Vibing a vibe, vibeously [or how the english language bends to my will]

i like the english language. i like it to do my bidding!

and so for years now i have played around with it, removing most capital letters [except for words associated with God like Love, Grace and Justice when i mean them in a God-related way way], changing nouns into verbs [see “vibe” and “vibing”] and other parts of speech, spelling words in my own unique, often phonetical way [thort for the week] or sometimes just adding in letters that don’t make a lot of sense just because they feel like they make sense in my mind [thankx] and more.

turns out i’m not the only one:

we like me some Calvin and Hobbes…

i also very much like the three dots, and i know they have an official name, but i don’t like that so much [but please do remind me what it is again] so i will stick with ‘the three little dots’ thank you very much… i end way too many sentences with them.

but not that one…

it’s a life to the full thing i think. you do only live less than twice so you might as well have fun with it. is it silly? absolutely. but it’s my quirk [well one of them]. some people wear make-up. i don’t generally wear make up so think of this as the make-up of my speech or at least my written speech. the three dots are my mascara.

what about you? any words you deliberately change or misspell? any conventions you like to cut corners on? do you too like ending sentences a preposition with? cos rumours are you can’t!

however, i am still a bit of a ‘there’ ‘they’re’ ‘their’ stickler so please keep those in Hors d’oeuvre!

that is all…

the games we play: part intro

my family and friends have always played a lot of games [except for my dad, he hates games with a passion, his favourite is sitting in the lounge reading his newspaper while the rest of the family plays trivial pursuit and shouting out all the answers, but that’s about the closest he gets]

but my mom and my sisters love games, and the large majority of friends in my and now our friend ship circles are games players to a certain extent – it is a great way to relax and vibe and hopefully chill together around a table with a bunch of mates…

growing up there was monopoly [only to be pulled out at sleepovers really cos tended to be an all nighter] and risk [which i played a crazy amount – we adapted a two player game and my friend ferdi and i played best of ten matches with one or two games almost daily at one point] and cluedo [‘clue’ to the americanese] and scrabble which were all good and fine and well and all…

but then we discovered Rage which is a special card deck game for up to ten players where you bid on how many tricks you are going to get and then try and get them… and life changed forever [especially at our church student house called ‘Highbury’ where we would play through the night on occasion, because after all, what is the difference between 1.15am and 1.45am?]

and then a good mate of mine introduced me to Settlers of Catan [or more accurately, the german version, called ‘Die Siedler von Catan’] and i had to trust his translations of all the german cards and wonder why he kept beating me, but then later we discovered the english version and it became a firm favourite.

what made it better was the expansion pack known as ‘cities and knights’ which added a whole lot of new dimensions to an already great game and the record for playing that stands at something crazy like seven and a half hours [largely due to one of the players – you know who you are deane – playing reeeeeeally slowly] and once we’d played that we rarely went back [except to introduce someone new to ‘settlers’]

after that came ‘carcassonne’ which i call ‘kucky sahn’ and which my friend coe [who hates it] calls ‘shaka khan’ which was a settlerish type game [in that the game board is not constant but created differently each game which is a huge part of the attraction] but one that took 45 minutes to an hour as opposed to 2 to 3 hours…

all that to say there are a LOT of games out there and a bunch of them are REALLY a lot of good fun – we have discovered a small bunch more and i will give some reviews of the newer ones we play so that if any of you are looking for a new game to try, you might find something here… and i would love to hear what your favourite games to play with a group of friends are…

the latest we have been playing, or are just about to, include Seven Wonders, Jambo, Flash Point [played for the first time last night] and Forbidden Island [yet to play, still in packaging] – reviews to follow…

for The Settlers of Catan click here

it’s a vybe

so those of you who know me know that i use the word ‘vibe’ a lot

noun: look at that vibe

verb: let’s vibe tonite

adjective : the service was vibing last nite

adverb: we played hockey vibedly

pronoun: the sandwich is vibe the table… okay, well not yet, but any day now…

i dig the word – it’s a vibe

anyways it is also the name of our junior youth group (grade 4 to 7) at the vineyard church in stellenbosch – we started near the beginning of the year with about 6 kids and run it every two weeks from 5-6.30 and last nite we had 14 kids and did a mini olympics (toothpick javelin, paper plate discus, straw tossing the caber – i know i know not an olympic event….yet! and so on) and it was out best nite yet – complete vibe

Vybe obviously standing for Vineyard Youth and then BE as in ‘be there’

anyways vibe moment of the evening was a game of balance the polystyrene cup on the other polystyrene cup (imagine the steroid usage for that one if it ever takes off) where three reps from two teams had to one at a time spin round ten times with a broom on their chin facing upwards (to get dizzy) and then run to the back chair get a cup, run to the middle chair, get a cup and run to the close chair and balance the one upside down on the other one and then pass on to the next person

all went well until little rachel spun round her ten times and then ran and instantly ran a 45 degree left line right into emma coming back to place her cups on the chair and took her and the chair out in one seemingly-choreographed motion – it was incredible and just a pty that we don’t have that on film – priceless

and a complete vibous vibe of vibanity!