I went for an afternoon walk the other day. I had noticed before that Camperdown park is just beautiful at sunset and that the shafting golden light was also catching the graveyard next door. So I ran off down the street at sunset, camera in hand.



There's a cool old house:



Amazing trees (I think this one is a Moreton Bay Fig?)





And some very gothic spiky bushes which were crusted in spider's webs. I took lots of photos trying to show the way they were catching the light, but it doesn't really show up well. They were doubly gothic too, because as I walked away I felt something wet on my shin and looked down to see blood smeared across my shin!



The bamboo grove was small, but cool:







And lastly, as the sun really was going down, I took a few more shots of those bushes:

Bartlett For Tasmania

I haven't heard much Tassie news lately, so when I heard that Bartlett was being sworn in as the new Premier all I could think of was the West Wing :)

Here's the message I submitted (via GetUp!) to the new Premier:

Dear Premier,

I'm glad to see change in Tasmania and I wish you all the best. I trust that you will do the best by Tasmanians and look after those who need it most.

Will I vote for you next time? Not unless you also establish a proven track record of looking after the Tasmanian people's greatest asset - the environment.

I'm a 26 year old conservative Christian yet I find myself voting Green - not because I want them to win, but because I want to send a message: look after us now, but look after our future too!

I'd like to vote for you next time. Please consider the message.

Many Deliciousness

Yesterday we had a day off. We had a nice morning, went to a cafe and wrote letters and read. We had our yummy pumpkin and lentil salad for lunch, and then I decided to do some baking. I baked Nigella's Choc Chip Muffins. Here's Nigella on baking btw - taken from the blurb of How to be a Domestic Goddess

The trouble with much modern cooking is not that the food it produces isn’t good, but that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure. Sometimes that's the best we can manage, but at other times we don’t want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.

I'm not sure if there were nutmeggy fumes, but these were pretty
good and unlike most muffins, they were actually better the second day. Not that there were many left today, because we had Aidan and Soph over to help us eat them, and then um, I ate one for breakfast!

It was lovely to hang out with the New Zealanders. Those guys are so encouraging. They stayed for the afternoon and then I made pizza for dinner and Nick and I watched Boston Legal.

The good doctor

I just read this the other day. It's from a sermon by Lloyd-Jones at a conference on evangelism. There's something about the way he puts things in general that I find refreshing.

1. The supreme object of the work is to glorify God...The first object of preaching the Gospel is not to save souls...Nothing else, however good in itself, or however noble, must be allowed to usurp that first place.
2. The only power that can really do this work is that of the Holy Spirit...
3. The one and only medium through which the Holy Spirit works is the Word of God...The medium which is used by the Holy Spirit is the truth.
4. The true urge to evangelization must come from apprehending these principles and, therefore, of a zeal for the honour and glory of God, and a love for the souls of men.
5. There is a constant danger of error, and of heresy, even amongst the most sincere, and also the danger of a false zeal and the employment of unscriptural methods.

I'm a slow learner

For every hard thing we've had to face God has given three, four, five, or more things to be thankful for. And I know that in all the hard stuff he's teaching me and that is more valuable to me than anything.

This afternoon I was talking to my minister about how difficult prayer can be at college with all the time pressures. He told me about how when he was studying someone asked Broughton Knox about that. Knox replied that the workload was intentional, college was a chance to learn to prioritise all the different things demanding attention. All of a sudden the lights went on, success at college was redefined for me. If I grow as a Christian and love and revere God increasingly, that will be a successful end to our time here.

So this was going round in my head all afternoon and when I came home this evening. It was great to talk through it with Bron. I would have been extremely happy if the evening had ended there, a very good day. But it got better. I picked up Spurgeon's Lectures to My Students which I hadn't touched for a while and read the lecture on Private Prayer. I really can't describe how helpful it was to me. Perhaps an indication of it is that after a long day and two hours in bed trying to get to sleep I'm still awake (I'm normally gone in less than 10 minutes). I keep thinking and thinking. I'm excited about everything. I see God's goodness in everything.

Goodnight.

Adventures in Cheese

We've had our camera for over a year now but I've never got around to trying out it's video function. I think I need to use the 'compact' setting next time though! Here's a short clip from a week or so ago when Nick made Welsh Rarebit.

An update

It's funny, before we started this blog I wondered how it would go with both of us posting (well, actually... I worried that it would be all me posting because I was the only one who had kept up a blog before) But so far I think it has worked pretty well. I seem to provide the updates and observations and Nick tends towards comments and reflections. So you get a bit of everything.

