Facebook and other ways to distance ourselves from people we're close to

So, I recently joined Facebook, mostly because all my friends are doing it. It's funny how, even after almost 30 years of life, the phrase "Everone else is doing it" still carries a lot of weight.

Anyway, I noticed upon joining that there are over 800,000 people in the "London" network. That's 10% of the population of the entire city on Facebook. Now I'll grant that some of those people probably don't live in London, but it's still an impressive number of people connecting in a virtual network that is centered around geographic proximity. Kind of strange, huh? I communicated today with a friend who lives above me (he appointed me 'Chief Spiritual Advisor' to the 55 group on Facebook). You can 'poke' people, give them gifts, everything.

Now I'll also admit that I have taken to e-mailing my wife at times, even when she's sitting right next to me. And I am known to wake up in the morning, grunt 'check your e-mail' and then roll over.

Harry Potter

Somer and I went to get the last installment of the Harry Potter series last night. The local Waterstones opened at 12:01 AM, and we arrived at 11:45 to find a line of about 200 people. By the time midnight rolled around, there were 400 people in line. We waited about an hour, and finally we were ushered into the store by a wand toting clerk. In the meantime, we had witnessed a fight between rival youth gangs, chatted with the people in line around us, kept a band that had just played a show in a local venue from cutting in line in front of us, and endured countless claims of "Harry Potter dies" from drunken young adults. Interesting night, but by the time we got home, only Somer had it in her to read the first chapter, I ended up waiting until the next morning to crack open the book.

Independence Day...revisited

Friday night we got together with two other American couples who are working with churches here in London. The pastor of the American Church in London hosted, and as he's already posted on his blog about the evening (more eloquently than I could), I'll send you over there to read about it: Psalm 68:6

Concert to end slavery

Last night, as part of our ongoing work to highlight the problems of slavery and human trafficking, we helped film some footage for Concert To End Slavery. Clicking on the link will take you to their site, where you can view the trailer. We organized a mock pub-crawl, simulating our experiences last month distributing the posters and beer mats.

Movie

Somer and I took the girls to a movie yesterday. A friend of ours had tickets to an advance screening, but it was a kids movie, so she asked if we wanted to go. The girls had a really good time and enjoyed the movie. They had face painting and balloon art in the lobby before the movie started.