If I was asked to count my blessings after a day like today I should find it very difficult to know how to stop.  There really are, just too many.

It's been a month since I actually had my birthday, my 40th birthday, which I celebrated with my fabulous family in NZ, but I only celebrated it with my Australian family today due to all manner of work commitments and busyness in the intervening time.

I stood on the step looking out at everyone assembled, such a diverse group, all of them with different connections some to each other but all of them connected to me somehow.  It never hurts to get a picture some time of the people who would

Hello Blog.

Remember Me?  I used to live here.   Lately I'm not sure where I am but here are a few random tidbits so you don't get too hungry for lack of attention.

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I'm having a (delayed) birthday party Saturday (actual event was back in April) and have been taking a leaf out of the 'it will be alright on the day' school of party planning.  Also have notes in the margin of the 'order everything online' chapter and am fully immersed in the 'cross your fingers and hope for the best' epilogue.

Which is just fine if all you want to do is throw a couple of salads (as made by someone else) on the table, switch on the bbq for everyone to cook their own meat and basically just loll around and enjoy everybody's company.  My kind of party... schmooze and cruise, no need to impress, decorations not required etc...

BUT

If you have this harebrained idea to get people up and entertaining the troops you perhaps ought to have read the 'plan ahead and get organized' prologue of the party planning manual and nodded even to the 'if anything can go wrong it probably will' chapter.  I have this on inside authority because it's t-minus 36 hours and I'm still without a PA system. 

THANK GOD I have a mac and a usb input machine thingummy because at a pinch we can plug a mic and a piano into those and then even into a dodgy stereo and get some approximation of amplified sound...  (or hire something... which isn't exactly fulfilling the 'keep it under budget' requirements.)

Either way I'm still holding myself to the 'for God's sake, don't panic' sub-title of the 'So you want to plan a party - what were you thinking?' addendum.

(Fi, you know that if you were coming you could bring the SingStar and I'd be having NONE of these problems... I'm just saying...)

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I have been writing to a [probably not yellow] submarine.  Or more precisely to an American Sailor who lives one one.

It's a story that's begging for a whole convoluted yarn I could string you along with but really, I'm just too tired to make something up.  Before you ask it's not a romantic kind of writing, more like a pen pals kind of correspondence that has now been going on for more than 6 years. 

Pretty amazing really.  I never ever had a pen pal that lasted that long before.

That is all.  I just wanted to write some approximation of the phrase "I'm writing to an American Sailor on a Submarine and he's writing back." 

Just because I could.

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Just to prove how geeky I am I now read Wil Wheaton's blog.  He's a geek/nerd writer and if you're any kind of Sci Fi watcher he played Wesley Crusher on one of the Star Trek shows.  His blog's about as geeky as John Mayer's is cool.

Which for this chick is actually pretty cool (I mean geeky, I mean cool).  Oh, you know what I mean.

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Consider this post, if you will, a physical expression of shaking the detritus out of my head, a la "time to clean out your hand bag... oh god, can't believe all that crap's in there etc."

1. Please... a baby doll dress, cute [tiny] shoes AND a black thick woollen winter tea cosy hat?  What were you thinking?
2. I'm now no longer a menace on the road and it only cost me $1100 to make it so.
3. I am continuously at the mercy of well meaning idiots... I would like to reach out to them... with a baseball bat... hard... probably more than once, even.
4. It's approaching that time of the month... yes, this could be a factor in the baseball bat impulse.
5. Soup night.  Tomato.  How long is the grace period on expired sour cream do you think?  If I'm not twittering tomorrow you'll know it wasn't 3 days...
6. My house still smells like last night's curry.
7. Cooked 3 nights in a row.  It used to be that cooking all week was a record... 3 DAYS?  I need help.
8. Potatoes won't bugger up tomato soup, they may even save it.
9. Only took my family 5 days to acknowledge my graduation... with the exception of Mum (aww, bless).  I definitely live too far away; either that or my achievements are considered insignificant... I'm opting for the former.
10. I find getting to the root of what someone needs from me next to impossible.  Dee 101.  Need a hug?  Good practice to say "Dee, I need a hug, would you be so kind?" Easy.  Does compute.  Other less direct means may yield mixed results.

So, Twitter?  What's the big fuss about???

I hear you blogosphere... I asked myself the same question in the early stages of owning a Twitter account... Can I just say, that was in Feb 07?  I've had an account that long making me a bit of an early-ish adopter maybe... but not early appreciator... (tis a werd?) I actually really only started using it properly this month.

So, what is it? 

Twitter is micro-blogging tool for keeping up with people in real-time. It's based on the simple question "What are you doing now?" and it works like this.

• I create a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com
• I invite friends to follow me on Twitter
• I choose people to follow on Twitter
• Whenever the spirit moves me, I tell Twitter what I'm doing, thinking etc in 140 characters or less and Twitter tells all my followers.
• Whenever the people I'm following update with a new 'Tweet' I get the message in any of my chosen tools for keeping up to date (more about that further down the page).

Twitter can inform for me in a gazillion ways.  It can SMS my posse with my my update (depends on how they've got Twitter set up) and I can get SMS from any of my posse.  I haven't got into this side of it because I can't figure out if it costs me money...

