Tripodious Maximus

Hello Boxing Day sales, and helloooooo new tripod!

I've been looking for a tripod for a while, but haven't been sure about what features I needed and what price I was willing to pay.  But when I went shopping today I found this one at a good price, it's the height that I want it (which is my eye level!) and is easy to use and adjustable.  It even came with a carry bag!  Excitement.  I decided it needed a name and have thus dubbed it Tripodious Maximus.  Welcome aboard to the Maz Photography team!

Why do I need a tripod you ask?  I guess the main reason is night shots - when you need to take a photo without the flash and with a longer exposure and you need the camera to be perfectly still.   There have been many times when I have spotted the perfect photo opportunity, only to have been unable to capture it properly.  So I'm looking forward to lots of good times with the tripod.  Keep an eye on my photography blog to see the developments.

Merry Christmas

I was pretty excited about finding this Christmas tree for $2.50 at Spotlight :D I just wanted something small, but I had to have a Christmas tree!

Although Christmas did come pretty quickly as always (sorry for all who missed out on a Christmas card!), I did manage to feel the Christmas spirit quite a lot this year through a very simple means: music!  I have two concerts on DVD which I listened to (and sometimes watched) over and over, as well as the soundtrack for one of those concerts.  They're both Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square with guest performers Sissel, and Brian Mitchell Stokes and Edward K. Herrman respectively.

I think it was a good, solid two weeks leading up to Christmas that I pretty much listened to Christmas music only and it really helped me to focus on the joy of the season and the spirit of rejoicing in the Saviour's birth.

Another thing that helped me to focus on the true meaning of Christmas was some opportunities I had to give service.  Nothing huge, just a few little opportunities that reminded me that the reason we give at Christmas time is to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  I thought about why I was doing it, and if someone had asked I would have smiled and shrugged and said "Because the Saviour was born!" and that really was it.  God's gift to us of His Son inspires the giving spirit in us.  

You can read about some of my family Christmas traditions in my post on Jess's blog, which we were true to once again this year.

And here's the traditional prawn cocktail I was talking about with my aunt's AMAZING home-made dressing :D Even better than I remember.

Hoping you all had a joyful and meaningful Christmas this year :)

If I were a recipe, what would I be?

At my work recently for our yearbook we were each asked to come up with a personal "recipe" for ourselves, for which at first I had no idea what to write.  But weeks later, inspiration finally struck me.  They didn't end up including them in the yearbook, but here is mine for your reading pleasure...

Ingredients:
3 cups of nice
a pinch of feisty
1/2 cup of procrastination
a handful of optimism
a dash of perfectionism
3 teaspoons of creativity

Directions:
Mix all ingredients together carefully, ensuring all measurements are exact, and leave in the sun until warm.


And voila!  You have me!

What's your personal recipe?

Practise makes perfect...or does it?

It seems I have this strange ability to get better at my talents by not practising for a long time!  Take piano for example.  I would practise and practise and make only minimal progress and improvement, but after a few months of not playing a song I would sit down at the piano and suddenly play it better than ever!  So it also seems with juggling.  It was many months ago that I started teaching myself to juggle, close to a year ago even.  It took a lot of practise to get anywhere, but slowly, slowly the number of consecutive catches increased.  I think my absolute highest record may have been 18.  Well here I am a long time later without even touching the juggling balls.  I get back from the beach one afternoon, and with three tennis balls in my hands I think to myself "I wonder..."  And voila!  I can suddenly juggle!  I didn't count how many I caught as I wasn't expecting such success, I couldn't believe that I just kept going!  But my rough estimate is about 30.  Just like that!  Weird.

The X-files: Insect Invasion

I would like to publicly name and shame the little insects that, for so long, were destroying my strawberries.  They are evil little aphids!!  Firstly they destroyed my lettuce plants, and then moved onto my strawberries, living on the leaves and stalks of the plants.  For weeks my plants would produce the little white flowers, which were soon to become beautiful, red strawberries.  But before they were able to swell and grow, that part of the plant would die.  I was all sadness.

