School reunion

Over the weekend Chilton had its 90th birthday/jubilee. Now for those who know me - and you don't even have to know me that well - it won't come as a surprise to know that I was a loner at school, so it wasn't exactly a fun time full of good memories. So when I left my house to head down for the cocktail party on Friday night, I had a rather strange sensation of nervousness that came over me and didn't really go until I saw people I recognised, started talking and realised that after 11 years, people don't really change, but they do.

It's not an exaggeration to say I had no friends at school. Being brainy and a Christian made me an easy target. There was a rumour about me that started in form 2 that took until form 7 before somebody had the decency to ask me if it was true or not. In 6th form, I gave up on trying to fit in in the common room after only a couple of weeks (loud music and people 'borrowing' my homework) - much to the chagrin of the principal, who rang up my parents to ask why I was weird - and relocated myself to the library, where I was allowed to use the office as a locker room. In 7th form I guess people did settle down and start treating each other a bit more civilly - perhaps the responsibility of being on the school council helped with that. I had odd times for study periods so didn't have to compete in the common room so much.

But all that almost washed away like a bad dream at the weekend, as I caught up with people I haven't seen for ages, some of whom I got on with ok at school and others, well, not so ok - but everyone seemed happy to swap stories and hear what everyone else had been doing. It seems there's an unusually high proportion who have become teachers, most of them are married or nearly so, and a few have kids. Most have travelled and/or spent some time overseas.

School days are quite a tender time in a person's life. It's a time when character is developed, attitudes founded about how far you'll compromise just to fit in with the crowd, interests are piqued and self-discipline fostered. For me, being an outcast only made me the more independent. I never really cared what other people thought of me - this is the way I am. In those respects I haven't changed. But I have changed in areas of trying to relate to others; I hope I have become more patient and able to restrain myself from saying hurtful things.

So has my time at school shaped me, or would I have always turned out this way? I don't think it's possible to say. Certainly my faith is the foundation of who I am, and I sure didn't get that from school.

Update, and the election

The last few weeks have been pretty uneventful, hence the lack of posting. I helped out as emcee at Al's birthday party and was coming down with a cold already, so I don't think having to raise my voice helped that any. It's now almost two weeks later and I still have a cough.

Other than that I've been pottering around the house, following the rugby (Wellington is on a roll this year, having won the Ranfurly Shield earlier and on track to the finals - hope they don't choke like last year), trying to do a bit of bike riding in the lead up to the Lake Taupo cycle challenge, and spending way too much time on facebook. Oh, and for a challenge of a different sort I've tried to start learning Dvorak. Although I do run into trouble sometimes and accidentally hit the shortcut to switch keyboards, carry on typing in qwerty and get something like orm.ydcbi nct. ydcov

The election: well, I can't wait until it's over. It's pretty obvious who's going to win.

Now you're wondering if I'm referring to the US or the NZ election... does it matter? Except one of them I can do something about, and one I can't.

The CKC prize night... that wasn't

Well this week at CKC it was the end of term, which mean it was time for PRIZES!! The kids earn points every week for coming, doing their homework, knowing the memory verse from the week before, winning games etc. We have three prize levels: 50 points - chocolate bar, 100 points - eligible to come to a pizza/games night at my house, 150 points - I'll take them to the movies/zoo/10-pin bowling/science museum/etc. of their choice.

When we had the same system before at KBC, the pizza/games night was the highlight of the term for all the kids. There, the 150-point prize was also an aeroplane ride with me, and we had kids get to over 150 and insist that they couldn't ever miss coming to the games night, so they'd wait until they had 230 so they could do both (games night was 80 points in those days).

I'm not sure what it is - different kind of kids, I guess - but 5 of them had enough points to come to the games night and none of them wanted to.

I don't feel rejected (well, I do kind of) but I'm just wondering what to do, whether to persist with it or come up with a different prize. However, I don't want to get physical prizes because then they just end up with loads of 'stuff'; things they can eat or things they can do I think are better. Also there's the $$ to consider, knowing that the value kids place on things and their monetary value are often quite different.

