I'm excited!

Yes I know... I'm quite often excited! :) But this year I have every reason to be...

2007 was mainly characterised by:

... my last 5 eventful educational months en France, a 3 month long summer of activity, a messy break-up, good times with my family (highlights being this christmas hol, spending a whole summer at home and still appreciating them at the end of it, and getting to be towel-bearer for my little sister's baptism), a very joyful return to Glasgow, much banter spent with old friends and new friends, studying (woopwoop! still enjoying it... well most of it) and getting to know coursemates better, being back with what had developed into a full-fledged band while I was away, international students galore... siiigh... I love Glasgow... repeatedly messing up and repeatedly being forgiven, learning some difficult but valuable lessons about God and about myself (the latter being the less pleasant part).

What I am looking forward to in 2008:

All the newness; learning new things, taking on new challenges, doing new things such as going somewhere a bit further away in the summer (hopefully maybe). Spring in Glasgow (leaves growing on trees etc. etc.), getting to know some people better and meeting new folk that I will undoubtedly meet, my last full academic year of university (eeeep), getting to know God more and growing closer to him, using my new camera and taking pretty pictures (if it ever comes back into stock in Argos)

Oh and I still want to be a tree

This is my first year sans advent calender :"(

I roughly estimate that I spent the run up to Christmas doing

countless hours of studying
almost as many hours of celloing
several hours of singing carols at the top of my voice
8 hours of cleaning the flat
7 hours of 12 hour cheesy pop, (of which 2 hours were spent watching It's a Wonderful Life, 3 hours were spent boogying on at the headphone disco (quality concept!) and 2 hours spent chatting to randoms and not so randoms at the stall)
6 beanscene visits (most of which were to "chat about the critical review")
5 hours of mince pies and mulled-wine consumption
4 christmas carol services (to date)
3 and a half ceilidhs
2 exams
and 1 critical review

And after all that and some more that I couldn't fit into 12 verses, I am back in Edinburgh again for a proper break! It's roasting inside (having Sri Lankan parents means the heating is on ALL day!) and baltic outside (frost, unlike anything we ever get in glasgow, woopwoop!) Actually getting a proper break, except from celloing... in exchange for being fed I am playing in 3 church carol services avec les parents. A cellist's work is never done.

These Magic Changes

Yesterday I made a scrapbook of my year in France... It was both satisfying and disconcerting to reduce what was a year of my life into 20 pages of random bits and pieces of junk I've hoarded... kinda sad really. Still... I'm back in Glasgow indefinitely and excited by the prospect of starting back at uni, though looking at the course details for my joint honours coursem am feeling eversoslightly scared... what have I let myself in for?! A dissertation and a maxi project!?

As for the summer. Well that finished with a bit of a bang... The day after I finished at good ol H of H, I was jetted off for 3 days of glorious surreality in Lewis with the Potential Strangers... thankyou BBC! Here are some of my photographic highlights...

Sound-checking in the studio...

This pic (that Dol Eoin's 7 year old sister drew for the occasion) reminds me of this lovely welsh band that I fell in love with, not only for there ace music and genius lyrics (those that I could understand anyway) and the fact that the 4 of them sing in harmony at various points of each song but the fact that are genuinely nice boys :)

It's not an exaggeration... Harris though a little cold and windy, at least when we were there, really is stunningly beautiful.

Un éclat

I like this photo because of the memory I have of the moment when I took it. It had been raining for days and when it rains in Grenoble it snows on the mountains (up until about April that is) so you can't see them for the thick white clouds that obscure them. The mountains are a constant and familiar presence in Grenoble. You can see them looming behind all manner of buildings in almost every direction. So it's a kinda eerie feeling, not being able to see them. I was waiting at the bus-stop to go to school and then spotted that tiny gap in the clouds and that stunning turquoise blue patch of sky against fresh snow-covered mountains made me catch my breath! I just had to snap it! It was just so beautiful to see and even more so because it felt as though I was seeing blue sky and mountains for the first time! I felt as though I had forgotten what they looked like.

I had another one of those gap in the clouds experiences just recently though it didn't involve mountains or clouds.

