Month: March 2012

More “running” from Malaysia, and my (closer to “proper”) run…


It rained all day on Saturday. I was a bit restless as a result, itching to go out into the gardens to organise the pruning which has accumulated in a couple of corners in the backyard. The council’s “hard rubbish” week was to start today and I had wanted to clear my backyard off those pruning.

After our usual coffee at the Coffee Club at the Chase, we rang a new migrant couple and invited them to dinner. They were probably too polite or maybe they didn’t want to miss out on an evening of time with the kids (they have 3 young ones) so they suggested afternoon tea instead. It was a novel idea – albeit an very English and therefore old one – but as the idea was to get to know them and see if we can be their friends, we agreed and set it for 3.30. We then checked with Jason and Mel to make sure our suspicion that they would give this a miss was ok. We had asked them the previous night when they were at our home for the first cell meeting of the year, but we thought it was going to be dinner. Our dear friends spend Saturday afternoons swimming and/or playing badminton so dinner was going to suit better. The previous Sat had been taken up with another do at our mate’s home so two Saturdays in a row was always going to be tricky. So it was just Tress and I and the new family.

So we had “tea” on Saturday arvo. The family was lovely. They’re both IT professionals – very highly successful ones with large MNCs, but remained very pleasant and courteous. Their kids were a joy to be with. Extremely courteous, curious and obviously intelligent, they were very warm too, to boot. They would be such wonderful additions to the local community. They have been here only a few weeks, but they are one of probably half a dozen or so families we have met in the last 6 months or so, who have chosen to leave Malaysia. The trend is a continuing one and appears to be escalating. All Australia’s gain and Malaysia’s loss for sure, but I dont think those idiots who pretend to run the country care very much at all. Someone told me Idris Jala, a Malaysian government minister, recently went back on his views that Malaysia faced bankruptcy unless fuel subsidies were removed. No one in Malaysia thought this reversal had anything to do with any notion of an improving economy, and more to do with another minister who either did not know what he was talking about or one who lacked courage to defy his band of thieving and lying manipulators.

Anyway, this family appears to have settled in well and quickly and will no doubt contribute to Australia more positively and will be appreciated here more than they were in Malaysia. At least their kids can attend university courses of their choice and which they qualify for strictly on merit, instead of seeing buffoons take up places they dont deserve, in hopelessly narcissistic universities anyway.

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Yesterday in church someone asked me if I can recommend his grandson a job. He just finished his law course in a local uni and is probably having a testing time looking for work or deciding on the next step. I mentioned to his parents before, about roles in the State Revenue office but I’m not sure if he’s into that sort of stuff. Like I always suspected, if you finish law school without ever securing a summer clerkship at anytime or locking up an article clerkship, you’re in for a rough and yet very ordinary careeer. That is not a bad thing as lawyers who work their entire lifetime in suburban practice can do well and be happy but it does tamper with a young man’s often rose tinted view of a law career.

Having said that, I’m still struggling with what to do myself. Increasingly, spending time in my present role is just that – spending time. It is still underwhelming, uninspiring and I often go home with a flat feeling not from exhaustion but from being flat all day with little push or excitement. How one needs to be happy with one’s work.

So I’m hoping to make up for all that flatness by running a little bit more. I have previously resorted to food to do that for me – to provide something to look forward to each day – which has been a bit of a problem. Last week I clocked a 32km total, which is something I had not done for months and months. To run 8km a day again, for 4 days a week, feels a little better. It was laboured and it took a lot longer than it used to, but at least the run was clocked up.

This morning I did a 9.6km, albeit still at a slow time of just over an hour. I wonder if those 11km-12km an hour days are well and truly over. At least it made me feel a little better.

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Friday … Will Sunday Come?


I once heard Tony Campolo preach a sermon titled “Friday’s here but Sunday’s Coming”. It’s supposed to be an uplifting thing, so that those affected by the sufferings of Christ and the eventual crucifixion on Friday, may look forward to the hope of Easter on Sunday.

Well I’ve had my “Fridays” for a while now. Not in the sense that there has been suffering or anything like that. Just an overall sense of being really underwhelmed and deflated. I need Sunday to arrive, and soon.

Rubbish Man … and Simplicity again


I was griping to Tress last night, about the behaviour of some of the tenants in my building. They’re all mission organisations so I expected a higher standard of behaviour but in some aspects, it is worse than a secular set up.

Part of my routine is pushing out the bins of the building, on rubbish collection days. On alternate weeks these include the recycling bins. The way tenants deal with rubbish and the way it is disposed, leave much to be desired. It just makes an unpleasant job even harder and more of a pain than it should be.

Bins - MIne, all mine!

Such is the humbling nature of my work now. I wheel out up to five bins on Tuesday evenings before I leave the office and wheel them in again the next morning. Every time I do this I wonder what the Lord is doing to me through this exercise. I’m sure it can only be for the better, but it is just that I then get tagged as the guy who does the bins (amongst a myriad of other little stuff) and when someone has shredded paper or such other stuff to throw they would ask me if the bins are full, if they are in or out etc. I mean, why cant they just think and have a look for themselves? It is one thing to be the guy who wheels out the bins (relatively harmless thing) but it is quite another to be the guy people think of when they have rubbish to dispose!

I guess when I stressed simplicity, I get whacked with the extreme experience of being a simple person!

Speaking of simplicity, my boss is in the process of replacing his laptop computer. His is a HP – an almost 5 year old one. We’ve been looking at laptops in recent weeks and it is amazing how cheap they are these days. For under $1,000 you can get a pretty whiz bang machine, what with iCore 7 processors, 16GB chips blah blah blah. His wife uses a Mac (a personal one) so I thought he may want a Mac but he would have none of it. I guess he was just mindful that we’re a missions organisation with responsibility over other people’s hard earned money so we better be careful with how we spend it. Why blow more moolahs when you can go pretty far with relatively less?

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