Category Archives: Life

Conspiracy Confusion & Consternation

Posted on by

It is the Saturday before Christmas. Today, I was walking around outside in just my jeans and a hoodie. My bare feet were quite happy inside my sandal-shoes and my bare fingers were not cold in the slightest. It does not feel like Christmas.

Last year this time, we had more snow than we knew what to do with. This year, it is mild and might rain. Oh, how things change.

For a few days there, I was getting into the “Christmas Spirit,” whatever that means; I had a little more excitement and anticipation than I remember having last year. Now that has been replaced by the chaos of the last week as I hurry to write/submit my final paper, scurry around to finish last minute preparations to head over Vancouver for Christmas, wrap up some church commitments, and maintain my usual level of work/church/other activity.

Last night, we went to see the Messiah. It was a beautiful performance of some of my favourite music. It brought back memories of performing the Young Messiah with my elementary school choir and of making Christmas gifts aboard ship in Papua New Guinea. It helped to get me in the frame of mind of Christmas. But then this morning I passed one of the malls and all the parking spots looked full. At 9:40 in the morning. How discouraging.

I’ve been a part of a group encouraging people within church to participate in Advent Conspiracy but at the same time, I’ve been caught up in the quest to find the perfect gift for the one person on my list for whom I haven’t yet found something. How easy it is to loose perspective. I am reminded of something a friend wrote the other day. It was a good reminder then and is a great reminder now; In the hubbub of crass commercialism and my resultant desire to withdraw from Christmas altogether I cannot forget to hold on to why we have Christmas in the first place.

Coming Soon…

Posted on by

Real post coming soon (I swear!). The last couple of weeks have been a flurry of activity with me trying to write 2 papers (10 pages and 20 pages), complete 2 assignments, and get all the reading done before the end of my course for Christmas (done today!).

I’ve also managed to get myself onto about half of the committees at church, well, just 2 but it seems like a lot! I also ended up being in the Sunday School Christmas pageant this past Sunday. It was great fun, not having been in a pageant since I was somewhere around the age of 12 (@ St Thomas’). Between all of that and Advent service prep, its been busy.

One of the committees I’ve managed to get on is the Adult Faith and Development Committee. That’s a long, fancy way of saying that they plan Bible/book studies for the church and plan a (biannual?) conference. This conference is the reason I’ve been asked to join the committee. It seems I’m one of the only ones who is very familiar with the work of our two guests and they thought I should be involved. Given the guests, I am very happy to be involved!

Who are these people, you ask? The sessions will be led and facilitated by Brian McLaren with music by Steve Bell. The conference will be the last weekend in May, 2010 (May 28-29), hosted at Christ Church Cathedral, Victoria. It isn’t meant to be a closed, cathedral-only conference though. Anyone who wants to come can attend.

For more info, you can check out our website – it will be updated with registration info and tickets info for the Steve Bell concert as it becomes available.

Spring!

Posted on by

It feels like spring. Yesterday, Matthew and I had coffee before his class and then I walked home from the University. As I passed through the pathway that takes me from one major road to the residential area where I live, I noticed the sound of water dripping off of the trees and bushes, the birds were chirping and I could hear insects buzzing around the flowers. Spring! What a nice break in the midst of the grey and rain we’ve been having.

Oh, there have been small breaks: a bit of blue sky here and a peek of the sun there. But yesterday was a whole day of glorious blue sky and sunshine; today is shaping up to be more of the same.

I’ve dusted off the bicycle and I’m heading out to enjoy the beauty of Victoria.

Queue Jumping

Posted on by

No one loves a queue jumper.

Queue jumping has reached a whole new level with the H1N1 outbreak/pandemic/hysteria. Yes, I’m going there, even after promising not to. With some provinces (ahem Alberta) promising not to prioritize and then running out and closing all vaccination clinics and other provinces having day-long waits at their clinics, it is a bit of chaos and mayhem. After health care workers have been trying to convince the public of the importance and safety of the shot, they are now having to tell their patients that they are not high risk and can wait a little longer.

That is why the outrage over queue jumping; professional athletes have been given H1N1 shots before high priority individuals. When there is a limited number of vaccinations to go around people are bound to be upset when a non-priority individual gets it ahead of someone else.

Which is why I’m reluctant to admit that I’ve been vaccinated. I’m not a child or a senior. I’m not pregnant and don’t have any respiratory problems. Yes, I work closely with the public in a health care-related setting, but it is an eye clinic not a medical clinic. I was not even sure if I wanted to get vaccinated: I don’t think that I am personally at high risk of the flu. I am careful about washing my hands and try to eat healthily and get enough sleep. However, each season a bug does circulate the office and takes out a number of people.

So why did I get it? I went to my travel doctor for a followup from our trip to Kenya and he, unprompted, asked me if I’d been vaccinated yet. I said I was not high priority. He gave me a vaccination.

I guess that makes me a queue-jumper. Sorry all of you high-priority people, but my doctor gave me an H1N1 vaccination ahead of you. How do I feel about it? I am glad not to have to be overly-cautious at work any more. I am happy I didn’t have to line up for hours to get vaccinated. I think I probably could have waited a few weeks until it was open season for vaccination. But now it is done and I have a sore arm to prove it.

Autumn on the Island

Posted on by
Fall is here on the Island. I love the crisp, bright days and cool nights. The colours have been spectacular and it makes me happy to walk through the park with crunchy leaves underfoot watching the sun stream through leaves. There have been days of rain and mornings of fog, but they are just adding to the beauty of autumn in Victoria.

The Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, Matthew and I took Grebe out for a sail to move her from her summer location in Cadboro Bay to her winter dock in the Inner Harbour (right in front of the Empress). It was a lovely day and made even better by having the chance to say hi to friends on the Pacific Grace before heading out. Not only was the whole crew there to say hi to, but another friend was volunteering on that trip and one of the leaders was someone I knew from last season. It was a bit of a reunion of friends. Then we had a great sail, accompanied by both the Grace and the Pacific Swift (sort of… they were faster).

Intervening time has been spent with school, work, and various other things mixed in. School is coming along well, there is only a little more than a week remaining in my first course. While I have learnt very little in this course, it being a repetition of what I spent my undergrad learning, it has been a good refresher of material and a good way to get my feet back into school while learning a new [online] format. Dad and Colleen came over for a visit last week, bringing lots of boxes for me from my things still in Vancouver. I now have all my old textbooks here for reference. It was a great chance to catch up with them now that they are home from Kenya, and hear in person about how the remaining 3 months of their time went there.

What’s in a Name?

Posted on by

At the coffee shop close to Matthew’s house, there is a name analysis book. Not one of those books with a million different names for your baby and a few words about each, but a page long personality profile based on the phoneme sounds that make up your name. Strangely enough, when reading the profile associated with Gillian (which, for the first time ever, was not grouped with Jillian), I found myself identifying with most of it – it was pretty much spot on. Even my middle name was fairly accurate.

This got me to thinking, what is in a name? Did I become my name, that is grow into what I have been named? Or did my parents just do an incredibly insightful job at picking my name because they are possessed with crazy super-powers? (I’ll let Dad comment on that last bit!) But seriously, we get called our names multiple times a day, whether by friends, family, coworkers, people at the store or the doctor’s office, telemarketers, to name a few. How we decide to or not to shorten our name can say many things about us (I will accept Gill as tolerable, but not Gilly, for example). How others refer to us can also say a lot. Remember the rhyme, “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me”? They do. I hated it when, as a kid, people called me “Jillian Jiggs” because 1) my room did NOT look like it was lived in by pigs (a periodically messy child, yes, but certainly not pigs) and 2) my name is certainly not spelt with a “J.” (Yes, I was anal about this from a young age!). At work, we sometime chuckle at strange names we come across and wonder about the parents who would bestow that upon their children. A name is a label that you are stuck with your whole life.

Unless you change your name. Like, for example, some famous Bible characters. Jacob comes to mind, Jacob the Deceiver. If anyone would want a name change, it would be someone like him. However, it took wrestling with God to get that name change, whereupon he became known as Israel. Then there was Simon who was renamed Peter or “Rock.”

So what is in a name? Do we become what we are called? Scary but profound implications for all of us and an encouragement to pay attention to what we call each other.

About that Run

Posted on by

It is Saturday morning, I’m home alone. One roommate still isn’t back from her week-and-a-half long field trip (who knew they did field trips in university?!?) and the other probably went to visit her parents. The house is quiet, though I was awoke by the loud rain last night, especially when it started to come in my open window onto my bed. I’m having a lazy morning. I made chocolate brownies yesterday and then proceeded to consume far too many of them. Consequently, I should really go for a run this morning. But that would involve… running. Perhaps I’ll just go for a long walk instead.

The sun is out now and aside from some dark, damp spots on the pavement and rooftops, you can’t really tell that there was any rain last night. It is amazing what can happen without our knowledge while we are sleeping. Like the time I woke up with a spider crawling through my hair. How did it get there? Where did it walk before it got to my hair? Possibly there are things I don’t really want to know.

I like my current schedule: work for the first three days of the week then do school/friends/church on the remaining. I haven’t gone insane yet and I haven’t been too lacking in sleep. I am even discovering the joy of having papers written more than 8 hours before their due date. It is really quite freeing. Currently, my assignments are due Sundays at midnight, so writing them on Sunday is not really an option – I’m much to busy. The last two weeks I’ve taken to writing them on Friday which is amazingly early for me. It is quite a nice feeling to not be rushed in the last remaining hours leading up to a due date. Why did I not discover this during my undergrad years? Possibly because I am actually less busy than I was during my undergrad. Even with three (well, two and a half) days of work, I feel like I’m doing less than I have been. Maybe it is because I have less time I need to commit to school work. Maybe it is because I can fit my school work around the other parts of my life and so still have free time when I need it. (Friends in Victoria, that means I can have coffee with YOU!) Now I just need to transfer that healthy schedule over to other parts of my life. About that run…

Masters Degree: Week 3

Posted on by

It is week three of my degree and already I have managed to write 3 1/3 papers, submit a draft instead of a final copy of my team project for marking, and read more textbook chapters and journal articles than one should in a three week period.

It has been an interesting time. 

To be fair, the last few weekends have been fairly busy: I went to Edmonton for the long weekend, not realizing that my course started the week before the long weekend rather than the week after like every other school in the country. Last weekend was back over to Vancouver (third time in a month and a bit) for the marriage of two good friends and former co-workers.

I wouldn’t change any of it, but it has been challenging, to say the least, to get into a routine of work/life/school when the variables are constantly changing.  This week, well today, has been a bit of a low point in which I question my suitability for even doing the degree. Then I contemplate doing my current job for the rest of my life and I get encouraged to continue in school. But seriously, six years of post-secondary and I sign up for two more?!?

Oh well, it is nothing that a stiff drink and a good sleep won’t fix.