Cherry-Berries

A decidedly delicious childhood delight was munching bowls full of cherries and cream out in the garden with my sister. We would make a wonderful mess, have red-stained mouths and, to use one of my mom's favorite phrases, be as happy as crickets! (weird saying, i know... but it makes me laugh :D)

But why this random outpouring of my history with cherries? Well it stems from a highly startling conversation which I just had with two lovely people from my res in the dining hall during our delectable swot week brunch. It turns out that they are two young women who have NEVER EATEN CHERRIES!!!! I was seriously amazed and for a gobsmacked moment could say nothing! Then the funny part came where they asked me to explain what cherries taste like... i umed and aahed for a while and then lamely muttered something along the lines of "not as sweet as grapes...." what do you say!? it's like trying to describe the colour blue to someone who's blind!?

Also, more reasons for the cherriness of this post include much communication with the wonderful Leraine since she is now back from her stint as a bushbaby... Leraine calls me cherry berry and thus inspired the title of this post.

This is a pic of my afore mentioned berry partner in cherry-crime... my wonderful sister Kirsty, whom I am missing very very much at the moment and who is almost a super-cool qualified physiotherapist... she's even going to work at the Comrades this year and is the captain of the Wits physio strapping team (strapping is a hardcore skill) for the Comrades... yup folks, i am a super priveleged little sis to have this wonderful, godly, talented woman in my life!

ok... swot week has just about arrived and I am intending to do some SERIOUS work, but will definitely do some blogging for all you addicts out there! hehe :) Stay warm, hope you have a wonderful Sunday :D

Oh my word!

This is a VERY important post to inform everyone that Miss Leraine Wilkens has amazingly finally updated her blog for the first time since NOVEMBER last year!!!
This incredible event is worthy of a look all you munchkins... check it out here :)









Has anyone seen this lunatic? Fort England wants her back...
please dial 0800-D-I-E-S-E-L-S-M-O-M asap if found! :D

Courtship Shoe-mortship

After listening to Josh Harris' sermon entitled Courtship Schmoutship (click here for website link) and going to some of the Finding Love that Lasts seminar held by the church last Saturday I have had many thoughts and wonderful new revelations about the concept of courting and of the beauty of singleness.

However, while I was doing some random surfing on the deep well of waffle and some good stuff (eg. blogs) called the world wide web, I found this GREAT pic of something that is arbly (and yet so aptly) named a 'court shoe'.

I hosed myself when i saw it because my mind immediately started running in the 'court' as in 'courtship' direction. And since my (usually) trusty OED (Oxford English Dictionary Online) failed to provide me with a satisfactory reason for the naming of these types of shoes as 'court shoes', I have decided to make up my own meaning which is that they are ideal for any woman who is involved in a courting relationship.. here are my reasons why:

1. They are pretty and feminine and special, which should be a magnified feeling for women in this season of their life. (I say magnified because women should feel special and cherished all the time and regardless of their romantic circumstance, but will probably feel it to an augmented degree when courting)

2. They keep her feet on the ground, but because of the heel, she still gets to float in the clouds :)

3. They are pink (ok, so this isn't really a reason, but part of the reason I like them is because they are pink!)

4. They have sharp points at the front because a short sharp jab under the table has occasionally been found to be helpful in enhancing a man's social etiquette and tact.

Just to mention (in case you didn't already figure this out) all above comments regarding shoes were made in complete jest and leave much to be desired and corrected (bring on trip an d-ship! hehe) but it was a totally thrivable experience for me to write such nonsense! :D

To conclude with some more wise and amusing biped humour from Jack Handey...
“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.”

Word Drought

I have been mulling over what to post about for a while now and sadly, i am having a slight word drought. Not that I have nothing to say (as if! hehe) but just that I don't really know which bits to put down or how to put them down... I will try to do so soon though! For the moment i've decided to use someone else's words. This is one of my favorite poems in the whole wide world, and I've been meaning to post it for a while now, it's beautiful...

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ode to Derralyn Claire Martin

There once was a girl called Derralyn

Who was as pretty as a fairytale heroine

Her eyes were like stars

And her ancestors from Mars1

But her heart was as big as a watermelon2

1. Mars because Matin is just the 'earthified' version of Martian

2. This is a VERY big compliment and has no bearing on the fruitiness of her mind (although we're not exactly denying that!) Watermelons are one of my top 2 fruits and watermelons are very beeeeeeeeg (this is what i am referring to with her heart :D)

Dez was my absolute psycho hero and partner in crime on Thurs night/Fri morning :D

Lots has happened since then, but I am too tired to function properly so i shall write a post about it all later (like tomorrow or something).

Just to mention that the revelation of the day is that according to aptitude tests my triplet (Becs and Dez) are professionaly suited to being either a businesswoman/wife (Becs) or... A MANIKIN DRESSER (Dez)!!! I guess even that could be adapted to old Martin Luther's saying, "A milkmaid [manikin dresser] can milk a cow [dress a manikin] to the glory of God" :D hehe.

p.s. some new quotations up... check them out here

Alphabet Soup

As a denial rection to the shambles of my life as a journalist right now, i am going to continue this theme of random, yet hopefully slightly entertaining, posts which i began yesterday...

