I keep on telling people I love to write. And yet, this is my first write in nine months. I’ve only been moderately busy, too.

I look around, I look around. My life keeps changing, and in some ways I control the change. This is good, because

A: I don’t like the idea of life being entirely random (which prevents me from becoming an evolutionist) and

B: Achieving goals provide a self esteem boost.

Idle hands make the devil’s work. Was that it?

Was that the saying, passed down, misinterpreted, and spoken over and over the generations?

How busy should I be then? Is working busy? Saving? Building?

If I spend every day reading books, to fill my mind with knowledge, trying to push my brain and my life to a higher goal, a more defined point, a sharper wit- is that busy? Is that honorable?

What if I work my life away? The love of money may well be the root of all evil, but the use of money can do a lot of good. But you’ve gotta have it to spend it. And, I know how to spend it. It’s not even hard. I can spend vast amounts of money and have nothing to show for it at all!

But life trudges on. I get a little older (nowhere NEAR old) and hopefully a little wiser. My house starts to look like a home, with stuff hanging on the walls and useful things in the shed.

That’s not the sum of my life though, oh no sir, not me.

I live for a BIGGER CAUSE! Of course! I remember the stories in the word…

I remember Joshua and Caleb. How they led the people out of the desert, into the promised land, and into the battle to win. I remember how Caleb, late in his life, effectively came out of retirement to show the people how to fight.

I’m old, he must have thought, what am I still doing here?

What am I doing here?

I’ve been thinking a lot about materialism. Which inevitably leads to consumerism.

You see, it’s easy for me. Perhaps that’s what it is. I do not buy because of what I know.

I know if I buy another xbox, I will not get my work done.

But that’s as far as I get. And I buy way to much ‘stuff’ to possibly have needed all of it.

I struggle to see things for what they are.

I had a scary thought the other week.

The money I have spent on my dog in the last twelve months closely rivals that which I spent supporting two children in Inda.

Now. I have a rad dog. He’s like some sort of pathetic faux child to my wife and I, which can’t be healthy in the long run, but it does boil down to this: My dog cost the same to keep as changing the life prospects (in a dramatic way) for two children.

It gets better.

My dog, plus one of the three payments of vehicle registration payment we make annually is easily more than we spend on any charitable groups combined.

My wife is a Teacher. My perogative is to work full time, but for varied reasons I didn’t work for about three months this year, which capped my salary somewhat. But any way you look at it, we netted probably 70 grand this year.

There is no way we gave even a thenth of that away. Well, not like that.

It went away, some got saved, bills got paid, we ate and drank.

We saved some money, bought some things and bills got paid.

Is this progress? Or is it just living?

I’m changing my basic life direction. I’m not looing for a new job, I want to finish the tasks in my shed and go to university.

What is my motivation? Do I want to improve my life? Improve other peoples live? I thought it was the career path I wanted, that I could be more useful in a job I desired rather than one I endured.

But am I qualified to make these decisions?

I don’t have to look far to see that my decisions aren’t always the best. I’ve had a drivers licence for five and a half years now, and I’ve owned seven different vehicles.

Can I really trust my judgement?

Where is God’s will?

Is the prayer, ‘God, lead my life’ enough for me to walk on my own feet? Does this mean I walk, and I take Him with me, or do I walk after him?

Is God as preoccupied with my occupation as I am? Perhaps not. Perhaps He looks at the heart.

So what of all this stuff? And this money I’ve fallen into, this kitchen sink of cash that seems to leak it out as fas as I pour it in. What is the purpose of it?

No wonder I can’t sleep.

Lord, lead my life…

-The attitude that we need to be protected from ourselves.
If I want to cross the road, surely the responsibility can be put on me to ensure that I cross in a safe manner. But should I choose to cross at a time when a little red man is illuminated, then I can be fined $58 for the privilege of thinking for myself. Does this mean that, should I be required to think for myself during the crossing (under strict green man conditions) because of a certain nufftie making a left hand turn, that I can bill the boys in blue for my time?

