Tuesday 30 August 2016

The Valley of Vision

In recent years it has become my custom to pray through a list of people and situations most mornings.  For some months, however, I've been very tired and haven't had the concentration to do that.  That's OK in itself, but it's also meant that I've drifted into a pattern of not talking to God very much at all.  Talking about God yes, but precious little talking to God :-(

Once I realised that I was keen to change it, and one thing that's made a difference is a book I came across called The Valley of Vision.

https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/justintaylor/2013/07/11/valley-of-vision/

Thursday 18 August 2016

Edible weeds in my Auckland garden

The other day a friend saw I had a bowl of nasturtium leaves on the bench, along with other salad ingredients.  "Are those a vegetable?", she asked.  She was very excited when I said they were - she has lots of them growing in her garden and thought they were 'only a weed'.  Inspired, I enthusiastically showed her the oxalis that was going into the same salad.  She was positively ecstatic about that one: apparently it tastes very similar to a herb from her Thai homeland that she hasn't been able to find in New Zealand!

I love edible weeds like these: delicious herbs that show up of their own accord and thrive without care in our garden.  Here are some of my favourites.

Nasturtium

(source)

Friday 5 August 2016

Making a table of contents in a blogger blogpost

This won't interest any of my regular readers. I hope some people who will benefit from it will find it, but mostly I hope it will save me having to figure this out again every time I need it!

On some of my longer blog posts (such as my recent one on seeing the world) I like to include a table of contents to make it easier to navigate.  Unfortunately, blogger does not make this easy and, as someone with no background in computer programming, I found the online guides on how to do it hard to follow.  So, for other programming-novices out there, here's how to do it.

Seeing the world

I think it's fantastic that many Kiwis want to better understand how life is lived in places far away.  Most of those people will do this by traveling; however, in the spirit of not encouraging flying, I'd like to introduce you to some resources that have helped me to do this from the comfort of my own bed.

Bon Voyage!