VOAA Ep 14: Welcome Back

The speaker apologizes for the background noise in previous episodes and explains that they are working to fix the issue. They discuss their plans to release three episodes in one week to catch up on missed episodes. The speaker expresses their excitement to go back to church and mentions a new song by their pastor that they want to dance to. They talk about their busy schedule and the need to offload some tasks. They mention wanting to get a new microphone and discuss the stress of planning a friend's wedding. They also mention house hunting and express concerns about the quality of houses being built in Nigeria. Hi, welcome back to Voice of an Angel. I miss speaking with you. I know it's been a while and I miss talking to you. It's been two weeks since my last conversation, yeah? How have you been? How's your Easter break? How's your Ramadan break? Those were really long holidays and I think that's something that made me lazy and I didn't come back to record. Anyways, so I got this feedback and I also observed that there's been some funny, tacky background sound on every episode and I promise you that's not intentional. I am working on it. I don't know if it's from my microphone or my set, I don't know. I really don't know where it's from. From investigating and I promise you I didn't hear all of these when I was doing the testing phase of before releasing this, the first episode. I didn't hear them. So I don't know, it's either during recording or maybe during exporting to the other platform. I really don't know where it's from. But it's been two weeks since I spoke to you and I'm excited to get back at it. Wow, this week is going to make it three weeks so I may get to put something out. The goal is 52 episodes for each week of the year, so we're down by two. So there's going to be a back-to-back release of three episodes in this week, such that from first week of May, we will get back to routine. So usually the episodes come out on Sunday, however, to cover up all lapses and gaps, I'm going to have to release two episodes during the week and then by Sunday we will go back to normal routine. I have a lot to talk to you about. God, a lot has happened. I'm going to collect my thoughts together so that I can put word out life of a broken mum. Sheesh, who would have said adulthood would be so easy? This is probably a random banter, but I need to clear my head. I need to clear my mind. It's foggy up here, like all over my mind is foggy. My mind runs at one terabyte per second because I'm always thinking about something, even in my sleep. Over the last two weeks, I haven't been to church, the school church, and I miss it. You know, there's something about habits. When I wasn't going to church, it didn't feel like I was missing on anything. I felt like, oh, just worshipping from home and just being, going to church, just streaming like It's usually the same thing, right? Well, I try to go where the pastor is at, at the headquarters, which is what I prefer. But the last two weeks that I haven't been going, it's been feeling like I'm missing out on a lot. And I do not particularly like that. I'm sorry, I do not particularly like that. So I'm going back to church. I'm excited to go back to church this Sunday. One, because I miss being in the presence of my father or in the way that it could be at church, you know, the ambience and all. And also because my pastor released a new song and it's going to be played in church this Sunday. And I just want to dance there because it's been on my wake up dance list. So I'm recommending to you, because the song is such a joyful sound, Agalio by Pastor Emmanuel Irene. Oh, I said that again. Agalio by Apostle Emmanuel Irene and Pastor Nathaniel Bassi. That song is life. It's joy. Everything is coming out of sadness. Last week, or earlier this week rather. It's 5.02am on a Saturday morning. Saturday morning is April 20th. Oh, I have this wedding to attend. I'm not going. I'm not going. Gosh, Nigeria will test you. You think you're patient? Nigeria will test you. If you think you're a patient, come and meet me close to a mosque. That's what the hell is this song you're waking up very early in the morning to do. Between 5am and 6am, you've screamed like three times already. 5am, 5.30, 5.40. Come on now. Damn. And it's not melodic. It's just there. Routine. Don't have mercy on myself. Anyways, like I said, I do have a lot to tell you about. Now that I'm talking to my mic, it's like everywhere. Before now, I had my thoughts articulated. But then again, I'm writing down topics I want to talk to you about. I think I'm trying to pass time because I'm about to go for my Saturday morning walk. I joined PPC prayers yesterday, prophetic power contact with Apostle Feminazios. And he's talking about health. He talked about physical and spiritual health, but he put trust more on physical health, where he says, in fact, he challenged us to go for a walk. Well, I try to work out the health and I find that recently I've been living a sedentary lifestyle where I just sit in the same spot, move about. All my shoulders are tense from sitting and typing on my PC. But I think I've overcommitted myself. There's so many things I want to do and I feel like time is going. So I'm trying to like cramp them all up. But it's probably not working. I'm trying to offload. I'm going to have to. I'm going to offload. I'm