Singular Scene

So Singular in Each Particular

What the Blazes Were They Thinking?

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You’ve probably seen the news, or if you follow any Australian Twitterers you’ve likely heard mention of the Victorian Bushfires (link to Google map of the fires) that are burning up the Victorian landscape in the South East corner of Australia.  Today the toll stands at 108 and it won’t end there as parts of the large fire areas still haven’t been entered by fire crews.  People have died in their homes, in their cars as the tried to flee, people have died trying to escape. It’s utterly unbelievable to see every news item on the tv, every radio announcement, every Australian blog I read, and every online news distributor rail against the callous and ignorant fools who light these fires on purpose.

On.Purpose.

It boggles my mind that people put their impulses for thrills, power, control and sexual excitement well above the sanctity of human life, above the respect for fellow Australian’s homes, businesses, land, environment, wildlife.  It beggars belief.

I saw an interview with a woman on the show ‘Sunday Night’ whose whole home had been destroyed, she showed us around her property, the worst for me was watching her break as she showed us her dog’s kennels and runs, lovingly situated in the “best part of the section” and to hear her tell of her helplessness to know her precious animals died helpless as the fire-front rushed over their property.  It’s just so heart-breaking.

By the time this is all over I would find it very surprising if there was not one person in Australia who doesn’t know someone, or someone’s relative or friend who has been touched by the fire. For me, I have a friend whose cousin has lost their home, our Kelley from Magnetoboldtoo actually lives in country Victoria and has friends in affected areas. In a disaster like this everyone knows someone.  And if, as a reader you know us, then you too are touched in a small way by this heinous situation.  I implore you, if you have any means to offer assistance, please do what you can.

  • If you can give even a small amount financially please follow this link to the Australian Red Cross in Victoria and make a donation.
  • If you want to add messages of support to the Twitterstream tag your tweets with #vicfires
  • If you’re in Australia and are eligible (I am not… WAH) to give blood, please do so.
  • If you want to hear from other Australian Bloggers or you’re a member on the Aussie bloggers’ forums you can check in to see what’s happening or to add your messages of support.
  • If you’re of the praying persuasion, to whomever you pray, please keep in your thoughts, your prayers and hearts all of those in Victoria, particularly those valiant men and women, many of whom are volunteers, who are working day and night to bring an end to this disaster. And for the future, pray that the recovery, physical and emotional, would be gentle and would be swift.

Home Office

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It’s been quite some time since I arranged myself a corner of the flat into a office space, one that was suitable for both work and study.  I deemed it necessary because a) it makes a percentage of my home expenses tax deductible and b) because when I’m working on stuff it really is a lot easier to get into the right head-space if I’m actually ‘at work’ even if it is only 3 steps from the sofa.  It’s a bit of a weird psychological thing but I find myself a lot less easily distracted when I’m looking the to do list on the white board and am working with a keyboard and mouse than when I’m sitting on the sofa with a cat and the laptop on my lap and am also easily distracted onto sites like facebook… It also makes a difference when I actually get dressed for ‘work’ rather than hanging about in my pajamas… (oh, wait… I don’t… er… this is awkward.)

So, there it is above, my little office!!!  No, it doesn’t really have natural light, but in reality, neither does the flat as a whole, which is a bonus in this heatwave.  The flat’s always about 10degC cooler than the outdoors.  The table is actually my dining table around which there used to be 4 chairs… Now I have to dismantle the office when I want to have anyone over to dinner… bummer that, in fact, most of the time we end up eating off our plates on our knees…  (Ed. God, this is boring… haven’t you got anything else?) so now you know how to picture me when I’m blogging, as I’m now (Ed. except for the pajamas part, you don’t want them picturing that… Me. True enough… er, as you were everyone.)

I twittered during the week about having 2 Macs on the go and whether or not I was in heaven or the other place.  I think, after a whole lot of toing and froing to my serviceman (whom I <3 with all my Mac loving little heart) I can finally say I’m a happy Mac camper again… it was touch and go for a while there…  The new love pictured above is an older version of the old love which was given to me by ‘real job’ in lieu of certain other entitlements I had been pinning a bit of hope on.  I accepted it, probably slightly less than graciously because the offer was made after I’d spent half an hour talking over the merits of a brand spanking new MacBook Pro with my sales agent and getting all excited about the prospect of this fancy new machine.  So to take on the older one, while clearly saving me going into debt or onto a lease for a new machine was a bit of a downgrade…

In a rather ironic turn of events the new mac (which is an older mac) had been in possession of another staff member who’d just upgraded and actually, its hard-drive DIED the day before she went overseas… so I have been holding onto my old mac (which is a newer mac) until such a time as I could transistion to the other machine.  Well that was the heaven/hell episode last week, I got the new one and it gave me all manner of grief as I tried to get it into some kind of functional order… bah humbug.

Finally, I took it back to my lovely service man and bless his little cotton socks if he didn’t actually replace both sticks of RAM in the machine for no cost… zero. <3 <3 <3.  So finally I bought it home and was able to get it into a place where it is barely any different than the old machine (which is newer… you get the idea now, right?!).  So, I’m finally feeling the blessing of the machine.  It still looks good, it works fine with one lingering exception I’m waiting for an answer on from my fabulous service man as to why it’s such a noisy beastie and when that is resolved I shall be in fine shape to get my game on for the epic that shall be called ‘study09’. 