Luckily, sometimes tragedies in our lives can turn into blessings.  My decaying tulip, which had died before it reached the flowering stage, apparently became quite desirable to these little aphids and they all seemed to gather on this one plant.  So with an evil laugh I grabbed the can of aphid spray and sprayed them all! Mwahaha!  And I honestly haven't had any aphid trouble since.  Instead, I have been blessed with this:

Helloooooooo strawberry milkshakes! With fresh strawberries, mmmm tastes so good!!

Having said that, I discovered today that I need to make an additional note to myself: 

Always pick the strawberries as soon as they're ripe!  (I suspect fowl play). And thus, the circle of life continues...

From the Mouth of a Donkey

Had a little scare yesterday when I looked at my blog and it appeared that 2 followers had abandoned me overnight! That was 30% of my total followers, gone at the same time!  Turned out to be a false alarm, but it inspired me to post this little clip...

If you would like to cheer me up, please become a follower by hitting the "Join this site" button on the right hand side of the page ---------->

And a big thank you to my 6 lovely dedicated followers :)

Horse Sense

Meet my new friend, Johnno.

Fine specimen, isn't he?  This is us right after we met...

After a brief introduction it was down to business, and I got on my high horse...

Couldn't show my face in the photo due to secret-spy-horse-training reasons.  That's all I'm allowed to say about that.  But needless to say, that's me on a horse.  I won't say when or where.

I will say that you can thank my lovely cousin for the awesome idea of trying out horse riding recently, on a beautiful sunny day.  For both of us, the last time we were on a horse was when we were much, much younger, and according to our conclusions we went together back then too.  With the number of years that had passed since then, this was pretty much like our first time on a horse. 

After some brief instructions on how to drive these things, we began our trek with the rest of the group.  About 5 or 10 minutes into the ride we got to a road which we had to cross.  Um, pretty scary moment in my life, especially when a truck just went past and then you're told it's time to cross the road on a horse you were just told how to control a short time earlier.  Sure, it wasn't a busy road, but still!  I survived though and continued on, enjoying the scenery and the fresh air and bonding with my noble steed.  Halfway in we tried a short moment of trotting.  This is when I concluded that they need to invent seat-belts for horses.  Having said that, it was pretty fun (aside from the ouch factor).  We also passed an emu farm where we discovered one of the horses is terrified of emus.  Interesting phobia!

Just before we get onto the beach I'm told that Johnno looooooves the water.  So much so, that he loves to roll in it any chance he gets.  I was instructed to keep him OUT of the water as much as possible, and if he looked like he was going down, get ready to jump!  Talk about adventure!!  Luckily, despite having a little splash, he did not decide to stop, drop and roll, and so I left the beach dry.  

That's when we took this great shot of Becky and her horse Patch, and me and Johnno (can you see Johnno trying to pull the reins away from me, yet again?? So cheeky!).

Well by the time we made it back at the end of the two hours, I could understand why in Old Western movies the cowboys always walked with a funny stance.  Pretty sure I was walking like that too.  Also pretty sure I wouldn't be sitting down for a while.  

Having said that it was pretty fun and a great experience, and I'd like to do more of the trotting next time, but after I've learnt the technique to do it without pain!  Actually what I'd really like is to go in a large open field and practise the acceleration, brakes and steering, just for fun ;)

All Curries Are Not Created Equal

Tonight after attending a concert by the Tasmanian Symphany Orchestra, I ate at an Indian restaurant.  I know, you’re all shocked, right? Wait…some of  you aren’t shocked? Oh, you must be getting confused with my love affair with Indian music and movies, aka Bollywood.  But Indian food for me is an entirely different story – one that usually ends in tears.  However, a couple of friends convinced me to try butter chicken about a year ago, and you know what? It did not taste like curry at all!  I could live with that. 

