Flatout Neglect

I've been negelcting this blog quite alot recently, with only 4 (this makes 5) posts in the last month. My site statistics have reflected this, with August likely to be the second lowest number of hits in a month since the inception of this blog. The positive side to those statistics is that it shows that people will come & read what I have to say, as long as I'm saying stuff. So why the neglect? Two reasons that I can pinpoint:

1. After the excitement of getting engaged, everything else that I'd normally blog about suddenly seemed trivial & un-important.
2. I am pretty flatout with different things at the moment.
   

Here's a rough listing of events on each weekend starting 1 week ago from today.

• Went home for the weekend.
  
• Team weekend for Rock Solid Kidz mission.
• Going to Adelaide (next weekend) to visit Tiarnee.
• Nothing at this stage (Switchfoot, Pillar Antiskeptic Gig in Melb on the 6th.)
• Engagement Party weekend (at home/ Bordertown)
  
• Rock-Solid Kids Mission in Ballarat from the 22nd-28th Sept.
  
• Home for the final weekend of the holidays, before coming back for final few weeks at Uni.
  

So all that on top of the roughly 15 hours a week at IBM & the final Semester Uni assignments. Speaking of which, I've gotta go and design me a website. I have 2 assignments due before I leave for Adelaide on Thursday. I'd better start one of them....

Does this bother you?

Read "In Iraq, sex is traded for survival"and tell me if it bothers you. Because it certainly bothers me.

She said: "I'm a nice-looking woman and it wasn't difficult to find a client. When we got to the bed I tried to run away … I just couldn't do it, but he hit and raped me. When he paid me afterwards, it was finished for me.

"When I came home with some food I had bought from that money and saw my children screaming of happiness, I discovered that honour is insignificant compared to the hunger of my children."

So this is what we've helped to create.

Why doesn't our media do reports like that one? For those like me that wonder the real reasons for the war in Iraq, have a read of this article: Row over Iraq oil law

Not Yet Anyway

I was digging through my rarely checked Hotmail account just now when I found this, sent to me a couple of weeks ago by a reformed South Australian. Seen as how I'm moving to Adelaide next year, I thought I'd go through them to see how South Australian I hopefully am not yet.

I'll bold all the ones that apply to me

YOU KNOW YOU ARE FROM SA WHEN.............

• You have been to Glenelg and got extremely sunburnt
• You know what fritz is
• You say plaaaant not pleeeent
• You have the same friends from high school
• You can't go out without seeing someone you know
• You really miss the old Sizzler cheese bread!!!
• You like ugg boots, not moccies
• You have a very strong opinion on Lleyton Hewitt
• You have been to one of the following lookouts: Stirling, Mt Lofty, Penfolds Rd, Sunnyside Rd, Eagle On The Hill, Montefiore Hill,Windy Point
• You know what Fruchocs are.
• You believe that anything that has ever breathed or moved in Adelaide air is 'Adelaide's Own'.
• You're well aware that for one month of the year, it is impossible to travel from one side of the city to the other, and during this period you will acquire a passion for V8s, a love of the arts, appreciation for world music, and expertise in food and wine.
• You pour Farmer's Union Iced Coffee on your breakfast cereal.
• You will never forgive Melbourne for stealing our Grand Prix. Never.
• You know how 'dance', 'pool', 'castle' and 'graph' are SUPPOSED to be pronounced. - NOTE: YEAH, the only one that has an 'r' sound in it, is the word that actually contains that letter.....
• You get offended when people from Western Australia call SA part of the "East Coast".
• You insist on calling AAMI Stadium, "Footy Park".
• You say a Pie Floater tastes great just to maintain your street cred.
• You believe that other states' time zones are not good enough for us. - I believe the inverse.
• You acknowledge that, while half of our state is uninhabitable, you know that it's still the greatest.
• You think the 'Tiser has no journalistic integrity whatsoever....and yet you still read it every day.
• One word: Haigh's - Never been there, heard they're really good & probably will when I move there.
• You buy your CDs from shabby "Big Star" outlets
• You know that Victor Harbor is the only place to be for Schoolies.
• You forgave the Chappells for the 1981 Underarm Incident purely out of South Australian patriotism.
• You have a unfettered love of either Crows or Port to the complete exclusion of the other.
• You know the people out on the Torrens are either tourists or rowers. No one else would go near that water. - That sounds strangely like the Yarra......
• You think the Festival Centre is a wonder of modern architecture. -HAHA, Like Federation Square..... *Sarcasm*
• You console yourself that, despite all our faults, at least South Australia wasn't built by convicts.
• You can leave work at 5:15 and miss "peak hour traffic" -Bull, it's always peakhour because they havn't thought of building Freeways yet.
• You can have a grin at the fact that Adelaide's second name is "City of Churches"
• You're not scared by Aboriginals walking around Adelaide in speedos and gumboots - That guy was (is?) a legend......
• Your 'sports gurus' are KG and Cornesy
• You either live on one side or the other of the great divide (Gepps
• Cross intersection)
• You're aware that everything is not just good, it's "heaps good"
• You still claim Anthony LaPaglia as an Adelaidean cos he worked in a shoe shop in Rundle Mall once.