Well, anyway, here's a brief update. Work is going well. The uncertainty about the future has not been resolved, but I know that management are working on several solutions and alternatives (yes, I'm deliberately being hazy because like, hello, this is the internets). One of the two other companies who do what we do has already folded so it is pretty serious.

But I've been assured (although not officially yet) that the global company who we are a part of is very good at looking after its employees and that even if my job becomes redundant (which, personally, I expect it will within a week or so if they don't manage to find some sort of solution) they'd probably be able to shift me around to somewhere else until they are back up and running or are able to launch something else. So I'm glad about that. Also, it has been very nice with business being substantially quieter this week! I'm much less stressed that I was before.

I'll let Nick fill you in on College. I'm very proud of him and he's doing very well, but I think it's quite a struggle at the moment. Certainly the sheer volume of work is overwhelming! He's also preaching on Sunday for the first time at our new Church (always a bit nerve wracking!). It's a bit of a hard topic as it's on a person not a Bible passage (John Calvin) and he's very keen to make sure that it's a sermon not a biographical lecture (actually, I think his words were "Calvin would punch me in the face if I preached on Calvin")

Like any busy lifestyle, it's very hard to "switch off". We had a good talk about it tonight, and I think we'll both be trying to use the evenings more for winding down and just enjoying resting together rather than just spending the evening in front of a dvd or playing computer games or blogging.

Nick's been reading The Eyre Affair out loud to me. It's pretty good, but kinda weird. It's like The Office meets Magic Realism with a dash of faded Austin Powers. Interesting enough when you're on a roll... but still pretty weird. I think Nick likes it more than I do. It has made me want to read more of the literary classics though. Actually, if you're still reading... here's a question for you: where do you begin with Dickens? I kind of wrote him off in my early teens, but I'm thinking that maybe I might try again. Any suggestions?

Scandal!

What were they thinking?

I remember my first Pale, it was during my first O-week at uni. I think I may have been given 6 of them for signing up to the rowing society or maybe the gourmet travelers society. I drank one while in the line for a free hamburger.

I love the fact that this is news.

Buying a heater

At this time of year I see heaters for sale in the shops and I always hope that people won't get sucked in and buy something expensive just because they don't know anything about heaters. Here are 3 things you need to know when buying a plug-in electric heater.

1. Expensive heaters never equal more heat. Electric heaters are all 100% efficient (that is, they all put out as much heat as the watts of power says on the box). A $20 heater will keep you as warm as a $200 heater.

2. No heater is cheaper to run than any other. It's true, they all use electricity. The maximum amount of power you can get from a plug is 2400 watts. Any plug-in heater will be 2400 watts or less. If it has less watts, you'll just end up using it for more time and seeing as your power is charged by kilowatt hours (that is, the number of watts running over a period of time) it'll still cost the same. The way to save money when using electric heaters is to make sure you've got the best type of heater for you (and your house)


3. Know what kind of heat you like. There are two types of people: those who will never be warm unless they're huddling in front of a fire and those who never feel warm unless they can waltz around in a t-shirt. It's helpful to know whether you're someone who likes to sit in front of a heater, or someone who wants the air to be warm because there are 3 basic types of heaters* and each will cater better towards different people's needs.

• Radiant heaters - you know, the ones which have little radiant bars (or panels) which glow red. These directly heat the objects in front of them, NOT the air. They're good for 3 reasons: a) if you like to huddle in front of a heat source. b) if you'll never heat the room properly (eg, its high ceilinged, draughty or not insulated) and c) if you like fresh air and want to keep a window open (or are outdoors!)

• Fan heaters - glorified hairdryer. They pump out hot air. They're good for small spaces, they take the chill off a room quickly. They're cheap (to buy) and you can sit in front of it if you're a huddler. Just don't leave the window open or you're wasting your money. A fan heater is what I'd buy most of the time.

• Convection heaters - there are a few types: panel heaters, oil column heaters etc. Basically, heat just wafts out of them into the air. They're useless if you like huddling, but they are what you want if you're a t-shirt person and you don't like fan heaters. They make a room feel evenly warm. They have a reputation for being expensive to run but I think this is generally because the wrong people use them. I had some friends who had an oil column heater, but they were fresh air people, so they'd also have the window open. So the oil column heater was on all the time but never making the room warm = expensive power bill. I told them to buy a radiant heater and they've never looked back! Also, if you're a huddler, and you sit on the floor in front of an oil column heater trying to get warm I can guarantee that you'll be the last thing in the room to feel warm (at least stand up - don't you know heat rises!). Buy a convection heater if you're financially well enough off to want your house to feel effortlessly warm or if you've got a baby and you want to take the chill off their room by leaving it on very low all night.

