Monthly Archives: February 2012

An extra day

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I’m kinda drained after the last few days, and really I don’t have energy to write anything of depth, humour or significance. I just wanted to ensure I had a post on Feb 29th, because who knows, blogging may be non existence by the time Feb 29th rolls around again.

I could talk about why I’m not promoting buying a song to ‘stop human trafficking’. I could talk about grief since I’ve been looking at it a lot recently. I can talk about the thankfulness and release I’m experiencing reading a book by Donald Miller on fatherlessness. I could talk about my excitement that a girl in England has created a Girlguiding badge to raise awareness of organ donation and heart disease. I could talk about how annoyed I got watching a reckless driver on the M8 coming home today. I could talk about the struggles I have with my broken family and what it’s like to feel like you are parenting a parent.

But really, I’m going to be thankful that I got an unexpected evening home without the sounds of banging and drilling. To do my laundry (since I’ve worn the same top two days in a row now and it smells like chicken burritos) and just to chill.

Tonight the phone will be going on silent, and no alarms will be set.

This koala needs to sleep.

:)

Muppet brain

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So. After the craziness of the weekend (the entire contents of our kitchen cupboards and worktops are now in our living room…) and a very long and crazy day at work today, I’m a little bit tired. Do you ever get so tired, you get a little hyperactive?

Yeah. Me too.

I went to see The Muppets Movie yesterday afternoon with my friend, her daughter and her daughter’s friend. Now as I’ve got tired, this tune has popped into my head. Like over and over. More specifically Beaker’s mee mee mee mo!. All day long. Even when we were doing a training session on supporting people through grief after pregnancy loss tonight.

Oh dear..

I think my mother may now be despairing of me, as I got home at 10.30 p.m., saw our living room exclaimed ‘It’s like Fun House!’ (her response was ‘Except it’s not fun!!’) and randomly burst out with ‘An albeeno! A moskeeto! Mee mee mee mo!’

I’ve always loved Nirvana, and now I just love it more. Tee hee hee hee.

Over and out.

Lent Sunday Causes – Girlguiding

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Every Sunday of Lent, I choose to highlight one of the charities that I support. This weekend, I choosing Girlguiding because earlier this week it was World Thinking Day. (This is the birthday of the founders of Guiding & Scouting, and the day when Girl Guides & Girl Scouts all around the world think about their sisters globally each year).

I’ve been involved in Girlguiding for half my life. I was a Rainbow; a Brownie – where I first got a taste of leadership becoming seconder, then sixer of the Pixies; I moved up to Guides where I first got thrown into having to work things out as a team, went to camp and met several of my high school friends. As a Guide I learned Scottish country dance, how to do a reef knot (actually kinda handy), how to pack to go on holiday super efficiently, First Aid, sign language, leadership skills and team work. Doing my Baden-Powell Award I had to do all sorts of things including becoming a leader at a local Brownie Pack for a year. I still have the toy Mushu (a character from Mulan) that one of the Brownies gave me for my 16th birthday. I was a Young Leader - I stayed on with the Brownie Pack and then later helped at a challenging Guide unit in Leith. While working on a service team at a big Scottish camp me & my friend Kate met our friends Lizzie and Karen and they introduced us to Rangers. We got to go on Venture Scout camps doing activities we’d never have got to do usually, did community projects and ended up becoming finalists in a competition where we got taken to London to give a presentation about it.

All of these things gave me skills I’ve been able to use in the workplace and at university. And I’m super grateful.

I am super happy after a 9 year separation from Guiding, to be back as a leader!

Girlguiding has 500,000 members in the UK alone. The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) has about 10 million members across the world, making it probably one of the largest international youth organisations.

I loved guiding. For a while as a teenager I thought it was a bit ‘uncool’ but now I’m so happy I stuck with it, because I learned a lot and made some amazing friends. I love guiding still because I’ve realised how inclusive it is compared to most youth organisations. I also love that it has stayed ‘girls-only’, because I think it’s important to have a place were girls can be girls with no pressure to look good because of the distraction of boys!!

If you are female, and would like to be involved in your region’s Girlguiding/Girl Scouts you can find out how to contact them here on the map of WAGGGS member organisations. There are so many ways to be involved – by volunteering your time, by donating to your local organisation or some of the Global funds…

Nerves

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It has been a strange week.

Our centre is busy with clients still. Plus there’s training going on. And a conference to organise (I finally got booking forms out this week, phew!). There’s a lot of work, and not many workers (or so it feels like).

This makes me nervous. How am I going to get everything done?

