That pretty much sums it up. I don't think I'll miss blogging all that much. I'll miss email though. But I have my moby, so friendlys can message me - this may or may not mean you... coz i aint gonna post my mobile number on my blog!
I hope you have a great week!
I hope I have a great week... and the rest of the Poatina inhabitants and visitors.
A week is a long time. Ehhhhhh... it's all good.
Stupid dial up internet cut me out... sooo unreliable. I actually attempted to post the below entry at 5:45pm on Wednesday... but noooooo. Silly SACS. At least it's working now...
I have to fly on an aeroplane tomorrow... not a fan, but you get that. Poatina for a week. I'll miss Tim. And at least only miss one church. But I'll miss Tim. I've decided not to take my flying tablets - they make me too sleepy, and I'm tired enough as it is. But I hope I don't get too nervous about it all. I'm not sure what the deal is with my flying fear. I'm not sure if it's about the plane crashing, or the confined space, or what. I trace it back to flying to Honkers (Hong Kong) in 1998, and my eating disorder, fear of driving, starting year 12, and how close the plane actually flies to the buildings at the old HK airport - freaky!! But it's since that flight that I've been uneasy I think. Lots of things on top of each otehr amounting to a bad overall flying experience and holiday. I don't like Hong Kong - too smelly, too dirty, too crowded. But then you go, wouldn't that describe London? A place I love? Aw well, who can understand the human mind?!
i burnted my hand at work this evening... owwy. and then i held it under a tap for ages, and then in a bowl of water, and then a big container of water. and it still hurt. so howie suggested i put butter on it, so we did. and then i got home and showed my mum, and she said me showing her made her stomach squirm, and i said we put butter on it, and she said that's the WORST thing you can do or something - oil isn't good for it anymore. so then she put ice on it (contrary to howie's first aid advice and action) and then i put cream on it. and it still hurts :)
that's three times i've burnt myself on the oven at work!
and meanwhile i won TWO games of pool today!
i forgot how much i like being cold more than being hot. hmmm... not that it's hot yet, but you can feel the potential in the air. when you're cold you can always put more clothes on, but when you're hot, there's nothing you can do. at least i'm going to tassie for a week! but i love summer for the beach and the water, and the sunshine, and the tan! and it's another long hair in a ponytail kinda summer. been a while since that for me. oh, but hot away from water is not the funnest.
rocky got angry at me yesterday :) all i ate was a banana, half a glass of orange juice, an apple, half a scoop of strawberry gelato, and a glass of apple juice. whoops. and eating breakie this morning made me feel queasy still. silly nervous butterflies. don't know why i'm still nervous today!
i think i drove about 100 kms over the past two days, and i only travelled within the suburbs of thornleigh to asquith. oh and to st ives once too. but still.
it's hard not too get lost and confused in all the busyness. i found that yesterday. i think i get too goal-orientated at the expense of people i work with - i'm not sure. sometimes it feels like that though.
Kaia and Dana go to poatina today. i go on thursday with howie. so there'll be no blogging - coz Poatina (or poetryland as one fine friend calls it) i don't think has easily accessible internet (mawwww...).
