One of my stronger childhood memories is of visiting my paternal grandparents for the weekend, waking up earlier than mum and dad, going upstairs to where my grandparents were already up and about and being given a couple of pieces of bread with butter and tomato jam. Yummo.
Since we have a reasonable crop of tomatoes coming on at the moment I thought I’d turn some into tomato jam.
I did make tomato jam around 10 years ago but didn’t have the recipe accessible so went searching online…
Nothing to do with Sgt. Pepper, but all to do with home coffee roasting.
My first home roast was on 7th November 2003. I had given up smoking around 3 1/2 months earlier, and had been retrenched for the second time a month earlier so had some time on my hands to take up something new.
My first roast was of a Sumatran Mandheling, 80 grams in a popcorn popper. The roast was too dark because I hadn’t been able to identify the cracks as the beans heat up and make cracking sounds - firstly as the water in the beans heats and expands, and secondly as the coffee oils do likewise.
My wife and I currently read the daily devotional The Lord My Portion by Watchman Nee after dinner. The devotionals have been extracted from some of his later writings. Of the 280+ entries so far this year a few have raised our eyebrows, most are pretty good and helpful, and a few are extraordinary for their incisiveness and clarity. One of the later is from October 2nd. We first heard this read out at a church we were attending last year and it prompted me to buy the book.
I’m currently reading a book entitled The Holy Spirit of Promise by J.Oswald Sanders first published in 1940.
Oswald Sanders was New Zealand-born and served as the general director of the China Inland Mission (later renamed to Overseas Missionary Fellowship). He was born in 1902 and died in 1992. He was a prolific author between the 1930s and the 1990s. One of his better-known works is Spiritual Leadership (1967).
One chapter (chapter 12 of 16) in The Holy Spirit of Promise is entitled “The Administrator of the Church”.
After a deal of consideration and prayer, I will be voting “No” in the upcoming referendum about a “Voice to Parliament” (Voice).
It’s not a decision I’ve arrived at lightly. Let me outline some of the reasons behind my decision:
The idea of a Voice that advances the ideas or aspirations of one (small) portion of the population without allowing all other members of society the same opportunity is inherently racist.
I’ve been gradually reviewing and revising the packages I use to complete particular tasks and the way the underlying data (my data) is being stored.
Where possible I prefer to have my data stored on systems I own in something like plain text format, and retrievable or at least accessible through a number of means.
The types of tasks I have in mind, the primary package I use to access this data and some backup packages are listed below:
My most recent Linux distribution and Window Manager change was back in December when I landed on Debian Testing running OpenBox for my Window Manager.
I ran in to a couple of Debian update issues recently which required me to roll back to a prior kernel. Whilst I resolved that issue, I decided to look at some alternative distros and reconsider my use of WM.
I ran openSUSE Tumbleweed for a month-or-so.
What follows is my assembling of a number of outlines of the book of Isaiah from a variety of sources. The point is that there are many variations between these sources. The only real commonality is that chapters 1 through 39 are pre-Babylonian exile and chapters 40-66 are post-exilic.
From Executable Outlines I. The Assyrian Period - Conflict And Victory (1-39) A. Prophecies Concerning Judah And Jerusalem (1-12) B. Prophecies Concerning The Nations (13-27) C.
A couple of years ago I wrote about using Search the Scriptures (StS) as a part of my daily Bible reading regimen.
Between April and June 2021 I used StS when reading the first nine chapters of Luke across 25 daily studies, and the first 26 chapters of Genesis across 19 studies.
At the time I quite appreciated the discipline of answering specific questions based on the passage. I will often make notes on passages I read but this may take the form of observations about the text, or some historical or contextual information.
For the last two weeks I’ve been reading Isaiah in my daily bible reading. And at my current rate of a chapter a day, I’ll still be reading Isaiah for another seven-or-so weeks.
As I’ve read I’ve been a little confused trying to follow the line of narrative or prophecy from chapter to chapter or even within chapters. My normal bible only contains paragraph headings but nothing in the way of cross references or study notes I can readily refer to.