Tag: work

the pen is mightier than the sword…

The world’s coolest housemate has started a blog. That’s right. Everyone needs a bit of Swede in their daily diet. Mattiac, the artist formerly known as Matty, and formally known as Karl Mattias Carlehall (funny Swedish characters excluded – not Matt himself but the letters – I’d also exclude the Swedish chef, he’s a funny Swedish character.) has joined the blogosphere. Find him at this place here.

Let me fill you in a little bit on the debonair, blonde haired and blue eyed (I think) young man… he’s single ladies. And very elligible. Did I mention Swedish. He can cook. He’s clean. He’s clearly very witty as you’ll be able to tell from his blog. I imagine it must be hard being funny in a second language – but he pulls it off.

In the last couple of days I’ve done a bit of free lance writing for some people (and I stress the free). It occured to me that the word free lance probably comes from the historical concept of mercenaries who were paid for their lance value. There’s no real point to this post actually – except that I think that etymology is endlessly fascinating. It only dawned on me tonight during bible study that the words response and responsibility are probably tied together in a pretty significant fashion – spooky hey.

Speaking of things dawning on people – I had an interesting conversation at work this morning. While I mentioned in my job interview that I was involved in church and used examples from my time on the QC exec I don’t think it had dawned on one of the girls in my section that I’m “religious.” She started telling me this story about an email she’d just received from her crazy Christian cousin – and half way through she said “gee I hope you’re not religious” and I let her keep going till the end of her story before I told her that I am in fact a Christian. Very funny stuff.

May 17, 2006

Wednesday, Bloody Wednesday

Apologies firstly for the use of vernacular in the title. It would seem though that as a result of Tourism Australia’s “where the bloody hell are you” campaign the word bloody is now an acceptable, but slightly cheeky, piece of Australiana. Actually I should really be apologising for a reference to a U2 song. I guess it’s a song from before they were middle aged political activists trying to be cool while writing inoffensive, sugar sweet pop music that you could play your gran (hi gran if you’re reading this again). How cool is my gran – she posted a comment on a blog. I bet your gran doesn’t do stuff like that.

This is my first blog post on a Wednesday. Wednesday’s have traditionally been lambasted as terrible office days – the furthest point from a weekend. In fact right now, in the middle of the day, must be the absolute middle of the week. How significant. Today I didn’t want to get out of bed. It was drizzly, my airconditioning and quilt were combining to keep me at optimal sleeping temperature and my alarm clock was just a distant buzzing problem which could be solved by a quick press of the snooze button. Or several quick presses of the snooze button. Luckily after 22 years I know myself pretty well so I set my alarm to go off much earlier than it has to.

The post cyclone activity cycle is on the down hill run now. We had Fran Bailey, the Minister for Small Business and Tourism come through town yesterday. She addressed a power lunch/forum on the issues in her portfolio post cyclone. I got to go. My free meal count for the week is up to 4. It could have been 5 but I blew off a church dinner arrangement last night to do important other things (nothing really, well a phone call or two and a DVD – I bought Run Lola Run from the local Video Ezy for $10 – a bargain at twice the price, unfortunately it was a badly dubbed version rather than the subtitled version… but I digress. End Brackets.). So far I’ve had sausages, bacon, eggs and croissants for breakfast at an animal park, crab, chicken and prawns at a resort, a roast at the church’s youth minister’s house, and Atlantic Salmon followed by a cheese/fruit platter at the casino. I capitalised Atlantic Salmon because that’s the way it should be served, as a proper noun.

Free food aside, it was interesting hearing from the Hon Fran Bailey MP. She spoke about baby boomers hogging all the good jobs in traditional big business. This has apparently forced the youth of today into more entrepreneurial roles. Big business now outsource a whole lot of niche things like training and stuff. So I quit my job and started a company. Well I didn’t. But if anyone has any good niche ideas that come with free food…

The dinner at the youth minister, Dave Hopper’s house was good. We’re/we were discussing the direction to take young adult stuff at the church in. There’s a bunch of uni student types who are so heavily involved in AFES stuff they’re not doing anything at church and there’s a shortage of people involved in leadership roles for teenage and children’s stuff. Which brings me to my favourite topic at the moment – the relationship between church stuff and parachurch stuff. I think one day I’m going to write a book on the whole church vs uni ministry conflict. It’s bizarre that it even operates as a conflict – surely as part of the one kingdom or wider church there should be a more synergetic or symbiotic relationship between the two groups. Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out. Both the AFES staff workers up here go to Willows so there’s this occasionally tense undercurrent somewhere in the background (which I assume is where most undercurrents operate.)

So there’s a rambling update free of fake news (not that my stories about breaking an artwork and killing a national icon were fake it’s just that as Matt so rightly pointed out in his comments, or at least the sentiment in those comments pointed out – they weren’t really news. Actually I’m not sure his comments were pointing that out at all – I just wanted to put his name in the main bit to encourage further comments so did it in a way that vaguely supported my original point. I’ve been spending too much time with politicians.)