i slept through two alarms this morning - my 6am one and my 6:26am one too. Actually not slept through, but turned alarm off, in full expectancy of me getting up after doing that. luckily i woke myself up at 6:58am, so it was a bit of the hoorah coz i wasn't running heaps late. I got to phil's spot on 8am. then i borrowed timothy's car from the station and went food shopping at Hornsby. I hate tim's car (sorry tim). It doesn't like me. It konked out 4 times as I tried to reverse out of my westfield parking space - not happy jen. I got all shaky and stuff, coz there was this huge queue of people behind me. and then on the way out i almost hit another lady's car coz i was just wanting to get out of that parking station. then to the office to drop of food. then to the fruit market to buy apples. then to the office to pick up food. then to the cafe to drop off food. then to church to pick up the key i forgot to get when with phil. then to the station to leave tim's car and catch the train to work. then to the office to do work. then to westfield again to do more shopping and banking. then to the cafe to talk to steve and say hi to people. then to the office to work. then to the station to go home. then sit down for a bit. then walk to tim's to pick up the falcon power. then to my house to go to sleep. but deb's bible study will be there, and they'll be all loud and up late. so it's been a day. it sure has. bring on sunday!!! (sorry tim i don't hate your car - i just like it better when it works)
dreams are fun things. i just woke up from the best dream - it was very cool coz me and tim bought this awesome house (with all our money, and all our heaps marriedness). but it was the coolest house. rex sold it to use, and had shown us through it. i think bel had furnished some of it, coz i remember her handwriting on some of the little bits and pieces around the place. another part of my dream involved me and cathy bell running around Sydney at all hours of the morning trying to avoid scary people, and find a maccas. riiiight.
i love having dreams (mostly, coz the scary ones suck). I was talking to luke and kaz on saturday night about dreams, and luke was reminded of my dream from 1999 where he'd had a baby, and bart had thought the baby looked like him. we were all at supper in kirri's room, and tim had enough of the baby and almost put it's head through the wall. also running around the streets of thornleigh in pink dressing gowns (definitly influenced by luke and tim's pink teabag adventures). i think too tom's blog reminded me of recurring dreams - i had lots of flying ones (i fly doing breaststroke), and the one's where you can't quite open your eyes, or you can't quite run when you really need to. my scary dreams though are tornado ones. tornados freak me out - and so they're included in many of my nightmares :(
but dreams are fun, coz you wake up and if they were heaps realistic (well to you anyway) you can't tell for a minute if they were real or not. i think that maybe (coz i haven't done any psychology so really i don't know) it's a way of your brain debriefing itself after the day. so very often, although my dreams are totally left field, i can tend to trace it back to something that i'd been thinking about, something that happened that day or something that someone had spoken about that day. i think that's also pretty tricky. meanwhile the whole concept of a dream and how that works is beyond me!! i'm just happy to have them :)
i'm not quite sure what i'm about to write about - all i know is i have to coz the "blog police" were on to me today for not updating my blog quick enough :p
anyway, had an awesome time in the cafe this arvo - real quality time with the young people, and other workers. like howie said, it gave the sense of the cafe running as it should be, and that the young people were treating and seeing the team as peers - which is a good thing. it was just a great atmosphere, and lots of fun, and I wish i had a bigger and better vocabulary to describe it all!
wasted a good two hours of potential sleep last night by watching "The Bachelor III" with Debs. Coz season finale, and wanted to see who won... very strange concept i think. This guy proposes to this chick (he picked the right one though in me and Debs expert opinion) after knowing her for 2 months, and after having pashed all these other girls for 2 months just to see who the 'one' is. It's just bizarre the things people do. It's so not right! But, I guess, shame on us for watching it and getting sucked in.
i love playing my flute. (I seem to love a lot of things today). it brings me so much closer to God i think. and i like laughing at myself stuffing up when i play too. but there's not much better than chucking on a worship cd and playing along to it, and worshipping the living God!
i had a chat with God tonight about the Bible and where I read most and stuff. I think I focus too much on Paul's letters - i mean they're all good! but i don't get into the gospels enough, and so don't know Jesus enough, and so don't know the God that I've given my life to as well as i could or should. But i love the psalms and isaiah and stuff too. i love it's meatyness. so yeh, God and i decided that i'm gonna look more closely into the gospels and stop being so paul happy.