Camping out has begun. On Tuesday morning I began to try and work out how I was going to manage my living space while it gets invaded by building work. On Wednesday morning camping out in the living room began. On Thursday the builders started using my Mum’s bathroom and let’s just say they gave that stereotype of men’s bad toilet habits a whole lot more fuel. Today I was about to go home and get my stuff when I got told the front door had been sealed off. When I got home I heard a weird hissing noise and 15 mins later our heating broke. The cause? The builders had fractured a pipe AGAIN. Thankfully someone came out to fix it, but it meant I missed meeting my friends for tea. I’ve now been told that we have to empty out our kitchen by Monday.

This makes me nervous. How will I wash my clothes? How will I cook my breakfast or tea? 

On Thursday afternoon I got a phone call from a lady who works for a Christian magazine. She wants me to write an article on abortion. The hope is to get the church talking about stuff they don’t talk about – like the fact hundreds and thousands of women have had abortions and secretly struggle with it for fear of judgment from the church. I’ve never subscribed to a Christian magazine. I’ve picked them up and usually get so irritated by the content I throw them back down. It’s also been a long time since I’ve written anything resembling an article.

This makes me nervous. What if my words are rejected? What if I misrepresent this issue? myself? my work?

Cassie is due to get her MOT soon. Last year she went to get an MOT, and it was 2 months before I got a working car again. It had to spend crazy amounts of money getting her repaired. In fact, I still owe someone money for the loan they gave me to get the repairs done.

This makes me nervous. What if I don’t get my car back straight away again? What if a huge amount of costly repairs are needed?

In essence, there are a lot of things I’m anxious about just now. I don’t have any control over them. I realise I need to take it one day at a time, do the best I can do with what I can control, and leave the rest and let peace rule in the crazy moments.

 

Pancakes, pancakes, I love the pancakes!

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One of my favourite days of the year is PANCAKE DAY. Nothing like bringing in a season of reflecting on Easter sacrifice by feasting on pancakes with lots of yummy toppings (standard lemon and sugar, not so standard banana & maple syrup) and of course the very important pancake tossing. Sadly the first of our pancakes got binned when my Mum got a little overzealous in her tossing – she was doing double and triple flips and then on her 3rd toss the pancake landed on our very dirty kitchen floor.

It’s now Lent. I would have liked to have given up eating out or something – however, we’re now beginning our ‘camping out’ stage of the building. Tonight I’m camped out in the living room as our dining room wall is mostly a big sheet – soon to become totally non-existent tomorrow morning. You need to go through the dining room to get to the attic conversion part of the house, and at the moment the dining room is sealed off with masking tape. To add to our ‘camp out’ fun, just after the builders left there was a power cut in our area, so we had no electricity for over 3 hours. So thankful my friends were kind enough to let me come over early as it began to get dark!

In a week or so we will be without a kitchen. You may see why giving up eating out is not really the best idea this Lent. However, I do plan to do Lent Sunday ‘Causes’ to give money and give a shout out to charities I’m a fan of, like I did last year. :)

Are you doing anything for Lent this year? (I’m curious!)

About to be homeless

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So I came home to be told I might need to find another home to live in over the next month.

Yep. it’s those pesky builders again!

Apparently in the coming week they are going to be knocking down walls, and since there is no door at the bottom of the stairs to the attic (my bit of the house) they are going to seal it off. We’re also going to be without a kitchen for at least 3 weeks soon.  This means I either have to

1) start climbing out the window and scaling the house to get out/get food

2) Set up camp in our living room (and face the horrors of Coronation Street, Eastenders, Emmerdale and things like X Factor every evening because that’s what my Mum does there every.single.night. of the week)

3) Move out the house for a while

Bearing in mind that I do a lot of work from home, work is really busy and I have a lot on over the coming months this is going to be a challenge.

Please pray for my sanity.

The wall: to bring pleasure or pain?

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“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world”

-John Steinbeck

2 years ago, I quoted those words reflecting on the death of Eva Markvoort, a blogger who had a huge impact on me and thousands of others across the world. I found myself deeply affected by her death, which came as a shock to me for two reasons. Firstly, even the people who I’m very close to that have died, I’ve rarely broken down in tears as a reaction to their death. Secondly, I had never met or even spoken to Eva.

I think Eva epitomised those words from Steinbeck. Eva knew her life would likely be shorter than most of her peers. She could have chosen a very different path of bitterness, anger, resentment. Instead, she chose to live a life of love. She chose to battle her CF and chronic rejection with everything she had. She chose to take risks. She chose to be vulnerable allowing a film crew into her and her family’s life at one of the toughest times of her life so that others might understand what life is like for someone waiting for a transplant and how it affects those around them. She found ways of living life and making a difference to those around her in very creative ways. When life said ‘no’ she’d fight for a ‘yes’.

Her death brought no pleasure on the world.

I was watching an episode of The Mentalist, where a guy was the intended target for a car bomb and everyone thinks he’s dead. The CBI decide to let people think this is the case in the hope it will help them find the murderer. During the investigation the guy gets to hear what people say and think about him. Let’s just say a lot of it wasn’t positive.