So, I am blessed. I was given a MacBook Pro and my leaving gift from the office will be some rather expensive software that I’ll be needing this year and when all of that is in order the ‘real job’ era will be completely over.  I cannot tell you, even after the shaky end to it all, how fabulous it feels to be in a whole new chapter of my story! 

So, here’s to a new year! Hopefully one that will include more blogging, even if it is tedious drivel like the above…

What’s not to Love?

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  1. The weight of the camera in my hand.
  2. The cat snuggled under my covers.
  3. Skype conversations with family.
  4. Rainy Days.
  5. Coffee.
  6. Waking up with a jazz standard stuck in my head.
  7. French Perfume.
  8. Foreign Currency.
  9. Taking off and Landing.
  10. Watching my boys [All Blacks] do the Haka.
  11. Daffodils.
  12. Driving long highways.
  13. Living within walking distance of the ocean.
  14. The God who is there.
  15. Having a night in.
  16. Quality movies.
  17. The smell of rain on hot tarmac (it even has a name – petrichor)
  18. Eating with chopsticks.
  19. The scent of fresh herbs.
  20. Salt and Vinegar on chips (and crisps).
  21. Exploring new places (camera in hand, of course!).
  22. Tweaking Movable Type.
  23. Eggs Benedict.
  24. Oh, how could I leave these to number 24?!!  Margaritas, baby…
  25. Roast Lamb.  Is this a Kiwi thing?
  26. Singing with my awesome choir.
  27. Speaking to Woh Woh on the telephone.
  28. Hanging out with Kirk and the family.
  29. Washing that dried on the line – not in the drier.
  30. Board Games.
  31. Chilli and Chocolate – in the same mouthful.
  32. Coke Zero – even better than the real thing.
  33. Watching Tennis.
  34. Making static designs come alive in HTML (it’s a coder thing).
  35. Renewing old acquaintances.
  36. Crossword Puzzles.
  37. Ticking off a long list of jobs to do.
  38. Wrapping my brain around a complex problem and solving it.
  39. Waking up without an alarm.
  40. Slipping between clean sheets.
  41. Cheese and Vegemite on toast.
  42. Long slow kisses.
  43. Champagne bubbles.
  44. Cooking up a storm.
  45. Arranging music for voices.
  46. Living in Sydney, and by extension, Australia.
  47. The view out onto my garden.
  48. Hanging with my friends!
  49. Being part of an awesome community.
  50. The fact that my 3 favourite baristas make my coffee without asking what I want!

Seriously, I’ve seen people do 100 of these… who has time for that??

Closing the Work Chapter.

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I know, I still haven’t blogged about work, you know, my OLD work, formerly known as ‘proper job’.  Truth is, the further I get away from it the less it matters. 

I’ll simply say that I had wanted, very specifically, to leave well because there are any number of former employees of the church who have reason to be anti ‘church as a workplace’ (or maybe just anti ‘our church’) and who left, burning their bridges behind them and now feel unable/unwilling to even attend services there. On the other hand there are those who managed to disentangle themselves from the staff without actually burning those bridges and who, while aware of the church’s faults, remain in fellowship (ergh, Christianese, sorry) there.

I’m happy to count myself in the latter.  It was a battle hard won as my last week at work was impossibly difficult and made me particularly glad I had written my leaving speech well in advance.  My emotional state when it was delivered was such the speech around the tears meant that were parts of it I wasn’t sure I still believed. However, I do believe it was possible to leave well because of a conscious choice I made years ago to separate my service to God from the business of other people’s service. 

People come and go in the name of God in any church and quite frankly, they bring with them all manner of f*cked-upness. All the while, God loves and accepts their service same as He did mine with all my f*ckedup-ness. At the end of the day, us God-botherers are called to represent Christ in the world so that others may see Him in us and may choose to follow Him too.  The thing is,  we bugger it up all the time and some of us even end up giving Christ a bad name.  So, in work, as in life, it’s my hope that in some small way I give Him a good name by living a life of integrity walking the walk that goes with the talk… so leaving the staff well was about more than not burning my bridges, it was also about doing ‘what Jesus would do’ (and no, I don’t wear the bracelets or have a WWJD tattoo, no, really…).  Realistically, there are a bunch of people on staff in every church in the world who probably give Christ a bad name to each of their colleagues at different times, they’re human after all, I’ve no illusions that our church is any different.

Anyway, here I am, a month later, and the book is closed. I’ve finished up all the little jobs I’d left to deal with when I came home from NZ and while I still have the work-supplied Mac, I’m happy that it will be handed back in the next few weeks when I take delivery of one of the older machines that’s just about to go off its lease.  Now here I am content to be a regular tutor for the students (my favourite role last year), voluntary staff photographer and committed attender.  Which, really, is just perfect for a year which will be dominated by study and assignments. 

I think the conclusion that I’ve come to is that I’m called to follow Christ and while I’ve heard all manner of preaching over the years concerning ones call to one church, one leader, I’m not so ‘sheepish’ as to buy it all hook line and sinker.  I’ll go where I believe I’m meant to be, and for now, whether or not it remains true in the future, I’ll stay where I am, believing that for a time I was paid staff which benefitted both me and my church but for 2009 I’m moving forward into whatever new thing God and/or Life has in store.

I couldn’t be more excited.