prayer of the day

Lord,
Make me an instrument of your peace,
where there is hatred let me sow love,
where there is injury...pardon,
where there is discord...unity,where there is doubt...faith,
where there is error...truth,
where there is despair...hope,
where there is sadness...joy,
where there is darkness...light.

Divine Master,
grant that I might not so much seek
to be consoled, as to console,
to be understood, as to understand,to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

(attributed to St Francis of Assisi - the one that loved animals

and got caught preaching to the birds :))

Hungry.

I was thinking about how much I post about food. And how I really don't have any conception of what it would be like to actually not have enough to eat. Not just not enough for one meal, or missing one meal, but consistently just not having enough.

Yesterday I went without food until sunset. And I was sooo hungry, but I could still look forward to dinner that night, which would be delicious and nutritious. I knew when I'd next be able to eat, and that after that I could eat again when I got hungry. Imagine what life would be like if I couldn't. I can't.

So of course now I'm thinking of those starving kids in Africa, in countries torn apart by wars and crap governments for years, land cracked and dried to its very bones in drought. Especially Somalia. Imagine being a parent watching your kids cry themselves to sleep from hunger pangs. Imagine being a kid displaced by conflict, with no one.

UNICEF

http://www.unicef.org.au/Donate/One-off-Donation/east-africa-drought-emergency-appeal-famine.aspx

TEAR Australia

http://www.tear.org.au/emergencies/east-africa-food-crisis/

Doing what Malaysians do best...

Tonight Mandie, Koiter & I went to dinner with some lovely Malaysian friends. They call the meal 'buka puasa' (that may or may not be how it's spelled) which means 'break fast'. It's the Islamic month of Ramadan in which they fast every day between sunrise and sunset, so this meal is breaking that daily fast. It's a time to celebrate God, friends, family & share together - even with people of other faiths (like us!) or no faith.

Lana invited us around to her place, so we whipped up a bit of food and took it to share. There were yummy soups and noodles.. couscous.. idli.. raya cookies.. Devina even made beautiful masala chai.

Great night hanging out together!

I don't have any pics from it to share, sadly, but I have just been flicking back through shots of fun food times when I was in Malaysia earlier in the year - mmmmmmmmm...

murtabak!

blue rice

bbq pork, noodles, seafoody soups I think.. and coconut water!

durian feast - such a weird, rich fruit

look at those great mugs of teh tarik

*sigh*

Just a short post, as I'm on a borrowed computer cos mine decided to not turn on - plus it's bedtime!

Today I and my co-conspirators scored a free lunch from the Presbyterian church opposite the Con in town - so good. It's on every tuesday, for students (and whoever rocks up, really). There was lasagne and soup and pasta and sausages and pies and everything! You should go.

Then we went and had coffee at the Bank Corner cafe near Spotlight. Cool little place, I hadn't been there before.

There were other fun bits (like cute babies!) but the main thing I had in mind to say was that my preferences for placement ended up being put in yesterday by the kind lady in charge of the database - yay! We should hear back this week about where we're getting sent, hopefully.

winter babies

Look at that wacky radish!!

Other seedlings:

I need to do some weeding.. I'll save that for my next phone conversation (I like to call it phoneweeding. Tonight I practised phonecooking - vietnamese ricepaper rolls, yummo!)

Someone's a Sillyhead

So I guess it's time for my confession regarding the stupid/embarrassing thing that happened two days ago. I did promise, didn't I?

Well, this semester we get to go on field placement for Social Work. The way they do it is all the placement options are entered into a database, we put in preferences, they run an algorithm and it tries to find the best match for everyone.

Ok so skip back to the bit where I said 'we put in preferences'. yep. Now fast-forward to Friday evening. I'm talking on the phone to mum at the same time as cutting material for that onesie, people are coming in and out, mum asks excitedly "so did you get to put in your preferences and stuff yet?"

and everything stops. It's 6:30pm. They were meant to be in by 5. And I had utterly and completely forgotten. Damn. I start berating myself over the phone (basically imagine a broken record of 'I'm such an idiot, I'm such an idiot'). Mum ends up saying "well maybe I should let you go" as I seem to have trouble moving on. I shunt off a grovelly apologetic email to the organising people. OH embarrassment.

I know I'll still get to go on placement. I know I didn't have that much chance of getting one of my preferences anyway as they're probably the ones everyone wants (although now I probably have less :P). The worst bit is the memory of a teacher's remark in class - "email us if you have any issues with it but don't imagine we'll have any sympathy for the idiot who just plain forgets."

hm.

ah well. It's good to be reminded now & then of how dumb I can be. I guess.

(A funny thing I heard later is that in the same moment I was flipping out about forgetting that, Mandie discovered her cake was leaking all over the oven and Skyby found out her violin teacher was leaving. happy times!)

DIY Onesie

Today I made a onesie. Well, I started it yesterday but sewed it today:

(sorry about the crappy photo)

It was lots of fun. I made it on Hanwen's new sewing machine - yay for her mum randomly giving her a sewing machine!!

It turned out fairly different to the picture I first had in mind, but I'm pretty happy with it. Particularly because I didn't end up needing to get any buttons (or make any buttonholes for said buttons) cos I went for the wraparound effect.

I didn't want to buy anything, so I'd looked around for a piece of clothing that

1) I didn't care about cutting up

2) was big enough to make into a one-piece suit.

And I found a pair of wraparound pants that I never wore because they were too long and flappy and annoying:

And I cut them up. Yay for recycling things!

And then what did I do with my new onesie?! I went to a onesie party in it of course!