you know when you've been to a 'sleepover' and get little to no sleep on an uncomfortable couch or the floor, and the next day it's just yik and a shower doesn't make you feel clean?! last night i accidently stayed up late and now there's a bit of the seediness today. i got home from youth group at about 11:15pm (not too bad) - and we discovered tennis with actual racquets and tennis balls works real well in the Red Room - seriously!, anyway, i got home and chatted to Deb a bit, coz we thought Dad had disappeared. But he just wasn't home yet. And then i stayed up to watch AFL semi of Brisbane vs Adelaide, although Deb told me already that Brisbane had won. I made it to about 12:30am and fell asleep on the couch. Then i woke up at 2:45pm to an infomercial about something or other that will improve your fitness. So i didn't end up knowing how they won and by how much, which was the point of staying up. you see, I tend to go to bed by 10pm most night, coz of waking at 6am. So 2:45am is a huge deal to me :) Although technically I'd already fallen asleep. Oh well. And i have a 21st tonight too. Stu-boy.
its so exciting! sandals and jeans weather. My favourite time of the year. I love my jesus shoes.
our office photocopier 'peter' is a jolly old chap, but he's thick as a brick. and he doesn't like to work. and so today when he was being silly, i impersonated him. and unfortunately i did that in front of howie, and that was embarrassing. to say the least. it was a very poor impersonation effort. but i laughed so hard i cried. i laughed coz it was funny, and coz i was embarrassed, and coz howie always makes me laugh. so now that event is immortalised on howie's noticeboard at work, and on his makeshift blog. how embarrassing. mind you, at least noone else was there!
i can't figure out how to create hyperlinks. sorry howie.
i feel like having a whinge. but i always whinge. i am a whinger. i'm always complaining about stuff... all kinds of stuff. i wonder why. attention? self-pity is uplifting in some whacky way? wallowing helps? i don't know. sometimes things just get on top of me. work. church. gap. friends. family. tim. relationship with God. i dunno. and then i always end up unleashing a big ol'fashioned whinge. i wish i didn't though. sometimes the way things are confuse me. i don't understand a lot of things and it makes me confused or frustrated or angry or sad or hurt. i don't understand God. but i want to. but i can't. and that makes me sad. and it makes me awe-filled, coz i don't think i really want to be able to understand God. i want to understand what matters. and i think that will do me. at least Jesus understands me. even though i don't!
i'm feeling the pressure to upkeep my blogging and make it worth a read (not that i'd know how to do that, coz it's not like my life has much interest in it), all because of Howie linking my blog on his makeshift halfpipe. And all these random people I don't know may be curious enough to see who this Jenny is... well, HI!!!! Thanks for visiting. don't feel you have to stay, but you're more than welcome too. BYE!!
I'm so excited Bad Boys 2 is out in a week!!! Sam & I are so excited. We're sooo going to see it on Thrusday. It'll probably end up heaps dodgy, but who cares!! I miss Sam (don't worry Tim, not like that). He was my bestfriend for 3 years or something, and now I don't really get to see him muchly anymore. But I love when i do get too. We always have so much fun together. He's the kinda of friend where you can do the same thing everytime you play, and it doesn't matter. Our thing is slurpees, lolly bananas, the gorge, dvd at his house. Oh and Brooklyn too, but that's other people as well. Our friendship has been through a lot (fat history) and I'm so thankful to God that he's pulled us through all the yukky stuff, and got us where we are. It's strange reflecting on friendships and seeing people who've moved in and out of my life, or me in and out of theirs!, and how everything's always changing. sometimes it's kinda sad, like with Jo, but other times it's positive coz moving on to bigger and better things. but i think it's true that everyone leaves an impression on your life. hmmmm....
one of my good friends is leaving work. i guess we sorta all saw it coming and stuff, but it's still a bit sad. i'll miss seeing her regularly. i met her through work-related stuff, and although i haven't known her heaps long (only since January this year), she's become a good mate, and good (mostly) workmate. i'm not sure how i feel about her decisions, but i guess it's not really up to me at all!! i just hope she's doing whatever she's doing for right reasons, and not because of other people's opinions or pressure. it got me thinking about my future and other related stuff. i think i still see work as a fill-in until i get married and have kids. i really have no career ambitions, and essentially, I guess i'm just waiting for a certain someone to finish uni and get a bit older. when we had 3-year planning day, it was an interesting mix of things happening in my head as to where i'd be in three years. I probably won't be married by then (dammit!), but hopefully soon after... and it's funny how too i struggle with wanting to be a kooshy Christian (coz so many people are, including me) and wanting to do what God wants. sometimes i think its not fair the way some people have so much work to do, while others, still saved and loved by God, get to live in their nice big houses, with their four cars, and their big-screen tvs, and their holiday houses (i promise I'm not thinking of anyone in particular). but that's me being worldly - i don't really want that stuff anyway. but still it doesn't seem heaps fair.