Maybe playing games is not 'fun' enough for them - these are kids whom I've heard say, 'the school holidays are boring unless we go overseas'... must be terrible to be so hard-up. Back in my day going to McDonalds was a big treat, and you wore your best clothes to go to the movies. Can anybody else relate??

= = = = = = = = = =

In the meantime I had to laugh at this:

(The original, for my non-kiwi readers:
http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo )

Pulp Sport parody:
http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=vVj-EnGNiic

Soccer: end of the season

It's a relief knowing that there are no more soccer games that might be cancelled or defaulted. But also extremely frustrating, that I played one game all season and broke my collarbone in the process.

I'm not sure what to do for next year - whether to take up another sport instead (badminton or maybe even go back to hockey) or go to another club. In the meantime I've registered for the 'Twilight soccer' tournament to be held at Fraser Park over the next few months...

By popular demand

I mentioned a while ago that I'd try and help all my American friends out by supplying you with a NZ word dictionary of sorts. The list is by no means complete.

(some) New Zealand words and phrases

chocka - full, as in 'my schedule is chocka today'

jandals - what Americans call flip-flops and Aussies call thongs

chilly bin - what Americans call a cooler or ice box and Aussies call an eskie

knackered - (1) tired, feeling worn out ('I'm knackered'); (2) kaputt, broken ('my car is knackered')

cheerio - (1) 'Goodbye'; (2) a cocktail sausage

tramping - hiking

strewth - actually more an Aussie word than NZ, an exclamation meaning 'wow', corrupt form of 'truth'

having a yak - talking, gossipping, gasbagging

footy - football. In NZ and Australia this means different sports: in Australia AFL (Aussie Rules) or rugby league; in NZ always rugby union.

rattle your dags - means 'hurry up'. Originates from sheep farming...

common as muck - very common, nothing special. 'Around Stanford, BMW's are common as muck'.

hard yakker - hard work

hit the sack - go to bed

making a racket - making a noise. Note that in NZ the word 'racket' is never used of a tennis or squash racquet.

fluffing around - mucking around, causing a delay. 'Sarah's in the bathroom, fluffing around'.

stonkered - full (especially with regards to overeating)

tucker - food

yonks - ages, a long time. 'He was away on holiday for yonks'

drongo - idiot. 'Stop being a drongo'

packing a sad - pouting. 'Whenever my brother didn't get his own way, he'd pack a sad'.

piker - someone who opts out of an activity. 'We went to the beach but Joe didn't go swimming, what a piker'.

pong - bad smell

skite - (v) bragging, boasting; (n) someone who skites. 'Tom was skiting about his new car'.

sook - wuss, wimp, piker, crybaby.

squiz - to look at something. 'I had a squiz at the menu.'

blobbing out - relaxing, chilling out.

spanner - Americans call 'wrench'. e.g. crescent spanner. Distinct from an Allen key, which Americans also call a 'wrench'.

put a spanner in the works - causing complication. 'We wanted to go to town but the buses weren't running, so that put a spanner in the works.'

Muscles I didn't know I had

The last few days I've spent down in Geelong visiting a friend, blobbing out between last weekend's experiments and this weekend's. Last night he took me along to rock climbing. I was trying to remember the last time I did any, and it must be at least 6 years ago.
Intellectually, I know what you're supposed to do: use your legs to push yourself up and your hands to keep from falling off. But when you get half-way up a wall and you can't see where you're putting your feet, it all turns to custard. There were some climbs where I didn't make it all the way to the top, and others that I did, so all in all it was quite enjoyable.

I'm paying the price for my efforts today though - although the good news is that my collarbone has given me zero grief over it.

On the way driving back to Melbourne, I had a slight detour to the RAAF museum at Point Cook. I thought it was excellent - well laid out and a good display of different aircraft and other exhibits.

Now I'm back at the synchrotron (internet access! yay!) and checking that all our samples and chemicals etc. we need for this weekend have arrived. The student will arrive sometime tomorrow, then it's all on. But if everything works, we should get some fantastic (i.e. immediately publishable) results...

When you can't agree to disagree

There's been an incident on a private Christian message I'm part of recently, concerning denominational doctrinal differences. Well, not specifically concerning that, but it's where my mind ended up wandering to.