going to have to. I'm going to offload. And I will. I will. Yeah, so I'm going for my Saturday morning walk. I can't wait to walk with Apostle Feminazios. He says we should post it on Twitter. I probably won't. I know. I'm going to do an evidence simply because I send it to my coach anyways. So, um. Maybe I should just get started on one of the topics I want to talk about. I'm really hoping this will be very short. Assuming I have, I have done that now for like three times already. It's just this is my outlet and I really want to let out. I really want to talk about a lot of things and everything at the same time. But I need it to make sense and I don't just want to mumble and jumble and give you a list of things that I probably don't want to come back to listen to. So yeah, there's that. I'm looking to get a new, a new microphone. I want like a plug and play setting. Initially I wanted the whole thing with the sound card and all. But right now I think I just want a plug and play because the whole setup is pretty stressful. Maybe when I move to my studio setting or when I move to my workspace where I can just have my mic installed and rest like that. I don't have to like pack it up or pack it back. Then that would be more comfortable. But now I have to do the whole, the whole nine yards, the whole, maybe 10 yards set. Oh yay, my friend's getting married. Yes, my friend's getting married and hey, I'm the chief planner for that wedding. And gosh, who knew the planning of a wedding could be this stressful. When I'm married, I just stay traditional. And something I did like in a month, um, you know, I was a niggas. I contacted my uncle through my dad, sent me my wedding list over email. Thank you for technology, right? My husband looked at it. Uh, when I got into the wedding, when I got into town for my wedding in Calabar, I entered on Monday, I entered on Sunday. I don't know, it was for Saturday that week. So it was that whole week. I went to buy things for my wedding list, things for the wedding. I even had my cousin say, well, I should have sent money. Oh man, honestly, I didn't know. And he has that cash and I just needed to be there to see that. So what I've sent him money for, if I did at all, was being sorted. It's just how I am. It's my, it's my thing, right? I don't trust people enough to do things to be out to them, especially before myself, especially when I'm entertaining external guests. My wedding wasn't really big. It was my dream wedding, but I've never really wanted a big wedding. It was small and fancy. It was, it was a budget wedding and it was cool. Now my friend's getting married and most of our focus is on the wedding, which is something that takes a lot of time. We knew that you had to use almost six months to plan a one day event. Sheesh, I don't think wedding is for all of us. The marriage is for both of them. I'm really encouraging her to not splurge. I think your wedding is supposed to be one of your lifetime events. So go all out if you can, but you're a young couple. You're looking to get an apartment. They're moving cities. They're considering to get an apartment in the new city. They're going to need to furnish the apartment. It costs a lot and the economy is not exactly being very friendly towards people in terms of housing. I'm even house hunting at the moment. The search is not that easy and I'm not full blown searching because, well, we still have time here, but I don't want to waste the last minute before I do things. I've started looking around, just surveying the market, seeing what it's like to get a three bedroom apartment in today's market. Everybody seems to be selling their houses and the new person comes, they want to do a lot of renovation. They don't want to maintain the old structure and all of these old houses were built when cement wasn't as expensive as now. You can trust the durability. Cement and sand and whatever mixed in the appropriate proportion. I feel like now because cement is so expensive, people are going to want to shortcut around it. The new houses being built today collapse easily because they're not so structured. Did you know that Nigeria is not the kind of place where you can exactly go check out structures? When the people in charge of infrastructure, the board, the authority, they're probably not doing the right thing. What they do is, when they see that you're building or renovating, they'll come up with that red X, oh, stop work and put a date, and then you're supposed to go meet them, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Housing or something, and you're supposed to go meet them to sort it out, and sort it out here means paying money. Are they really checking out the things that they should in terms of the house? What are you building? Is it conducive where it is? Otherwise, you shouldn't be having so many churches in residential areas. You shouldn't be having more than two worship centers, possibly one church and one mosque in an entire street, but you will find one narrow street that goes from house 1 to house 50. There are four churches, five churches, and then there's one mosque two or three streets away whose sound or noise will get to you early in the morning, so the mosque literally acts as an alarm for 5 a.m. That was the only thing I missed about the downtime with light when the national grid fells. Every time national grid falls, and we don't have to