An Unexpected Journey

Hi all, and my apologies for the long silence. It's partly been due to extreme busy-ness (is that a word? I just tried spelling it three different ways, and none of them looked right.) and partly due to me not being sure what the point of this blog is. Should I write more deep and meaningful posts about my life and faith? Should it be more about the silliness of everyday life? A bit of both? More recipes? More photos? More books, films and pop culture references? Today, it's going to be the latter...

Last night, I went to see 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' with a bunch of mates from church. Now before I continue, I should rave (a little) about my undying love for all things Tolkien related. I first read The Hobbit and all three books of the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was eleven. There have been a few subsequent re-readings. The first movie came out when I was thirteen, and I was really surprised that my mum not only let me see a movie with (what was for me at that time) such a high rating, but actively encouraged me to see it. I thought it would be disappointing after reading the books, but it turns out that I was wrong. Later that year, my school concert band played an arrangement of themes from the movie, and that was when I really started to realise how powerfully moving music could be. I introduced a friend to the movie, and she became even more of a Tolkien fan than I am. This friend and I then went to see The Two Towers and The Return of the King together at the cinemas at the first showing. In later years, we would celebrate the day the movies were released by having marathons of all three movies.

I left high school, and my love of The Lord of the Rings did not wane. One of my uni assignments was to write or arrange a song for high school level choir. I wrote a melody to 'The Merry Old Inn', which Frodo sang in the inn at Bree (but only in the book, not in the movie). From memory, I got quite a good mark for that assignment. I've also been on a holiday to New Zealand, which partly, but not entirely, consisted of visiting movie sets.

Anyway, last night I went to see The Hobbit. I no longer live in the same city as my friend from high school, so we went on opening night in our separate cities, and sent happy togetherness vibes to each other. I thought the movie was fantastic, even with the addition of quite a bit of subplot to link it more closely to The Lord of the Rings. (However, it has been a few years since I've read the book, and I'm sure there's a lot that I just didn't remember. Maybe that can be my holiday project.)

I'm generally pretty good at getting lost in a story, but occasionally a few thoughts pop into my head while trying to immerse myself in fantasy. This is the kind of unexpected journey my brain takes during movies:

• Oh listen to that, they have a lot of the same music as the Lord of the Rings movies. That's a good thing. It links the stories together more closely, even if other people don't realise it.
• Wow, the dwarf song is amazing! (I may have been listening to it all morning.) Those low bass harmonies are so awesome!
• How come Bilbo's sword is invisible when he's wearing the ring? And what would happen if he dropped it?
• I thought all dwarves had long beards. What happened to Kili's beard?
• Speaking of dwarves, did they find lots of actors with really big noses, or are they prosthetic? And why does their king look more human and less dwarvy than the rest of the dwarves?
• Which dwarf is which? (This helped a lot)

The Best Medicine

Today was a rather amusing day. I spent the day with the school concert band I help to run, performing at local primary schools. The band is made up of a great bunch of kids, all of whom gave me a little bit of a giggle. But two things today made me laugh so much that I just have to tell people about them:

1) The band has three percussionists, all teenage boys. One of the boys was so tired before our final concert that he decided to have a little lie down on the stage. So one of the other boys tucked him in under an old towel and I decided to play a lullaby on the glockenspiel. As you do. A few minutes later, we realised that the kid was still very quiet, and had actually fallen asleep. But the concert was about to start, and we needed to wake him up. After shaking his foot, he still didn't wake up, but rolled over saying "I don't want to go to school". We eventually had to play the crash cymbals in his face to wake him up. It was one of those teaching moments that makes your heart swell about three sizes!

2) I've recently been talked into joining the Bible reading roster at church, so once a month I read the passage from the Bible that the day's sermon is based on. My church is currently doing a sermon series on marriage (and I won't go into details here about being a cynical spinster who doesn't think that a 6-week series on marriage is really necessary). Anyway, today I've been told that this week's reading is from the book of Song of Songs. So come this Sunday, I will have to publicly say things like "Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine", "Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon", and "Your breasts are like clusters of fruit". As a Christian, I think that all of God's word is important and useful, but if I can get through this reading without dissolving into fits of giggles, it will be a major achievement. (And if a man ever says things like that to me, he's going to get what's coming to him, probably involving a black eye!)

What has made you laugh today?

This is why I don't have #twitter

I once heard somebody say that to fully grasp the concept of twitter, you have to imagine everyone in the world shouting everything they're thinking into a megaphone. But that's not the reason I don't have twitter. It's more to do with the fact that I don't exactly want everybody in the world to know the crazy things that I'm thinking and doing. But you, o priveledged portion of the blogosphere, have achieved the entitlement of knowing exactly why I don't have twitter.

