Good news!:)

Hello all,
As much as I have been tempted to inform all out there in blog-land, I have been cautious because,... well,... just because. Sometimes you just need to hold on to too-good-to-be-true news because sometimes it doesnt happen the way you think. It has been over a week now so I guess I can spill..
As of last Sunday (19th March) I am no longer a single man. No, I didnt elope with someone, just that I am officially going out with a lovely girl called Emily.
Emily is studying a masters in medical ethics at uni and started coming to my church recently. I could go into a vast amount of detail but I will just summarise it by saying that she is great.
On the weekend, Friday night was Cath's 25th birthday which was really nice. We started out at Roppongi for dinner and then went to the north Gong upstairs for Cocktails and hanging out. I bought Cath a cocktail for her birthday. I think she liked it.:)
Saturday night was Emily and my pre-arranged 'date' we went to the German club for dinner and dancing and then we watched a couple of movies back at my house after that. Totally cool night. We both had a great time.
Yesterday I went for a motorbike ride with an old friend. He lives in Sydney now and so once I got to his house we went north along the Pacific highway. It was lots of fun. We stopped at Mt White for lunch and then went on to Wiseman's Ferry. The road was pretty rough and so was harder work to make sure I was being safe. Good fun though. I got home at about 6 and boy was I in pain. Aches all over. Especially the butt! I can even feel it today and probably will tomorrow too! I had an array of dead bugs on my face and had an interesting sunburn mark but if you arent getting dirty you arent having fun!

What goes on

Well, I think it is high time for a 'what have I been up to' post.
I'll try and keep them a few days worth.
Monday was work. Pretty good. We are doing post tensioned design now which is a new step for the company. One of the big post tensioning companies has sub-contracted to us to do the design for certain projects. So far I have done one in Redcliffe in QLD and St Andrews Lutheran College. It has been quite interesting and so I would say that work generally is going very well.
After work I would have had role playing but it was cancelled. So instead I went around to Shaggy and Alice's house to hang out and play the PS2 with Shaggs. We played star wars - Battlefront 2 which is a fun multiplayer game. Their son Zander was around too. He's getting pretty big now!
After that I dropped over to Emily's house to give her a cat scratching post that I picked up from homeart on sale. All good.
Tuesday after work was bible study. Eltham led the study which was a topical on the relevance of the old testament law. Quite well done. There was some good discussion and I think people learnt stuff.
Wednesday I got myself a new Xbox game! Red Faction 2 second hand from EB games for $20. Hard to go wrong for that price! Played it a bit after work and then went and saw Paul play at the Oxford. Not such a big turn out but the music was the usual high quality you can expect when you see Paul play.
Last night was good too. A little xbox, then went and played indoor ultimate frisbee at the uni. We won our first game and tied the second. Third was a bye. The second game was especially hard because the team we played had 2 players who apparently played for Australia! It was fun and good exercise. My poor legs! Need to work on the running fitness.
Well there you go. Hopefully I can keep up the updates at a decent frequency.

One Way Streets

How do you feel when you put alot of effort into a freindship and the other person just doesnt seem to reciprocate?
To be honest, I dont like it.

I think that it is a tricky business because what I do and show to people who are friends is often different to what someone else would do. I also think it is incorrect to jump to immediate negative conclusions. But what is reasonable to expect from your friends? In one sense you should expect nothing. But, what is helpful for them to be doing to maintain the equality in the relationship.

With some people, I feel like I am the one doing all the emailing, all the instigating and basically keeping the friendship going. When I think about the one-way nature of the relationship it makes me sad. The question then is, what should I do about that? Should I do anything? Well, sometimes the person in question may just not think much about that stuff. Sometimes they are busy and in the overall scheme of things they are reciprocating, in their own way.

Sometimes however, I think I am expecting more out of the friendship than they are willing to give. At that point I think it is helpful to just take a step back and see what they do. For some people that means they dont ever make another effort to email me or whatever again. That is sad, but to be honest, a one-way relationship like that is just not helpful. I think alot of it comes back to the doormat stuff that Matt discussed.

My time is valuable, I am a great guy and if so-and-so cant see that then I am going to spend my time with someone who does appreciate me. I guess alot of it is linked to self-esteem. If you think you are worth less than standard treatment, then when some shmo treats you that way, you think it is fine. They will continue treating you that way and so reinforce your low self esteem.
In my time I have done alot of time and effort chasing people who just didnt treat me the way I should be treated. Often these were the popular people who's friendship I craved. I used to think: "If only I just did such and such...". Getting past this has been a great gift of God.

The reality though, is that you are one of God's creatures and deserve the respect and time due to you. If people treat you like you arent worth their time, then get some new friends. You deserve better.

Primary Hard Disk Failure

Last Friday my computer had a bit of a problem. At about 9:00 in the morning I was mid writing an email and my computer froze. No biggy, it's happened before. I tried to CTRL ALT DEL it to get the program manager up and find out which program wasnt responding. There was no response.
That had not happened before but, using my extensive computer knowledge, tried the old 'turn it off and back on again' trick. As it reset it stopped and said "Primary hard disk failure" and then "Insert system disk to continue". That wasnt so good.
I decided that my computer was just having a bad day so I turned it off for 5 minutes and made myself a coffee.
I came back and turned it back on. It just got to the windows loading page and then reset itself then tried again. This just went on for a few minutes and thought it was bad. Took my computer down the road to the computer guy and after he tried to get the info off without success informed me that basically all my stuff was gone.
Now, I dont really have a computer at home that is use very often because I dont have the net at home. So, apart from the obvious work stuff I had on there which is a whole world of pain, I also lost all of my personal stuff that I had accrued from the last 3 or so years of work here. As much as that is annoying, the most annoying thing is that I also lost all of my emails that people had sent me. Subsequently I have lost most people's email addresses.
So, if you're a buddy of Stu and have my email, I dont have yours! If you could send me a one line email (or more if you are inclined) so that I have your address again.
I'll be backing up more in the future methinks...