So tonight I ordered the tried and true, despite my friends telling me that korma and mango chicken are also not spicy.  A little note to any spiceophobics out there like me: that is false! We agreed to open our curries for general sampling at our table, so I tried them both, the korma wasn’t too bad but it certainly had me reaching for my water, but the mango chicken had a strong spice kick to it which kind of made me do this choke reaction in surprise.  So I was glad I stuck with the butter chicken, although it tasted more like tomato chicken, hmm…  But hey, it was definitely a fun evening!

Black Holes and Infinite Truths.

Tonight while I was relaxing and channel surfing, I came across a programme on SBS called "Who's Afraid Of a Big Black Hole?"  Can I first say that my brain nearly exploded as I started watching this.  I mean firstly, gravity, they said, is the effect of space and time around an object (e.g. the earth) bending, and essentially pushing us onto earth.  How the heck does time bend?  What a weird concept.  I simply cannot comprehend time as anything other than purely linear and constant, and intangible.  Having said that, I believe in Eternity.  I believe in God, who is a Being without beginning or end.  I don't comprehend it, but I believe it.  So firstly I find it fascinating that scientists also say that time has other dimensions than what we initially comprehend.

But onto the real mind-blowing stuff - black holes.  Essentially, black holes are known for sucking time and space out of the universe.  They are kind of invisible, being purely black because they emit no light.  Einstein's theory of relativity predicted the existence of black holes, but his calculations led to a big problem in physics - infinity.  In fact some later related calculations they showed led to an infinite number of infinities.  "Impossible" in physics.  One scientist said that it pretty much breaks the laws of physics as they know them.  "It's like a nervous breakdown of physics.  Something is infinitely wrong...nature is smarter than we are."  Nature, or is it really God? I vote the latter, and yes He definitely is smarter than we are! So, SO much smarter.

Near the end they asked all these scientists who had been studying, researching, making break-throughs in the understanding of black holes, one simple question.  "Have you ever seen a black hole?"  What do you think they all said? It was a universal "no."  So, the concept of believing entirely in something that you cannot see is not so bizarre after all.  And so why should a belief in God be so strange?  Newsflash: it's not.    These scientists cannot see black holes, but they can observe their effect on their surroundings.  I cannot see God, but I have seen His effects in the world around me - in my life.  I know He is real.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Nice t-shirt huh? Well actually, I made it myself.  Okay, not the tshirt, just the design on the front.  Cool eh?  But you know what, fashion design is a lot harder than I thought.  I probably won't quit my day job.  I had cut out three different rainbow shapes and sizes before I decided I had one that would work.  Funny how something looks great on the flat t-shirt, but once I tried it on I found the 3-dimensional figure changed things completely.  I actually pinned the rough shape of the third rainbow while I was wearing the t-shirt!  So once I was happy with it I hand sewed the shapes on, whilst watching "How to Train Your Dragon" for the second time.  Finally at 1 am I was done.

Here's a close-up of my amazing skills.  Does the cloud fabric look familiar?  Yep, it was left over from the cushion I made recently.  So why would I put so much effort into making this amazing shirt?

To wear at the rainbow themed Young Single Adult dance of course! Do you think I looked bright enough?

Weed Your Life

This week on my day off work I agreed to help mum with some weeding in her garden.  I started out with the peas which were pretty overgrown, and the weeds were intertwined with the plants.  I'll confess there were a few pea plant casualties.  It reminded me of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt 13:24-30, 36-43), where the man tells his servants to let the wheat (good stuff) and tares (bad stuff) to grow together because if they tried to remove the tares they might up-root the wheat also.  Not sure how this applies to the peas, but perhaps I'll take it a little slower next time.

Next I decided to tackle the strawberries.  Here's a little glimpse of how the strawberries were going.  

