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August 30th, 2008 22:25
Well the trip was awesome: it’ll have to wait for a proper post though. Got back Wednesday night, raced off to rehearsal (ddin’t want to miss it since we have a v. important gig a week from today).
Thursday morning took S & D to the airport then went to work. No running with the girls that night which was good since I busted up my feet pretty good from poorly-fitting fins and some aggressive beach soccer.
Friday had to race home from work early because we had to play a charity gig that evening.
This morning was church work day so we cleaned the church: then I spent the afternoon food shopping and cooking (there was nothing to eat!!!), then had to race off to a rehearsal, and then another gig, or rather concert, since this one was orchestra, not band. it was interesting, there were can-can dancers! Just got home. Man I’m tired.
Tomorrow is church, then all afternoon is another (band) rehearsal for the swing gig next weekend.
Here’s a teaser from the trip though. Me & Zaubi with a Maori Rass (a juvenile, at that!) named Priscilla.
August 23rd, 2008 22:57
Well, we’re off to the north (kind of) tomorrow. I’m frankly exhausted. Very stressful week. Maybe I’ll write about it sometime.
Hopefully a couple of days on a dive boat will prove relaxing… Tomorrow we’re flying to Airlie Beach to spend a night there, then Monday onto the boat! Bop around the Whitsundays for a couple days and nights (ooo sleeping inside a boat) and then racing back to Brisbane so S & D can catch their plane back to LA the next morning.
I’m excited to go diving again. It’s been 4 years after I got my certification, and I haven’t gone once! But I’m also psyched just to snorkel. In Hawaii I actually enjoyed snorkling off Molokini more than the diving we did, though that was fantastic as well. And being out in the sun in the fresh air instead of cooped up inside in front of a computer…
August 17th, 2008 20:56
Had a little incident at the Blood Van the other day. Went to give blood (it hangs out just down the road from work): everything was fine during the whole process, I wasn’t squeamish or anything, but just in the last minute or so that the needle was in, my arm started to hurt. A lot.
They took out the needle, but my arm kept hurting, and then I started feeling woozy. It wasn’t squeamish woozy, it was some other weird kind of woozy. Within just a few moments, my blood pressure dropped to 60/30 and I passed out. I remember seeing my arm flop off the side of the table: I couldn’t move it. They kept saying “YOU CAN’T GO TO SLEEP! STAY WITH US!” but it was no use.
I woke up after a while but it took a long time for my blood pressure to even make it up to 90. I had to stay with with an O2 mask on for about an hour. Finally staggered back to work and was completely useless for the rest of the day: I kept getting really faint and having to stop and put my head down on the desk. Driving home was a worry.
The Blood Van people thought the Blood Meisters would forbid me for coming back for at least a year, but it turns out I’m only banned for 6 months. Australia is kind of desperate for blood. But I’m feeling a bit paranoid now.
What was that? I mean, sometimes in times past I’ve been a bit squeamish about bleeding, but not like *that*. And the worst was over at that point anyway. I’ve had a lot of people stick needles in my over my lifetime, and I really never had an issue before.
August 14th, 2008 20:35
I’ve had enough of winter. I know, you people who live in actually cold places are sniggering behind your hands (she’s complaining about winter in a subtropical location! BWAHAHAHAHA) but it really does get cold here! It’s usually about 40 degrees overnight and there’s no heat.
Part of the problem is really that this house is plain out cold. It has no insulation, and just something about the way it’s built, the directions it gets sun from etc. means that it is cool in the summer (yay) and cold in the winter. Even if we heat one room (or smallest room has an aircon that doubles as a heater), as soon as we turn the heater off, the heat is gone. Poof.
So we’re going to struggle through it this year, but the next winter we spend here, we’re going to install a wood stove.
Living in eager anticipation of next week; S & D are coming and we’re going diving in the Whitsundays. It HAS to be warm there…
August 14th, 2008 20:20
For a while now I’ve been puzzled by something. A lot of times when I’m driving, stopped at a light, I notice the person in the car next to me is looking at me. Not a kind of just-happen-to-be-looking-that-way look, but an actual purposeful look. It always makes me nervous, I start feeling paranoid — are my lights on? my tyres not flat? Is something hanging out of my car?
