i sat for my 3rd and last MTh exam on wednesday. that just leaves a 30K thesis to write on Chrysostom's homilies on John. then i will have 3 more letters to add after my name.

preaching all the way through john, a chapter at a time. up to chapter 17 this week. there is definitely something to be said for preaching all the way through a book.

been watching supernatural on dvd. i started watching it on tv mid season-3, so it's been good to go back to the beginning. nice to see amy acker in episode 3. this is our tv schedule these days: supernatural, ncis, mad men, flight of the conchords.

funding crisis might mean i lose my job, but i think we're past worrying about that.

changeling is still on pause until our storyteller reads the manual (!), but we've been playing some warhammer fantasy roleplay, which is always wild fun (though one of our players has some pretty deviant morality).

all systems normal.

and now i'm institutionalised.

i would quite like to be a full time student, followed by a full-time academic, and live close to campus, and just learn and study and drink coffee and teach and research and chat and discuss, etc..

then maybe i'd find some time to read more greek and latin texts. and stop feeling holed up in suburbia.

just a dream, just a dream.

meanwhile, the changeling game is on hiatus, because our GM/DM/ST needs to read the core manual (!). i keep prodding him, hopefully he'll get that together soon. instead we've played some random sessions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, always good fun (especially with a norsca beserker...)


also, warm is good.

that title may bear no relation to this entry.

i'm not a big fan of uncertainty. i like to plan, and i particularly like to plan myself: work out timetables, schedules, calendars, 5-year plans, all those things.

but right now i'm facing some uncertainty, and i could lose my job due to lack of funding.
i'm pretty optimistic about keeping it, and about picking up a job if i lose this one, but it's not a comfortable position to be in. plus, i tend to be fairly negative about my own job performance anyway, i don't think that helps.

major exam in about 2 weeks time; this will be my final exam for my masters, and i'll move into a thesis stage after this. i'm trying desperately to get my reading list finished this week, so i can spend next week revising about 300 pages of study notes (i know it's a lot, but that's just what the summaries came out at).

i'd like to rant about Colin Gunton a little, but all i have to say is that he's wrong, and particularly wrong on Augustine. wrong, wrong, wrong! he made me angry. i can tell how much i disagree when summarising because i start attributing more:
"This is X, Y, Z" becomes "Gunton says X,Y,Z".

the internet is also slowly killing me.

okay, that is all.

i think i might have graduated from u.sydney last week. that makes my 4th university so far, and 5th tertiary qualification. but i am more interested in the fact that it's about 3 weeks to my 3rd MTh exam on 4th century patristics....

like i'm a bad friend or something!

hmm, latest events:
1. gave a talk on torture for students in a christian gap-year program.
2. having almost finished reading T.F. Torrance's "The Trinitarian Faith" (for the 3rd time; it mostly makes sense now)
3. reading through Ayres, "Nicaea and its Legacy", which is revisionist 4th century history that basically shouts at you, "Everything you knew about Nicaea and Constantinople is Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!"

trying not to get distracted by the world full of distractions.

tripled blog-traffic at my other blog with a long series on language learning and ancient languages (it got picked up as part of a discussion amongst serious biblical scholar type people).

finding it hard to get out of bed on winter mornings.

chronically time-poor.

( Read more... )

Tags: changeling

just finished De Trinitate.
much goodness, but a really long slog.

totally unrelated.

i was hoping to get through all of De Trinitate this week, but I'm only up to Book X. It's been a good read though. I'm going to have to spread the rest of the work on top of my next reading in the coming week.

MyBrute is distracting. Go and play it once, just for me.

i played basketball (at juvie) for the first time in perhaps a decade. it's not my forte. at least i'm fit enough to play.

yesterday I lost my wallet. it was very distressing for me. not because i was particularly worried about losing money or cards or anything, but I really hate inconveniences, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend time calling banks, cancelling cards, getting a new license, etc.. And the space in which I lost it was very short - i paid for some stuff at the mechanic, came home, then went to get my wallet to go and pick the wife up from the train station, and it was missing. it threw my whole evening into disarray.

having exhausted the possible locations within my house, the best probability was that it was at the mechanic and had somehow leapt out of my pocket or bag. so i drove out there hopefully despairing this morning, and indeed it was there. oh what joy! i felt quite relieved, and could now get on with my day.

you probably thought the last paragraph was the found of the title. and you could be right. this morning i went and spoke to a university about PhD possibilities. They have a strong ancient history department with a strong suit in early christianity as well. they don't seem at all bothered that I intend to do most of my work from mongolia. and they seem to think my proposal has some legs. this is all very positive. they do want me to consider spending the second half of 2010 in virtually full-time research to get a kick-start, which raises some financial questions for us, but all in all it's very positive. so, looks like i've found a doctoral program.

