A Cat Post.

“If we are very lucky, we will have spent some of our life being owned by a cat.”

I have never understood people telling me they prefer dogs because cats are unsociable & unloving.  I have never found that to be the case.  Rather the opposite in fact.

Just at present we are going through some particularly hot, sticky days. The humidity is through the roof & we are all sweltering under the fan. Both cats are generally to be found in the coolest spot available, spread~eagled on their backs, feet in the air aiming for as much cool air as possible over as much of their considerable girths as they can get! There is nothing in the least unusual about this.  However my cats are used to a a lot  of attention ~ & I do mean a lot! It's not just that we talk to them.  They get chucked under the chin as we pass by, stroked & rubbed, commented on, tickled, played with & generally called upon to keep us company ~ though that last is simply because if we disappear from sight they start calling for us! Yet they are not lap cats.  They want to be near us, with us, around us but not necessarily on us. The MOTH complains whenever I go away because the cats expect him to replace my allotment of love & cuddles as well as his share.

That is how we roll ~ except when it is hot & humid.  When it is hot & humid no~one wants to touch the cats because cat hair sticks to everything like glue. It is far too hot for cuddles ~ & our cats, as you can see, are semi~long haired cats who generate plenty of heat of their own.

We were out yesterday, leaving the cats in charge of the house. We got home rather more hot & bothered than when we left but dutifully said hello to both cats, who were anxious to reconnect with their humans after such a long absence!  I took my glass of ice cold water & went to sit in the breeze on the verandah.

 Within moments Kirby had lept into my lap for head butts, chin rubs, kitty kisses & big smooches. *sigh* Cat hair stuck to my damp face & the rim of my glass, my glasses, my hands & my damp T~shirt. Nothing quite like breathing in lungfuls of cat hair.  I rubbed my thumb along his jawline in the way he loves thinking he would hop down soon enough but no.  He had missed me & having  rubbed his scent glands all over me to ensure I  smelt just right he curled up in a ball in my lap.

Ummm...it was like cuddling a fire pot. Thankfully he thought so too & quickly hopped down again but for the next hour he kept trying, as if the outcome would be any different. His need to love & be loved outweighed being uncomfortably hot.

Marlow, is another story.  He hovered.  He gets stepped on constantly because he is constantly underfoot, getting as close as possible without actually getting on me. When it gets close to bedtime his eyes never leave me, waiting anxiously for that moment when I scoop him up in my arms & cart him up the stairs to bed. If he thinks I have forgotten him a most anxious pacing around my ankles begins.

Cats are territorial so our bedroom is divided between the two.  Kirby likes the windowsill on my side of the bed.  Marlow sleeps at the bottom corners ~ in summer more on the MOTH's side of the bed because that's where the fan hits but not last night.  Last night he slept on my side & as so often happens when Marlow is feeling especially loving he draped one paw over my foot & gently just hooked his claws onto my leathery sole. It is not unusual for me to wake to find that cat gently patting some part of my body, just like a mother would pat a baby to reassure them. To say Marlow is a little odd is an understatement.

The scientific community informs me that in the wild cats don't vocalize. That is something they developed uniquely to communicate with their humans. They are pretty good at it too.  I know the difference between  Hello. I've missed you & where have you been? Where's my food? & Look what I've caught you! Kirby is particularly vocal chattering away in long paragraphs.

 Just like humans they want & need to reconnect after any absence but they do not have the effusiveness of dogs.  Kirby will wait, sitting upright & straining towards the sound of our voices waiting for us to notice him & greet him. Marlow will come sauntering towards us, tail plumed & carried high, waiting for his greeting. I feel so blessed to have always known the love of good cats.

A Post About Kitchens.

Today we went & paid for our new kitchen.  In a perfect world my kitchen would be a pristine white with pale robin's egg blue, teal & aqua accents, a marvelous marble benchtop & glass fronted cabinets to display lovely willoware china.

Alas.  I do not live in a perfect world.  In no time at all we would smash the glass fronts from banging them shut too hard, stain the marble with beetroot juice & break all our glasses dropping them on the bench. *sigh* I would be gripping about how hard the glass was to clean & how the white showed up every little stain. I know.  I had a lovely kitchen but after 30 years of my children & my children's friends ~ all of whom learnt to cook in it~ it hardly deserves the name kitchen anymore. It is warped & buckled & most of the doors are missing. I had short children; they stood on drawers & cupboard doors in order to make themselves taller so they could reach. *sigh*

And I've learnt some things about myself over the years.  I hate housework.  I really, really do.  I am prepared to sacrifice *pretty* for practical, functional, easy maintenance if it means less work.  Besides my idea of *decorating* is random jugs & jars with sprigs of this & that growing wildly in them. Sometimes I scare me by how like my Aunty Shirley I am. Books & plants. Very little else in this world matters.