Mum has quite a large patch of strawberry plants, the benefits of which I have been enjoying for years.  But this year they've been left a little worse for wear.  With such a big patch and so many weeds, I wondered what kind of approach to take.  I decided that rather than trying to do a quick job over the whole large area, to instead start in one spot near the edge and work very thoroughly on that spot.  I might not get much done, but at least I know that my little cleared patch would produce good strawberries in the summer.  

So with this approach in mind I began the weeding, pulling out every little blade of grass, as well as the dead bits of the strawberry plants.  This brought a few more thoughts to my mind.  If I were to leave the dead parts on there, the rest of the plant would probably still grow fine, but by removing the bad parts it removes something which could stop the rest of the plant reaching it's full potential.  Like pruning, when we remove a bad or unnecessary part of a plant it means that it will no longer be hoarding the water or important nutrients that the rest of the plant needs.  Instead, the rest of the plant can grow larger and stronger, and produce more fruit.  Like our lives, we sometimes allow a few bad things to hang on.  It might be a bad habit or a guilty pleasure of which we don't want to let go, or it could be movies or music we have which contain some vulgarity, swearing, or immorality which effect us a little more each time.  Yet if we weed that out of our lives, the quality of the rest of our life improves and we are much more equipped to reach our full potential for happiness.

There's an audio talk by a great guy called John Bytheway, "Weed Your Brain; Grow Your Testimony," which compares the principles of gardening and weeding to our spiritual lives.  I think next time I do some weeding I'll take my iPod and listen to it again.  Oh, and in case you're wondering how I went, here's the result of mum's and my efforts (keeping in mind there's a few other plants down this end of the patch).  Not bad, huh?  Still a bit more work to do though.

At the police station...getting finger-printed...for the FBI

No, really.  There I was at the Glenorchy Police Station on Thursday getting finger-printed by a female officer.  They have a bench with a little strip across it, and she gets out a roller and paints black sticky ink all over it.  "Now just relax," she told me, "if you look away then you will be less likely to try to 'help' me, if you know what I mean."  Most of the crims in there just do their own, she tells me.  "Because they've done it so many times huh?" Yep.  In the toilets I attempt to wash the ink off with soap, but it sticks and is all over my previously clear nail polish.  Note to self: buy some wet wipes.

Backtrack a few days and I was on the internet looking up how to get a criminal history check from the USA, as I lived there for 18 months during my church mission, and I discover I must send my fingerprints to the FBI with a few forms and $18 USD.  Sounds like an organised crime job eh?  Why do I need a criminal history check?  Well, ask the Japanese consulate...yes, the plot thickens.  It's all part of an application for something called the "JET programme."  Kinda scary to think the FBI will have my fingerprints.  Hope I don't a have genetic-twin axe-murderer out there...

A Curly One

Decided to give the curling iron a go with my new haircut, I think it turned out well.  I shall now be gracing the op-shops in style!  It's gonna be a good day...haha.

Introducing Will: The Local Lindisfarne Goat

Once upon a time (a few weeks ago) in a land far away (my neighbourhood of Lindisfarne), I was out taking a walk.  I walked a different way to what I usually did, just for a change.  As I was walking along the street I noticed a sign which started with "My name is Will, I like eating."  As I kept walking I thought, what a weird sign!! As I looked over my shoulder I also thought wait, was that a tennis court?? Out of curiosity I turned back to have a look, and noticed something white and fluffy moving hear the fence.  I was wondering if this was some kind of vicious scary dog or something, but as I got closer I realised - it was a goat!  His enclosure looks like it once was a small tennis court, but is now overgrown with grass. So just like the sign said, I got some green leafy branches from outside of the fence and fed it to the Will, which he chomped right up with a happy grin.  I couldn't believe it, a goat in Lindisfarne!! How random.  I was pretty delighted with my new friend.  I have been back a few times to visit, including the time I took a bag of grassy weeds from mum's garden which he ate right up by the hand-full (as pictured below), and seemed quite disappointed to learn there wasn't any more.  Whenever I leave he always says goodbye - or maybe it's "Where are you going? Come baaaaaack!"

