a hundred years ago, and she was right. I love it.

I love talking about the Xenos stuff we do by and for missionary children; it reflects the one thing I love about this college, which if I were to sum it up in two words would be "thoughtful care".

So I was an excited and enthusiastic tour guide, which infected my team and, I hope, some of the people I took around. I've certainly heard good reports back about it.

Joe, our principal, is very much the father of the college family. After the whole college had been put back to normality in the two hours between the close of open day and our mealtime, he announced at dinner that we had made him proud of us. That's when the emotion started.

This evening we're tired as well as emotional. We've been chilling out with a video, and we have the weekend and Monday off to recover. We need it. It's been really, really hard work. But ultimately, very worth it.

Now I know I've said this before, but I shall say it again - today I finished writing Advanced Perl Programming 2nd Edition. I've had an afternoon of feeling vaguely goal-less, until my to-do list caught up with me again.

I still have a sermon to write in Japanese by two weeks time, but I'm putting that off until I get back to college where my books are. I've got to finish off Songbee, but that needs a load of libraries which I'll need to download, so I'm putting that off until I get to a better network connection. (Tuesday) I have some Christian writing to do; I'm working on an essay about evolution, but obviously I have to play that one pretty carefully, and I'm thinking hard about writing a Christian book, I'm about a chapter through that.

I want to work on Mitiki, the Maypole Wiki, so that it supports the sort of things that we need to run it as an intranet in college. I'm also working on some kind of idea exchange project that I've been discussing with Joshua Schachter. Then I can start working through the stuff in my little ideas file. Oh, and I'm trying to organize taking a team to Sri Lanka, but I don't know how likely that's going to be.

So in all, it's business as usual.