3rd Sunday in Lent

Walked home from GURPS in a heavy rain. My flatmates behaved like a pair of buttocks because I was soaked to the skin. What annoyed me most is that my shoes were damp. I don’t think they have started leaking yet. I think instead it was an accumulation of several days skin water settling in the shoes. Still I need to dry out my shoes properly when I’m not wearing them. Further investigation suggests that water is seeping in between the suede and the sole. Perhaps I should rub the interstice with dubbin.

I heard rumours about a shy man having problems at work. No details, no concrete gossip. It is somebody who I have worked with previously. He is in a position of authority and not liked by his staff because he is too shy it make a rapport with them. When I worked there I found him a bit stand-offish. He snubs people on the street. I am less shy than that, still I can sympathise.

Yew Tree Woman has had further proof that her body is disintergrating as she can only watch.

Bought some sausages for a barbecue which never eventuated. Instead they were recycled for a potluck lunch with the church music group. Not really disappointed as it meant I got to stay home and watch the first episode of the first season of the New Battlestar Galactica series. I was impressed with the mini-series and hope that I will feel the same about the series.

Graeme very agitated at church. Apparently he threw stones at his supervisor’s car at workshop and his money has been suspended for a month. He has been visiting parishioners near the community house on Grandview Crescent. I’m impressed by that. He was unwell and wriggly, openly lamenting during the prayers. Several people spoke to me after church about my ability to support him through the service.

After lunch, late in the afternoon I visited Harry to participate in the Lord of the Rings game he is creating. I left at ten to eleven, and the game still had to be resolved between the last two players. By the time I left we had been going for six hours, plus a break to watch Top Gear. I will rule out doing that again. I’m not happy about losing a whole evening to board games. Perhaps the game, like Lord of the Rings Risk needs a more clear and precise end.

Morning tea; potluck lunch; and then pizza with Harry for tea. Feeling rather full by the end of it.

beginning, again.

Checked google and I can’t find the webpage that made me think that William Wordsworth wrote that quote.

The archives catalogue on computer has been acting up. We have zipped it into digestible bits and posted it the catalogue’s sponsor in Auckland. He says that he has come across some bad entries, including one that with some investigation has a print-out dating back to 2002. We feel that there is a slur on our reputation for data entry.

Initiation for first years. The school of ministry began theirs with a conch shell horn. The residents had an egg fight and made the freshers run around the college with an ice cream stuck to their heads. It’s one of the annual traditions.

not Wordsworth

The Open Polytechnic semester should have started for the year. It works on a website forum rather than teleconference, as far as I can tell. I have no idea what is going on. Somebody will make noises eventually about what we should be doing. The lecturer was in Dunedin briefly last week. There was no chance to meet her. I expect I will eventually.

My mother rang last night. She found the competition quote in Tennyson’s big poem In Memoriam. So I have sent away the wrong answer! Posted a second answer.

If it’s any consolation I prefer The Prelude by Wordsworth over Tennyson.

Wordsworth

“Ring out a thousand wars; ring in a thousand years of peace”.

One of the harder competition questions I have tried to answer on ConcertFM. It took me about five pages of googling until I found the answer. The question had given the clue of being Shakespeare, Wordsworth or Tennyson. I thought Wordsworth was the most likely choice, flourishing both during a turn of centuries and in a time troubled by the clash of nations at war. More so than the other two choices given.

The showers were out of order at the gym – how will I live with myself? I smell manly!

Heard a car brake suddenly and went outside to see if it was one of my cats. There was a body lying on the pavement, it must have got that far and died as the people in the car were there still getting out of there SUV. Apparently it ran out in front of them. A mature white cat tipped with ginger fur. It was not one with which I was familiar. A collar tag named it Jerry. The phone number proved to be the house in front of which it died, our neighbours the joiners. The owner came out, cradled the dead creature and took it away.

2nd Sunday in Lent

Books due back at the library. Spent the afternoon finishing two of them:

The Last Light of the Sun: pleasantly elegaic retelling of the story of Alfred the Great by Guy Gavriel Kay. His version of the Norsemen, the Erlings, was rather harsh. From what I’ve read of the sagas it was not inaccurate. His Celts and Englisc; the Cyngael and the Anglcynn was enjoyable to read. Not Kay’s best stand-alone novel – that is probably Tigana – it had moments of better-than-average high fantasy style.

The Eyre Affair: temporal anomalies and literary absurdities clash in the first of a series of books that have proven to be popular. What more can be said about about a book that has a century long conflict in the Crimea, Baconian street evangelists, gang clashes between the surrealists and the pre-Raphaelites; not to mention pet dodos? This proved to be a real hoot, must reserve the second in the series: Lost in a good book, which is literally true.

Living in borrowed time

The residents are trickling back into the college. Next week is the beginning of the new semester. On Chapelside they refer to it as ‘Lent Term’, a pale attempt by anglophiles to emulate Oxbridge. The university is semestered and secular. Lent Term has never been observed there.

I thought one of the other gym users was familiar. He is a Dunedin principal in whose school I did six months’ voluntary work when I first came to Dunedin. I found his name on the website for St. Clair School. I got a ride home out of it. He lives nearby.

I have been playing around with an eclectic language that I’m designing. It’s very relaxing.