So.our basic layout remains the same. No overhead cupboards to tempt those of us who are vertically challenged to climb to unprecedented heights. No corner cupboards for things to disappear in & die. This will give us dead corners but I can live with that. A proper oven tower with space for a microwave ~ which we also bought today. Three big sets of draws & a cabinet under the sink. No dishwasher.  I think they are filthy things. Ick! Our present pantry will be slighlty altered to save on cost but as there is nothing really wrong with it I can't see why we should spend money on a new one.

We have pine paneled walls.  Almost anything goes with that so although I adored the rich European Cherry benchtops with their warm, deep hues practically had to win out as the cherry was 10 X more than the Alder.  The Alder is sort of like this:

The cupboards are plain, unadorned antique white & I am assured they are really practical & easy to wipe clean. I have chosen discreet grip handles to discourage our newest little addition who promises to be more like his father than not & his father climbed everything climbable & quite a bit that wasn't!

I am not looking forward to the rip, tearing, bust but a working kitchen again will be absolutely wonderful!

One hot summer.

We are in the middle of our summer.  Being subtropical & on the coastal fringe we expect it to be hot & muggy.  We expect our afternoons to be electric with approaching storms & sudden torrential downpours, for lush steamy days of languid heat & the heavy, drowsy  somnolence that drugs the senses & dulls the mind. We get a *wet* season.  Not quite the equatorial months of water falling from the sky but rain, yet each day I find myself filling our birdbaths multiple times & the number & variety of the birds I see is increasing.

I have had birdbaths longer than I have had a garden. Water brings the birds & over the years you learn who to expect perched on the rim & when they are likely to arrive. Our regulars are the little dusky & olive backed honeyeaters.  They are always around, winter & summer, & they arrive first thing in the morning & late in the afternoon.  They are noisy & aggressive.  They know about the cats & they post a watchman who shrieks & screams if a cat so much as twitches a whisker.

We have noisy friar birds, butcher birds, & blue~faced honeyeaters who sometimes come & loll, until all the water is gone & the little birds scream in protest but there are birds we never see at the birdbath: robins; flycatchers, finches. These are hawkers, shy insectivores who prefer the top of the canopy or the hidden places of the bush.  They stay away from humans yet this year I have seen them all at the birdbath. They arrive in the heat of the day, have a quick dip & dab & flit away.

We are in drought. Even the little double barred finches have come for the water. Everything in our garden is stressed, even our big well established eucalyptus. Along the foreshore we are seeing wallabies & paddy melons travelling between water sources & we find the birdbaths tippled by the roos trying to reach the water. The curlews have floundered in & out of the waterlily pond; the bandicoots were not so lucky.  They got in but not out again.

In the midst of peaking heat waves & exorbitant, record breaking temperatures we are waiting... there hasn't been a spate of big cyclones in some time. The signs are all there.

Not of God.

It has been coming for some time. Bit by bit I have been culling my FB friends list.  Finally I have

reduced it to just family & Church ~ with just one or two others.  No, I haven't closed it completely.  I have our church page, which must be linked to a private account, & there are ministries I follow but the vitriol, the partisanship, the lack of logic along with purely emotive pictures & language, horrify me.  Enough is enough.

What I am seeing is a complete lack of balance coupled with venom for anyone who disagrees. This is not of God.  It is satan who seeks to kill, destroy & steal, who enjoys seeing the church divide like the Red Sea over 1 man.  The *Social Gospel* is not the gospel at all.  The gospel is Christ crucified to return us to relationship with God the Father & nowhere in scripture do I see Jesus expending His energy fighting for change.  Yes, in His relationships He was radical ~ but he led by example, not by rallying the troops to fight social injustices ~ which is rather interesting because the Jews were certainly looking for that sort of a Messiah.

Deuteronomy 32:8 has this to say: When the Most High assigned lands to the nations, when he divided up the human race, he established the boundaries of the peoples according to the number in his heavenly court.