It burrrrrrrns....

Today at work I was unfairly attacked by an evil cup of noodles.  I had taken off the lid, put in the flavour sachets and filled the cup with hot filtered water, just like I have done on many previous occasions, and was carrying it over to the table, when suddenly my hand was wet and it burrrrrrned!! Ow!! I managed to make it to the table to put them down, but decided I had better minimise the damage A-SAP and so I put it under running cold water for a while.  The following picture shows what my hand looked like after this:

Can you see the spill mark?? Ouch! I made sure I kept my hand cold through the afternoon by applying a bit more cold water when needed.  By some miracle (and prayer) the redness had cleared up in a few hours time when I left work this afternoon, and you can now barely notice it at all.  In fact, aside from the initial burn I felt very little pain. Very different from my last experience of hot water burn...yes, there's been more than one (a few years back now).  Last time the burn area was much smaller, but it hurt so much it was nearly unbearable!  So in the end I was pretty blessed this time to escape a similar fate.  In revenge, I ate the evil noodles.

So the moral of this story is: don't overfill your noodle cup!

Modest is Hottest

You've heard the tag line before, but let's admit it - it's true.  No one really respects someone who bares it all for the world to see.  When you dress modestly you allow others to focus on your best features, such as your smile.  I saw this photo of Amy Adams (Enchanted, Night at the Museum II) in a magazine, where they point out the good and bad in hollywood fashion, and this was on the good list!  I have no idea what the back looks like, could be a whole different story, but based on this photo she is wearing a rather modest dress and looks great.  Way too skinny though, but that's a different story ;)

Gambling...why?

I happened to be flicking channels the other night when I came across this - literally at the very right moment...weird!  But I loved it.  It's funny that it's meant to a completely ridiculous idea, turning Aussies against the Melbourne Cup.  I bet the Melbourne Cup paid them to say that even.  But seriously people, what is it all about, really?  It's about money, and greed, and corruption.  That why the famous horse Phar Lap was most likely poisoned, because when it comes to money people don't play fair.  And drinking, let's not forget the senseless drinking.  But hey, it's all in good fun, right?

The burgers probably ARE better at Hungry Jacks...

So I was running a little late the other week, and decided to grab dinner from Macca's.  So I ordered a quarter pounder through the drive through and when I took it out of the box to eat, it looked like this.  Someone didn't slap that thing together properly!

So I've started a blog - who knew?

Yep it has been many a year since the whole personal blog phenomenon hit the cyber world, yet I have never jumped on the band-wagon - until now.  Sure, I've made blogs for various groups, and then my own photography blog, but this is the first one just about me.  Or my thoughts and/or life experiences.  A bit of thinking out loud perhaps.  Which could be slightly disturbing...haha!  But life is an experiment, so I'm giving this a go.  Look out!

Free time!

Today I have a day off work, happens from time to time due to varying rostered hours at work, I always love a day off work! Okay, so what if I don't get paid? I get a day during the week to get many things done, as well as take out some time for myself, or "sharpen the saw."

This morning I went for a short run (I can only manage short runs in my current unfit state, but it's enough to take effect), stopped to take a few photos along the way of the early spring blossoms, and make a great breakfast of fried egg on toast, topped with fried ham and tomato and garnished with parsley.  On a work day I usually manage toast, or grab an "Up & Go" drink on my way out the door, so a good breakfast is always exciting.

I've been getting into sewing lately, and the other day just finished the second pillowcase I'd been meaning to do for ages, so I'm going to head to Spotlight and buy some material to cover the cushion inserts I bought a little while back, seeing as I have no cushions on my couch in my bachelorette pad.  I've got a list of many more things to do on my day off today, we'll see how many I get done! Don't worry, relaxing is in there too :)