But I think I may have figured it out. On the back of the car is a sticker. It says MY OTHER VEHICLE IS UNMANNED. Get it? As in, my husband works with autonomous robots bwahahaha. It’s making fun of the MY OTHER CAR IS A BOAT stickers that are annoyingly prevalent here. In a kind of dorky way. But I don’t think people get it. Once I was stopped at a light and the lady next to me actually rolled down her window and demanded to know what the sticker meant.
So I think that Australians, with their innate pseudo pervert sense of humor, assume it means my car is castrated. Or something of the sort.
August 6th, 2008 13:20
I never knew until I came to Australia that Christians were actively persecuted. I thought the days of persecution, being torched, fed to the lions in the arena, etc. were done some 1500 years ago. And yet, because of a random day last year where I went to church and they had a visiting speaker from Barnabus Fund, I have come to realize that more Christians have been martyred in the past 150 years than in all the time before that.
You almost never hear about the persecution in the news. Sure, we hear a lot about terrorism, something of jihad, especially lately, but we really don’t hear about what is being done to Christians the world over other than a very isolated incident here or there. I was startled to discover that the torture, murder, etc. that I thought was essentially long past is current and rampant in the Middle East, Asia, Africa. Sure, we all know that certain countries aren’t psyched about Christianity, and that there are issues here and there, but to realize that every single day villages are burned, people are persecuted, murdered, tortured… how is it that those of us who are safe and well-off and who care for peace and human rights don’t know about these things?
The Christian religion in the Western world has become something laughable. And yet, what is so ironic, is that our Western countries are based upon it. We don’t even realize that so much of what makes our Western countries and societies what they are: comfortable, successful, powerful;and so much of what we fight for today: equality, justice, human rights, was in first based on biblical Christianity and God. When we call Christianity backwards and repressive, we don’t realize just how much Christianity thought out of the box at its inception, how much it has given us with regards to compassion, charity, women’s eqaulity, the abolishment of slavery and many other things that are part of our Western thinking today. Our long Christian history has gifted us with so much of the success and prosperity we have now in Western countries, and yet the religion itself is dying a slow death as we smother it with political correctness and compromise, materialism and comfortably isolated lifestyles.
“Christianity” has become something associated with cultists, stupid people, superstition, backwardness, prejudiced jerks, overbearing chauvinists, sexual predators, hypocrites, and mealy-mouthed weaklings. It has become the butt of countless jokes. If you claim to believe the Bible, people will automatically demote your IQ about 40 points.
And yet, one says, how can people be blamed for thinking of it this way, seeing the hundreds of years of shocking corruption and depravity of the Catholic church (Constantine should never have joined church and state!), or the actions/words of small-minded & asinine people who claim to be Christian and/or doing things in the name of God?
And I agree, in that sense. When someone claims to be Christian and is doing something small-minded/asinine/corrupt/sicko, it is really hard not to loathe them and loathe what they claim to stand for as well. But I wonder why we so easily take their Christianity claim as true instead of taking out our bucket of salt and discovering whether their claims actually have any merit. After all, Adolf Hitler himself claimed to be Christian (and ‘backed up’ his claims with Bible references) — yet I can’t imagine that there are many today who would agree with his self-assessment!
True Christianity has become so unpopular (in great part because so many people have abused and/or subtly changed the truth of it for their own benefit) that the church has decided that the solution is to compromise. Unfortunately, by trying to take all the hard truths out of Christianity and make it all soft lovingness guaranteed not to offend anyone’s sensibilities (and we all know how delicate everybody’s sensibilities are becoming thanks to the Political Correctness we’ve invaded ourselves with), we are dooming ourselves. By being too tolerant, we invite intolerance. By being too malleable, we become weak. Moreover, the new soft & fluffy compromised Christianity of the West does little more than provide new fodder for those who are disgusted by the hypocrisy of those who call themselves Christian.
It’s funny, because “Christian” people compromise on certain things because they don’t like the implications, often not realizing that the implications are due to a misunderstanding of whatever it was in the first place.