have lights for up to 24 hours, that's the only thing I miss, because there's the 5 a.m. shouting, there's the 5.30, there's the 5.40, if you're not careful, sometimes you get the 6 a.m., and it's like you get it every hour, and as hot as the sun is at 2 p.m., you're getting a sound from the mosque again, and that can be really, really tiring, really, really stressful, because the weather is hot already, and then there's no light. I'm sorry if you take that as light, and you know how hot it is these days? Even in the inside of your house, the heat is coming in. The fan is on, but the fan is blowing heat, and because of electricity tariff, we can't be running air conditioners like that. Just a lot of pollution in Nigeria today, and I really wish there was so much we could do to tidy it up, if we're not talking about, there's a lot of focus on carbon monoxide being released into the air, but we're not paying attention to noise pollution around us. An average Nigerian compound now, you can see here a lot of generator sounds. There's a lot of ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding Nigeria, I look forward to the future where everybody takes renewable energy very personal, that you decide not to buy generators, I mean, China should ship somewhere else, Japan should ship somewhere else, enough of all of this pollution, we can buy small portable inverter systems, I so want portable inverter systems that make use of fuel, so I think instead of using the battery to run at downtime or times where the sun is down, you can use fuel to run it like a generator but noiseless, okay, so I don't have to go all dragon and go, oh, oh my god, oh, I'm sorry, I've done that like seven times already, okay, it's 5 minutes to 6am and I'll be going for my morning walk like I said earlier, not just because AFL said so but also because I'm trying to get back to my workout routine and I won't take walks because the whole week I've been sitting at home in response to my dining table, working, typing out on my laptop, working, studying, taking classes, doing assignments, something's gonna lack and I don't know when my job's gonna lack, so, oh, by the way, I got a promotion at work, a vertical, no, not vertical, a horizontal promotion, it's a change of role, it's a new challenge, okay, kind of an addendum to my existing J.D. but it's me literally doing the job of two persons, my boss, my line manager, who is Portuguese by the way, he told us that he was leaving and that hit me really hard because it felt like I had the news all over me, the news of the passing of someone and I cried and I told him that all I do at work is because I know that he's there and now that he's leaving, it just feels like it took away my lifeguard and my coach and then he drops me into the water to swim, ah, by the way, I've learned how to swim for the last two weeks when I was at my in-laws for the Easter and Ramadan break, so I've learned how to swim, I learned but I'm gonna need a lot more practice, practice to get my hands right but I do know that I'm comfortable in the water now, not enough to go on the big water, I'll just like swim full size, you know, that kind and I still haven't swum towards the six feet part, so don't get me wrong, but it's a mind thing, so back to my boss that's leaving, it really hurts me and I don't know, I think I'm dodging it, I'm just getting hung up to why he's there because he's been a good person, he's been an inspiration to me, he'll always tell me how I'm a leader, how I can be better, he just makes me want to be a better person, you know, he's so patient, he never, he never, he never outdoes you, he never comes to outshine you, if you do something, he credits you for the work that you do, he trusts me so much and he and I work very good together because most of the tasks I work on are his but I do like the preliminary parts because he's the management staff level, so I do the preliminary parts, I pass it over to him, he reviews the job and he trusts that if he tasks me with a thing, he knows what I'm going to deliver, but now he has to go, the safety company thing, I don't fully understand it, but I hope that he and I get to work together again someday and I feel really proud for him because I really, really miss him and I'm glad that I have this new challenge to take up, to take up such that I get my mind busy, yeah, and yes, a few other gigs here and there that I'm hoping to get, plus I'm trying to get my tribe started on new stuff, new challenges, it's a lot really, it's a lot, but I'm not one to leave my mind idle because an idle mind is the devil's workshop and that's not even a saying, that's not even an idiom, that's a real thing, because when there's nothing occupying your mind, the devil comes in and he comes in with his legions, anyways, I've spoken for longer than I thought I would on this particular episode, this is going to go out on Sunday and within the week, before next Sunday, we're going to have two more roll outs such that we make up for lost time, I have a lot to talk to you about again and I'm excited to share, so yeah, I have to go for my morning run, oops, it's 6am already, I have to go for my morning run, I'll talk to you again soon, I mean, you know that road ride, I told you that already, this is First of an Angel and I'm signing out, have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful weekend, peace, cheers.