My hope had been leaking for a while... I didn't notice at first, and then after a while I started noticing a pit-hole kinda empty feeling when I was alone, something which I hadn't experienced in a long time and it didn't feel like something I could stop. I suddenly had so many questions that made my head hurt. It was kinda like having my vision obscured by impenetrable clouds.

See I had forgotten what God is like. Somewhere along the line I had lost perspective and so lost heart. It seemed to me that He was letting people slip through His fingers that shouldn't be slipping through, people that I really cared about or who had grown to care about. I had the initial gap in the cloud experience because of a few words that made me realise God wasn't letting things slip through his fingers at all. That He truly cares. And once realising that I found my eyes opening to other situations and people that God was working in and through. This week I'm helping out with kids and youth work with my home church. This week is "launch-week" of a church-plant in a small town Kirkliston, the next nearest town to where I grew up. The very fact that God has put so many passionate inspired gifted people in the area and is enabling this to happen is evidence of the fact that He doesn't let seemingly hopeless areas, people, situations just slip through His fingers even if everyone else seems to have given up hope.

I'm not going to give up on Him, Christ Jesus our Hope.

Excuses for not blogging

First there was my cousin's wedding



and that whole seeing the crazy extended family from the four corners of the earth together for the first time in several years (actually twas the first time in 17 years that my dad and his 5 siblings were in the same country at once!) Birthdays were celebrated, a memorial service held, lots and lots of music has been played, and heated discussions had on everything from, what culture is, to how a video should be converted to dvd...

And there was SU music camp... Lots of musicmusicmusic, mind-blowing singing, seeing parables with fresh eyes, good chat, silly chat, late nights, early mornings, tiredness, awesome food, challenges, competitiveness, birthdays, balloons in my bed, surprises, sleeplessness, insane laughter, emotional 12 year old girls, illness, headaches, bollywood dancing, realising God doesn't work quite the way I expect Him to...

Voila some of us younger members of the team after we let loose the campers on their day out

you need that level of sanity to hack that kinda week with that kinda company I can tell you :D

Oh and there was Harry Potter... a surprisingly satisfying read I must say!

and those are a few of the many reasons why I haven't blogged in about a month! :)

blahweatherblahblahweatherblah

We Scots spend far too much time talking about the weather... I don't know how I didn't notice it before. The people I meet at the bus-stop, the bus driver, every customer that comes in, shop assistants, my friends and family... no one seems to stop talking about it! Having been away from the country for 9 months really has shed new light and in this case irritation, onto things. Yet despite having ranted to several people recently about how annoying I find it, I'm going to go back on what I said. Because sometimes the weather merits being talked about. Like today, at this very moment, in the centre of Edinburgh, at the end of June, it's hailing...

Surprises

Today was a relatively eventful day... as I stood by a roadside waiting to risk my life to cross the scariest-ever road to catch my bus I was hit by a lorry-fueled tidal-wave leaving me running around with smelly wet socks at work for the rest of the day. Still recovering from the shock of this (and mildly distracted by the excitement of the severalth reading of the third Harry Potter book) I managed to leave my purse on the bus. (which I discovered at lunch). This resulted in my having to trek across to Linlithgow to the bus station to pick it up (thankfully it had been found and handed in) instad of heading home this evening, spending a total of 2 hours and 45 minutes travelling. (It seems in spite of Linlithgow and Queensferry being so geographically close, when it comes down to public transport, they are really badly connected) I did not expect my day to turn out that way. I did not expect to spend 4 hours in travelling when I went to bed last night. I may have had even more trouble getting up in the morning if I had known that that would be the case.

I do like those little surprises though. Working at H of H is full of them... What with those surprise customers that require many runs up and down the stairs, lack of tea spillages on my part (that is an event I assure you) and the moment when the Quinnster says no to the biscuit (ok perhaps that one's more of a hypothetical surprise). And then every now and again, we receive a call which requires bellowing down the phone and though these can quite often be expected when one works in a place which services those who have hearing difficulties, they are a surpise nonetheless.
And then there are the events unconnected to the workplace... unexpected phonecalls on the bus, a frenchman preaching at Findlay on Sunday morning, the rain stopping...
what can I say... I like surprises :)