it's wednesday, i've only read 2/15 books of Aug's De Trinitate, which I really need to finish by the end of the week. so i better stop drinking my lunch-time coffee and get to work.

today was unproductive and frustrating.

my mp3 player seems to have died. possibly from the cold.
i dropped my car in for a rego check
then i went to staff-meeting, which is good but is smack-dab in the middle of the morning and so destroys the working possibilities of monday mornings altogether.
i had hoped that the mechanic would call and my car would be ready (it also had a headlight that needed some fixing), but no.
i came home and spent some time working on John 12 (productive session 1)
i spent inordinate amounts of time trying to get sound working on ubuntu 9.04, with no luck. HDA-Intel + ALSA = fail.
the garage called and they had failed to get the part they need to fix the headlight. decided it was better to leave the car there until tomorrow instead of picking it up, dropping it off again tomorrow, and then picking it up a third time.
read 1/5th of hoped for portion of Augustine's De Trinitate (I have the week to read the whole thing).

they go by quickly, don't they.
still haven't found a solution for sound on Ubuntu 9.04. haven't searched too hard, but I'd have thought more people would have had this problem, and there might be some more solutions out there.

going to go and chat to some people about PhD studies this week. The head of department even sounds positive about me doing doctoral work from Mongolia. That has to be a plus.

going to read all of Augustine's De Trinitate too (in English), by Friday.

exercise is going well. need to be a little more regular about it.

thinking of reading all of the Aeneid in Latin.

those are my thoughts tonight

after a long hiatus in our fortnightly roleplaying group, last night we (I?) persuaded our GM to finally run Changeling: The Lost.

I have wanted to play Changeling for a *very* long time. I have some C:the Dreaming books also, that first got me interested, but the product line was well dead even before I discovered it. I like the new Changeling line better though, I think it's more playable. They're quite different games though.

Anyway, we spent most of the night with myself trying to explain game concepts to our GM and another player. It's been a while since I've read through the manuals. But we got some character gen going, so that is a positive. Hopefully next session we'll get into it.

I'll write up my character concept later, and try and keep some kind of gaming journal.

Tags: changeling
quod nunc sentio: excited

i never meant to make that happen, but it's just the reality. over there i post more 'seriously'. here i just write random stuff about my life. but i guess i'm okay with that.

been working flat-chat lately. read a truckload of Hilary of Poitiers last week, and still need to fit some more in the next few days. So, on top of that I have been trying to write a paper, which i need to present to a class tomorrow, on narrative christology in john's gospel. i only really got to it today and am writing it at the moment. then of course every week involves preparing a sermon. on top of this and everything normal in a week, i went to a conference on early christianity on the saturday. an enjoyable day, but a long day nonetheless.

someone smashed up our driver's side mirror on sunday night. that doesn't really bother me. getting it fixed bothers me. it involved a monday morning drive to the mechanic's, and now i'll have to take it in tomorrow morning to actually get fixed. morning hours are valuable study-real-estate for me.

had a rental inspection today, which likewise meant that most of monday and a couple of hours this morning were spent cleaning the house fairly thoroughly. which is good for the house, but there goes more hours. then they asked about a spot in the ceiling where there looks like there had been a fire alarm or something. but it's always been like that. i'm pretty sure our property report has it on there. they keep changing our property manager too. oh well, there are some nasty black marks on the lounge room wall from two chairs, and they never notice them, so i guess that evens out.

was anticipating a long drive in traffic home tonight, but the road was miraculously clear. i couldn't believe how clear it was! listened to a good sermon by Tom Schreiner on revelation 11. I think he got it right too.

i upgraded my ubuntu.
and now my sound is not working :(
apart from that it is marginally improved in noticeable ways.

that's me. not posting here very much, and i've become lazy about mirroring entries from my other blog. i guess that is part of the nature of trying to run 2, now 3, quite different blogs.

also, i've just been trying to work away solidly, and writing a good post takes 20-30mins, time I would have, but not time I do have, on account of being diligent and switching off the internet to get work done.

trying to write a narrative study on jesus in John's gospel. not a lot of secondary material to work with is going to make it hard. need to clear that out of the way to get straight back into some heavy trinitarian-patristics. had planned to do an exam in may, but now thinking june. really must knock it over in june, since i scheduled a research presentation for late july and it would be good to have actually done a few weeks of research before presenting!

wondering how hard i can hit-up the research in the second half of the year. want to be substantially done by dec/jan, and then spend a few months going easy and finishing up in '10. that would leave me with the freedom to work more (the wife will study next year), and also get some things in place for a doctorate, or even begin some research, enrolled or not, for the same.

i am still reading your lj though.

ad Mongoliam!

