My life as a comic book
Thursday, 09 June, 2005
The story so far ...
It is Friday and our heroine (Bible college student, chronic procrastinator and Chinese-peanut addict) has a 1,000-word History of Christian Mission Primary Document Assignment on John Stott's Christian Mission in the Modern World due on the Monday which she Has Not Started Writing. On the other hand, the infamous Deborah is coming up on the weekend to escape the banality of Canberra. /Ben/ has a 1,000-word Church History Primary Document to do on Augustine's Confessions but he still chooses to attend PEC's music appreciation night, taking much time to agonise over what music he should get others to appreciate.
Friday
/Karen/ barely manages to scrape through the day, learning about the Pietists and the Puritans in History of Christian Mission, almost falling asleep in combined chapel, avoiding everyone at morning tea, not absorbing Greek (3rd declension nouns—yuck!), keeping her stomach growls to a minimum during Cross Cultural Communication, and playing with many participles. Over lunch, some of the girls in her year get the impression that she's stressed (which she sort of is but not really) and keep trying to console her. /Ben/ and /Karen/ drive home in the afternoon and /Karen/ tries unsuccessfully to get some work done but ends up watching an episode of Law and Order and taking a shower while waiting for Deb who turns up at around 11 pm and partakes of the rest of /Ben's/ very interesting tuna and cashew stir fry. They both stay up talking for longer than intended.
Saturday
/Karen/ virtuously gets up at 8 am to work on her Primary Document assignment. Everyone stays asleep. She's managed to write 200 words by the time Deb is awake. She drives her to Hurstville so that Deb can go wander around Surry Hills and Oxford Street. Over lunch, /Karen/ watches Law & Order and thinks about knitting. In the afternoon she and /Ben/ go to his parents' place for afternoon tea where she persuades her other sister-in-law to make fudge for the Moore College winter fete.
Returning home, /Karen/ still isn't making much headway on the Primary Doc. /Ben/ goes off to a buck's party for a guy at church. /Karen/'s relatives turn up because her cousin is coming back from his honeymoon and needs picking up from the airport. /Karen/ goes to pick up Deb and apologises for the number of people in her lounge room and the two-year-old who's racing around with a purple balloon. They soon leave. Deb very graciously makes Pad Thai for dinner. /Karen/ shows her how to make the egg bit. They eat dinner, then /Karen/, who is getting annoyed at her Primary Doc, tries to finish it off. Deb goes to watch Dr. Who. The evening drags on and /Karen/ keeps kept Deb waiting. At 9:30 /Karen/ is done, having counted and re-counted her words half a dozen times to make sure she's not over the 10% variation limit (Dave, I've created formatting styles to exclude the text I don't want in the word count but I can't get Word to not include them in the word count). She and Deb watch Whale Rider while Deb looks at wedding photos (all three albums!). Once again, another late night.
Sunday
/Karen/ sleeps in a little. /Ben/ worries about his Primary Doc assignment. /Karen/ finally gets up and starts to try to engage her brain to catch up on the 7 or 8 hours of work she still owes Matthias Media—catching up on previous weeks. Deb abandons plans to visit her friends' church. /Karen/ discovers that Deb does not like sultanas. At 3 they go out for a walk to the point and then get hungry for fish & chips. /Karen/ shows Deb how to pump her tyres and takes her to Connell's Point to show her the lovely house at Connell's Point which, Deb agrees, is lovely. It is getting close to 5:30 and /Karen/ and /Ben/ have to go off to church so Deb says farewell to return to Canberra once more.
At church /Ben/ is leading. /Karen/ does an impromptu Bible reading of Hebrews 10 (which she feels she read very well) and then falls asleep during the sermon. /Ben/ gets really embarassed—especially when Cameron starts talking about people falling asleep in church and how maybe it's better to stay home and recover if you're not feeling well—“I'm not looking at anyone in particular,” says Cameron, but /Ben/ feels that Cameron is talking specifically about /Karen/ (which he wasn't—I found this out today—he didn't even notice that I was asleep). Dinner after church is nice and the post-church meeting meeting is cancelled.
Monday
/Karen/ gets up early, discovers she doesn't have the right bus timetable, prints it off the internet and then realises she only has 3 mins to get out of the house and catch the bus. Surprisingly, Denise is on it so they have a nice catch up all the way to Hurstville. On the train, /Karen/ is fortunate to get a seat and she knits all the way to Redfern. Her bag is heavy but it's good exercise to walk from Redfern to the University of Sydney's Parking Office where she collects the $10 that ate her mother's change on Thursday night which she then promptly spends on green tea and a toasted cream cheese bagel for breakfast (Panther points out that she's gotten cream cheese all over her face—how embarassing). Panther is off to England and so /Karen/ supplies her with reading material and returns three of the Robin Hobbs to her.
Then it's time for class—1 Corinthians 15 and 5 mins on 2 Corinthians in New Testament Survey and more of Mark in New Testament 1. Ben has been participating in an in-class debate on the meaning of Mark chapter 13 and he is quite vehement about refuting the Peter Bolt-ians—so much so that he plays “villain” music when they get up to speak. The class is in stitches.
