I’m having an online clear out of my DVD collection at Trade Me – Listings from bignoseduglyguy – a tiny selection including a Cold War classic, a documentary, a Russian horror, an Iranian drama and more besides.
I’m calling it a garage sale as the money will be used to offset an increase in parking fees I have to pay at work.
With SWMBO out at a school meeting, the eldest out with friends and the middle two at dance rehearsals, it was just me and the youngest at home tonight. Eschewing the usual drivel on the TV, we settled down to watch Radar’s Patch which we have on loan from the great ‘free to borrow’ selection at our local library.
The show, which won Best Information/Lifestyle Programme at the 2010 Qantas Film and Television Awards, follows Te Radar‘s humourous but informative attempt to live sustainably on a typical Kiwi quarter-acre section using methods he picks up from those he visits during the show. As the house and section is just a few kilometres from our house, we enjoyed some quality couch time watching a few episodes and spotting local landmarks.
Halfway through episode five, as Radar is filmed enjoying the local Santa Parade that rumbles down our High Road every December, we each did an open-mouthed double-take. We reversed the DVD and played it again and, sure enough, there with her friends yelling ‘Merry Christmas’ from the church float, is the same girl sitting next to me!
A great way to end a lovely ‘dad and daughter’ evening.
I slipped a year closer to the half-century in the middle of last week and received cards from friends and family near and far. In the card that she gave me, there was a small handwritten note from She Who Must Be Obeyed, cryptically hinting that we were to leave our home to the mercies of our four girls plus various invited friends on Saturday morning for a mysterious romantic night away over the weekend.
Well, she must have been salting away the grocery money for years because, after a relaxed and leisurely lunch at The Packing Shed in Oratia, we drove up into the Waitakere hills and ended up at the Waitakere Estate. The estate is Auckland’s equivalent of an eagle’s nest Bond villain lair – complete with helipad and steep winding approach road - set above the bush overlooking Auckland.
We had a great room with view right across the city and harbour to Rangitoto and the Coromandel beyond. Beneath our balcony was the pool and, following a walk through the bush and tall kauri listening to the call of tui, we had a cool, refreshing swim before relaxing and taking in the view. With a pre-dinner ‘nana nap’ under our belts, we headed to the dining room and a table that gave us a few of the city and Waitemata harbour in the setting sun while we ate a lovely meal and chatted about all sorts.
SWMBO skipped the starter but I couldn’t resist trying soft shell crab with stir-fried vegetables and Asian-inspired sauce, which came with the waiter’s hushed but redundant reassurance that I could ‘eat the shell as well’. After that, we tucked into a main course of fresh snapper for her and 60 day aged Waikato eye filet for me, along with sage-stuffed onion, roast new potatoes and a ‘trio of mustards’. We finished off by sharing a NZ manuka honey cheesecake with sauteed rhubarb, nut brittle and nasturtium flowers which prompted the waiter to again advise me of the edibility of my meal.
After a nightcap (to aid digestion, you understand), we slept like the proverbial log and awoke to a sunny morning. After a hearty breakfast overlooking forest and city, we packed up and headed home to see what was left of the house. While I am not always comfortable in such luxurious surroundings, our getaway was a beautiful gift of time spent together. I am determined to cherish such times, be grateful that we can experience them when so many have so little and know that we are blessed beyond words when we do.
The womenfolk of the homestead were all preoccupied with their own affairs yesterday so I grabbed a few hours of bloke time and retreated to my workbench.
There I discovered that if you mess around for an hour or so in order to find the right combination of drinking straws, tissue paper, glue, plastic string and a paper clip, you end up with a fantastic tetrahedral ‘pyramid’ kite for almost no money.
Down at the local domain for flight testing, the kite jibed and chopped around madly, swooping and spiralling insanely enough to indicate self-destruction if it wasn’t tweaked to deliver a more stable flight.
The addition of a tiny tail of two straws and string plus a few tweaks of the bridle, to help it sit on rather than in the wind, worked wonders. It flew like a beauty in variable winds for 30 minutes – during which I just enjoyed myself and put up a few prayers – until I had to pack up and head to a youth ministry meeting.
Sadly, in my rush to go out, I just left the kite on the workbench, completely forgetting that we have a mischievous moggie in our home. Moral of the story? Never leave your handcrafted pride and joy where your inquisitive white cat can play with it. That said, this tragic molestation does give me the perfect excuse to head to the store and buy the materials for Mark II!
You can see more photos of the construction and flight phases on this Flickr page and a truly murky video clip here.
In between work and family life, I have had a week of introspection and consideration, spending time considering my priorities in the year ahead. This has meant evaluating, shifting and, in some cases, discarding the big rocks in my world.
Funny then that I should could across a link to Inspiration and Chai, the blog of Australian palliative nurse and singer, Bronnie Ware. In her most widely quoted post, Regrets of the Dying, she relates the five most common wishes she has heard expressed by those she has cared for in their last days.
Bronnie offers her comments and perspectives in the full post here.
I reckon that I managed to clock up a little of Nos. 1, 2 and 5 earlier today when Maisie and I headed over to the local domain to fly kites. As well as the new kite I bought for Maisie when we were at the beach a few weeks back, we also flew a Worlds Apart Air Sport 170 CX, a couple of Pocket Parafoils (see above) and a homemade dustbin liner and dowel sled kite.
This we did to the backdrop of cries of ‘Howzat!’ from the cricket club and the inevitable Westie dad teaching his very young offspring how to annoy others and break local byelaws by riding a mini-motorbike with stabilisers. My mild but silent annoyance at the kid riding across our kite lines at one point changed to horror when, despite the mad shouting of his father, the tiny kid missed the brake and rode headlong into his mum and a younger sibling in a pushchair.
While I wouldn’t want to be unkind, the kid made a half-decent attempt at getting himself, mum and sibling a Darwin Award.
Middle school at KingsWay begins in a few hours so here’s a picture of sprog No. 4, in school uniform for the first time in her life and about to head off to catch the school bus with her mates for the first time in her life. Very excited would be an accurate description (her, not me – well, maybe me a little bit too).
Again, I find myself I appreciating guest blogger Scott Miller’s open and frank sharing about his faith on Tony Jones blog. He articulates much that I can empathise with in a clear and simple manner.
If I could talk to my 17-year-old self, I would say that I still believe that God is at work in my life, but maybe not in the same way that a 17-year-old understands. I would tell him that I still experience the authority of scripture, but I don’t find that authority in the words of scripture, but in the Event to whom scripture testifies. And I would say that I have not substituted human reason for revelation, but realize that I can only understand the revelation in human, fallible, finite ways, and that it is a mistake to think that anyone’s theology is every entirely adequate to express the revelation of the Infinite.
But above all, I would tell my gnostic-leaning 17-year-old self, it’s more important to be a true follower of Christ and actually act in Christlike ways than it is to have what you think is the correct theology. Ideas matter, but real, living human beings matter more. Don’t forget Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 13:1-3:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love I gain nothing.
via Theoblogy
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do”.
- Ann Lamott, quoting her priest friend Tom, in ‘Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life‘.
Reading this a few moments ago pulled me up short; a more succinct reality-check statement would be hard to conceive. I always appreciate Ann Lamott’s writing; when I read her stuff, it’s like I’m listening to a sister who has seen a lot more and done a lot more than me – and cares enough to share the lessons.
Seeing her quoted always makes me sit up and pay more attention as she invariably polarises folk and provokes debate. In this case, the quote appeared in a open letter about LGBT and faith issues at play in the current US political race, itself quoted in Scott Miller’s guest post on Donald Miller’s blog.
