I went to a 25th birthday party last night, courtesy of an acquaintance of Monet’s. It was a private party at a rooftop of a club. The weather was good, the crowd was dressed up. The DJ was ripping it up with the music selection, and the bar had an open tab thanks to someone. It was a recipe for fun.
One thing that struck me however was the dance techniques used. Yes I know, by me even saying such a thing implies that I am OLD. But I must say I was stunned yet intrigued by the youth today. This type of dance was free for all, one vs one dance off battles. It was pretty cool I must say! Arms, legs, all sorts of limbs were being waved all around.
I found out then that I cannot dance. I wonder if you can actually even learn this or just practice in the bedroom. All in all, it was a good night although Monet was half dizzy from one drink.
I think I must have some issues. Who walks into a property, sees it for 10 minutes and then decides to buy it? Although in my self-defence, it was an auction.
The facts:
1. Spent 10 to 15 minutes seeing the place
2. No lawyer/solicitor lined up
3. No finance
4. No building checks or strata report done
It all started when I saw this place, it looked alright and pretty decent so I figured yeah why not, I’ll give it a go. Handed over my drivers license. Got my bidder registration card and sat down.
Next thing you know, all the other bidders fled before the auction even started. It was down to me and one other person. Auctioneer looks down at me rather menacingly “would you like to start the bidding sir?”
“Uh, sure….”, in the most uncertain voice I could muster. I name a price.
“Going once…… going twice…….”. Here I am looking around frantically looking for someone to save my day.
“SOLD!!!” – before I could even open my mouth.
Congratulations, blah blah blah was the response I get. Please sign here. Next thing you know, I’m stuck with a huge mortage.
Oh well, the way I see it, it’s like buying a very expensive tshirt with a credit card. Except you can’t return it. Well, you can, but you’d be losing your very expensive car with it.
My favourite album these days is by Hillsong – Saviour King. That is one epic album, to which I have known people come to Christ because of the songs on the album. One song in particular sticks in my head these days:
In Your Freedom
I search for You God of strength
I bow to You in my brokenness
And no other King could have so humbly come
To save my soul and heal my heart
I have nothing more than all You offer me
There is nothing else that’s of worth to me
And I love You Lord
You rescued me
You are all that I want
You’re all that I need
I pray to You God of peace
I rest in You my cares released
I have nothing more than all You offer me
There is nothing else that’s of worth to me
And I love You Lord
You rescued me
You are all that I want
You’re all that I need
In Your freedom I will live
In Your freedom I will live
I offer devotion, I offer devotion
It brings to mind discussions I have had lately with many people, including my roommate who is organising a night of prayer and praise in September. What should the format be? As organisers, what do we want people to feel? What is the goal and objective?
These are all good questions but my heart begs for a night of pouring out of emotional content through prayer, something I feel this church I go to isn’t very strong in (generally speaking). But that’s fine, every church has strengths. BCPC is especially strong with doctrine and teaching. Seriously, this church has some serious players who can discuss scripture with you to the nth degree. Whilst it’s true that the mind and heart are symbiotic (ie. the mind motivates the heart and vice versa), I believe it is the holy spirit that convicts the heart and thus motivates the mind. Which is more powerful – the mind or the heart?
Ever since coming back from north america, I feel that I have gotten back into the old ways of being careful with emotions. Partly it is due to the environment here in Sydney. People are much less likely to open up for some reason, and like the osmosis effect I do the same. God has granted me some amazing opportunities to be around a diverse group of people – I hang out with adults from 18 to 30 somethings. When I question the youth I sense a longing to be more connected with God and each other. When I question the more mature, I sense opposition to change but yet a willingness to try. So what are we waiting for? The fear of dropping this veil of security is understandable, but from personal experience it is like living a life half full when you can truly experience the grace of God with the support and love of the community growing together spiritually. If the goal is to be like Jesus, then surely this is the right step to take?