Afterwards, we discover our NT1 essays have been returned. Particularly enjoyable were some of Bill's comments:
(Under “English Expression”): “Admirably clear.” (ooh, admirably!)
“You have an enviable economy with words which allows you to pack in considerable content in a lucid fashion.” (ooh, enviable!)
while /Ben/ got:
“The women in the narrative prove more faithful in the narrative than the male disciples but wonder what you make of Bolt's overall thesis concerning the supplicants—men and women together making a point of identification for Mark's readers implying the open nature of the kingdom as you rightly finish with. It's late; I am starting to ramble ... well done!”
They drive home and get there earlier than expected. /Ben/ starts watching an old Law & Order while /Karen/ keeps working on the Erin rug (one panel to go! NB: the Erin rug was made by Erin—long panels in garter stitch using two different colours of 12 ply yarn. Unfortunately Erin didn't know how to put it together so I volunteered to do it for her). Then /Karen/ leaves to drive to Wollongong, listening to the CD /Ben/ made of all his favourite songs.
It's dark and late but admittance to the Anglicare centre is not a problem. The counselling session is good but very hard, with /Karen/'s counsellor saying a lot of true but very hard things which I am not going to divulge on this blog. “If I don't hear from you in a month, I'm going to call you,” says the counsellor. /Karen/ drives back to Sydney listening to George, Unity to cheer herself up. She knows she should be doing Matthias work when she gets home (after all, she is skipping Bible Study) but her brain isn't working and she ends up watching Desperate Housewives and going to bed early. This starts to set the pattern for the rest of the week.
Tuesday
Getting up at 6:30 am is getting harder and harder. /Ben/ elects not to come in and has the day off. /Karen/ kind of wishes she could stay home too but she has Matthias work to do and she's on critiquing for women's chapel (thankfully she doesn't fall asleep this time). She has a persistent headache but somehow manages to get through the entire day and drive to Kingsford without having and accident and do 3.5 hours of Matthias work in which she finishes off the project she's been working on. There is bad traffic on the way home but /Ben/ has dinner waiting (note to self: do not buy thai basil when making coconut chili basil chicken; it doesn't taste that good). Because she cannot face doing any more work, /Karen/ ends up watching The Simpsons and knitting in front of the television.
Wednesday
/Karen/ decides she does not like getting up early in the dark. /Ben/ is harder to wake and they set off for college later than usual. Mark Baddeley is in fine form on the book of James but he speaks fairly rapidly. Dictation-wise, John is /Karen/'s favourite lecturer. Doctrine 1 finishes of a very interesting lecture on men and women which gave everyone in the room something to think about. In Pastoral Ministry, Paul Barnett seems to throw in the oddball pop culture reference to make sure we're awake. We seem to appreciate it anyway.
In the afternoon, /Ben/ and /Karen/ go to Malcolm's to pick up more invitations to the FEVA black tie dinner to find that no one's home. When they go home, /Karen/ starts procrastinating in earnest by zipping up her lecture notes, putting them online and re-jigging the secret 1st year Moore college lecture notes part of her site with Movable Type. This makes them late for dinner at Tim and Liz's and there is an accident on the M5 to boot so they are very late. Miriam is there and they have a lovely evening which makes /Karen/ long for the Wollongong days, especially now that Simon's been evicted from Planet Bob (it's the end of an era!!) Tim creates a 1st year site and shows /Karen/ how to play around with it. One of its supremely cool features is that users get their own logins and passwords, and they can upload their own files to the site.
Thursday
Waking up at 6:30 again makes /Karen/ really look forward to the long weekend which she's cleared of practically all commitments so that she can get some much-needed R&R. For once, every person in her 1st year chaplaincy group is there. Naomi talks about Steve's proposal and Andrew talks about his remarkable family. In Old Testament 1 /Karen/ makes an announcement about the lecture notes and tries to encourage people not to use the notes as an excuse to miss lectures. Three other people are doing the essay on Daniel. At lunch she advertises the Black Tie dinner but is discouraged to find that Tho doesn't want to come. MAC chapel critique is on when /Karen/ normally has prayer group—further evidence that her brain is not exactly working at 100%.
In the afternoon /Ben/ and /Karen/ go to Malcolm's and pick up the FEVA Black Tie invitations. At home, /Karen/ climbs into bed spends a stack of time uploading files and rejigging the lecture notes site so that you can actually download lecture notes. She knows that she ought to be reading Numbers, Joshua, Daniel (plus the Tyndale commentary), Salvation to the Ends of the Earth (one chapter to go!), A Biblical History of Israel, James (plus the Tyndale commentary!) as well as studying for her Biblical Set Books exam and her Mission Foundations exam but, we repeat, she cannot make her brain work so it will probably be Law & Order again tonight.
Only four hours of class, one hour of chapel and dinner at Bishopscourt to go before my Sabbath.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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I saw that first sentence and saw “heroin addict” for a moment.