what a joke! if they want us to use it (and 70% of people don't) why do they hike the prices up and have such dodgy services?? i don't get it.
how come sometimes it can feel so easy to be "in step" with God, and sometimes you feel sooo very far. i struggle so much with the word "feel". i rarely feel close to God, in terms of how I think i should feel?! Doesn't seem to make sense. I guess i have a picture in my mind of how I should feel if i'm right there with God - based on other people's experiences? - and i often don't feel that. when i feel closest to God, I always end up crying - whether through godly sorrow or complete joy. neither of those are a bad thing! but i don't let myselfget to that point enough. i don't like to cry. i really don't. and i will avoid it at all costs. I remember once at a state conference last year, i did a listening to God workshop, and after a while we were asked to say what we heard God saying to us. Everyone came out with things like 'you're special', 'i love you', 'i'm proud of you' etc etc. I heard God telling me i needed to be broken. That was pretty powerful coz godly sorrow was being thrown in my face a lot at that time. i hate getting into a pattern with QTs. i mean it's a helpful (not good c:) habit to have, but it so easily becomes dry for me. to go through the same routine and come out no different. then i feel lost and disconnected and afraid that i'm not really saved at all. Then I know that God is bigger than all that, even than the bogeyman (for all you veggietales fans), and He loves me and nothing NOTHING can seperate me from the love of Jesus Christ (Praise GOD!!). But so often I crave that "feeling" of God. And then coz I can't, I feel discouraged. Keep growing me Lord.
Meanwhile, as a different comment, struggle is the much with boundaries. I like my boundaries. I like to put boundaries around myself so no one can get in. I cage myself so I won't get hurt. But I find that when i'm weak, I let people walk all over me, and I don't have the courage to stand up for myself, or what I believe in, or what I believe, or KNOW, to be right. It's not always their fault. My failure to be right hurts myself and them. Often i'm just too tired, or in the moment when it's easy to say a hurtful thing or do something unhelpful, or it makes me feel better or nice for that moment at least, or i don't know. But thankyou God that although there are always consequences, you remove my transgressions away from me as far as east is from west (that's a long way!).
My cat is a meany. My mumma found him 'playing' with a bird at our back door this afternoon. when we got up this morning there were feathers all over the back yard, well not all over, but there were lots. and then we figure this must have been the same bird, coz it has a lot of feathers missing. i don't know how to care for a bird. dad took it to the vet, but the vet was closed. so now it's living in a cardboard box, with a little plastic water container and it's sitting on the back verandah table with a towel partially over the top of the box, so it can get out if it wants to. but it's seems perfectly content just to sit in the box. the poor little thing. my stupid cat. although, stupid bird for not flying away. isn't that the point of the bell on the collar thing? i hope it heal up all good, and can go back home soon. and i hope it's not a mummy or daddy bird that's meant to be feeding it's babies. mum reckons it's some kind of dove. i call it birdy.
i just cleaned my room. well really i dusted it from top to bottom, coz that's what cleaning my room means. i don't really have to put stuff away coz i never leave things lying around (!!!). but sooo much dust, and all up my nose. you know when you mow the lawn, and you come inside after, and blow your nose, and all that comes out is dirt and grit that got sucked up tehre while you were breathing as you mowed the lawn?! well, it was the same as that, but with all the dust my room was hiding all around the place. but i did a thorough job. i think i'll make it six monthly. but i'll dust the floor more than that, coz that building up is gross. and i fell off the stool as i was dusting the top of my wardrobe, and caned myself. good bruise already coming up on my leg. it hurt but. and then the stool bottoms had put black marks all over my floor boards so i had to scrub them off too. silly unco. i didn't cry though! or swear! (not that i normally swear in situations like that anymore, but i can think of a number of people who would have, and used to would have).
