What’s happening in my life
My girlfriend prepared a small surprise for me today. She’d made a cup of tea and bought a couple of pastries, but when I took a bite of mine, there was a ring in it.
For a moment I thought “whoah, is she proposing or what?” I don’t mind telling you, that for a few seconds there, I was spooked.
Then I remembered that today is… April 1st. Score one for Patricia.
Yep, this sunday (feb. 29) the “happy at work project” arranged a clown course for some people, and I’m now a certified, first grade clown.
The story is this: Back in november, Lise Egeberg who is a hospital clown, asked around for contributions to a trip she wanted to take to Jamaica to visit schools, hospitals and orphanages and clown for the children there. It’s not like we’re swimming in money, but we decided to give her 1000$, and in return she gave us this training, and it was a lot of fun.
Starting from a simple warm-up, she soon had everybody tripping over invisible wires, giving gifts in the clown manner and making fools of ourselves in many other ways. It was great!
One exercise that made a great impression on me was about personal space. Take two people one walks towards the other, and the person standing still says stop, when he feels his personal space being invaded. When we did this normally, my personal space was a little less than a meter. But with the clown nose on, I had no personal space. I was not only comfortable with people getting really close to me – I was enjoying it. That was a powerful demonstration of the barriers we build around ourselves every day, and how clowning around and being more childlike can tear the barriers down.
And today after the course, I feel more open, more spontaneous and more alive. There’s a great power in clowning. Here’s a picture of the graduates.
2003 has been a wonderful year for me. Here’s a list of some of the things that I’m really grateful for in 2003, in no particular order:
* The company of the wonderful and innovative people at Arena. Thomas, Ole, David, Valdemar, Peter, Tine, Guan, Niels and many more. We rock!
* Moving to an appartment on the 7th. floor. Great sunsets!
* Meeting Traci, Justin, Christine, Mike and the other wonderful people at the World Dynamics CEO round table.
* Seeing Seattle with Pam.
* Seeing the happy at work project take off like it has, and being able to make people happy.
(more…)
For those of you who read danish, I wrote this summary of the “Happy at work” project in 2003.
The short version in english: It’s been one hell of a year. In january it was just me and a few loose ideas, and none of the methods had been tested. Now, there are lots of interesting, skilled and dedicated people working on it, we’ve proven that our methods work, and there are lots of exciting projects coming out of it.
A HUGE thank you to everyone who participated. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do in 2004, I KNOW it will be wild.
Last saturday the Sats Aerobics show team had its christmas party at my place, and we decided to try something new: We bought a game at Murder Mystery Games. This is not a traditional board game, it’s more like impro theater.
Every guest gets a role and when they arrive for the party they discover that, gasp, a murder has been committed and, GASP, the killer is one of the guests present. The rest of the game (maybe a couple of hours) is spent trying to figure out who the killer is. Every player gets a list of hints that they have to pass on, and based on those you should be able to figure it out. The really fun bit is to stay in character and to improvise accordingly. We had a GREAT time, and people really went to town on the costumes!
The really cool bit is that even though the game is played live, all of the management is done online. You give the site the emails of your guests, and invitations and pregame info is sent out automatically. Everything you need to actually play the game can be downloaded and printed easily for each guest.
I spent 11 hours in middle earth yesterday. We started at 4:30 with the first Lord of the rings movie, a couple of sandwiches at 7 and the next movie at 8:30. Then at 3 minutes past midnight they showed the third movie. It was kinda funny to see a cinema-full of people turn out for three movies straight, and here you can see what popcorn for 500 people looks like.
Return of the king rocks, as do all the LOTR movies. I stand in awe of the whole project of creating these movies, and I’m so happy that they’ve managed to capture the majesty and spirit of the books. Go see it! Now: How do we get Peter Jackson to do “The hobbit”?
My wonderful girlfriend Patricia, who is now getting her feet wet as a blogger.
We had our second fantastic open space, open source cocktail party in october. It was a great evening and here are the pictures to prove it.
Want to do an open space cocktailparty yourself? Here’s how:
1: Invite a lot of nice people
2: Figure out what you’ll need to make lots of different cocktails – our list is here (in danish)
3: Let each guest decide what they want to bring
4: When guests arrive put everything in the kitchen
5: Let each guest decide what cocktail to make and when
6: Have a blast
We didn’t serve any food but we did arrange for plenty of chips and snacks. We had the party on the same day we moved in to the appartment, and while it worked great for us I’m not sure I’d recommend that particular solution to everyone.
Gee but it’s great to be back home
Home is where I want to be boy
I’ve been on the road for so long my friend
And if you came along I know you wouldn’t disagree
– Paul Simon, keep the customer satisfied
I’m now home after my trip to the states, and it’s been a wonderful trip. It’s been all about interesting conversations, wonderful people and exciting new thoughts – I live for this kind of thing.
And it’s equally great to be back home. I may even have tricked the jetlag in one day. I arrived sunday at 1PM, went home and unpacked (mentally and physically) and then Patricia and I went to the movies (Finding Nemo and and Matrix revolutions, they both rock) the evening to keep me awake until a suitable hour, following all of which I woke up refreshed and ready this morning.
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