Quite the wake up call.

I really wouldn’t want people being relieved or glad that I’m dead – apart from the ‘LA is kicking it with Jesus now‘ factor wearing her heavenly pretty shoes that don’t give her blisters* singing songs to God that sound nothing like music made by Coldplay with lots of freaky creatures with wings and tons of eyes** doing the same thing. :)

The main thing is – we’re not going live here forever and at some point we’re going to die. So we have two possible courses – live to bring pain in the world or live to bring pleasure in the world.

I would like to choose the latter course.

*this is not mentioned in the bible, but I’m hoping in the new heaven & earth that there will be gorgeous shoes that don’t bring you pain to wear like the ones here on earth.
** Confused? See Revelation 4&5 for more details. Apparently heaven is not a peace and quiet kind of place. It sounds like it be quite the musical gig and the reserved religious types might be a little uncomfortable with the worship there.

For all the nosy blog readers – a life of BK update!

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And by nosy, I mean curious and wondering just like I am about the bloggers whose blogs I follow! ;)

Tee hee.

Well, first of all. The builders. A few people have been asking why we have builders (having read some tweets or facebook statuses which have occurred – like when one of them came and started banging, I assume to demolish something at 7.15 a.m. when it was still pitch dark; or the day off I had where they were drilling all day long and I wished I’d been at work instead!). Actually our builders are pretty decent blokes, and we get on fine with them. They also think it’s funny that I teach sex ed classes in high schools and when they found that out would point to some of the younger guys and say ‘You need to tell him about all that stuff, aye, he needs those lessons. He needs some of your pregnancy counselling too!‘

They also tried to wind me up (after I pulled them up about the 7.15 a.m. start!) saying they were coming on a Saturday morning to get a delivery of cement at 5 a.m.

They just laughed when I raised my eyebrows and said ‘Aye right!‘ (which is a Scots sarcastic version of ‘Oh no you won’t!’ or ‘I don’t believe you’). Anyway, we’re almost a month in and this is the view from my old bedroom:

I’m now in the other attic bedroom (which used to be for my brothers). The room my brothers now stay in has our freezer, tumble dryer, and a shower door, sink and toilet waiting to be installed at some point during the build. The contents of our dining room and hall are in my old room, and our fridges are in the hall.

Confused? Me too.

I got a fringe. Already it’s doing strange things. I have a ‘cow’s lick’ which means my hair does part very well and curls on one side.

Work is crazy busy at the moment. At the beginning of the week I was feeling more stressed than I have done for a very long time. I wasn’t sleeping, I was waking up feeling panicked and I felt completely on edge 100% of the time. Despite having loads to do, I took the whole of yesterday off (having done my hours for the week) and feel much better for it. I’m also considering creating some kind of ‘Don’t drink and have sex‘ campaign for next Christmas. Seriously, alcohol really does up the chances of contraception failure.

Powerpoint was awesome. My new earphones worked a treat. I kept having to push my right ear back in so it wouldn’t fall out and get tangled in my hair though. I was most amused when I got tagged in this photo from the event…caught in the act! I also got asked to join the worship team at my new church this past weekend. It was very different from I was used to, and knew hardly any of the songs so it made it a bit challenging, but the folks in the band were really friendly. I’m finally getting to know people a bit better now, and it’s a lot more like my church in Aberdeen apart from Sunday services are very different from what I’m used to.

With Valentine’s Day having been this week, we’d been working on a fundraising project with the Guides called ‘Bake A Little Love‘ to raise funds for Scottish Love in Action. Our Guides have spent the last month making Valentine’s Cards, making yoghurt pots into baskets filled with chocolates and decorating jars to fill with sweets, decorating biscuits and us leaders made some Valentine cupcakes. We had a few stalls after the morning service at our local church (where we meet) and raised £100 in an hour. Amazing! We pretty much sold out all our stalls!

I can’t remember if I mentioned before but on 16th January, I received my application form to join the GirlGuiding Association as an official member so I can start my leadership training to become a qualified Guider. Thought that was quite funny given what the blog post I had written on that day. :)

I had a few social things planned this week and one by one they seemed to go to pot as people got sick. However, I’m glad that one social event was able to happen as my lovely friend Ruth was up in the beautiful burgh and so we had a wee tweet up with our friend Lynn. After a meal, we went to the Dome (a very posh venue in Edinburgh) for a drink, I tried to take a pic of us all on Lynn’s phone and this was the result:

Not showing the best of my photography skills there, but oh well. We had a lovely night catching up. The only sad thing was that we didn’t spot any celebrities this time. It is hard to top meeting Alf though.

And so there we have it. Attempt number 3 at going to see The Descendants shall be made next week. I also really want to see the Muppets Movie. I think sadly I’ve missed my chance to see J.Edgar.

