This arrived in the post today.
You may think that it’s not much to look at, but if you’re a singer/muso and GarageBand owner this thing’s a beauty. You plug it into the Mac and hook up your keyboard and mic to it and ‘Bingo!’ you can call yourself a recording artist. And if you’re a geek; it’s another gadget… and you can’t be unhappy with any product if it has cables and sockets.
I bought this baby on ebay.
In December.
It FINALLY arrived today… I won’t bore you with the tedium of the details, but let’s say someone at the USPS couldn’t tell his Argentina from his Australia causing me to say to the vendor, “they begin and end with the same letters but there’s a world of difference in between”. I was less than pleased, as you can imagine…
However, the bigger part of the story is actually not the eventual arrival of this unit; instead it is the purpose for which it was purchased.
You see, I’m singing again.
I’ve done a little, you may have heard it at Christmas time, but I’ve never really talked about why it’s been so long since I did the one thing that actually brought me to Australia.
Simply put, someone who had an inordinate amount of influence in my life asked me to stop.
It wasn’t because I wasn’t good at it, it was because my singing got in the way of his purposes, the purposes that were all about him achieving his ends and not wanting me to have anything in my world that got in the way of that, anything that got in the way of me being completely available, or me having any confidence that I was anything without him. (It makes me sick even to write that down, 4 years later).
Initially he said it would only be for a few months, but when I asked him, at the end of that time, when I could get back behind the mic he simply said that he felt “like God really still didn’t have his hands on me” as if using the gift God gave would be contrary to doing ‘the Lord’s work’!
I know, you’re probably reading that and thinking, “this is precisely the reason why God fucks so many people up” and you may also be wondering why I still even go to church. The truth of it is, when I finally got out from under his influence I determined that I wasn’t ever going to let a man get in the way of me and my relationship with God. For better or worse God is bigger than the shit that goes on in church, none of the petty (or the monumental) stuff changes Him.
Anyway, I stopped singing in 2003 and except for a couple of terms singing with Jonah in 05 I haven’t taken it seriously again until now.
Now I’m singing in a choir of my own making. Mine. I’m working on it with one of my very best good friends and on Monday we had our first rehearsal. There were 6 of us there, the foundation members of our community choir.
Even if I say so myself, we sounded awesome.
The Tascam was bought so that we can record parts for rehearsal tracks and to record rehearsals.
The 2nd part of my reason for starting up this choir is that I’m not the only person who lost their place to sing and I wanted to give it back to them too.
I don’t think any circumstance is ever wasted. It all works out for good somewhere along the line, and you know,
…I think all good things come to those who wait.
My Own Private Dinosaur
Yep… another gift from the ‘Great Beige Hunter’.
He’s pretty cute…
At the Airport on the Way ‘Home’
Another gratuitous post about the inherent conflict of the expatriate’s condition.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone across the Tasman in the 9 years I’ve lived in Sydney (it might just about have got to double figures) and even in having done it so many times I still find myself scoping out the atmosphere when I arrive as if to test the waters before leaping in.
It has been hard to define how to describe the nature of that inquiry. Is it just a scan for a homing signal that’s starting to ping a lot louder saying, please come back?
I hadn’t been able to qualify it until a friend neatly summed it up last week at lunch.
She said that after 6 years of living in the UK she only moved back to New Zealand when she stopped feeling like a visitor on Kiwi soil; it wasn’t until then that she knew that it was time to move home.
Here’s me, 9 years later and I still feel like a visitor. Not, I’m quick to point out in the midst of my family, we’re still as connected as ever we were, even more so now with video conferencing and the like… but in terms of having a life here… there’s a part of me that wonders if, having lived in Oz now for so long, I haven’t passed the point of no return.
Is that wrong? I was born here, did the best part of my growing up here, I identify so strongly with the Kiwi identity, my blood still runs black for my rugby heroes. Kiwi is the greatest part of my national identity, even though I have a cast iron association with Australia in the form of a naturalization certificate… It really does feel as though you can take the girl out of New Zealand but you can’t take New Zealand out of the girl.
I’ve never ruled out the possibility of moving back some time. Truth to tell I wish I could feel a definite ease on the state of play in Australia, a winding down, a tailing off that would release me to come back to NZ feeling as though my time there was done. Skeet has got it. Her feeling is moving her on to the UK, but me?
I’m resolutely still in Sydney even though right now I’m physically in New Zealand; and on Tuesday, as I was driving away from Sis’ place watching one of her little tackers cry as I was leaving (more because he wasn’t getting to come too than because I was on my way) I wished it was an easy decision to drop everything and come back to NZ.
Because bloody hell, the constant leaving is really (really, really) hard.
Days Eight, Nine & Ten – Cliff Notes
And so this travelogue comes to a close.
Day Eight, which was Thursday January 3rd was the highlight for me. A trip to see the iconic sandstone monoliths, ‘The 12 Apostles’ just out of Port Campbell at the most eastern end of the Great Ocean Road.
Of course, we didn’t go straight there. There’s no point being in a new part of the country (IMHO) unless you’re prepared to do a bit of exploring… So, we.did.
We actually left fairly late in the afternoon with a hope of catching pretty views of the Apostles with a sunset feel about them… or behind them. But as I wasn’t keen to waste the whole day away waiting for sunset we left a little earlier in anticipation of finding other things to see on the way.
The most notable diversionwas the Cape Otway Lightstation (actually this links to a quite comprehensive website all about it so I won’t bore you too much…)
Apart from the fact we had another close koala encounter on the way down to Cape Otway there was at the end of the road quite a delightful attraction which is focused around the Lightstation and the Radar Station based there in WW2. Cape Otway actually marks the point where Bass Straight (the body of water between the Australian mainland and Tasmania) meet and which was significant in the development of communication between Tassie and the mainland in the early years of the telegraph. It was a great spot to spend an hour or so, and would have only been improved by the café being open and serving lattes…
You may not be surprised to learn that this is the Cape Otway Lighthouse…
The view looking West. You can’t tell from here just how extraordinarily strong the winds were up here… definitely ‘take your hat off and stow it somewhere safe’, and ‘hold the hands of small children’ strength winds!
This is looking back at the Lightstationmaster’s house right up on the cliff top. Incredible views!