25 before 25

A few years ago, I was on the cusp of a new era in my life. I was mere weeks away from finishing my time as a student and venturing forth into the working world. It was then that I came across another blogger's 40 before 40 list (ie. 40 things he wanted to accomplish before his 40th birthday). New beginnings are always a good time to take stock of your life, and so I wrote my own version of the list. However, being much younger, I made the list shorter, and gave myself a shorter time frame - enter the 25 before 25 list!

Last Saturday was my 24th birthday. I was going to have a quiet dinner with my family, but they suggested a barbecue at a nearby beach. When we got there, I saw my friends from church also having a barbecue. For a few seconds I was quite upset, because I thought they had forgotten to invite me. But then I saw the banner reading 'Happy Birthday', and realised that it was a party for me. Surprise!

So with the beginning of a new year, and only one year left to complete the 25 before 25 list, I thought it would be a good idea to take stock of how I'm going.

1. Read all of the Bible - This is going okay. Last year I finished all the obscure OT books. This year, I'm doing a read through the Bible in a year plan, just to make sure I haven't missed anything.  
2.  Go to ISME conference in Thessolonika - Done and dusted!
3. Visit France - At the time I was writing the list, my sister and brinlaw (brother-in-law) were planning a long holiday through Europe, and suggested that I visit them in France. That didn't end up happening, and I don't think I'll have time in the next year for another Euro-trip.
4. Finish learning ‘Another Look at Autumn’ - This is a crazy-difficult but beautiful piano piece that I started learning about 5 years ago. I might finally get around to it...
5. Finish Thesis - Done and dusted!
6. Learn guitar - I have a few chords in my repertoire. I don't think I'll ever be a brilliant guitarist, but I managed to convince a group of 6-year-olds that I was good enough to audition for X-factor!
7. Walk a leg of the Bibblemun track - Hasn't happened yet, but I've done a lot of other walk trails near where I live.
8. Take up horn again - Done! I've started playing in a local concert band.
9. Finish all the Plants vs Zombies challenges and gain the golden sunflower trophy - A couple of levels are too hard. I haven't given up completely, but I won't be too upset if this doesn't happen.
10. Shave for a cure (probably colour!) - This one seemed like a good idea at the time, but again, won't be too upset if it doesn't happen.
11. Do a paid singing gig - At the time, I had just turned down a gig because I had a prior commitment. Still a bit grumpy about it! Now that I've moved away from the city, I don't think the offer will come up again.
12. Keep my house clean so that it is a pleasant place to relax and to socialise – This is in progress. I am not the tidiest person in the world, but I like being hospitable. These two facets of my personality often clash!
13. Act in another musical - This year, the local theatre company is producing The Phantom of the Opera. I'm definitely going to audition.
14. Finish 50 books on the BBC reading list - Almost done. I'm partway into book 49 (Dune by Frank Herbert)
15. Learn to sew - Mum taught me to sew in high school, but I had since forgotten. I'm getting back into it.
16. Attend church more regularly  - At the time I wrote this list, I was at a bit of a low point in my walk with Jesus. Since moving to my new town, I've been a regular attendee at a local church. This has been very encouraging.
17. Get Christmas shopping finished 1 week before Christmas - yet another vain attempt to become more organised. We'll see how next year goes...
18. Go to an AFL game - I'm an Australian, yet I've never been to an AFL game. We'll see what this year holds.
19. Do dance lessons - I've done a short Lindy Hop course (the idea was to meet some friends, but everyone else in the class was middle aged plus!), and I've gone to a West Coast Swing open night.
20. Do singing lessons - Check. My line manager gave me a few lessons.
21. Regain Bronze medallion - I really should get a wriggle on with this one - lifesaving qualifications are so useful to have. Plus, more swimming would be great for my overall fitness levels.
22. Compose a piece of choral music from scratch - I've been doing more arranging than composing lately, but again, we'll see what happens.
23. Buy an Ipod - still hasn't happened. There's a little part of me that wants to see how far through life I can get without owning one.
24. Go to Mandurah - At the time, I didn't think I would leave the city for a substantial period. Mandurah is a nearby town that would have been fun for a day trip with friends. This one may not happen, but I won't mind.
25. Initiate social interactions at least fortnightly - Remember when I wrote this list, I was about to leave uni, so random hangouts between classes were becoming a thing of the past. I don't think I've stuck to the at least fortnightly part of the clause, particularly during the school term, but I am getting better at initiating time with friends.

From going through this list, it's become clear that my life has changed dramatically in the last few years. Some of the items on the list are no longer relevant. Some of them I just threw in to round out the list to 25. Some of them I still care about, but won't happen in the next 12 months. In that case, I don't see a problem with pushing them onto the 30 before 30 list.

What's on your xx before xx list?

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.