Location
Brisbane, Queensland
Way Corp group(s) I was in
15 and 14
Where I live
Brisbane, Queensland "Sunshine State", Australia
About Me
Born in Kenya, raised in Australia. I am a Subject of the Sultan of Zanzibar, a British subject, a naturalised Australian Citizen and I have two Kiwi/Aussie children... but I don't think I have a valid passport just at the moment.
My Interests
English literature, history, education, music, dance...
Employment or Career
I am gradually working towards my BA, majoring in History and English literature as an on-and-off part-time student.
In the past I have been employed in the following jobs: fruit shop assistant, waitress, Arnotts Biscuits factory worker (biscuits = cookies), Hoyts candy bar attendant, legal secretary, McDonalds front-counter (are you impressed?), student nurse, nurses aide, customer service at St George Bank: loans and enquiries, motel house-maid, cocktail waitress, house-cleaner (for Dial-an-Angel), Telecom NZ faults centre officer, bookkeeper, and self-employed office manager for high-rise window-cleaning business (the latter for about 13 years.) I resigned from my full-time job in administration at the University of Queensland to study and complete my Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Literature and History.
Music I Like
Piano, guitar, clarinet, trumpet... I mean, I like to hear other people playing them - solo, as accompaniment, in orchestras, and bands.
I like music.
Books I Like
I love to read! Recently I've read several "Postmodern" novels for a literature course.
I enjoy novels by Jane Austen, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, PD James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Gerald Durrell, John Steinbeck, Rosemary Sutcliffe, E Nesbit and many others.
I like reading the poems of writers like Rudyard Kipling, AB Peterson, Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Henry Lawson, John Donne, Robert Frost, Mo Wilkinson (she's my mum!)
And I like books that help me to spring-clean the brain cells:
- The Peter Principle (Laurence and Hull)
- The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Hoffer)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
- Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Brafman and Brafman)
- The Language of God (Collins)
- In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (Honore)
- Dumbing Down: Outcomes-based and politically correct – the impact of the Culture Wars on our schools (Donnelly)
- Endangered Minds (Healey)
- The Tipping Point (Gladwell)
- Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say (Rushkoff)
- Boys Adrift: the Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Sax)
- A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century (Van DeMille)
- Eve’s Bite (Wishart)
Television I like
Crime investigation, British comedies - don't watch it very much - so I even find the adverts interesting!
Movies I like
The Mission, Out of Africa, The God's Must Be Crazy, The Constant Gardener, The Devil Wears Prada, Gone With The Wind, The Bourne Identity, The Sound of Music, Brave Heart, Spy Game, Finding Nemo, The Insider, Pulp Fiction, Along Came Polly, Love Actually, The Full Monty, Cool Runnings and all the rest! :-)
Sports Teams I like
Yeronga Devils, Brisbane Lions, the Kenyan Olympic team and the Kenya national rugby union sevens team.
Comments
Thanks for your birthday greetings!
Have a blessed day.
Barbara
Don't I have one of Bob and Sue in there? Aren't they the couple that was in Iran when the revolution hit? I am embarrassed to say, looking through those old shots, that I am terrible with some of the names. When I put the photos in an album years ago, I knew everybody's. I should have written them on the back, just for historical purposes.
Anyway, that's just about all I've got photo-wise of my Way Corps days. At one point my last year I talked up doing a Way C. of E. yearbook, and had people lined up who wanted to work on the project. Quite a pool of talent, actually. An in-resident coordinator took the idea to Pat Lynn, who shot it down like a duck. Looking back, there was way too much "the nail that sticks up will be pounded down" in the program. That wasn't Pat "The Hammer's" fault though.
Whoops, I forgot. Not a gripe site. And anyway, being one among the multitude of "nails that won't be pounded" was great training in-and-of itself. To see how God would side-step the bureaucratic b.s. to bless me and others with things like a day on horseback, spent wandering the BLM land. Or my personal favorite, working for actual dollars with Way Builders in Wichita between graduation and the ROA, instead of as GRADUATE slave labor at Emporia. ("It's an abomination!," complained Jeff: and lo it cometh -- the Lord's deliverance; out of which, an article for Free Spirit sprang.)
Congratulations on going back to school. I bet you're loving it. Sounds like you're going to be doing a lot of reading, of both fiction and non-fiction. I'm curious, do you have any idea what the "canon" will be on the English Lit side? My opinion only, but I hope you'll be working on the classics of Western literature and not johnny-come-lately "disciplines" like gender studies. It takes a lot to make Joyce enjoyable by comparison, but in my book, they've managed to.
Thank you for the birthday greeting.
God bless you*smiles*
Carolyn