It reminded me a little bit (in a very random sort of way) to the most recent time the JW's knocked on my front door. They started off by showing some articles in their latest magazine about Jesus coming back, and shared an obscure Scripture out of Psalms to bolster their point. I replied by saying, there are plenty of other Scriptures that you could use rather than that one - such as Isaiah 65, Revelation 21 etc. Which led onto a discussion culminating in them saying Jesus was not God but the archangel Michael.
I was labouring this point, and the older woman (she had taken over quite early in the piece, a comforting sign that they were a bit rattled) said something along the lines of 'We'll just have to agree to disagree about that.'
I replied, 'No, that's not possible - if you've got the wrong Jesus, then nothing else matters.' At which point she quicked thanked me for my time and literally almost ran down the driveway.

Coming back to the Christian message board conversation. The notion of Jesus being God, come to earth as a man, dying on the cross for our sins, a price that completely satisfied God's justice, and bodily rising from the dead - is central to Christianity. It is the definition of Christianity and the Gospel.

But branching out from there one encounters all the other doctrines: the Trinity, literal 6-day Creation, the Second Coming, once-saved-always-saved, the gifts of the Spirit, water baptism, etc. Each of these is determined by our hermeneutics (the way we interpret the Bible, from literal to allegorical). And our stance on the core doctrine of 'what is the Gospel' is likewise affected, although this is not always evident.

I don't know what the answer is to the question, 'How much doctrine do you have to have correct, to be a Christian'. Because in reality, none of us can truly grasp the notion of the Trinity, or the means of justification.

So what are the bare bones of Christian belief? Here are my thoughts:
- Jesus Christ is God (but this by itself is not enough, because demons believe this)
- His death on the cross and resurrection paid for my sins (but this by itself is not enough, because if we do not apply this truth to our lives, it means nothing)
- Jesus Christ is Lord of my life (now it's personal)

The implications of the last one are far-reaching... encompassing repentance, turning from sin, pursuing righteousness. If He is Lord, it will greatly impact how we live. Ultimately it will affect how we read the Scriptures (that He wrote), and the other doctrines mentioned above will fall into their rightful places.

Melbourne, again

I'm writing this from the synchrotron in Melbourne, our first set of experiments start tomorrow. Getting the samples ready in time was a bit of a rush, but we managed. One of those jobs requiring a lot of patience: transferring pinch after pinch of sample into a 0.2 mm diameter thin-walled glass tube and gently flicking it with your fingernail to make the powder progress to the bottom. I think we made about 12 in total; I couldn't get one done in anything less than about 45 minutes. So it has definitely been an exercise in patience!!

Will write more once our experiments get started, I may have some news by then.

What a difference a functional modem makes

I've been struggling with my internet connection ever since getting it set up, back in October/November last year. I learnt fairly quickly that it's useless trying to call the Slingshot 'help' desk - they always seemed to think there was something wrong with the way I was connecting it (no!) or something wrong with the phone line (no!). The actual problem was the modem THEY sent me.
Dad lent me another modem, which would take about half an hour to connect, but at least once it did the connection would stay up for about an hour on average - much better than the 2 minutes the el cheapo Slingshot modem would. But getting that connection was driving me nuts, so yesterday I splashed out $130 on a new modem/router - wireless too (why not).
It took half an hour initial set up to get my computer to talk to it, and now it is working fantastically.

What's on today: soccer at Kilbirnie vs. Marist (the team I was kind of asked to play for). The weather hasn't delivered the rain promised, so the only thing stopping things will be if we don't get enough players and have to default. Again.

UPDATE: Soccer was defaulted. And it's raining now, so it wouldn't have been all that fun anyway.

The kangaroo route

That's right folks, I've been home less than a fortnight and in 12 days' time I'm off again back to Melbourne for the next round of beamtime. The time was only scheduled 5 days ago which has not given me a lot of time to arrange everything... this time it will be measuring anomalous diffraction of Bi-2212 superconductors, and then looking at the formation of Pd (and/or Pd-hydride) nanoparticles in solution, in situ.
No more technical stuff, I promise. At least for this post...

Both experiments have been scheduled over two consecutive weekends. It works out more cost-effective to stay over there than to return to NZ in between. So I may be able to spend a bit of time catching up with friends...