Towards the end of last year I thought I’d re-commence reading the Bible sequentially and try to take on the overall narrative as much as I can, without too much pondering or hip hopping from one book to another. And so I did, trudged along and recently finished reading the Old Testament.

So about nearly a couple of weeks ago I started on the New Testament and took in the Gospel narratives of Matthew and Mark. I should finish Mark today/tomorrow.

When one reads the gospel narratives by 2 different writers consecutively, one gets a sense of the statements or events which resonated with both the writers. One was the feeding of the multitudes, followed very soon by the incident where the disciples talked about not having bread. Jesus had just before that talked about being wary of the leaven of the Jewish leaders and the disciples then zeroed in on the fact that they had no bread with them, and were a little bit concerned.

Jesus’ admonition to remember what he did (in feeding the multitudes) in a way, says don’t worry about our feed.

Not long after that incident the narrative switched to a teacher who professed the greatest law in loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and the second being to love our neighbour as ourselves. These are more important edicts than those involving burnt offerings and sacrifices. When I read that (in Mark 12) I thought it meant the greatest 2 laws are far more important than what we do in and in relation to church. The Sunday services, the tithes, the home group attendances, the participation of church activities, are really all secondary rules and practices. If they all take precedence over the first two laws, we’ve missed the point.

They would have been obvious points. However in eking out a grind of a living it is easy to (1) think about where our daily bread is or will come from and (2) worry more about the burnt offering and sacrifices. Loving God with all of our being and loving my neighbour as myself needs to fight their ways to occupy more central focus.

So this arvo when I took my quick midday walk I sought out the couple of homeless persons I have often walked past. I didn’t see them today. I wanted to offer to buy them a meal – of hot soup maybe. Have a chat with them to see how they’re doing and how they’re coping. Maybe give them my coat if they needed something warmer. Do what’s needed to love them as myself. Maybe I’ll go look for one of them again tomorrow arvo. I’m kind of scared. But I think I’d try to.

This is a “wordy” space, not one with many pictures. A picture sometimes does say (or paint?) a thousand words and last weekend, the numerous pictures Tress and I took would indeed, say a whole lot more than I can properly write.

Tress and I were at the Flowerdale Estate in the King Lake/southern Goulbourn Valley area. It’s a serene pocket in Victoria. So peaceful you could hear the calls of half dozen or bird species calling out incessantly. Soft, lyrical calls which make the peaceful scene even more laid back. A particular type of rosella on the other hand, was very quiet but the half dozen or so feeding on the grounds of the property added such luscious colours we kept taking photos.

We arrived on Saturday afternoon just before 3pm. Tress and I had spent the morning cleaning the house. She vacuumed and I trimmed the hedges on our back fences, which are now over 7foot tall. We then had lunch at Madam K’s before dropping LBJ off at George’s just after 1pm.

On arrival, we quickly checked into our room and walked around the property. A small sheep paddock with maybe a dozen sheep on one stretch along a creek set against a backdrop of rolling hills looked so picturesque I wish I was a painter with a canvas and a palette full of colours. Some say winter creates a certain mood for a joint like this which in fact makes it a better time to visit. I can imagine however, the autumn colours doing so much more justice to the palette, or summer making it far more exciting to explore the creek. As it were, we tip toed past through the paddock towards the creek, manoeuvring past a minefield of very healthy looking sheep droppings. There was also a lake which was very still except when some ducks swim through it. A few more quaint features peppered across the property and we explored it enough to make dinner less guilty.

After a very thorough and wonderful dinner at Gracies’ on the property, we went to our room to play with the photos we took, watched tv and then went to bed. In the morning it was back to Gracies for an equally delicious breakfast. We then left the property just after 11am, picked up LBJ just before 1pm and headed home. Once home, it was the usual routine of cooking for the week. This time Tress did some curries for our lunches and so the past couple of days I’ve had something more interesting than my usual bean salad. Happy.