On a totally separate note, I write all of the above after drinking some homemade Vietnamese coffee. I bought the coffee and filter from Bankstown, thanks to my viet friend who took me for a personal tour of Bankstown. Wow, that place is amazing. You can go to places where only viets are there and apparently it’s like being in vietnam. Anyway, this is my homemade attempt:
This stuff is strong! But the taste is like a drug I want another cup! I recall first drinking it in a vietnamese cafe in Montreal a few years back, and everytime I go to that place for lunch I ordered that. Talk about being wired on caffeine. Maybe that’s what I’m on at the moment…
So just recently, I underwent some surgery to fix up my nose, which has been blocked for well over a decade. Turns out that when you get older, your body doesn’t heal too well anymore and so those nights where you don’t get as much sleep as you like to – you don’t really heal or recover too well. The surgeon fixed that up… hopefully (I’m still recovering and my nose is completely blocked).
What was interesting however, was the overnight stay in the hospital. You see, I expected this to be a straightforward in-and-out thing. Turns out complications occurred which prevented me from being discharged immediately and prompted an overnight stay for monitoring purposes.
The way I’d describe this prolonged stay was – I was bored. I couldn’t do anything much really as I was still drowsy from the anesthetic and so I slept. I slept so much that when I woke up, I was like “great, that wasn’t so bad!”. And then I saw the clock on the wall that said 11:30pm.
I had a whole night to go and I was bright eyed, totally awake. But you see, it felt like daytime because of all the chaos occurring. In the corner, we have an insane patient screaming her head off: “Ella, ellaaaa, ellllaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! Akhbar allah akhbar!”. What a way to pray, waking up every other patient in the ward at the same time. The attending nurse comes storming down the hall muttering as she goes past “goodness gracious, is ANYONE getting any sleep around here – excuse me, WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?”. The lady proceeds to mutter in some middle eastern/persian language and somehow the nurse understands. “Well what would you like me to do? Give you some morphine?”. Lo and behold, nurse shoots her up one and she falls asleep. The wonders some people will go through to get some morphine?
Meanwhile after this commotion, I’m still bored so I pretend to wander down to the toilets, like 5 times. Walking around trying to see who else wanted a conversation. And then no sooner than I think that I hear: “Ellllaaaaaaaa!!!!”
I never knew a hospital could be this interesting.
ps. shot with Nikkor 80-200 F2.8 in the daytime, 1:1 crop:
After weeks of the never ending drone of work, weekends of house hunting and general other commitments, I finally have a free weekend to actually clean my room. I love a clean room, but don’t like the cleaning. But I must say, it was very therapeutic to methodically clean the room. Anyway, I suddenly discover lately that there have been a bunch of ants roaming around my desk for some reason. I don’t really keep food around my desk, but more so I was puzzled where they come from. After some cleaning I open up my window to let some fresh air in. Now note that it is winter, so I haven’t really opened my window for some time. Lo and behold, there’s a complete infestation of ants living INSIDE the flyscreen edge!
Now I have nothing against ants, but I cannot have them running around amok around my window sill and potentially all over my room. I take out the trusty insect spray and spray the edges… and the ants KEEP COMING OUT of their mothership at the crack of the flyscreen. One by one, as soon as they hit the wet moisture of the poison, they drop dead instantly. I was actually quite impressed by the effectiveness of the spray. As soon as one died, another ant comes out and crawls over the dead comrade only to hit the next patch of poison and die as well. So the picture below is the carnage:
In a way, it was actually quite funny to see ant after ant try to make a run for it only to succumb to the death. On the other hand, it was gross. So, depending on your personality you may find this post quite offensive!
On a somewhat related note, I have a theory how they make these insect ‘surface’ sprays last for up to 6 months. If you ever get the spray on your hand and try to wash it off, you’ll find it’s rather oily. I think that’s the key. It’s poison simply suspended in a oil mixture, which allows it to coat whatever surface and keep the poison there! Pretty simple huh? No fancy tricks, just plain oil. Anyway that’s my theory.