It can be added into my Facebook account and be used to look after my status updates.  THIS is the primary reason I started getting in to Twitter.  I LOVE Facebook status updates - and being able to update Facebook, without being IN Facebook seemed a very good idea... especially as Facebook is blocked at work for most of the day...

Having Twitter meant that I could update the blog with status updates!  Whee... little tiny bits of 'what am I doing' at Singular Scene without having to make a new post.  I know... a little bit tragic... but fun nonetheless... the technique of doing this involves getting the 'add twitter to your website' code from my twitter account and pasting it into my blog templates.  It also required a bit of css coding to make it look like the rest of the blog... I'll post more on that over at the Web Princess Blog... (remind me to tell you about the Web Princess Blog...)

I also have a Firefox add-in (seriously, get Firefox) called TwitterFox that sits in the status bar at the bottom of my browser which keeps a counter of current Tweets I can check out at any time and on which I can click to add a Tweet of my own and given that, when you know how much time I spend in front of my computer you'll understand why I don't really need to update Twitter from my phone...

Basically, it's another form of blogging that's a bit less word intensive and a bit more immediate.  It has proven useful for one particular man as it helped keep him out of an Egyptian jail! recently.  The rest of the time it keeps your friends and relations up to date with the inanities and enormities of your existence with very little effort required on your part.

And on that point alone it could be a curse or a blessing... So tell me, do you Twitter?

What happens when an Anglican, an Orthodox, a Baptist and a Pentecostal all sit down for lunch? Almost 3 hours of conversation and laughter!!!

Ba-dum Tish!

Ian, Yay, Semele and I, met up for a somewhat annual Anzac Day (ish) wibmeet at the Wok Bar today.

It really is lovely to sit at a restaurant on the deck with the sea breeze keeping the air fresh on such a lovely autumn afternoon, even lovelier to do so in such good company! No shortage of things to talk about and at least one outlandish topic of conversation, this pretty normal for us. This time around it was the suggestion of a new ministry, an Orthodox/Pentecostal fellowship headed up by Ian, I think I'll be called in for Pentecostalising such a congregation... could be fun...

We finished of our lunch (3 pad thais - pads thai? and a Vietnamese beef salad - followed by fried icecream for 2 and death by chocolate and warm iced chocolate for others) with fortune cookies... I believe the others will post the contents of theirs... mine was ... "Be on alert for a new opportunity" It sounds very like a prophecy I had once (oops, that Pentecostalism just slipped out... ) I'll let you know if anything comes of it!!

All in all it's been a fabulous week/weekend with one thing and another... still, I'm looking forward to the day off tomorrow and a the chance to relax a little... it's been full speed ahead for quite some time!

Heark back if you will to January 2006.  I put to the blogosphere the prospect of my going back to do a couple of years of part-time study in order to upgrade my Adv Dip in Christian Ministry to a Bachelor of Theology.  Today marked the end of that particular journey.  Man, 2 years never went so fast...

I'm  pretty satisfied with my results, 2 credits, 4 distinctions and 2 high distinctions with an average of 80%, and I'm really pleased to have achieved the work required and say I've done my degree but I have to confess I thought I'd be more excited...

Maybe I'm just too egalitarian to think that a degree puts one person ahead of another...  Maybe I'm less interested in the outcome than the process of learning... and maybe my ambivalence is making you wonder why I bothered in the first place.

I bothered at all because a) because I could, b) because if I didn't I would have gone out of my tree LONG ago out of sheer boredom, c) because having now got a degree I'm eligible to pass on some that knowledge to others as a tutor and d) because I can go on to further study in some other areas I'm interested in, and maybe even at such exalted palaces as The University of Sydney rather than a Divinity College.

I'm under a bit of pressure from PIA to do my Masters.  I scoff at the prospect most of the time but I'm actually not opposed to the idea... however, should I actually decide to do it...  I won't be doing Theological Study - I've given God enough grief...

...and I don't want to push him over the edge to a heart attack...

It's the biggest week of my working year... sorry... blog posting likely to be limited this week (yeah, I hear you... sorry, last week wasn't much better... call it the run up to the biggest week of the year...).

Have a great week.  See you after 1.  Conference. 2. Anzac Day. 3. Graduation. 4. Wibmeet. 5. All of the above...

This whole new Movable Type 4 kinckers drawer (ahem... back end) that I'm using to manage this site these days has introduced a whole new business end as far as comments are concerned...  Here's a little tutorial in case you've been a bit stuck on how to do it!!

You can use the 'sign in' option.   For the first time you'll have to select the 'sign up' option and put in all your details and basically sign in to be a member on this site.  I'll approve you as a commenter and next time you come back it should remember you and you won't need to put details in in future!

If you don't wish to sign up to this site then you can sign in anonymously, by which you do your usual name, email, and site info, click remember me and comment as you've always done...

The other business of OpenID and so on is a bit of a mystery to me... I'll figure that out in due course and let you know how it works...

Oh, and if when you've signed in to comments and you're good to go and you want your own little photo/avatar to show up next to your comments you need to go to http://en.gravatar.com/ with your pic in your hand and sign up for your globally recognized avatar... THEN... whenever you sign in with the email address you used to sign up to gravatar it will appear in the comments here (or any other gravatar enabled site)... (oh, and if you have a gravatar that isn't showing up you might want to check which email address you're using to sign in here...).

So, there you go... Singular Scene Commenting 101! Now that you know how... why not show me some comment love!!!