150,000

My car turned over 150,000kms while driving back to Ballarat on Sunday. This means I've driven approx 56,000kms in the 2.5 years I’ve had my licence. My statistical analysis indicates then, that I’m averaging 22,400 kilometres per year, which equates to approximately 430km a week, or 61 kilometres per day. To take this analysis a step further, assuming an average of 550km per tank of fuel, which seems to be about what I get on highway driving, I’ve burnt 101 tanks of fuel. A 40L refill at $1.15/L would indicate between $4,500- $5,000 worth of petrol in that time. The cheapest tank of fuel I brought was 95.5c/L, the most expensive $1.399/L. In that time I've owned the car I've had to replace the tires, windscreen, timing belt & some drive thing in the steering.

You don't have to live in The Matrix to be dependant on machines.

Media Announcement

This is how the big news was reported in all the local media outlets!

Communion

I've been going to blog about this for a week or so now, but with other exciting things happening, I've not gotton around to it.

On the last night of camp at Halls Gap, we had a church-type service which included communion. The communion talk given on this night, painted communion in a whole new way for me.

The humanity of Jesus is often lost within Christianity & religion. Communion is a very good example of this. What do you do when you're about to leave your home base on any sort-of long journey? Alot of people hold going-away parties, so that they can say good-bye to those closest to them. At the very least people will catch-up with all thier closest relatives and friends. Jesus was no different. It is Jesus last night before being arrested and eventually crucified, and he knows this. So what is he doing with his last night of ministry? How did Jesus spend his last free hours on earth? He wasn't out healing the terminally ill, forgiving & talking to prostitutes or condemming the actions of religious leaders, as he'd become famous for. Nor was he delivering that one last 'this is how I want you to live' message. No, he spent it having a meal with his closest friends. He even states in Luke 22

"I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God."

Or to put it in the way I understand it "I've been looking foward to eating this meal tonight guys, it's the last one I'm getting untill I've been raised from the dead." (Which was still 3 days away) So Jesus is about to have his last meal with his disciples, a meal which has extra significance, because it is the Passover, an important celebratory meal in the Jewish tradition. He then takes bread, a staple food of his time, and still a staple food now & breaks it. He similarly takes wine, a common drink then, and a common drink now & gives it to his closest friends as is recorded in 1st Corinthians 11:

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me." For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So Jesus is telling his closest friends that whenever you eat bread & drink wine, remember him! Not once a week, or once a month. But every time you eat bread or drink wine, which in those days, would've been almost every meal. Jesus intended communion to be a normal thing for his followers to do. Eating a meal, remembering Christ. A normal daily occourance. When Jesus instituted what we now call communion, I think he meant more that a semi-formalised ritual undertaken weekly or monthly.

Anyone understand what I'm trying to get out of my head into words?