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Thanks heaps Robin

One of my favourite performing artists has died. Thank you Robin Williams, for some of the best movie roles I’ve witnessed. John Keating in Dead Poets Society, Adrian Covoure in Good Moring Vietnam and Dr Macquire in Good

We’re going away this weekend to a place known as Flowerdale Estate. It’s just another dot to connect in the State we live in. Victoria is small compared to any of the other mainland States but it is still very large. It is probably 20-30 times larger than Selangor, our previous home State in Malaysia.

The weather forecast for the Strath Creek area looks good for the weekend. It’s supposed to dip to about 2deg on Sat morning but we’re only going to arrive after lunch so that should be nice. In any event, it can’t get much worse than last Sat when even in Forest Hill the temp dipped to 0deg and parts of suburbs nearby dived below that. It was reported to be one of the coldest mornings Victoria ever had.

We’ve also made plans to go across to Warnambool in a little over a month. It would have been far nicer to go now as it’s the height of the whale watching season and when we get there next month it’s probably tapering off. But connecting dots in this State of Victoria is our current favoured activity now and it isn’t a bad way to have some welcomed distractions from an otherwise long and drudged winter.

There was an article I read somewhere a few weeks ago. I think it was in The Australian by Greg Sheridan. It was on breakdown of governance and structured society. Soon after that the MH17 disaster happened. It brought that article to sharp focus for me.

In so many places around the world today, there appears to be deliberate discarding of a structured society and governance. Eastern Ukraine had for several weeks, showed no one was really in charged or claim to be. The Ukrainian government was up against separatist rebels as well as the Russians. Many say those rebels are proxies for the Russians but equally there were apparently fragments of groups all claiming different things. Nearly 300 innocent lives otherwise totally unconnected to the quarrel were lost as a result of such breakdown.

Then there is the situation in northern Iraq. Many blame Islamic State (formerly ISIS) for the plight of the Christians in Mosul. The Islamic State may rightly cause revulsion and yet they are only one of several rogue groups marauding across Iraq, undermining the formal government of Al-Maliki. It often comes across as no one being in charged, even the notorious Al Baghdadi, who at least projects the image of a reigning caliph.

Then you scan through the scenes of Egypt, Syria and maybe even parts of China and the sense is reinforced. It is as though groups are sprouting out which decide to do as they please, abiding only by the rules accepted within the respective groups. The formal governments don’t seem to matter too much.

I wonder if the self-determination mantra so priced by many is starting to demonstrate the risk of this mantra spreading and being given an elevated importance. No one is completely free. Everyone needs to come under the control of some regime. It is entirely legitimate for that control to be properly and strictly defined but where anything resembling anarchy takes any level of significance, maybe not immediately but not too far down the track the outcome is almost certainly disastrous.

Something was whirring away in a corner in my mind when we were seated in the lovely New Shanghai restaurant in The Emporium in the city on Saturday arvo. There we were enjoying lunchof very delicate and delicious food, just before we joined a public meeting to protest the killing of Christians in Mosul in Iraq. There was something incompatible between the two activities but such is Melbourne which presents a juxtaposed context in which first world consciousness of world peace issues is played out. The soft, translucent skins of the xiao long bau or the steamed dumplings were in stark contrast to the horrors of what we saw on the screens and heard from the lecterns a few hours later in Fed Square.

It was nevertheless, a hell of an arvo. It felt strange to be part of only a handful of orientals in a sea of Arabic people. Persians to be accurate – modern day Iraqis, Syrians and Macedonians – but the sounds and appearances were Arabic. Probably part of my ignorance. But we soaked it all up. The over riding message was silence and apathy when others were systematically persecuted. Driven out by the thousands, the Christian community of the ancient city of Mosul (aka Niniveh) in northern Iraq has been eliminated but the world has reacted in such a muted fashion. As a fellow Christian, I felt like a traitor. Someone who has betrayed my fellow believer. Martin Luther King Jr’s statement about silence and betrayal comes to mind.

We took pictures and dutifully put them up in facebook. I hope more have become more tuned in. I have noted more postings about this. I guess it has had its effects.

The day had started very cold but has ended in me being warmed up to care more.

