Today I woke up and there was a rose on my pillow.  My husband is such a romantic.  It made me feel all warm inside. 

Tonight we are heading down to Wiseman’s Ferry to spend the night and tommorrow there.  It is not very far away but it will be nice to be out of the city, surrounded by trees and river and have some quality time with Martin.  I think I would be lying if I said it has been a very smooth 2 years but I still think that being married to Martin is the privelege of life and I am very grateful.   

Last weekend I went to the “Liberating the Captives” conference.  I have been thinking about some of the stuff that was talked about there a lot this week.  I think I have been feeling quite ambivalent about leaving Australia lately,  I am very happy and comfortable here and I won’t deny I am very keen to have some children but it reminded me that it is the thing that I most want and feel quite called to.  The main speaker was quite involved with some organisations in Peru.  I got his contact details as I would very much like to see what other people are doing in Peru.  Hopefully there will be time when I am there in June. 

Dave Andrews, as always, left me with some stuff to think about.  I will try to reframe from raving about it too much but he told us a version of the serenity prayer which has been going around my head since.  It goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I can not change, Courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.

Today Ryan and Helen and I went down to Coogee Beach for a morning swim. After Ryan decided that he did not want to do laps but rather run Helen and I decided to try out the woman’s only pool. I loved it. It was like a great giant rock pool. I can not even begin to describe how much nicer it is to look up when breathing and see rocks and ocean and then look down and see some fishes rather than just the bottom of Victoria pool. I also really liked how friendly the other women were. I often find beach culture to be quite cold whereas these ladies were very friendly.

After the swim I went back to Helen’s for a hot shower. Our hot water tank had been out since Thursday so it had been awhile. It was difficult but I could almost do it again for the joy of feeling the hot water run down after a few days without it. It was joyous. Ours has now been replaced so I am very grateful.

Helen then came over for some study. I am finding my studies so boring at the moment. It is making me quite angry. I think that boring lecturors are so disrespectful to their students. And it annoys me how irrelavant what I am doing is to what I want to do. It is very draining. Attending the Liberating the Captives Conference helped a little to reinspire me but today pulle dme vback into boredom. Anyway at least it was somewhat productive.

Finally in the evening Tom brought around his little brother. I really like him. So confident and friendly. He said I was funny – that happens to me very rarely so I was very excited. i wanted to hug him. We had BBQ dinner and played on David’s Wii. I thought it was lots of fun even if I couldn’t totally work it out.

Yay for such fun days that are totally unplanned and unexpected.

I know that Ryan and Tom have already mentioned that we watched Boytown last night but just in case you didn’t believe them I thought I would confirm that it was crap.  Apart from 3 or 4  pretty funny jokes at the beginning and an Irish guy who I think is pretty cool the rest was appaling.  The script had no direction and most of the jokes have been done before. I think that joke where someone is talking to a man who is sitting at a desk and then the person talking walks out and a girl puts her head up from under the desk would have to be one of the most offensive jokes around.  It really annoys me.  I wish they would just stop.  I also don’t like gender stereotypes,  I wish they would just stop too.

I have to say watching movies a Simmons Street is totally cool, I am still not over the massive screen projected on the wall but 9 out of 10 times the movies we hire are not very good.  I don’t know if that is because 9 movies out of 10 that are made these day are crap or if it is because we are just not very good at choosing.  I think I will have to stick with TV series.

I wish I was one of those kinds of people who can think of really good things to say in the moment.  Rather than the type who 10 minutes later thinks of a really good point but only gets to share it with themselves.   

I find negative people so draining.

I am uni at the moment and everyone is so negative. They don’t like the course, they don’t like the teacher, they don’t like the other people in the course, they don’t like Christians, far out some don’t even like migrants. I mean I am struggling this morning with many things about the course and the teacher and yes some people are difficult and hey after reading Howie’s blog I could probably easily say some pretty negative things about Christians too but really. The classroom is just so hard to be in. I can feel the negative energy floating around. I tell you what it is not very conducive to learning.

Today Ryan and I went for a run. I don’t like running around Enmore/Newtown much. I tend to fall over a lot and the path is really hard and it jars me but we did go to the Brickpit or Sydney Park and that is the coolest place. We sprinted to the top of the hill and we could look out over the city and it was great. We could also see all the planes coming and going and it made me feel excited. On the way back we walked because I was really intrigued by all the cute little cafes and houses and brick bridges and the light was all cool as well. It made me feel very happy.

However one of the things that I don’t like about living in the inner city is all the cockroaches. They are everywhere and they leave their mess behind. So yesterday we bombed the house. I felt a bit bad when I saw them all there dead or half dead crawling around slowly but it was very nice when we got rid of them and I could sit up last night without seeing them running all over the walls.

Well Ryan has made my blog all fancy and pretty so come and check it out. I am very happy, thanks Ryan.

I have even managed to work out (with a little bit of help) how to write about myself in the “about” page and when I write names how to get a link. Yay for me I feel very fancy. Now all I need is to work out categories but I think I am getting there and maybe I will get rid of the links that Ryan has put to make fun of me.

I guess after three years of blogging it is about time.

Well Tom shared with us the other day a part of his sermon where he discussed how much the people in our house liked Kevin Rudd. He may have been exaggerating a little but just to prove he really was telling the truth I thought I’d post about how happy I am to see how popular Kevin is at the moment with a two-party-preferred vote of 61 per cent to the Coalition’s 39 per cent.

That makes me happy not only because I really, really want Labor to get in and Liberal to get out but also because it has happened despite the fact that John Howard and the Liberal party have been attacking him mercilessly for the last couple of weeks. To the extent that John Howard even forced someone to resign – which I have to say given he didn’t even do that to Amanda Vanstone despite the extreme errors that she made which ended with someone wrongfully deported shows where his priorities are at. Anyway, they were saying on the radio this morning that maybe people actually realised the game that John was playing and didn’t like it. Now I know I am probably being a little too hopeful and maybe a little hypocritical as if it was the other way around I may not have cared so much but wouldn’t it be good if Australians decided that we didn’t actually want to see these kinds of attacks on people’s personality but rather we wanted to see what people had to offer.

Now I know that John Howard is a pretty clever politician and has been in places of unpopularity before and still managed to win but I am feeling very hopeful that by this time next year he will no longer be the prime minister.