Late Sunday afternoon we came home from a barbeque with some friends and went straight down the beach, and I went for the first snorkel of the season. The water was only moderately cold and the clarity was awesome, I saw many fish and had a short excitement with a swimmer crab.
I love snorkelling.
But Elicia doesn’t.
… was cool. The service was fairly trad, with a printed liturgy and response prayers and that sort of thing. Choir sounded Very Nice, four of my family members involved in that, thank you very much. Not a huge part of the festival though, I think most of the congregation were the normal church folk from the local UCs. And we had to vacate the venue as soon as the service finished so the next performance could come in, so there wasn’t alot of hanging around afterward.
If we’re around next year I might join the choir, I used to sing in the Christmas choir in OG and it rocked. I love voice harmonies.
The Queenscliff Music Festival is on this weekend, which means it’s quite busy around here. The only part we’re going to is Church in the Big Top tomorrow morning so I’ll give a report of that in the near future.
But for the moment I have a far more special treat: a photo of the other pier in Queenscliff!
A bit hard to see, but if you click the photo above you’ll be magically transported to a larger pic. This pier is used by the Port Authorities so it’s off-limits to non-employees like myself – hence the seaweed featuring in the foreground. I suppose I could have taken a photo of the locked gate…
I’m going to a Sight Magazine Christmas breakup tonight. We are all invited to bring a dish from a country that has hit the site. I chose Poland because my mum is Polish, so I spent yesterday evening making Bigos, a traditional Polish meal that is basically four kinds of meat swimming in sauerkraut. I didn’t make it entirely to the trad recipe, I Australianised it a little bit by using kangaroo steak instead of venison. Yum!
Another interesting experience I had on the weekend was eating sashimi. Our housemate works on a boat that takes tourists out to see dolphins and seals in Port Phillip Bay, and sometimes they do a bit of fishing from it too. On the weekend he came home with a bagful of salmon they’d caught, and before putting most of them in the freezer he cut a couple of fillets up into strips and we dipped them in soy sauce and ate them raw. It was delicious! I have never tried fresh, raw fish like that before. It was not as “fishy” as I thought it would be, I imagined it would taste salty or tangy but it was neither. Very smooth and a beautiful texture.
So there you go!
It’s been so long since I’ve had a chance to blog! It’s funny how I miss it.
The reason is that I haven’t been working on the computer, instead I’ve been chainsawing, chopping, pulling up fences and stumps, wearing an akubra and dodging snakes and spiders. By nighttime, when I would usually blog and catch up on emails and play around with pet projects that never seem to finish, I have instead been ready to sit very still, drooling, in front of the tele, or sleeping. Actually, all this physical work is really quite good for me, I’ve been feeling great. And Dad’s place is looking terrific.
We meditated at cell group last night. No particular reason, but we talk occasionally about alt worship sort of things and one of the leaders is reading a book about spiritual disciplines in which meditating features, so she thought we’d try it. It was very good, interesting to see how positively everyone reacted to it. If it’s that easy and that positive, why isn’t it done more?
… and I’m pretty good.
Work has been slow so we’re taking a week off and I’ve been helping Dad clear out a lot of trees and other things in his garden. He has several acres of land and many trees and large bushes that have been getting unkempt since the last time he had a proper clean up. We were building a bonfire out of the branches and rubbish, but when the pile began to approach the size of their house we decided that hiring a big mulcher might be the go.
This year our cell group is doing Adopt-a-Family, a local charity organised by the Geelong Advertiser where businesses and community groups can sign up to buy presents and food for families in the region that might otherwise not have a very good Christmas. We got our family today, they’re all boys! A single dad with his sons, probably. All very exciting.
This is what I find interesting – the program isn’t a Christian Thing at all, but it is a Good Thing. Personally, I think it’s important and very worthwhile for the church to get involved in normal charity type things or other community-building activities, without an agenda to preach at the people involved, or even build ‘brownie points’. It shows we have a genuine care for them – we want to help even if they never know we are Christians.
But some Christians get a bit funny about that kind of thing and think we should put our efforts into prgrams with more ‘eternal consequences’ – ie things that don’t just help, but also evangelise.
Interesting.
This is the main pier at Queenscliff. It is quite a popular fishing spot, especially with old men of Greek heritage who like to catch squid. I also like to catch squid, but I have never tried from this pier. Non-fisherpeople regularly walk up and down this pier for fun.
The large wooden garage-looking thing used to hold a rescue boat that went splashing out into the waves in the old days and rowed out to ships that were wrecked in Port Phillip Bay heads. It happened quite often, I believe.
It came to my knowledge today that there is a town called Swansea in Australia. It is just south of Newcastle in New South Wales – so there is a semi-Welsh connection there just to keep everyone happy – on a spit of land between Lake Macquarie and the Pacific Ocean.
I didn’t take that photo, in fact I’ve never been to either Swansea. I got it from Air View Online.