Sunday started just as cold. Colder, in fact. As I stumbled out of bed and struggled against the 0.1 deg  temperature, I drew the blinds in the lounge room and saw the oval covered with ice. The windscreen of my car – ditto. We eventually managed to get through the morning and go to church, where Mike preached on euthanasia. It was that kind of weekend. Stories of mass persecution and killing in Iraq ans Syria and Macedonia and slow creep of euthanasia the next. They made me sombre…

After lunch at Madam K, we went grocery shopping, then Tress took LBJ for a walk while I went and saw Gus, an old friend I hadnt caught up with for a long time. We met at The Glen and over coffee (his shout) talked about family, work and current issues and challenges. We talked about rebellious teenage children, politically correctness at work and I’m glad I responded to his initiative to catch up.

I got home a bit after 4, sat down to watch Hawks demolish the Bulldogs, while I did the second batch of soup for the week. Soups done, breakfast and lunch for today packed, all cleaned up, Tress and I sat down again and I thought what a weekend. I’m grateful. Living in a city which affords such divergent and contrasting indulgences. My taste buds, conscience, awareness and my emotions all stimulated in one weekend without travelling out of Melbourne. Yet it’s more than those things. As always, few things are about me. The Iraqi christians need advocacy and help. The assisted and unnecessary deaths need to stop.

My manager is the General Counsel of the company. That’s almost always the highest ranked legal person in an organisation. In my organisation however, there is an executive above the GC. My boss the GC reports to this executive, who also has a legal background.

I’ve always felt it strange that such a structure exists. The executive role was a newly created one. It wasn’t in place when I joined this organisation. When it was created, I thought my boss would seek appointment to the role. That didn’t happen and this executive came on board.

Many things have changed since. For sure, my boss is almost certainly more stressed. That stress factor certainly got elevated today.

For some time now the company has been on the periphery of a royal commission hearing into union behaviour that is now under way. There has been some allegation of mishandling of personal information, and also allegation of privacy law breaches. Naturally my boss has been all over this issue.

For an executive team meeting this morning the executive had asked my boss to prepare and present a memo on the status of the commission hearing. So my boss dutifully prepared and presented the paper. Apparently, one of the executives thought that paper was an utter waste of time and the executives need not have that paper presented.

My boss’ boss kept quiet and did not respond to that feedback/remark. How could you instruct a subordinate to prepare a paper and present it, sat in a meeting where it was presented by your subordinate and kept quiet when there was a question as to why the paper was thought necessary and it had been a waste of time?

It would be interesting to have been a fly on the wall when a discussion (between my boss and that executive) eventually takes place to walk through what happened. I think this goes straight to the keeper, any future talks about integrity and team work and resilience and all those types of threads would ring hollow.

It rained almost all day on Saturday. So Tress and I slept in and had a lazy breakfast before moseying around at home. I turned on the laptop for the first time in weeks, ostensibly to attempt preparing for the church small group discussion which I was tasked to lead this coming week. I read a little bit but was distracted by some emails, and ended up applying for a job.

My employer has for the past year or so, been facing very uncertain times. Losses and inability to deliver on a major IT project have led to shareholders reviewing their options. Recent reports suggest they are ready to sell and the usual vicissitudes of this scenario means uncertainty rules the day. Relationships with shareholders have been fraught in any event and this often has a cascading effect on the environment at work. But I try to keep my head down and plug away but it would be foolish to not try and seek alternatives/options elsewhere, where they present themselves. Anyway the applications are in and “que sera sera” I guess. Meanwhile, Tress did some filing in anticipation of submitting our tax returns soon.

A bit after mid-day we went out for our usual errands. We dropped into a tax accountant’s office to check out their fees. They were a few doors away from my dry cleaners so that was convenient as I dropped and collected my work shirts. We then did the usual grocery shopping and I went back to make the pumpkin soups that were to make 2 dinners for us.

We had tickets to the big game later that night but it was still raining close to 6pm so we decided to just stay home. Those tickets were free anyway. It turned out to be a ripper of a game. Hawks fought hard and brilliantly to overcome the very good side that is Sydney.

