My most ambitious clothing alteration yet

Last summer I bought a dress on TradeMe.  It turned out to fit OK, but to hang like a sack :-(

Back at Oakley Creek :-)

I've been avoiding Oakley Creek/Te Auaunga since we went into lockdown back in August.  The paths are narrow and it's super-popular - I found it impossible to stay 2 metres away from people there.  But today, on a somewhat grey day, I decided to take the risk and head down right as the 4pm levels adjustment announcement started.  I hoped that most people would be glued to their radios and TVs and I'd have the place to myself.  I was right :-)  And it was so good to be back!

A bend in the Creek right near the entrance from our street.  The water was running high and cloudy after all the rain last night.

A cabbage tree/tī kōuka in flower up near Harbutt Reserve

New growth on a young tōtara - coming in a much greyer colour than the more brownish/yellowish established leaves.

I loved all the cheerful clumps of daisies in the grassy area on the other side of the creek from us.

A tiny mānuka (or kānuka?) flowering its wee heart out :-)

I love the vivid golden yellow of kōwhai at this time of year :-)

Another stretch of creek as I headed back towards home - so lush with all the spring growth around.

 

It's such a treasure having the Creek so close, and it was a delight to spend time there today :-)

Escaping the fear machine

At the moment, I feel a bit like I'm surrounded by voices that urge me to be afraid.  The New Zealand media is the main voice, with stories about our current Covid outbreak dominating everything, and this voice is reinforced by many people I speak to, by social media, even, to an extent, by my church prayer meetings.  It feels like there is one key issue in the whole world, and that subject is scary.

I often buy into it.  I miss the Covid-free-paradise that we had only a month or so ago.   I tend towards the anxious anyway.

All of which makes my 'Sabbath Mondays' particularly precious right now.  I'm so appreciating having a day to just 'be' and a day to fix my eyes on Jesus.

Holiday in Te Aroha and Auckland

On August 12th I had my first Covid vaccination.  At the time it was scheduled, my most local vaccination sites were the CBD and Henderson.  I decided to have it in town and to schedule it on a Thursday (Martin's regular day off) so we could spend some time exploring the waterfront together first.

Unexpectedly 'visiting' the Philippines

Today we went on a household excursion to Rizal Reserve.  It turns out to be named in honour of José Rizal: a Philippine nationalist who seems to have been quite the polymath!  There's a monument to him there, put up by the local Philippine community.

I'm not sure what the Philippine connection to the area is, but there's a Corregidor Place running more-or-less parallel to the park, too.

Still figuring things out

It's two and half years since I got better, but I still feel like I've got a lot to figure out about this new life.  When I first got sick, I think it took around that long to move from being scared through to a place of contentment - and it took periodic reviews of my activities to keep me there.  I guess I shouldn't be too surprised it's taking a long time this time around, too.  It's a big change!

I think one trouble is that I still don't have a good idea how much energy a lot of things will take.  Recently I went to visit a friend in Takapuna.  I spent about two hours with her, maybe an hour or so each way in travel time, and I rested for about an hour at her place before coming home.  I'd expected it to take basically the whole day, so wasn't unduly distressed at the two hour visit taking five hours - and we had a really good time together :-)  What I hadn't expected was being incredibly wiped out almost the whole following day as well, so suddenly my fun two hours had cost me almost two entire days...

And then I felt stink, and lonely - if visiting one friend 'costs' so much, how can I ever get around to visiting all the people I miss?  Time already feels so tight.

That was probably mostly because my expectations are still all a bit all over the place.  After all, no one else gets to do things that take two whole days all that often, either!  But I hadn't realised that was what this would take.

That's kind-of prompted a bit of a review of my time, though.  If things that matter so much to me take so long, I really do need to take steps to make sure they can happen at least sometimes!

Two favourite psalms

For our home group last week, we each had to pick a psalm of significance to us and talk a little about what it meant to us.  We then spent some time as a group, praying the sorts of things the psalmist was praying in the psalm, before doing the same with the next person's psalm.

Two psalms immediately came to mind for me (or rather, phrases from two psalms - I couldn't have told you the numbers of either, let alone quoted them in their entirety), and I was struck by how similar they were.