Oh, and it’s Ants: 0 … possibly 0.5 because they made an absolute mess in my room! They were dying and falling all over the ground, I had to take the flyscreens out and wash them and they were still coming out! What a mess…
So, it appears I have jumped onto the dark side and gone with a Mac. That last Dell XPS was great, but after two replaced motherboards, countless reformats and no guarantee of it staying alive I could not bear the data risk. Who knows if Macbooks will be any better? In any case, I figure I’d see what the fuss is all about.
The unboxing of a new Apple product as they all used to say, is an experience in itself. The meticulous attention to detail is truly commendable. Each item individually wrapped and packaged nicely to ensure maximum satisfaction. And when you first turn it on, it actually take the time to greet you nicely. Video tutorials, etc… touche!
One of the first programs I start to learn to use is iPhoto 09. The face recognition feature is incredible! Very impressive and I can certainly see the uses of this. What *really* gets to me however, is that after a couple of days of exploring and getting to know the system, I find that iPhoto is a disk hog. Like, what the heck were the software designers thinking? Well, there are a couple of remedies. Firstly, you’d best uncheck the copy photos to the library feature – that automatically doubles your disk space requirements. However, for every photo that you manipulate it automatically creates a duplicate to ensure non-destructive editing. Fair enough. But why then does it automatically import pictures *still*, into its library? The photos it keeps seem to be random too, some it would make a copy of during import, some not (even though you tell it not to import). What a ridiculous thing to do!
In any case, iPhoto 09 for newbies on the surface is pretty good, as long as you don’t care about how it does it. Does anyone know of a better photo management software for Macs though? More experimentation to come with other programs no doubt… once I get over the keyboard shortcuts.
This meal was one of the most expensive meals I have ever had, not to say it wasn’t good, but on a bang for buck basis it was pretty poor to be honest. For an entree and mains (2 course meal) to cost this much was quite frankly incredible. Okay, there was a fish pie in the middle somewhere too so maybe 3 course meal then. At least the experience was quite pleasant! Service was snappy and good, food was also very good.
Still trying out the new 2.8 lens, here are some of the things we ate for Anthony’s birthday luncheon by the river (all from the camera, cropped to fit but no processing because I recently sold my computer and now using work computer to post):
This is the Boathouse Restaurant, Glebe
The menu
Entree #1: Ceviche with deep fried crackers
Entree #2: Sliced squid panfried with black squid and balsamic jus and chilli salad
Wagyu beef mains, perfectly cooked
Perfectly seared blue eye cod. Crispy on outside, juicy on the in
Little Creatures pale ale - a fine drink to wash it all down
A few weeks ago, we went on a night photographing trip. I’m really enjoying this low light performance on the D90. Too bad my lenses still suck and I don’t have a tripod (essential!)… One more thing – when doing night shots with lots of light sources about, it is ESSENTIAL to have a clean lens! The spray from the ocean screwed up so many of my photos
Anyway, we did a simple dinner at some swank restaurant (Wildfire) by the harbour as part of the Sydney festival week. My goodness, the view from that restaurant is spectacular. Food was good too, but way too pricey as expected. I guess only the super rich get to dine for real at places like this. So we walk around to find a spot to photograph – we go walking around this place:
The harbour kitchen and bar is one of the most famous dining places in Sydney. I am yet to try this place out… maybe one day.
Was on Anthony’s manfrotto tripod and did a long exposure / low ISO shot when this ferry screams past. Oh well, at least it’s a different shot from the usual.
One of Monet’s first use of the D90, shooting a seagull that’s perched on the top of a car roof a little full on a meal of probably other people’s chips and leftovers but running away (camera shy) everytime you point a lens at it. We went to the Sydney fish market on a balmy, cloudy and drizzly valentine’s day to eat some fresh Sydney rock oysters, fish, calamari and prawns!