So many people getting married... I was talking to Andrew from Blind about it (being marriage) and how it's a big step you don't want to rush into and all that. Earlier, Shazz was talking about how people tell you it won't be easy and it's a lot of work, but she found it easy (maybe that's just her and Phil!). And Scottie was talking about how it'll be exciting but a bit scary and a big change (duh). I wonder what Nat's thinking - I know she's totally stressed about the wedding night - she's so cute! But I wonder how worried she is, or excited (Nat excited, yeh nah!), or what about the whole concept. And too coz of Mel & Darren, and Mel & Ben, and Jo & Pat. Me and Debs are lagging way behind. I think too much emphasis is put on making sure you're ready to marry. Of course preparing is important and commitment. And I guess I've never been married, so I don't know. But surely it wasn't created by God to be this arduous! I think wedding's would be so much fun to plan, besides all the stress and bother and cost.
From now on, I'm not going to blog while at work - coz that is dodgy. That's what i think. So this is the last time - I promise.
I think I'm getting a cold - ba baow. I blame Tim. Not coz of anything, just coz :)
I really don't have anything interesting to write at the moment... I did yesterday but I didn't end up blogging.
well, i figured its ok if it's not $84.95 - I paid $63.96 instead!! Bargain!! And it was all thanks to wonderful Tim who reminded me that I (he, since technically I had given it to him) had a 20% off Borders voucher! Score! And then when I bought "Fellowship of the Ring" this morning, I got ANOTHER 20% off Borders voucher... so i'll give that back to Tim. See, it's all good :)
Our church is doing this prayer thing for the morning service people (plus me and Tim), where you pray the prayer for the Ephesians (Ephesians 3:14-21) each day for all this month for our church family. I think it's a pretty good idea - because God can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine - but i find it hard to read prayers sometimes. I like to just speak my own words, you know... or know the words to speak. So I guess if i memorise that passage, then I won't have to complain anymore!
And I'm looking forward to Bible study tomorrow night coz Phil's taking us through the women bit in 1 Timothy (1 Tim 2:9-15). Should be rather interesting. I wonder how the girls will take to it, and how deep Phil will go with it. You can't just pass off everything as "cultural" in the Bible. But where's the limit??
I constantly find myself putting my desires before God's, or in front of what would please God. I talk myself out of exercising integrity in the moment of choice. Most of the time, the battle is won (by Satan) before it even starts, like I'm resigned to the fact that I'll lose, so what's the point denying it. In that moment, I'm not in God's strength, but my own, and of course I'm doomed to failure! I don't hate my sin enough. But thankfully, so very thankfully, Jesus knows my struggles and knows when I stuff up. And He's taken all that, He became all that, so I can be with God for all eternity. That is huge! I am that loved! I am a daughter of the Most High God. Amazing.
"so is My word that goes out from My mouth: it will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it"
Praise God!
If it feels wrong to pay $84.95 for the 4-disc 'Fellowship of the Ring' DVD, does it then feel right to buy it when you realise you have a 20% off Borders discount voucher??? $68 - not bad!!
And I forgot to have on that list my and Erin's insane laughing fit on the floor in the foyer of Brigidine College at St Ives after Foundations one night - oh that was hilarious, funny to the point of painful, and beyond. We didn't stop laughing for about 15mins, and then giggled all the way home in the car. And i'm not even sure what started it. It may have been Tim Shaw playing the vacuum like a digeridoo (spelling?!) and saying something inappropriate. I remember getting in trouble off people though. Lots of funny moments like that with Erin. Can't help it!