What the world eats

This is a photo essay showing what families around the world eat in a week. Apparently families recorded what they ate during the week, and then posed for a photo with the total week's food. Below each picture is the weekly food expenditure in dollars. Go compare.

The 12 days of training

I'd like to apologise publicly for my singing on this; I'm sorry, I couldn't help joining in.

Thursday lunchtime (thinking about heaven)

Using my lunch break to do a bit of blogging; been doing a lot of thinking recently, much of which is related to therapy, so will not be in the public domain, but has brought me back to ideas about control and frustration, and what happens when the "real" world (the world-as-experienced) is different from SteveWorld™, where everything happens the way I want it to and everyone feels the way I think they should. Apart from my personal stuff, it did make me think about the way in which everyone, to some extent or another, has their own version of [Insert Name Here]World. We wouldn't feel disappointed or angry or frustrated or outraged unless the world-as-experienced was different from the world-as-we-think-it-ought-to-be. This isn't really news when we're thinking about this life; however, I think that there's a temptation to carry on doing it when we're thinking about heaven. Once we get beyond ideas about people in dresses sitting around on clouds, I think that there's a tendency to think about heaven as a place (/situation/experience) where we are happy and have our needs met and there's no more mourning or crying or pain; a place where life-as-experienced is exactly the same as life-as-we-think-it-should-be. Heaven gets sold as always doing the things you love best and feeling happy and never being bored. But I'm not too sure about this now. Jesus pretty much says that eternal life is exactly not all the best bits from this life, and there's lots of stuff in the gospels about treating other people in ways that might not make us happy, or about being prepared to give up everything. Maybe the joy of heaven is the joy of being with God, reunited in the one relationship that eternally tells us the uplifting truth of who we really are, recreated and renewed as we were intended to be made by the One who doesn't make mistakes; but maybe this means that the joy of heaven is joy for those who feel a reflection of that joy here in this life; heaven isn't eternal golf for fanatical golfers and eternal dancing for clubbers and eternal Sunday morning lie-ins for parents: heaven is being with God, and if being with God isn't your highest and greatest and best happiness here and now, then maybe heaven won't be for you.

OK, obviously need to do a lot more thinking about this, but I'm trying very hard to do work stuff during work time, and I've already exceeded my allotted lunch break so I'll have to stop.

Shrove Tuesday (2)

Because our children are scattered all over the place doing various activities on Tuesday evenings, I got up at 6.15am so that everyone could have pancakes for breakfast. Do I like being a dad? Absolutely. Do I wish it didn't involve being quite so tired? Oooh yes.

Shrove Tuesday

It occurs to me that Shrove Tuesday is the best day for procrastination: I will be self-disciplined, I will undertake all manner of improvements both spiritual and physical, I will mark each day with acts of self-denial, but best of all I will not start these things until tomorrow. It's not clear from the Gospels how long it was between Jesus' baptism and his forty days in the desert: Mark (of course) says that it was "at once", Matthew has "then", while Luke chooses to put his genealogy in at this point and has Jesus returning from the Jordan and then being led into the desert. It is quite nice to imagine Jesus saying to himself "I've got forty days of fasting and temptation coming up - I think I'll have a nice bath."

Slightly more seriously, reading these accounts reminds me that the forty days comes immediately after the affirmation of Jesus as loved by God. We can't know how different Jesus' relationship with his Father was when he was on earth from when he was/is the second person of the trinity; maybe he was in exactly the same relationship of eternal unequivocal love throughout all of his life and the affirmation was for the benefit of those listening, but maybe, being human, it was important to hear that he was loved, even if he knew it anyway. However, one important point that I need to bear in mind is that acts of self-discipline come out of the security of being loved, not the other way round. I don't get my relationship right with God (and therefore my relationships with myself and with others) through self-discipline: I undertake self-discipline becasue the desire to do so arises from the sure and secure knowledge that I am loved. There is a world of difference between buying chocolates and flowers for someone to make them love you and buying chocolates and flowers for someone because you love them.

Hema

If I ever go to Holland, I am going to shop in Hema, purely on the strength of this advert. Wait for a while after the page loads.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear

I managed to have a genuinely psychotic experiene the other day: I was driving along when I saw a silver Espace pulling out of a junction ahead. Often when I see this I forget that we only have one car, and I think "Oh, there's Katrina" (usually followed by looking to see if it actually is her, then remembering that in fact I'm in the Espace). On this occasion though I clearly remembered that we only have one car, because I saw the other vehicle and my first thought was "Oh, there's me."

I offer no excuse for this (though I was tired, distracted, etc, etc).

And the winner is...

Bursledon Players have decided that they will submit my short play, And the winner is..., to Totton Drama Festival. I'll be directing it. We had a casting session last Thursday which was markedly under-attended, leaving me needing to phone people and appeal for them to please take on a part. I've also said that I will direct that play and one or two other short plays for the April Bursledon Players production.

openSUSE

I finally have the openSUSE install program running on the Compaq Armada 1750 that I bought before Christmas. It turned out that it was nothing to do with the BIOS, nothing that needed any of the hoops that I've been jumping through. It just needed me to read this, and in particular the bit that says

"Microsoft Windows users
Windows XP can't burn ISO images without third party software."

Maybe this could be a little bit more obvious for first time users? Because lo and behold, as soon as I used the recommended software to burn the image (rather than simply copying it to a disk), it ran the install from the CD with no problem at all.