We went to bed soon after the game, which for a Saturday night was an early night. It had been that sort of day…

Sunday was far better, weather wise especially. Jean (from Madam Kwong’s) had suggested we visited a new café a friend of hers started, which had taken over the well-known Straits Café on Doncaster Road. So we went there after church. There was a chemist warehouse a few doors away so I picked up my allopurinol top-up. We then picked up some quick grocery to make more soups for the week and headed home.

It was sunny when we got home so we quickly changed into gardening gear, and I gave the hedge a good clip. We had picked up a new hedge trimmer on Friday night – a very good Ryobi which made the clip faster and neater. It was also heavier than the old one so it gave me a good workout too! The old one was a smaller unit and earlier this year – in March I think – I accidentally ran it through a lopper and the blades got out of alignment. A dodgy repair shop on Blackburn Road had it for months but couldn’t fix it so I decided to write it off. I had milked it for over 5 years anyway so the Ryobi was a good step-up replacement.

Tress did some weeding and when we finished with the mowing we took the little fellow for a walk. When we finished Tress decided to take him to the oval to let him run and I went home to cook the other soup – a leek and cauliflower soup with sweet potato and bacon. It was very good and we have 4 days’ stock of soup for the week so we were happy.

So it was another weekend of a break from weekday routines. This mini-cycle in the larger cycles of our current life provides little other than a circuit breaker to the weekday routine which tires both of us and zap us out each Friday night. Sitting on the couch on Friday night, Tress would often drift away to slumber land due to outright tiredness. There have been numerous Friday nights when our preferred activity is to be at home watching tele and eating something straight from Coles or Woollies. In some ways this was what I sought – a serenity of sorts. And yet the droning effect of regular cycles of work and rest can dull one’s senses to the point of near total oblivion to others’ needs. Occasionally events like the MH17 tragedy and conflicts in Palestine and Iraq wake me from my slumber and prick my senses. The juggernaut of work and rest cycles however, roll on and quite often, blot those out over time – slowly but ever so surely.

Maybe that’s why in some ways I seek change often. Maybe that’s what drives me to lift my head often – to check out the horizon and see if there’s something else out there for me to spend the rest of my days. For while I am enjoying most present days, I keep longing for more meaningful to spend my future days. I think perhaps many share these thoughts.

I did another 10k on the treadmill yesterday morning and it was just a touch over an hour. It’s still slower than the minimum benchmark I’d love to set but I’m glad the process of resuming training has well and truly commenced.

In many ways I feel a sense of Deja vu – the running and the thought of being regimented (in some ways) again. Maybe this time I’m less caught up with the idea of doing something and more with actually the doing of that something.

Sometimes the idea of doing something is so attractive and that is why we do it. It may be attractive because our contemporaries do the same thing or because it is de rigueur under the circumstances and at that time in question.

The first time around, it wasn’t purely running per se which drove me on. It’s also the idea of being a runner, one who cares about his body and how it performs. Being a runner gave me the idea of being someone with a different label if you like. There weren’t many runners I knew when I started. It’s just the idea of being one which made me one.

I wonder about the choices we make simply because the idea per se was fun. Another instance is being in love I guess. I can’t recall which movie it was but there was one I watched – something about a girl wanting to be in a relationship – wanting a boyfriend – because the idea of being in one helped her relate better to her peers. All of her friends were in relationships and while she didn’t necessarily look for one, she found herself wanting one because the idea of being in one was attractive (because it helped her relate more to her peers). Was it a Renee Zellwegger movie? I forget…

This time however, the very act of running has been enjoyable. I could almost feel the effects of those happy hormones (endorphins?) streaming through at some point, as I soak in a sweat drenched t-shirt.

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It was also a few days of trying to come to terms with the horrendous event last Friday morning. Maybe it’s the media. With the inclusion of some permanent residents, 37 Australians were killed. Amongst those later inclusions were a couple whom we were told were regulars at Madam Kwong’s. Jean the owner chef had a chat with us when we ate there on Saturday. Although the majority of the 37 victims were Victorians, the event didn’t hit home so closely until that conversation with Jean.