God allocated land to the different peoples of the earth ~ with borders! This free flow across open borders is not of God. God is orderly. Governments, leaders & authorities are given to us by God ~ He raises them up, He takes them down. We get the governments we pray for ~ or fail to pray for.

Yes, there are terrible social injustices.  Yes we are to help the poor & downtrodden but we over~ride other biblical principles regarding the government of our countries at our peril. Our loyalty to a cause should  never over~ride our loyalty to God. Jesus lived under Roman government.  Rarely has there been a more corrupt, power~hungry, globally minded government yet Jesus still said to render unto Caesar that which is Caesars, & unto God that which is God's. That so many Christians seem to think marching in the streets alongside people who smash in windows, riot, litter, scream obscenities, disrespect the government, the police, the very process of democratic government is somehow more godly that those of us who retreat to our prayer closets & petition the One who can actually effect change boggles my mind.

Changing Horses mid~stream.

I often find myself at odds with Christian communities.  In Australia @ least, many people take a laissez faire approach to their religion, a *She'll be right, mate,* approach as they throw another snag on the barbie. Few people are passionate about their beliefs, possibly because a convict heritage cultivated a lack of trust in any form of organised authority [including the church], or possibly because the dominant religions were Irish Catholic & Anglican, both of which discouraged any overt expression of love of God while encouraging adherence to the practices of Mother Church. The charismatic is still viewed with suspicion in many quarters, the messianic almost unheard of.

I bite my tongue a lot ~ or @ least I try! Like my mother announcing out of the blue that the bible is not meant to be taken literally. Well, that depends who you're reading, what you're reading & where you're reading it.  A little understanding of Middle Eastern literary forms clears much of that up quite quickly so that what is left is actually meant to be taken literally ~ including all the things that make my mother uncomfortable.

Anyway, what I discovered when I began to deliberately listen for the voice of the Lord, was that the Holy Spirit wanted to share some quite surprising things with me. He began with the obvious: Jesus was an orthodox practicing Jew. Duh! However, knowing next to nothing about Judaism I had never made the obvious connection between belief & practice. As the Holy Spirit revealed the connections the New Testament sprang into vivid life. Everything from Jesus baptism to how the woman with the issue of blood was healed had roots in the Old Testament & it was hugely exciting & immensely satisfying   to discover the connections.

However, one of the things the Lord began to show me was the importance of the Festivals. I was shown very quickly there was an Old Testament application with a New Testament revelation & a prophetic understanding to each & every one of the major festivals, the one's God initiated for memoriam ~ & @ least one minor one, Hanukkah

Everyone who knows me knows I have trouble with practical applications. The doing comes hard; the knowledge is easy. So I began with Passover which has direct parallels & can be @ least just a one day celebration.  I never initially meant it to be more than a one of thing with the girls, the only ones still @ home but it sort of grew & now our church celebrates it each year & everyone looks forward to it because God knows how to teach in a fun way! The girls, who thought they knew & understood the Pesach story, learnt so much. Occasionally one of the boys finds the lamb bone hidden in the depths of the freezer & wants to know why that old thing, meatless & dried out, is residing in our freezer.

TI was the child who was home the first time we did Hanukkah, the 2nd festival we experienced, though I worked my way into it by teaching about it before actually doing it. I did find it difficult to sustain my enthusiasm for a whole 8 days because let's face it, Christmas is only one day of madness & you're all done & dusted for another year. Hanukah goes against the flow of the culture for a whole 8 days.

As a Church we mark Sukkot each year & are gradually working into the other festivals as well but for the most part I thought it was just God indulging one of the quirkier quirks of my nature. That our church was fascinated & intrigued by the Festivals I sort of wrote off so it has taken me a while to grasp that the Lord is actually doing a work in all this.

You see TI got married & has spent the last 2 Christmases in S.A with his wife's family.  I know he was hoping to be on the island last year to go fishing & crabbing over his short break.  What I didn't realise was how much he was looking forward to doing Hanukkah again.

As I have said I find the doing difficult. By day 8 that first year I was distressed. I thought I had ruined the holiday season to no purpose.  I couldn't think what I had been thinking to try & change horses mid stream when all our lives we had celebrated Christmas.  I was over the cooking & the leading & the organising.  Sadly, in our house I am the learner, researcher, teacher.  Anyone who wants to know something asks me first in the hope I will know & they won't have to struggle with Google. And I was tired.  So come the final day I was just going to let things slide but TI had other ideas.  As the sun set he lit the candles, in their correct order, from the shamash & recalled each & every covenant we remember. I was blown away.