I’m also happy that NCIS has FINALLY made a return to Channel 5, wondering where The Mentalist has gone (it was on for 4 weeks, and then disappeared) and while waiting for those bought the first season of White Collar on DVD after a recommendation by my friend Anthony. I’m now waiting for season 2 to make it on to DVD here (sigh).

So that my bloggy friends is what has been going on in the life of the brunette koala. :)

What has been going on in your life?

The Updated Bucket List

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So a while ago I was looking back at journals from many years ago, and found a ‘Bucket List’ I’d written. Some stuff I’d written on my bucket list I no longer care about, but I thought I’d share the updated version – including some of the stuff I’ve ticked off. :)

1. to have a home that is welcoming (I hope had this from 2004-07 & wish to again)

2. to get a good education and a good degree at university (Class of 2006!)

3. to have lots of good friends (but more are welcome)

4. to visit South Africa, to work in South Africa (visited Durban in 2009)

5. to visit Ghana

6. to road trip across the USA & visit Wilmington, NC.

7. to visit Australia, to live in Australia (visited in 2007)

8. to hug a koala (Anzac Day 2007)

9. to learn to surf (2007 – though I’m sure I’ve already forgotten how to now!)

10. to get a tattoo

11. to get my navel pierced (done at New Year 2001, taken out the day of my abortion, and it’s not getting redone!)

12. to get a good job that helps other people & I enjoy doing (I’ve been lucky enough to have more than one!)

13. to dance en pointe (sponsored by animal wool & Boots Plaster strips)

14. to be able to do the splits

15. to find a 4-leaf clover

16. to see the artistic gymnastics competition live at an Olympic games

17. to visit Munich, Berlin & the Black Forest in Germany (visited Summer 2001)

18. to visit Paris, Verseilles & Lyon in France (visted Paris & Lyon in Summer 2001)

19. to visit Athens and other parts of Greece

20. to tour around Italy

21. to write a book

22. to visit New Zealand

23. to learn to ski & snowboard

24. to learn how to rock climb

25. to do something sporty for charity

26. to go to Barcelona, Madrid, Seville in Spain (visited Barcelona in April 2005)

27.to backpack around Europe (Summer 2001)

28. To camp out & drive a VW Camper van

29. To be on Top Gear (or better yet drive Top Gear test track!)

30. to learn how to play guitar or piano (or was learning until I damaged the tendons in my left wrist!)

31. to foster babies until they can be restored to their mothers.

32. to be on the set of Home & Away

33. to meet Ray Meagher (met November 2011)

34. To have a big party with bouncy castle, jelly and ice cream with all my friends young and older. Online friends included. :)

35. To give an inspirational talk at an event of some sort.

36. To cartwheel on as many beaches as possible.

37. To go on a spa day

38. To be in the Edinburgh Festival

39. To do a postgraduate qualification.

40. To make the world a better and more fun place to be in.

What’s on your bucket list? Is there anything you think I should add to mine?

The wall: crying out to God

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Of all the books in the bible, the two near the middle are my favourites. The Book of Proverbs for it’s straight up wisdom and common sense, and the Book of Psalms for it’s rawness, comfort and honesty.

Most of the time in the Psalms, it starts off positive, laments in the middle and ends with a resolve to remember the bigger picture.

I’m sure for some of my readers, you might think those verses are a little bit nutty. But over the last 4 years they’ve meant a great deal to me, and they went on my wall with another excerpt from Psalms…which is also on my wall but apparently I forgot to include it in my picture taking. Anyway, it says:

O Lord, hear me as I pray
Pay attention to my groaning
Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God, for I pray to no one but you.
Listen to my voice in the morning, Lord.
Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly

Psalm 5:1-3

What I love about the Psalms, is that there is no pretending. Sometimes I think Christians make out to other Christians that we should be joyfully taking all that is put against us. The Psalms tell me different. The Psalms say ‘be honest with how you feel’.

Let those emotions out.

It’s ok to feel whatever you’re feeling.

It’s what you do with what you’re feeling that counts.

 I’ve learned over the years that there are a lot of things that could happen in my life that would make fears realised. Bad things happen. People get sick. People die. People get taken away from us in other ways. Sometimes we struggle, we fear, we are desperate, it can seem like there is no hope. This thing we call life can lose it’s purpose and all seem totally pointless. Why bother trying to do good when it seems like there is so much evil, so much disaster that we can’t explain ‘why’.

In all of it, I’ve had to put my faith in God. I know that’s not going to stop the bad stuff.

It’s going to help me get through the bad stuff.

Sometimes I’m crawling through to the other side, rather than walking with my head high. It’s having peace to stay calm to get through the scary and tough times.

It’s getting through to the other side that counts.

That takes grit and courage and strength and encouragement.