Jordandchan

There is a recruiting ad for the Australian Navy that has been on air for quite a while now; Painting Navy life as non-stop excitement and fun

I stumbled across an interesting article by a Christian writer from Melbourne talking about how the way the Armed Forces are being marketed and perceived is an interesting indicator of the way marketers are starting to use this idea of Self Actualization and Improvement as a motivating factor.

Check out the article - From Duty to Self Actualization. It seems to me to just another way in which our world is becoming more self centred in the way we make decisions. There is no longer any overwhelming sense of duty or service in a lot of young people. It has been replaced with the responsibility to “Be All You Can Be” as the slightly older recruitment ads for the Australian Army used to say.

What do you think about this trend?

you can learn something new everyday…

i took a call at work from a very elderly gentlemen the other day. He wanted to get a phone number - i very rarely think about how to pronounce numbers - except for 0. some people cant hear or think you are saying um so i tend to pronounce it zero.
so i was reciting the number back to the gentleman with the last 4 digits being 0600.
i started to say zero six and was interrupted by him stating “no no love - we shot all of them down in the war”
i was a little confused but went on with the number - now saying it as oh-six-oh-oh.
once i’d hung up i googled zero and war.
turns out zero’s were the name given to japanese aeroplanes used in the war.
so i’d managed to offend a war veteran simply by giving him a phone number.

i will never get tired of listening to the older members of the population filling us in on things that they have seen and experienced - and i wont ever use the word zero when giving phone numbers to people anymore.

Are you a person who likes lots of choices? Or does it make life more difficult.

Frank Chimero has an interesting post over on his site talking about choices. In it he cites a study by Dan Gilbert that found people who made a decision about receiving something, with the knowledge they couldn’t change their mind or swap, were happier with their decision than those who knew they would have the option to swap.

Keep reading…

have you ever tried so hard to do something the right/best way only to have it blow up in your face???

i have one of those personalities that should could with a warning, something like the following perhaps:

WARNING: Severe emotionally unstable individual who may AT ANY TIME bacome aware of people not living up to her expectations of how life should go at which point you MUST evacuate the area so as to not witness the mushroom cloud like explosion of pent up frustration and DO NOT return until subject has again become stable or another fallout could occur.

sometimes i wish i could have warned jordan of this before we were married - he should have been able to go into it with his eyes open but instead ends up with a wife who moonlights as ‘a big ball of crazy’ every now and again. Sadly its only with age that i’ve actually noticed myself doing this and i would love to be able to say that its something i have under control - but i dont.

i can even point out at which point during one of said episodes that i KNOW that what im doing/saying is abnormal but cant seem to stop.…. well until i’ve done or said something that needs to be apologised for and taken back.

UNTIL TODAY  - when i was being completely rational and trying to think through the situation and how a normal person would react and i still came up with the same answer - so now im just thinking maybe everyone is a little bit crazy and maybe i pick up on it too easily.

Generally i spend the few hours or days afterward on the verge of tears and trying to rationalise myself.

I think maybe i should just stay away from people altogether.

I was nervously standing up the back of a church wondering how to make it to the other end without crying.

it was the federal election day 2001. the day of my sisters wedding. a warm november day. the beginning of a lifetime together.

i hardly imagined when kel bought this kind of odd guy home to attend my year 12 formal that this would be the man she would stand up in front of God and all our family and friends and promise to be with for the rest of her life.

i think partly i didnt want her to because in some way that would be having to say goodbye to my sister. In reality what it meant was that i f inally got the brother that i wanted. And in more than a few ways, dave has been a better sibling than i could have asked for… well at least most of the time :)

i wouldnt have imagined that 8 years later we would be living right across the road and watching them raise a gorgeous baby boy, one that i have come to love more as time goes by.

so here’s to 8 years of a marriage filled with all the love imaginable…

I have been contemplating recently how I associate myself with different places. For me there are areas that I will always feel at home. Penshurst (where I grew up), anywhere in the Sydney CBD, Katoomba, the South Coast between Austinmer and Wollongong, Christchurch and its surrounds.

All these places are familiar and I would say I have an affinity with them, and identify myself with them. I’m not sure yet whether I can say the same for Padstow, where we are living now. I certainly now have a familiarity with the area, and would call it home, but it doesn’t have the same permanence as the other examples.

Interestingly there was once a time when I would have considered the wider Hurstville area as on of “my places”. That’s not really the case any more - for the most part we rarely have a reason to do anything over there.

I wonder what part of our brain it is that processes these things, and whether there are actually firm factors that we feel about certain places. It bears thinking about anyway.

What places do you consider yourself associated with?

one of these things is not like the others, one of these things is kind of the same, but of these things is doing its own thing, now its time to play our game…

ok - so in figuring out what to do for kels birthday i really discovered how similar and how different we can be… and its really quite scary. we can finish each others sentances, but we hate each others music tastes (mostly), we can’t play certain games together becasue we can predict each other moves, but we dont like the same food, we can think we know what will be perfect for a day out, but we can get it so wrong…

i think that i may have come up with a fairly flawless formula for organising special occasions though. I think of all the things that i would like most in the world, then do the complete opposite for kel, and its perfect. i think similarly, if she was to organise something for me the same formula would work.

the day was spent with a lot of food, activities and ended with us getting to spend some time at home with puff.

i think of how often i used to take our relationship for granted becasue i assumed that all sisters are best friends who talk to each other every day and want to spend time together but i am increasingly aware these days that its not so when i look at my friends sibling relationships.

i dont know what i would do with out kel… she’s just that awesome.

Usually from the trailer of a movie you can get a sense for what its about and what you will walk away with at the end, at least i usually can…

Not so much last night when we went to see Up with Jordans folks and i realised at the end that i spent more time crying than laughing…  and things about the movie have weighted heavily in my thoughts ever since…

Having a great idea is never enough - you have to have the guts, time and energy to act on it.

There have been a few cases over the last little while where I have had an idea of one sort or the other. I would be really into it, and be totally convinced of how good it was, but I could never get it together to take the next step and do something about it. Whether it was lack of time, a perceived inability to deliver or something else - one way or other it never happened.

Keep reading…

The epitome of woman. Her poise, diction and wit are characteristics to aspire to – and her wicked sense of humour made her more than just my husband’s grandmother. It made her my friend, my ally and my kindred spirit.

I realised that on pondering our journey over the past 8 and a half years, a lot of the things I would want to share about Nana come across as insolent, disrespectful and harsh. But that was the joy of what we had, we gave as good as we got, and we loved each other for it. From her sneaky fibs about her deafness, to her harassment of my driving skills. All of these this I will miss, and all of which I hold very dear.

Friendship and love know no ages gaps and for that I am grateful. Nana always had something interesting to share with me when we spent time together, and with an age gap of 70 years, she certainly had more experiences to educate me with than I her. Nana wasn’t much of a talker, probably the biggest difference between us, but she always had something to add if it was a topic she felt needed exploring.

I haven’t been able to come up with a ‘fondest memory’ of Nana as they are all fond memories, even the scary ones when we first met, the visits to Southgate for lunch, Sundays at Landsowne Street and more recently the warmth of her room at Peakhurst.
I cherish every minute I spent with Nana and I hold her dearer to me now more than ever.
Farewell.