We had gone for a movie the night before. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was as good as the reviews suggested. We had then slept in on Sat morning and after a lazy breakfast at home, we drove to Simon’s in Mount Waverley and I had a haircut. It was after that we went to Madam Kwong’s and the rest of the day felt really subdued. Other than giving the little fellow a bath and doing a quick cleaning around the house (Tress washed the sheets and took them to the dry cleaners’ for drying) we didn’t do much else, which made a very restful weekend.

We ended the weekend in the usual fashion – doing some cooking for the week’s meals and watching some tele. We did however, have Kiddo on skype so that was good.

I was up at my usual time a little before 5 this morning and while having a few minutes of personal time during a private moment I came across this distressing news of yet another Malaysian Airlines plane crashing. This time however, it appeared to have been shot by a military missile while flying past the eastern part of Ukraine.

I whispered something to Tress just before I left home and she too sounded distressed at hearing the news.

When I got into the gym, the television screens were all trained on this piece of news. I followed the unfolding story as I worked my way through on the treadmill, and ended up chalking well over 11km – just under 9.5km in the first hour and another 15 minutes or so of walk.

It became apparent that an area journalists would focus on is the choice of flight path. Other airlines have avoided that area in recent months, as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia bubbled away. A couple of commercial cargo flights have been brought down in recent days. It would have been totally expected and reasonable for MAS to avoid this flight path. It would of course, have meant a costly detour. An Amsterdam/KL flight would have to make a detour south and east, if it were to do what other airlines have been doing and what would have been the more prudent and safer thing to do.

Years of corruption and mismanagement in Malaysian Airlines have lead to this high risk action of flying past eastern Ukraine when other airlines have avoided this path for months. Past and present MAS senior executives and the Malaysian Government may have a lot to answer for in precipitating this tragedy.

Yet in spite of everything that could have been done differently, there is an ever mounting body of evidence today which tells us and confirms for us (or maybe remind us) the simple fact that life is fragile and can be so fleeting.

So I continue to wonder why Jason’s “persecutors” could take all the time in the world to man up to do the right thing. From all available evidence they appear to have already walked away from any possible concrete action. It is like avoiding a path where one knows one has once killed something, for not knowing how to make amends or properly dealing with the carcass. Life can be fragile and fleeting. The opportunities to make amends may not always be there.

This week started and ended with unplanned long runs on the treadmill. Monday it was to witness Germany victorious in Brazil. This morning it was to follow reports of yet another tragic event befalling Malaysia. We “run” from the joys to the travails of life, don’t we?

It’s now the middle of winter and on most mornings when I leave home, I feel it in my bones. Again as is often the case, age may have something to do with it. I remember last year I seldom used my winter coat as the office is just directly across the road from the station. This year, notwithstanding the same setting, I have used that coat a whole lot more.

Ditto when the team goes out for coffee. From the office, the team on most mornings take a 5-10 minute walk to a coffee place some 100-150m away. In recent days, that walk has been taken with the coat on. It has hovered around the 7-8 deg mark at around 10-10.15am and the stretch from Little Lonsdale Street to Exhibition Street can be a bit of a wind tunnel. It gets chilly…

I often say to people I love winters. Other than the short days of course. I will always find it hard to accept a 7.30 sunrise and a pre-5pm sunset. Other than that, I love winters. The stillness, the quietness, the inert state of things around you – they all allow the mind to think better and I often notice things more (I think) in such conditions.

We’d walk the little furry ball each night after we’ve had our (mostly soup) dinner. We’d be walking him in the dark and he’d behave differently from when we walk him in summer, or on weekends when there’s light. His senses are actually on a more active or heightened level when it is dark. We also love the smells of fire places burning. When I do the walks alone, I’d slow down to try and spot possums. I’d feel lucky when I see one or more. The most I’d spotted was 4. Lately however, there has been no sightings and I hope they’re still out there and as busy as ever, havoc notwithstanding…

There’s another 6 weeks of winter left to run – officially that is. We had a week’s respite when we visited Singapore but the next 6 weeks would see a straight run. Our legs would be raw potato white when we emerge from this season – potentially only in October. That’s all fine with me. Other than the short days, I like winter.