The cats are objecting to the fact I only put two cans of catfood in the shopping trolley last Saturday. There is only dry catfood left in the kitchen.

chruch complex: faith reversed

More carpet laying at the college. I was glad to escape the fishy smell of the glue.

Yew Tree Woman has been given a clean bill of health. We are all celebrating with her.

The students are back. The quiet is over.

Heavy dew in the morning; harbinger of what is to come.

The residents are slowly trickling back into the college for the year. I will avoid having lunch in the quad from now on, it’s too distracting. Fortunately if I want to sit outside I can go around to the staff area behind the kitchen.

Noise coming through the concrete partition was not from the the machinary of the maintenance staff’s workshop next door. It was from the drums of the music room at the other end of the Hewitson Wing. I passed a black-clad grungy youth in the passage way carrying drumsticks. Tempted to ask nicely if he could restrict his drumming to more socially acceptable times – like outside work and study hours. Didn’t.

The Helen Hercus room is being painted a buttery yellow colour and the smell permeates the building. Fortunately I don’t have a strong sense of smell. Other people assure me that it is making them queasy.

There are road workers on Hatfield Street relaying the camber. I stepped over the cuts in the concrete after they had begun and feared briefly that I would slip through or that the hillside would slide away.

A friend had a mammogram this week. She was called in for further tests. She has five grains of salt formed in one of her breasts. On such things cancers can begin. She was not emotionally prepared for this. There will be more tests.

We can only save ourselves.

the Bechami and the Rugbi-hai

I have been considering the large sports posters that some shops displayed for the last few years. Everytime I see the life-sized posters of three All Blacks I note to myself that they are built like Lurtz of the Uruk-hai. Then I saw David Beckham’s new look and noted that he looks like Legolas. It impressed on me today, walking by the posters again, that this explains the difference between orcs and elves. Orcs are hulking great big thugs, built like brick shithouses sideways, who like to tackle. Elves are pretty boys who are light on their feet, can prance a bit, and wear sarongs, and their hair long. I’m sure that this new perspective helps to explain something.

I took a phone call this evening from a telemarketer. Their people were active in the city promoting medical insurance, said the mouth of sauron, would I be interested in receiving promotional material. I wasn’t interested. Would I be taking out medical insurance in the future. No, I replied. (In hindsight I think this is the right opinion; medical insurance is a placebo for not providing universal healthcare.) We are also providing life and mortgage insurance, would you be interested? I think you will have a hard time selling me life insurance. Why’s that? My life insurance was taken out in 1965 and I pay $18 a year on it. Oh…OK…goodbye. I put the phone receiver down on its rest and laughed like a sane man.

I met an elderly gentleman from my elder’s district. I asked him about his wife who collapsed in church two weeks ago. She is home now. He told me that she was dead for a moment after she collapsed. A doctor in the congregation gave her mouth-to-mouth and she revived. While they are in the evening of their lives, they can enjoy the view of a good sunset.

If ever tea was served up early here, I would know that my flatmates have been abducted by aliens and replaced by pod people. Then I would have to ally myself with the aliens to ensure that their experiments do not escape from their clutches.

1st Sunday in Lent

While I was wearing my cassock one person told me I should have become a priest. I replied that I don’t have that strength of conviction. One person understood what I meant. I have a religion of participation, not one of conviction to belief. Immediately the conversation jumped to the believability of god. It’s an amazing trick that I noticed among secular people, as if my admission to religious practice wasn’t recognised. Imagine if it had been a group of white people discussing racial politics in front of a coloured person.

I have been dwelling on the thought that the majority of people I meet socially do not have religious experience. They see it from the outside. Although I don’t have a nonreligious viewpoint I expect it as normative from others. It is not to be challenged. That would be dangerous.

I was talking to a friend about the New Zealand anthology of religious poetry, Spirit in a Strange Land. I had not found it useful as a devotional guide. The New Zealand poets compiled write from a ‘spirituality of suspicion’ (or a suspicion of spirituality, let the reader decide). In hindsight while the poetry was not experience, it reflects the wider culture in which I participate.

“A fish cannot distinugish between the gospel and a culture of sea-water.”

The preacher at the induction service was a recent immigrant minister from Scotland. One person observed that it was a typically ‘Scottish’ sermon: Scots rationalism with romantic hooks. I found it odd for its lack of application, especially directed at the incoming minister. Culture, again.

Attendence at the first service of the new ministry is noticeably up as nominal members begin to participate again. There is a happy feeling in the congregation. Graeme goes to the hospital tomorrow for a hernia examination. The hernia is in his groin and affects his water retention. Ah! The things I learn at church! At one point in the prayers he was going red in the face as he pulled at a pendant hung on a cord around his neck. I gave him a hug and he relaxed.

GURPS session moved this week to Saturday night – two of us, including myself, were unavailable on Thursday. The games master has thrown us into a spin with the current scenario. We are in an enchanted forest between worlds. The forest guardians are regularly attacked by twix-world magicians who want to release dark forces imprisoned in the forest onto the conscious world. The demizens of the forest know that the forest’s preservation from these attacks will cost their own lives. In the last attack, one of their own, a scryer, was badly injured. They want to use risky magic to heal the scryer to regain her information about the attackers. The benefits of the healing magic on the woman could be short-lived and ultimately kill her. As witnesses to these events our party has to decide whether the potential saving of many lives is worth this one life.