I guess I got sidetracked. I don’t really know the point of this post. It’s really just rambling, not organized. But, back to persecution, I wonder, would the Western world take Christianity any more seriously if they knew about the rampant persecution of Christians in other countries? Would those who compromise be shaken enough to stop compromising and start thinking? Or would they call it a dreadful thing, but consider those persecuted to be backwards for keeping their faith? I don’t know.
I just know I wish more people knew about it.
August 6th, 2008 12:56
Haha, I last took this quiz 5.5 years ago and turned out as a Chaotic Good Half-Elf Ranger Bard.
I Am A: Lawful Good Human Monk/Cleric (3rd/2nd Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-14
Dexterity-15
Constitution-15
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15
Alignment:
Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment because it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Primary Class:
Monks are versatile warriors skilled at fighting without weapons or armor. Good-aligned monks serve as protectors of the people, while evil monks make ideal spies and assassins. Though they don’t cast spells, monks channel a subtle energy, called ki. This energy allows them to perform amazing feats, such as healing themselves, catching arrows in flight, and dodging blows with lightning speed. Their mundane and ki-based abilities grow with experience, granting them more power over themselves and their environment. Monks suffer unique penalties to their abilities if they wear armor, as doing so violates their rigid oath. A monk wearing armor loses their Wisdom and level based armor class bonuses, their movement speed, and their additional unarmed attacks per round.
Secondary Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron’s vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity’s domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric’s Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
August 5th, 2008 21:48
I forgot to note that I even though I very recently got my hiking boots’ soles re-glued (the soles came off after my Israel trip two years ago), the day we climbed Castle Rock & Mt Norman, the soles came off again! Rotten gluing job I say. And incredibly annoying! Those hiking boots (which are fantastic, even so) are my NOLS hiking boots and they have a lifetime warranty. But I guess it doesn’t extend to soles.
Yesterday I was merrily eating my lunch when it slowly started dawning on me that something didn’t taste quite right. I guess stir fry doesn’t last a week. The stuff had fermented rather horribly, but I was too oblivious to know it. I was all for keeping eating, since I was starving, but the combined lunchroom made me stop.
I always figured that rotten non-meat things (milk, cheese, fruit, veg) won’t hurt you, but better safe than sorry I guess. There was in fact meat in the stir fry, but that part didn’t seem fermented.
I discovered Google Streets today. They just unveiled it in Australia and I had a grand old time looking at Clyde parked in our driveway (those sneaks!) and at Mama’s Chicken Shack where I used to live in the bottom of Harlem, NY, except it wasn’t called Mama’s Chicken Shack.
August 3rd, 2008 21:34
You know what’s sooooo tasty? Lindt’s Dark Chili Chocolate. It burns lusciously.
Princess Mononoke was pretty good, but Howl’s Moving Castle was head and shoulders above it. The music was so fantastic too: I can’t get it out of my head. Downloaded the theme song off iTunes 
Went camping this weekend in Girraween National Park with C & L and two of their friends. It was cold! This is pretty much as cold as it gets in QLD, and being as we were south (on the border of NSW) and well inland, it was in fact the coldest by far that I’ve experienced since coming to Oz. It actually went down to -4 Celsius (25 F) last night, as evidenced by a layer of frost on everything (which gave the other campers a source of awe while we chuckled).
It was fun. We made a little den in our tent – the air mattress with two woolen blankets on it, then our crappy K-Mart sleeping bags zipped together, then two more blankets on top. And pillows! This is the first time in my life I’ve been camping with pillows. I felt like such a pansy. I’ve never been so far from the NOLS days of sleeping 100 miles from civilization in 6 feet of snow without a tent even. But it was so comfy – almost as comfortable as bed at home, if only we hadn’t had to wear full layers of socks/pants/longjohns/jackets/hats to boot. It’s never very comfortable to sleep in clothes.
Climbed Castle Rock and Mt Norman, both easy, with some ok scrambling. Nice day hikes. I like it when there’s a bit of rock climbing/jumping in there as well as just hiking. The weather was stunningly beautiful and we saw no end of kangaroos, kookaburras and rosellas. The kookaburras were quite insane – swooping us to snatch sandwiches out of our hands and going all-out battle with each other over scraps.
The dogs were delirious with joy when we came back, you’d think we were gone two weeks, not two days. Tomorrow — back to work! The weekends never seem long enough.
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