Double~take | gifted wildlife

Blessed with raccoons & other pests

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accoons are officially awesome. Seriously, the way people in Canada speak about them, they might as well be rats or something! They’re big and weird, they have stripey faces, and they can walk along fences even when they’re 10 kilos overweight… I have orders to get photos of raccoons and squirrels (also awesome) to send to my old boss so he can show his kids some Canadian wildlife.

Judging from the Canadian reaction however, raccoons are like ibises in Brisbane. Search Google images for “ibis” and it’s the white ones with the black head and tail. One of my former high school teachers apparently had to rescue an ibis that had its head stuck in a drain – it branched out from raiding the bins, and started on the rubbish in the drains… It died about 30 seconds after it was rescued, and now that teachers’ standing punishment for kids caught littering is for them to stand over the grave of the ibis and contemplate the consequences of their actions…

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Double~take | testimony

… doomed if you do or you don’t

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ou’re at church and they’ve just announced that people can use this opportunity to testify. A big, burly guy with several tattoos and a nose piercing gets up and stands in front of the microphone:

“Hi, my name’s John. I guess I was about 9 when I decided that I didn’t want to be a truck driver anymore - I was going to be a radiologist. So I went through high school, studied hard and made it to university, where I eventually got my degree. Then I applied for several jobs until I was finally hired where I could get some professional experience while I worked towards my Masters. I have always loved God, and I always will.”

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Double~take | Juno

in-flight movies & inopportune acts

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oday I walked past an abortion clinic, and was sorely tempted to walk through the protestors towards the clinic entrance just to see what their response would be. Kind of like when I stopped over in Abu Dhabi Airport on my 29 hour flight to Canada, and my sleep deprived mind thought it would be brilliantly funny to grab out my bible and gatecrash the Muslim ablutions room I saw near the restrooms to see if I’d get into trouble. (Thankfully some sane part of my mind decided against it, and figured no one would care if I did, anyway…)

My temptation was probably due in part to an in-flight movie I saw on that same flight to Canada – Juno.

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Double~take | fitness

… limping spiritually

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went to the physiotherapist this week, after knee surgery three weeks ago. “Lift your leg, and hold for ten seconds. Make sure you keep your foot straight, and your quads tensed…”

“Do three sets of 15 lunges… make sure your hips don’t twist, keep your knee and foot in line, make sure your knee is moving straight up and down and keep your quads and gluteus maximus tensed…”

The list continues. Fiddly exercises, where I have to look at three different things all at once to make sure this is straight and that’s not twisting.

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Double~take | the rest of the story

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…
(A Tale of Two Cities)

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fter years of being an avid Star Trek fan, I have the questionable talent of being able to quote whole scripts from memory, which strangely includes dozens of lines from pieces of classic literature. Half of Shakespeare’s published works, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick…

Angels and minsters of grace defend us (Hamlet)
Cry “Havoc” and let slip the dogs of war! (Julius Caesar)

The only problem is, no matter how well I know the scripts of whole sci-fi movies, I have never read any of those quoted works, and so these quotations float around my head without any kind of context. I can only guess as to how the original story goes.

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Double~take | circle of friends

 … only one person outside my comfort zone

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recently added the Circle of Friends application on Facebook. It makes this cool rainbow circle by showing all your friends’ names around the edge, and using lines to connect each person shown with their other friends around the circle. I was playing with the various sorting algorithms you could use to distribute people around your wheel - classic, alphabetically etc, but I finally settled on the default, and through that I’ve decided you can learn a lot about someone from their Circle of Friends…

It’s interesting – on mine, you can totally see my groups of friends, and it’s very obvious that I’ve lived in another country, because my wheel is split into two main groups that know mostly everyone else in the same group, but no one in the other group.

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Double~take | kids ministry

… coathangered by kids

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ver years of doing children’s ministries, I have learned many things. Maybe one of the most annoying (yet sometimes unavoidable) things I’ve heard is that the naughty kids get most of the attention.  I’ll see a large group of kids with a few adults supervising. Ninety percent of their energy will be absolutely focused on stopping Luke and Jordan throwing chairs at each other, while simultaneously negotiating a truce between Jenna, Louise and Michelle; and with the remaining 10% of their energy they will distractedly keep an eye on the quiet, well behaved children who are colouring.

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Double~take | OWSOMS

… caught in the same trap 

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idn’t you know?” says my sister, “The universe revolves around me.”  Since ancient times we have all been at the centre of our universe. Galileo’s evidence to the contrary in the 1600’s had him thoroughly condemned by the church of the day and we’ve barely changed since.

Recently I was madly trying to get some paintings finished for another corps’ prayer room. I was doing up stained glass windows on cardboard, depicting three different focuses – personal, church/fellowship, and mission. The image for the mission window was the world. Easy, I said, and threw together a sun, Earth and some dark space beneath. After coming up with designs for the other two windows, I turned back to paint the mission window; with its nice view of Australia – India to the side; part of Indonesia up the top…

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Double~take | coincidence

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verheard Easter quote of the week:

“I can’t just give out eggs to the people I like. I’ve got some good eggs here, and I’ve gotta get some crap eggs too, to give out to the people I hate… see if they’ve got some cheap big bags of little eggs…” (Feel the love.)

I am reading through Psalms (again) with a group of people – a chapter a day, and the chapter for Good Friday was Psalm 22.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
…All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads…
…they have pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing…

It’s like, the ultimate Good Friday prophecy chapter.
Here’s to freakish random coincidences and relevant bible readings.

Double~take appears every Saturday on theRubicon. Find past Double~take posts and a bio of Stephanie Hung here.

Double~take | I still love chocolate

Stop The Traffik

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y brother was complaining last night, because we’d run out of cocoa. I offered him some sachets of caramel spiked hot chocolate mixes, but these he rejected out-of-hand because they contained phenylalanine. Because it’s poisonous (whatever…).

Of course, then I threw in my two cents worth, “But you’ll eat SLAVE cocoa made by SLAVES who are ENSLAVED? Mmmm SLAVE torture cocoa.”

Then our dad replies with, “Yeah, and it’s the only money they earn…”

Slaves don’t get paid guys. They get tortured.

Anyway, after an extended busy period, we have the latest news on our efforts to Stop The Traffik in the chocolate industry.

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