April 5, 2006

The day I became an Iconoclast

Monday mornings are bad. Today I woke myself up stupidly early to get into the office before a corporate breakfast. This was my first bad Monday morning as a full time professional worker. I turned up bushy eyed and bright tailed. Well actually I had no tail. But my early morning coffee did the trick. Breakfast was a selection of traditional hot breakfast foodstuffs eaten at a local animal sanctuary – surrounded by the animal inhabitants of said sanctuary and several interstate visitors looking at hosting corporate functions in Townsville.

Those of you familiar with my artistic opus (I’m not sure it was a magnum opus and it certainly wasn’t a magnum [of either the pistol variety or the ice cream]) Progress In Art may be sad to learn of its untimely demise over the weekend. Due to an absence of picture hanging capabilities in my bedroom (and uncertainty as to whether it would be appropriate to hammer nails into the wall for that purpose) I had placed the rather fragile masterpiece rather precariously on the fluro light on my wall. It looked pretty good there. The lighting was just right. For those of you who haven’t seen it it was basically the insides of a broken discman attached by sticky tape to a framed pane of glass. I was playing some music with a bass line (you know the notes played by the left hand, often below middle C – not the fishing line you’d use to catch bass – English is a fun language to play with) and the subwoofer in my room shook the wall causing the frame to fall to a rather crushing, crashing and smashing halt on the floor below. This made me sad. Mostly because I had to clean up the broken glass. But that was my second most brilliant creation ever. A triumph over the inherent stupidity of postmodern art. Clever on many, many levels. And now it’s gone.

It’s sad when the biggest bit of news you have to report is a broken piece of homemade artwork.

I went to my first Willows working bee on Saturday. Then I went for a cruise around the bay between the mainland and Magnetic Island. It had free food, drink and a band. Yesterday I went to church. Tonight I’m having dinner with the youth minister at Willows to discuss what I’ll be doing with the church this year. It looks like I’ll be co-ordinating the young adults stuff. Consider yourselves updated.

Until next time.

Goodbye.

April 3, 2006

My very first post

Welcome.

For those who came in late… to steal a well worn line from a comic book hero… here’s some information about the creator of this blog:
My full name is: Nathan Macleay Campbell.
I’m 22.
I like stuff.
and things.
I guess you can read more about the particular stuff and things I like on my profile.

At the time of writing I’m two days out from beginning the next adventurous stage in my life. I’m about to move 1400kms north to Townsville where I begin my life as a fulltime worker.

In order to cash in on the tradition of great Hollywood D-Grade movies like Ernest Goes To Camp I’ve decided to put the words “goes to” in between my name and my destination in the title of my blog. I’d like to think my adventure north is at least on par with Ernest’s trip to summer camp. I hope my adventures will be at least half as wacky as his were. I’d also like to think that reading about my adventures will be less painful for you than sitting through an Ernest movie. If you haven’t seen an Ernest movie you’re not missing out on much. They’re basically as painful as fingernails being scraped along a blackboard for an hour and a half.

There’s a lot of things I like about reading other people’s blogs that I’ll aim to recapture here. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about reading other people’s blogs that I’ll try not to include here.

So here you have my thoughts on my impending departure: I am simultaneously excited and nervous (I’m not sure what the adjectival form of the word trepidation is but I would have used it there, maybe trepidated?) Until last Sunday night I’d been pretty cool about the whole moving away thing casually farewelling friends with the knowledge that I was about to make a new beginning somewhere else which, at least in my mind, isn’t all that daunting. I’m really looking forward to starting my new job with Townsville Enterprise, who you can find here. I’m looking forward to meeting new people. I just didn’t think it would be that hard to say goodbye to old people but on the upside it’s not like I’m dying and there’s always me in blog form if you miss me too much. It’s much harder for me to be cool, calm and collected when other people are displaying their emotions. At the moment my emotional compass is pointing more towards the excited end of the spectrum but it fluctuates depending on what I’m doing with my time. I think making huge life changing decisions is like eating Pringles, once you pop, you can’t stop. To explain that analogy and further explain how i’m feeling I’ll use another analogy – you can’t get off the rollercoaster in the middle of the ride, you just have to sit back and enjoy it. There’s no pulling out now so I guess there’s no place for second thoughts even if I was considering having them. Which I’m not. But if I was I wouldn’t be any more because that analogy explains everything. I am clearly wise beyond my years. Or not.

So now to my favourite part of other people’s blogs the bit where I show just how good my taste in all things aesthetic is. The bit where I record for the ages what I’m listening to, watching, wearing etc. I’m going to restrict it to what I’m listening to this time round but if I find good websites I’ll put links and stuff.

This post was brought to you by the band MUSE and the album Absolution.

March 15, 2006