One post to summarise them all
Sunday, 17 September, 2006
Last week I finished enjoying Looking for Alibrandi all over the again. It means a little more to me, now that I'm older, I live in the inner west and have seen more of Sydney. How cool is it to have a book set in your home city! On the Friday night I also went to the movies with friends to see Thank You for Smoking which was disturbing because of the way the director made you sympathise with the main character who would just lie his way out of things. On Saturday, the rain bucketed down and we went to help Bron do the difficult task of moving for a couple of hours. Family lunch was at the Beilharzs and then, while Ben went to visit Luke, I spent the evening sitting up in bed, knitting and watching movies George lent me, feeling very decadent.
Sunday was a day of sleeping in and trying to work on my depression talk for PEC Women's Fellowship but instead getting distracted by The West Wing. At church I was on cooking, and Sarah and I made chicken and zucchini risoni, except it burned and had a very smokey flavour. My church was very nice to me about it and kept contradicting me when I kept talking about how much I suck at cooking.
I have spent most of this week feeling sorry for myself and not blogging. There are times when being a carer really gets me down, and this was just one of those weeks where I felt that everyone wanted a piece of me and nobody wanted to give me anything back. (All right, it wasn't “everyone”—that's just the bad thinking talking. But you get the idea.
On Monday I rolled into work, fully prepared for another tedious day of Teaching Little Ones (my job: to format the text and position all the pictures in Microsfot Word). Instead, Ian had a much more interesting job for me: get MM USA up and running.
The whole thing uses Movable Type to power it. I used the same rotate script from ECU Wollongong to bring up the random book images. I even figured out how to insert CHN there in the future, if need be. Do I rock or what!
On Monday evening Ben and I went to the September 11 seminar run by CASE. Larissa and Duncan were also there (and wrote up their thoughts on it here and here, respectively). The subject matter was certainly extremely interesting and stimulating—gave me lots to think about and was definitely worth missing Grey's Anatomy for (does anyone know what happened?). (Read Justine's article on September 11.)
Tuesday was spent editing Case #10 for Greg. I think people got annoyed at me because, in order to concentrate better (because I sit in a very busy corridor), I was listening to my walkman and so I never heard anything people said when they came up behind me. I had lunch with Greg during which I learnt lots of things about the history of ministry in the UNSW Arts Faculty and the history of Matthias Media. And in the afternoon I went home and kept working on MM USA.
On Wednesday I went to work a bit late (I figured that was permissible given that I spent four hours working on the site the night before). Ian told me the site was “brilliant”. Feeling quite chuffed, I spent the rest of the day doing the finishing touches, fiddling with the online store so that you can see all the Interactive Bible Studies and Pathway Bible Guides at once (oh dear, I just discovered that the logo doesn't click back to the main site ... fixed now. Wonder how long it's been like that), looking at Briefing submissions and chasing commissions.
When I got home, Ben and I did some music practice. I wanted to do “The Suffering Servant King” by Matthew Salvetti, but Ben's heart wasn't in it so we did “God is Good” (also by Matthew Salvetti) instead. Last year at college Andrew Shead asked me to sing a song at the Day of Prayer thing and I decided to sing that one. Unfortunately I was feeling really down that day and ended up crying my way through the song in front of the whole college. (Wow, I just checked and I never blogged about that. Go me ...) It's a song about suffering and I usually play it (not sing it) when I'm sad.
We were going to catch the 5:40 train but Ben was dawdling behind so we missed it. I was really mad about that, even though I had wanted to catch the 5:50 train. We sat on the platform for 20 mins and then caught the 5:50 train and got ot the Cathedral late. The Healing Ministry service had already started. We made our way down to the front on the right hand side where Cathy, my mother-in-law, was sitting. Luckily we weren't on until the end. Chris Moroney preached on the topic of forgiveness and the story of the paralytic in Mark 2. Then we were up and I sang and didn't cry. We left pretty soon after the service ended, and Betty gave me the book and the list of songs I was to play from on Saturday. I spent the rest of the evening watching House and NCIS.
Thursday morning I tried to get up at 6:20 and failed. I got to work by 8:30 and had my “15 minutes of fame” with Tony. (We used to have product development meetings every Thursday morning at 8:30 but decided to change things earlier this year so that each of us meet one-on-one with Tony for 15 minutes and then once a month we have the bigger team meeting. I forget who was the one who decided to call it “15 minutes of fame”.) I was pretty out of it during my 15 minutes of fame, but if that annoyed Tony, he didn't show it. Glendon showed up halfway through, bearing copies of the 2006-7 Pastor's Guide, which had just arrived. Tony and I were sitting there in his office, flipping through it, when Emma showed up, and she laughed at us and told us we looked like those couples who sit in cafés on Saturday mornings, reading their own books or newspapers.