He has remembered.  As he celebrated Christmas down south with his wife's family this year he explained Hanukkah to them & how we celebrated it, remembering the covenant journey God has made with mankind from the fall in the Garden to the resurrection of the Messiah. They were blown away. They expressed a desire to celebrate with us.  Why? Because it was God centric.

I'm sure that Hanukkah, just like Christmas, can be celebrated in secular fashion with little regard to it's spiritual implications but many Christians, distressed by the secularization & commercialization of Christmas, & looking for more authentic ways to mark Holy Days, have turned to the Moed for inspiration.  In my case I have so little idea of what I'm doing I stick like glue to the prophetic revelations.  I look for Jesus.  He is there: in the symbols; in the scriptures; in the revelation. And because we are the wild olive tree grafted into the root that is Israel He is to be found & it is a very wonderful thing.

The Bitter & the Sweet.

January is the bitter/sweet month. We have just come through 2 anniversaries &  are about to land on a 3rd when I pack my bags & head north to my mother.

Because numbers really do not exist I survive the anniversaries quite well.  I am unlikely to remember this is the day I got the phone call @ 5am to tell me my youngest brother was dead or this was the day I saw my father lying still warm but very dead under a hospital sheet.  My mind does not work that way.  Days are just days but a light aircraft droning overhead can send my heart palpitating suddenly with visions of metal falling from the sky while grey haired old men of a certain age & height can cause me to suddenly burst into tears distressing everyone around me.  Deary, deary. Life can be a terribly uncomfortable thing.

Why, asks the ODD, do all my relatives die @ Christmas? They don't, of course.  It just seems that way. Still January is when I try to be with my mother as the 3rd anniversary approaches because we spent so many Januaries with them celebrating my father's birthday & he always said his birthday went for the whole month & took every excuse to purchase something sweet to celebrate!

I expected, as I got older & the demands of my children grew fewer, that it would be easier to get away to spend time with my mother.  It has not happened.  Instead it has become more difficult. There are the cats, the church & 2 businesses ~ all of which apparently need me. There is the garden & bible study & a host of other things & of course my mother continues to get older. She is finally starting to slow down, distressed as year by year the circle of family & friends grows ever smaller.

So ODD collected me & drove me north & for a week I didn't do much of anything.  I ate.  I slept.  I read. I listened to the stories of my mother's life ~ again ~ & I didn't begrudge it. We all know tomorrow is not vouchsafed us.

And so it begins...

As we move through January life is beginning to settle once more.  Much as I love my children they bring an inordinate amount of chaos into my life. The yard stinks. Whatever the lads used for fishing has been dumped summarily somewhere I have yet to find but the smell is wafting... The CG has returned to Chile & we are not a family that does well with goodbyes. I will now get random phone calls until she has transversed the globe & landed back in Santiago.

Just when we were most emotionally vulnerable our little church came under serious attack. I did not realise how strong our *little, old, grey haired, ladies were*.  They refused to lay down & die. Rather they rose up as they have been trained to do, stood on the Word of God, declared we already had the victory in Jesus Christ & were champing at the bit. The victory is ours.  I am so very grateful.

In a few weeks we will tear out our old kitchen & revamp the whole thing.  I am not looking forward to the chaos & mess but I will very much enjoy having a working kitchen again so it will be worth it in the long run.

Meanwhile the wildlife continues to parade through our yard.  The curlews have a new chick & there is a stray egg laying about that no~one seems to want to claim. The little wallabies & paddymelons are continually being spotted foraging along the foreshore & one week our bible study were astonished witnesses to sharks herding mullet into shallow water then partially beaching themselves to feed before wriggling back into deep water.  I knew killer whales did this but had no idea about sharks. It was astonishing, terrifying & totally mesmerizing.

As usual CG abandoned anything that would not fit in her suitcases so I have a mishmash of her things lying about. She barely made her weight restrictions as it was so obviously nothing else was returning with her. As I dislike housework it will be some weeks before I have pulled my house back into some semblance of order. This is not helped by running 2 messy businesses out of our home & preparing to instal the new kitchen ~ obviously none of this will take precedence this week as this is my preaching week & that takes priority ~ not something it is hard to convince me of.  Research I do like.  Writing is tolerable.  Housework makes me want to curl up in a ball & go to bed.  Sometimes I do. Happy New Year!