• I've discovered that if you put all of your usual breakfast ingredients into a blender, it turns into a banana flavoured cappucino foam
• Does anybody else remember hair mascara? I never really got that stuff. Is it supposed to go over all your hair, or just streaks?
• This, my friends, is the technique known as 'flirt to convert'. I'm not sure if it's a great idea or not.
• "Miss, I really like the way you've done your ears today", says a seven-year-old-girl.
• Dark coloured dressing gowns are better when worn around the shoulders while jumping around the house pretending to be batman/the phantom of the opera.
•  "I'm going to stop being silly now, and start being sensitive", says another crazy seven-year-old.
• Stop the world! I want to get off!
• 'Won't you be my Pavlov, I could be your chocolate cake, we could form a habit neither one of us can break'.
• Nooooo! Starburns is dead!!!!! He was my favourite.
• Finishing the final season of Community is like saying goodbye to an old friend that was with me through my honours year.
• Evil Abed is really creepy.
• But if the guy goes back in time to remove his reason to go back in time, how does that work?
• "Spring is here, spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer'. Even though I don't like beer. 

I think you're all starting to get the idea. Welcome, yet again, to my crazy life!

On Holiday

So...guess who has a two week holiday from school.....

This girl does!

Seriously, one of the best things about being a teacher is the regular school holidays. I really love my job(s) but kids are exhausting, and I need regular breaks from them. This break, I'm not travelling far, and not travelling for long, so I get to spend a lot of time at home doing not much. I'm so excited! This is how I define 'not much'

I'm driving to a city about 5 hours away for a few days. The main reason for the trip is a friend's wedding, but I'll be spending a few days there visiting my sister, my grandmother and a few good friends.

I got lots of books out of the library the other day. I've already finished the Grumpy Old Men diary, but hope to get read 'On the Road', 'The Slap', and 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe'. And I've also recently discovered the DVDs at the library, so now there are many episodes of Blackadder to watch.

Speaking of TV, my mum has taped a few documentaries that I'd like to watch, so I'm going to spend a day at my family's house watching their TV. I've also recently acquired season 3 of Community, which my housemate and I are watching together. This is quite exciting because I have already seen seasons 1 and 2, which I watched again with her, but I haven't seen season 3 yet. Hooray for new Community episodes.

I'm also going to spend a day with mum visiting a few local art galleries, because there's a visual art festival happening in town, and my mum and I like to pretend that we're cultured. This will be a few days after a day hiking through nearby mountains with my dad and brother.

I should also probably do some gardening. Gardening isn't my favourite task, but I like the pretty roses that result from a little bit of maintenance.

My housemate and I have agreed to go op shopping, because it's something we've been talking about doing for ages, but it's a little bit hard to fit around a full time job.

I've got a few choral arrangements floating around in my head that I'd really like to get onto paper (or into notation software anyway). I love doing arranging, which I'm not ashamed to admit because I've decided to embrace my inner nerd, but I rarely get time during the school term.

I'm also vaguely thinking about hosting a party at my place, just because.


So much for a holiday spent doing not much. I'm not sure how I'm going to fit all the above in two weeks. but I'm certainly going to have fun trying :)

Living as a Christian woman

This post has been stewing around in my brain for quite a while, but tonight I have decided to stop agonising over every point and just write. Believe me, I'm a very long way from having everything figured out, but this is where my thoughts stand at the moment. Feel free to disagree with my opinions, as long as you can justify your own.

This is a post about me. As you can probably figure out from the title, I have two X chromosomes, I've made a decision to follow Jesus, and my heart is still working. When you reduce everything down to those basics, it all seems very simple. However life can often be anything but.

Recently, I've been reading through some of the harder books of the Bible, including Proverbs and Ecclesiasties. Proverbs in particular I've found challenging. It seemed to have very little to say to or about women, and that it did say wasn't very helpful. The three types of women referred to in the book are the good wife (Proverbs 31) the annoying wife and the adulteress. There wasn't anything there for somebody who fits in category D: none of the above. (That wasn't an emoticon!)

After finding links from a couple of the other blogs I read, I've rediscovered the Boundless webzine. And almost every article I've read has annoyed me. I consider most of the advice offered to be too pro marriage, and some of it downright mysoginistic. For example:

• Successful women are not marrying because they out-earn the men in their peer group.
• A woman travelling for a few days to attend a conference and leaving her husband with the house and children is contrary to God's design.
• Modern women are described as 'aggressively independent'. (If it's 'aggressive' to have a job I enjoy and be able to pay my own rent, then I'm guilty as charged.)
• Women need to live with their parents (or another Christian family) to protect them from men who would take advantage of the opportunity that a single woman living alone provides.

Please tell me I'm not the only person who is annoyed by these ideas (annoyed seems too passive a word!) God has given me many gifts, talents and opportunities, and I'm not about to squander them simply because using them to the best of my ability means that no nice Christian boy will want to marry me. Is it too much to ask for a boyfriend (and maybe future husband) who is enough of a man to find my strength and success attractive rather than intimidating?
And it's just plain frustrating when all the advice about making the most of your single years is written by married people with children.