I spent the day working on Teaching Little Ones. We had a team meeting at 2pm and I sat there, knitting these fingerless gloves. Simon told me it looked like I was knitting a porcupine. In the afternoon, I was feeling whingey and Emma was also feeling whingey, so we whinged together and I gave her a Cherry Ripe mini chocolate bar to ease the pain.
I went home and made a stir fry for Bible Study (it had puffed tofu in it!) 6:45 rolled around and only Marinka showed up. Toby and Sarah, it turned out, were at the snow, Emma wasn't coming for some reason I never discovered and Cindy rang to say that she was running late. Ben had an essay to work on so we made the decision to cancel Bible study (for the second week in a row!!!) and Marinka and I knitted and watched Jamie's Kitchen instead.
On Friday I also couldn't make myself get up at 6:20 so I got to work by 8 am instead. Fridays are strange because I'm the first one in and there's no one around for ages until the customer service staff show up. Sometimes I'm the only one in editing for ages and ages. I finished all I could possibly do on Teaching Little Ones (phew!!!), I did some website stuff and I managed to convince Tony to let me convert some aspects of the existing site to Movable Type so it's not such a pain to update every month. Elsie showed up at 3 and we looked at children and parents in the New Testament. We had questions about whether 2 Corinthians 12:14 is culturally specific but couldn't figure out the answer. After she left, I still had stuff to do and I didn't end up leaving until 5:15. I nearly slammed into a car outside the pub on Edgecliff Road because this prissy woman in a little black car wouldn't let me change into her lane (maybe I should have been more aggressive). And when I got home, I didn't even go upstairs into our flat because we had to leave to have dinner with the Blairs pretty much straight away. Lara made this really yummy lemon chicken and I stood in the kitchen and talked to her about my depression talk. It's all coming together; I just need to fill in the holes. Unfortunately it's on the Friday of the long weekend so I suspect that we won't get a very big turn out.
On Saturday I woke up early (uggghhh ...) and tried to practise quietly the songs that Betty had given me. Ben, who had gotten up before me, had gone back to bed at this stage, and because our piano is in the bedroom, I think I disturbed him greatly. I decided to walk to Newtown because it was such a nice day but that meant that I was slightly late. The first session of the Healing Ministry Inner Healing weekend began soon after and I fumbled my way through the songs. Some of them were quite dreadful due to me being unfamiliar with them, but no one seemed to mind. Jim Holbeck (the minister who performed the wedding ceremony for Ben and I, and my mother-in-law's boss for many years) preached on forgiveness and I found it really helpful. They asked me if I wanted to stay for lunch but I said I had to go, so after the first three songs in the second session, I caught the bus to the city and went to Lincraft to spend the birthday voucher that Simon and Naomi had given me. There was lots of yarn there for 99c a ball so I got 20 balls and a 40 cm circular 3.25 mm needle (which unfortunately broke when I got it home so I shall have to write to Sullivans International to complain).
I was looking for a quiet place to write and so I went to The Tea Centre, ordered a pot of Chai Marsala (with the milk in it) and spent about an hour or so up in their loft, blissfully scribbling away stuff for my depression talk.
On my way back to Town Hall, I discovered that a millinery exhibition is opening at the Queen Victoria Building on Monday (Level 1). Unfortunately nobody is as excited about this little piece of trivia as I am.
I spent the afternoon watching television, working on my fingerless gloves, washing the sheets and preparing to go out in the evening. I forgot to cook Ben dinner but it was just going to be gnocchi with stir through sauce which he was able to manage himself. Then I drove south in record time and met my friends from school for dinner at Zimme's for Melinda's birthday. Something strange was happening around near Kangaroo Point/Sylvania—we saw all these blue and red flashing lights through the trees, there were two helicopters circling the river area with searchlights, and every now and then a police rescue car or an ambulance would drive by.
After dinner it was back to Melinda's place to watch The Company. I quite liked it. Being Robert Altman, it was a definite change of pace from Centre Stage and the dancing, of course, was phenomenal. We finished up at around 11:30 and I drove home in record time.
Writing
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.
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Go the risoni! I haven’t made it in a while…