*Some heaters are a combination of one of these 3. Same principles apply.

Three not very related things

One thing I learned today is that there is apparently no general 'you' in Greek. You'd never write a sentence starting like this in Greek, where the 'you' is 'people in general' rather than a specific group. I don't think it's totally accepted by all the gurus but even so it's going to be helpful to know that as I approach the Bible because I think I've always assumed a general 'you' before this.

I've been finding it hard to focus lately. I think the problem is that when a task is obviously too big I give up. And the task of 2nd year is too big. There's no way anyone can get through it all, there just isn't enough time. That's intentional on the college's part and I can understand that they want to push people, challenge them and just chuck lots of stuff out there knowing that we'll have the rest of our lives to sort through it. Still. It doesn't work for me very well. It just discourages me. So I'm drifting a bit and my work is getting mediocre, or more so anyway. I've been dealing with it so far by keeping my head down and just doing the next thing but that's been hard lately and I don't know why.

Bron and I watched the first disc of French Leave yesterday. It's a 'reality' show about a British chef who takes his family of 8 to live in France for a year and for him to de-stress and remember why he likes cooking. It's pretty awesome, there's some amazing food. It's very much a warts-and-all sort of show. It comes across pretty strongly that he doesn't know how to relate to his kids and that his wife doesn't really respect him which provides quite a bit of drama. Even so, there are certainly some nice moments for the family. Also, the first episode has Gordon Ramsay talking for about a minute and he doesn't even swear once.

I've been given the day off. And tomorrow if I want it (heck yes!). It sounds like a really bad sign for the company, but it's more likely my supervisor realises that it could be a case of now or never for me taking the extra hours I've built up in-lieu and if there's any uncertainty, I may as well take them now.

Well, it's a lovely day. I know the future is in God's hands and there's no point in worrying about it (too much!) so I'm off to a friend's place to make playdough.

Everyone's talking about the Budget

Well, at work they are. Some tax law changes were announced that directly impact on our business. The company is kind of reeling at the moment, and there's quite a bit of uncertainty... so that made for a weird day at work.

Trying to make Work work

I was looking for tips on using Outlook (I know, there are heaps of productivity apps out there, but I'm going to at least try to use the tools we have on hand first before I introduce anything new) and anyway, I stumbled across this gem of a sentence (fiona, this one's for you!)

To conduct an electronic calendar is conveniently and especially actually in our century when all simply does not find room in a head, and electronic assistants so it is a lot of, that there are problems with synchronization of entered affairs.

It's just such beautiful engrish! I especially love the alliteration.

So back to the topic:

When my boss asks "do you know what happened with X last month, such and such hasn't been done properly?" I want a better answer than "....umm...."

What I want is a comprehensive way to track everything I do (and I do a heck of a lot of little things in a very busy environment with several channels 'in'). Unfortunately our systems are very manual and complicated and there is no single repository of information on clients (or a comments field in the main database which is what I'm used to). So I basically need to keep track of things myself.

It needs to interact with Outlook because a large volume of what I do is via email and it needs to be a basic inbox/scribble pad for me so that every time the phone rings it's what I open up. I need to be able to easily track what I've done every time something comes at me. It needs to be so easy that I use it for everything, even really quick phonecalls or small email tasks, and I don't want to have to double up all the time (doing something then recording what I did).

I'm not sure if the task manager in Outlook is up to this... but if anyone has any suggestions for maximising it's potential, please let me know. (I've already got an outlook keyboard shortcuts list from the GTD site).

In magical fairy land I would like:

• Something that looks like a notepad but can turn into a task or a new email (or easily launch those)
• Never gets buried on my windows taskbar (or can be retrieved with an easy shortcut)
• To be able to electronically 'pin' my notepad pages to emails and tasks and vice versa
• To be all separate (like individual sticky notes) but easily attachable (to each other) and searchable
• To never get lost! (autosave?)

Gardening

I'm enjoying our 'garden'. It's a pity it's too small to really be able to be 'in the garden' (well, not without doing some serious damage!) but I can at least look upon it.

I have a question though: When do I need to thin these carrots? The pot is only 10-15cm deep, so in a sense they'll all have to be baby carrots... but I think I might need to start plucking some soon ish... here's how tall they are:

Tassies!

Had a great time last night with some of the 'tassies' coming round to have dinner and pray together. I don't know why Nick is growing fruit out of his shoulder, but the Tart au Citron that Soph is about to carve up was fantastic!

It was lovely to see Mel again, and to catch up with Soph and Fiona. And we were stoked that Bernie and Katie and Noah could come too. It was a pity, but Noah needed bedtime more than he needed dessert, so Katie and Noah had to leave before this photo was taken.