Okay - so I'm just going to say it: I like boys. While God hasn't revealed all His plans regarding my future, I'm still hoping that a husband will turn up someday. Now this may just be a problem at my church with its current demographic, but unmarried men and women aren't particularly good at hanging out together socially. Youth Group supper is a post-evening service tradition where I worship. I've started noticing of late that the guys will all sit in one big group, the girls in another, and never the twain shall meet. And that bothers me a lot. There's also a girls' social night and a boys' social night weekly for the church youth. Of course, there is a time and a place for hanging out with friends of the same gender, I feel that this has become too much the norm. This might be partly because there are a lot of high school kids in the church youth group, and very little acknowledgement of people who have moved on to the next stage of their life without picking up a spouse on the way. While I love all my girl friends from church, I think that I, and a lot of other people, are missing out on their personal growth from their limited social interactions.


I hope this post doesn't portray me as some kind of bitter single woman. Ninety-nine per cent of the time I'm perfectly happy living and working as a single woman, trying to figure out how to honour God in all aspects of my life as it is now.

Counting My Blessings

So often I come to this blog as a space to whinge. Today wasn’t the best day of my life, but when I look over my last few posts, I feel silly writing about yet another of my problems. Particularly considering that my problems are so insignificant in the overall scheme of things. So today, I’m going to write a list of the things that, when looked at in the right perspective, remind me of the fact that God has blessed me far more richly than I deserve. 

• I had a long and tiring day at work today. That means that I have a job, so I don’t have the financial worries or long term boredom of unemployment. Not only do I have a job, but I really enjoy it. Getting out of bed in the morning is a challenge, but that’s only because it’s cold. Part of the reason that today was long and tiring is because I was planning a camp, which is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects of being a teacher (the camp itself – not the planning!)

• Today was rainy and windy. But that means that now I can sit inside my warm house, listening to the weather outside and drinking peppermint tea – a perfect night in.

• I had a day off yesterday, so I was able to clean my room and go op-shopping. So now I’m wearing a cool knitted vest kind-of-thing. I know it’s a bit shallow, but new clothes make me happy. 

• Speaking of retail therapy – If you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed by work, nothing will make you feel better than going to officeworks and buying a whiteboard/pinup board to write lists and pin things.

• I sometimes struggle to do my daily devotions, but then I remember that I own a bible, and I can speak the language in which it’s written. I have no excuses! But when I wake up and drag myself out of bed to do my bible reading over breakfast, I’m reminded what a privilege it is to commune with the Lord of the universe (and I can even do so while eating cereal!)

• Last week, I got to hang out with my sister. We had a couple of free hours on a school camp, and my sister was able to come and see me. My sister is awesome! She’s like me, except way cooler. There are very few people in the world that understand you the way that your family does, and nothing is quite like spending time with them.

I think that has made me happy enough to get back into the stuff I’m meant to be doing now, rather than wasting time blogging.

Greece 2.0

Greetings, Blogosphere!

I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me – my apologies. Life has been crazy busy. Even now, I can think of about five other things that I should be doing instead of writing, but I just don’t want to right now. So here I am instead. 

A few months ago, some of you will remember me writing about an upcoming trip to Greece. That has been and gone, and I managed to do most of the things on the list. I learnt a few traditional Greek songs and dances (at a conference, rather than the taverna, but hey!) I ate Greek Salad, ghalakto booreeko, dolmades, and almost died from caffeine overload when I drank the coffee. I spent three nights on the island of Naxos, and didn’t want to leave. I went up the Acropolis, and climbed the White Tower of Thessaloniki (on different days). The conference that I went to was inspiring. I met so many people who were really interested in the research that I’d done. It was just so exciting to spend a week in the company of people who are as passionate about music education as I am. To cut a long story short – I had an amazing time!

 Sunset over St George's beach on Naxos

 "If you like Pina Coladas..."

The Parthenon

On the ferry to Naxos

However, settling back into reality after an experience like that is always a bit difficult. I got back to Australia Sunday evening, went to work in the city Monday morning, and drove back to my town Monday afternoon. I’ve been working full time ever since, with busy weekends in between. Last week, I went away on a camp with the concert band that I conduct. That was really fun, but an exhausting kind of fun. Last weekend the concert band that I play in performed their annual concert; again, it was exhausting but fun. I’ve started a new job, one day a week at a local Christian school starting a classroom music programme. This is in addition to one day a week at a different primary school doing classroom music, two days at two high schools doing singing and percussion teaching, and often relief teaching on my ‘day off’, which is supposedly a day for preparation. To top it all off, I’ve had a cold that just took a really long time to shake. So lately, I’ve been really tired, but not yet sick enough to justify taking time out from my schedule.

I’m starting to get really annoyed at the hodge-podge of different jobs that I have to do to make up a full time work load. What I really want to do is just one job and to do it really well. Often, it takes as much time to prepare a day’s worth of lessons as a week’s. So my preparation time either spills into my personal time more than I think it should, or I go into classes underprepared and stressed – neither of which is much fun. However, with a lack of certainty in any of the positions that I have, I need to keep all my options open.  Either that, or throw everything in and move somewhere else to find a full time position. 

At the moment, in my current foul mood, what I want to do more than anything else is become a reclusive composer, preferably working from Naxos.  I do realise how impractical that is, so for now, I’ve decided to stick out for another year doing what I’m doing, and see what happens from there.