Easter came and went. We ate with a lot of people. Including my family. I like Easter.

We went and dined with the Yu's and half the corridor crew. This was followed by post-college college house party. Basically people from my year get together once a year to spend some time away, support each other in ministry, etc.. We spent two days away, heard a couple of talks from Justin Moffatt.

We then drove up to Port Macquarie to the in-laws. I went kayaking every morning. This makes me happy. Even on the last day when it rained half-way through and a foot of swell came up and made the going tough.

While in Port we went to a wedding. This involved kilting-up, because kilts are awesome and are always formal enough, unless you're actually in Scotland attending formal events, then the upper classes will bust you. But for me, kilts are always formal enough. They are also good for casual wear. In fact, kilts just rock. Also, at the wedding, someone Scottish asked me if I knew any Gaelic, to which I replied 'a little', and then we had the briefest of Gaelic conversations, as he knew less than I! But still it was good.

We drove back on the Sunday, then I went and preached on John 7.

I was feeling stressed about study, but I've decided just to push my exam back a month. That is the freedom I have and it won't really matter too much in the years of life anyway, so whatever. This is leaving me feeling much less stressed. Instead I am trying to get some work on John's gospel done.

What else? While on holidays I was reminded of my need to learn german. ach, I don't really like german, but I do need to learn it. So, I guess I will get back to that project too.

hmm, that's some of the latest.

Tags: life

Thought police muscle up in Britain

this blog has received an incredible number of hits the last couple of days. primarily a couple of readers reading back through hundreds of entries.

why? who?

seriously, it is not okay to write exercises that require grammatical material that hasn't been covered. don't ask me to translate genetives when about all you've done is mention that they exist. don't make me look up answers and then wonder where in the book you are even going to talk about genetives.

gaelic is hard enough without poorly written exercises.

i had a party. i turned a year older. a whole bunch of friends came. some should have come but didn't. i always feel a little rejected when people choose other events than my not so frequent birthday parties. but i'm not into chasing people these days. not friends, you don't chase friends.

i've been reading Gregory of Nyssa recently. He's a slow read. Contra Eunomium is a dense text. but there's some great Trinitarian gold in there.

Dropkick Murphys' "The Warrior's code" is a great album. fills me with gaelic pride.

speaking of, really encouraged by my recent progress in studying Gaelic.

church/ministry/etc is a slow, daily, constant struggle. but it's good. i work with a great ministry staff team, and that makes a big difference.

john's gospel is a wonderful text.

Today as i drove along and neglected to answer a call from a private no. (i couldn't pull over anyway), i began to reflect on why i dislike private telephone numbers so much.

I think there has been a shift in the last 15-20 years, at least in my experience. It used to be that all telephone conversations were blind - you'd pick up the phone and then need to establish who was calling and for whom. People accepted this as it was. The introduction of caller-id lead to a reaction - people didn't feel comfortable that answerers would know in-advance who was calling. The idea of screening your calls was somewhat offensive, and the idea that someone else knew your number before answering was seen as some kind of invasion of privacy.

Which is really weird when you reflect on it. It's not okay to know beforehand, what you're about to divulge once they pick up?

However, since caller-id is virtually ubiquitous, and mobile phone usage tends to mean people don't even know anybody's number any more, because they're all in contacts-lists, I feel like there has been a shift. Now I *personally* find it a little offensive to be called by private numbers. That's a person saying 'I can call you from behind a curtain of anonymity'. And it gives me no way to effectively filter my calls. I mean, usually I answer everything, but I am far more willing to be interrupted, to halt what I am doing, etc., for some people rather than others. Occasionally I won't pick up because the person calling will tell me things I expect to hear, and I have more pressing matters to deal with. I do deal with phone conversations with a black list/white list approach, and that doesn't bother me. Private number calls are trying to circumvent my filtering system, almost to force me to talk without any prior knowledge. It's like the blind date but in conversational terms.

so, there you go. call me from a private number and you're off to a bad start.

1. i've started doing some outreach program stuff in a local juvenile jail.

2. i'm hopelessly behind in my studies, but not my languages

3. i've started preaching an epic series on the gospel of john.

4. trinitarian conundrums keep me up at night.

5. it's almost my birthday

6. today i listened to a gaelic church service and comprehended almost nothing

7. i find arguments for the filioque largely unconvincing

8. the more i read the less i know

9. i wish i blogged more

so worthy