Praying together and reminiscing about Tassie was great, and it was lovely that we could do that together as a family - Noah included :)

Gems

This year I'd said that I was going to try and read the parts of Calvin's Institutes that Nick read over summer. So far I'd kind of stalled. I began with the introduction (my first mistake!) and had gotten bogged down.

Last Thursday I had another go at it and this time I think I'll probably be able to keep it up. How could I not when I come across such gems as this? I wrote it all out by hand so I'd be able to post it here (Calvin lives in the study room at college)

(Just read the last sentences if you don't have time, it's what really struck me) In the original it's all one paragraph, but I've broken it up newspaper style one sentence to a par so it's easier on the eyes!

Moreover, although our mind cannot apprehend God without rendering some honour to him, it will not suffice simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honour and adore, unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good, and that we must seek nothing elsewhere than in him.

This I take to mean that not only does he sustain the universe (as he once founded it) by his boundless might, regulate it by his wisdom, preserve it by his goodness, and especially rule mankind by his righteousness and judgment, bear with it in his mercy, watch over it by his protection; but also that no drop will be found either of wisdom and light, or of righteousness or power or rectitude, or of genuine truth, which does not flow from him, and of which he is not the cause.

Thus we may learn to await and seek all these things from him, and thankfully to ascribe them, once received, to him.

For this sense of the powers of God is for us a fit teacher of piety, from which religion is born.

I call 'piety' that reverence joined wtih love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.

For until men recognise that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him - they will never yield him willing service.

Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him.

Homesick

I haven't posted for a while. Been struggling with homesickness, frustrated at all the busyness, hardness etc. I don't want to just whinge here, but I guess it would be good if you could pray for us. I was reminded today when Nick came home looking happy and a lot less tired than usual that God does answer our prayers!!

Last week Nikki came up to visit. It was wonderful and lovely and awesome to see her again and we hung out lots, but I also realised how homesick I've been lately. I just miss everyone. I'm frustrated with the toll that the busy Sydney/College lifestyle takes on both of us. I lost it a bit on Sunday night. We didn't end up going to Church because I was pretty worked up. Nick looked after me, got us dinner and helped me do a few things that had been nagging for ages. I think I just need to trust God in everything and to learn to deal with the fact that life is always busy, it's just a matter of choosing what to be busy with.

Work is getting better slowly because we now have a customer service manager (who is great) and another guy full time doing customer service. Through the whole experience I've come to change my opinion on management. Despite people's failings, having a boss is actually really good! If you have a busy workload and no direct manager, there's no one to take responsibility when you have more work than you can physically do. You end up feeling like you can never leave. So, not only is my new boss really lovely and a good manager, even the fact that she's there is good! I've accrued quite a bit of time in lieu too, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to book in some time off soon.

Growing

The garden is growing well. There are 3 long pots like this. This one has carrots, rainbow beets and a leek.

Stright from the breakfast table to you

Bacon and Egg Roll (toasted Turkish bread for us) with Hommus. Don't write it off. Go try it now!

The Northern Beaches

We had a really lovely long weekend on the Northern Beaches. A friend's parents very generously let us stay in their beachside apartment and another friend had lent us her car because she was flying home to Adelaide for the holidays.

We stayed in a place called Mona Vale, in an apartment complex that was a block back from the beach. This is the view from our balcony:

Although it's still just a suburban area, it was nice and quiet and there was a lot less concrete than where we live!

We also had awesome weather. After 13 consecutive rainy days some sunshine was just wonderful!

We went for a few nice drives. Our favourite place was Whale Beach, a bit further up the coast. Didn't get a proper picture of the beach, but this was the sea swimming pool which was built into the rocks at one end of the beach:


On the way between Palm Beach and Whale beach we stopped because there was this cool palm grove on the side of the road. It was public land and had a little track going all the way down the hill to the beach. I think it was more or less a storm water drain, but it was really pretty! Instead of a concrete drain they'd made it like a little creek with a waterfall and everything



It was so nice to have that little break. When you're at home it's hard to put life on 'pause' and just relax. We stacked up on books and dvds and I took my stash of wool and even learned how to crochet from one of the books I got out from the library. We also made yummy food. We took the Bill Grainger Holiday Food cookbook I was given (from the same friends) for my birthday last year and tried out a few awesome recipes!

We also had another Pablo Enterprises sighting at a cool cafe we went to on Sunday morning at Narabeen beach. It says "Pablo and Rusty's Premium Espresso" - I have to say Pabs, that although Nick said his was very good coffee, the Chai Latte I got was pretty ordinary. Must've been Rusty's work hey :)