When I was a wee one, i never seemed to be able to motivate myself to study for class spelling tests... it ticked my mother off to no end. Thankfully though, i've always been a beeeeeeeg fan of reading, and this has redeemed my spelling issues to some extent - apparently if you see words often enough something soaks in! There remain, however, some words that i just never seem to grasp grammatically, I was thinking about these in my Classics lecture this morning, besides taking YEARS to learn how to spell 'beautiful' and having to make up a rhyme to spell 'colour' (Colin Ollen Likes Olives Under Rain), these are the one's i've come up with:

tounge - should be tongue
prescence - presence
definately (my mom's personal pet peeve) - should be definitely
recieved... i never did get the exceptions to the rule! - should be received
prehaps - perhaps

incidently, to try and recover some dignity now that you all know that i'm a hopeless speller, i will share my all time favorite word fact:

the longest word in the English language is not, in fact, as some jokers would like to believe, smile (it starts with an 's' and then goes on for a mile *cringe*) It is (drumroll please)...

floccinaucinihilipilification

(and the crowd goes wild)

pronounced: flock-i-naw-see-ne-heely-peely-fication
and it means "The action or habit of estimating as worthless"

cool hey :)

I'm not laughing at you...

This morning has been a wonderfully amusing one... i've seen or heard or a bucketload full of things that have brought a smile to my face in a way that has made this random Monday morning very worthwhile! The pinacle of these amusing things happened on my way home from the journ dept a moment ago. Firstly i encounterd (and i mean encountered as in 'almost ridden over' kind of way) a man in a truck who was reversing down the wrong lane in Prince Alfred street.... once the whole possible-death thing was over, i laughed. Then whilst passing by one of the annex buildings before the philosophy dept i saw through the window (i always look through those windows... it's like getting to watch your very own human zoo everytime you go past... these people obviously don't believe in net curtains!) that someone had a stationary holder on their desk, but all that you could see in it was a toothbrush and toothpaste! The complete randomness of this on the desk of some (probably) aging academic made me hose myself all the way down to Allan Gray... talk about halitophobia (the fear of having bad breath) when you replace pencils with dental accessories. NOTE: After re-reading this I realise that it is probably not so funny and the amusingness of it is much more related to my mood than anything else.

Talking about dental accessories though, I was shouted at by my dentist this vac for my failure in having been brought up in a family of non-flossers. He is a dear aging Polish man who amuses me greatly (not intentionally though) and whose horror at my unflossed dentures (despite the fact that I've never had a filling) was so sincere and touching that it flung me into a momentary state of guilt and I went to purchase some of this floss stuff. Learning to use it however, has been a whole other DIY adventure... and not one that I shall ever submit my adoring public to!

Now it's time for lunch and then some of the profound wisdom of Gareth at SOAR, but for all those who I encounter for the rest of the day... you have been warned:

5:40 PM turns out that the halitophobia joke is on me... lunch today was SERIOUSLY pungently garlicy... so i had to run back to res before SOAR to...yup you guessed it...brush my teeth! *blush* hehe :D I guess the people who sat next to me at SOAR were grateful tho! :)

No Sacrifice

Jason Upton has an amazing new song called No Sacrifice and today the idea of this song has been running through my thoughts over and over. The essence of it is that compared to Jesus dying on the cross in a place of deepest human wickedness (of which we all had a part) anything that we have or will ever 'give up' for God is so insignificant in comparison that it doesn't deserve to be called a sacrifice. This is amazing to me because so often I make such a big deal about giving stuff up for God and I think its so hectic, but really I'm failing to see the big picture of the minisculeness of this compared to God's sacrifice! This ties in so much with so many of the lessons that I've been learning lately about God's wonderous love and grace. We were created by Him to be loved and He loves us SO much that any love we have for other people, and even loving God is just an overflow of His love... that's intense. So today I got a fresh revelation of the depth and awesomeness of what it means to be able to live for God.

"Your thoughts are higher than mine

Your words are deeper than mine

Your love is stronger than mine

This is no sacrifice

Here's my life"

Jason Upton - No Sacrifice

Slobberry

When I'm big and all growed up I want to be a land version of a beachbum who lives at Rebecca's house where I can watch any movie ever created, eat as much food as is humanly possible (including muchos chocolate) laugh until my belly aches and hug people to my heart's content.... aaah *sigh of deeep contentment* this weekend was wonderful! It was just so great to be surrounded by lovely friends at a house where a truly delightful family resides :) It was a time of much, much laughter and hapiness and there were many crazy photo moments... see pics for confirmation! I especially enjoyed being cozy around the fire, surrounded by a mocha creation from Becs' mom's amazing frothy machine... yummy. Now I have to go and do an English essay, study for some tests and work some kind of journalistic wonder by Friday... gtown madness begins again...

p.s. much to my delight the blogging bug has bitten again and resulted in several great new places to visit including (some of them even mention little ol' me!):
Becs: Beautiful Days
Derralyn: BeAnz
James: Calvin's Space