-General sensationalism, as so perfectly defined in any given showing of a current affairs program.
BIG FAT “I’M BIASED” WARNING
When an employee is killed or injured, the responsibility falls on either his own head, or, much more likely, his employers. When a contractor dies, the responsibility is on himself. As soon as you are your own boss, you have to assess the danger, you have to find (and finance) the safety equipment, and you are entirely responsible to find out all of the information regarding the work you are about to undertake.
So the unfortunate truth stands as such: no matter how inept or poorly trained to undertake a particular task (insulating roofs would be a good example) a person is, the consequences of the tasks rests on either them (in the case of a contractor) or their employer (for an employee), and not on the minister for the environment. No matter how inept he may or may not be at rolling out a scheme.

-The attitude that kids need to be shielded from all forms of danger.
Skateboards hurt. Gravel rash hurts. Falling from a tree hurts. Football hurts.
Let’s face it, life has a whole buttload of hurt, and that’s an essential life lesson. Fun hurts, more accurately. So it really ticks me off when The Man shuts down slides, flying foxes, steep hills and anything else that might hurt little Johnny should he take a little tumble, and his parents take legal action… please. No wonder people take to drugs and alcohol so readily. They’ve been bored since childbirth.

We’re headed in a bad direction. Life has consequences, really big ones. Our actions cause ripples that spread out across society. But the more that we shield ourselves and our children from this, the bigger and more horrible the shock of responsibility will be.

These are my irritations. Oh, and Ford Territory drivers. But I’ll get to them later.

I think Ben Carson said “‘peers’ stands for People Encouraging Rudeness and Stupidity” (so I can’t remember the second ‘E’) so with this in mind, and with a good injection of the healthy competitiveness that we both suffer from/revel in, Steve opened up his low kay, unscratched GPX250 and was having a half decent crack through the bends with me in tow on my GS500.

Now Steve is fairly adept at most things, he’s one of those annoying people who seem to be very good at most things he lays his hand to without actually trying. So when I got into roadies with a bit more aptitude than him… I MIGHT have taken it upon myself to challenge him a bit.

So after a few kays I overtook Steve and turned up the wick a bit. Zipping along, I braked a bit late, panicked, froze up and ran REAL wide on a right hand turn. Fortunately, I had knocked most of my speed off, and both my feet hit the gravel, but I kept the bike upright, and didn’t hit the guard rail. Success… I waved back to Steve, tapped my helmet (as if to somehow signify my stupidity was unpunished) and went right back to our best Valentino impressions.

I said the road gets a bit sketchy.. Sink holes, sharp edged potholes, and some really narrow bits with no runoff and a lovely soft guardrail to slow you up a bit. Great stuff to put the focus on your skills, and natural intelligence or lack thereof.
Approaching a turn, I saw big soft pothole square in the middle of the road right at the last second. I shot straight over it, slightly unsettled, but tipped in, no probs, and got back on the gas out of the corner. The thought had occurred to me that lighter Steve on his lighter bike might be more upset by the crater, and when I glance back in my mirror coming out of the next couple of turns, there was a conspicuous absence of one black GPX…

After the most panic wrought U-turn (on a nice blind turn) and the worst feeling short squirt of my life, I found Steve, upright, although scratched a touch, and in pretty good form. He’d seen the pothole too, and grabbed the brakes instead. He froze up, ran wide, found the gravel edge, low-sided his way across a road marker and come to a stop in the gravel parking area.
Just a scrape or two, he’d slowed down a heap before he took a tumble, but, like me, he reacted in panic rather than tipping in and turning the corner like he should have. Fortunately it was one of better spots to crash, so to speak, and he didn’t shoot off into Bass Strait.

We continued on to Apollo Bay, albeit a bit slower, and I thought about a few things.
For starters, my reactions are wrong. Freezing up, grabbing brakes, and dropping your feet down aren’t half as good as leaning in, gassing a bit, maybe a touch of rear brake to tighten up your line a bit.
Also that confidence is everything. The ride immediately after the tumble had more mistakes in it from both of us than any other time during the day. But when we started to attack the corners properly again, we were safer, more consistent riders, had better lines, all that.

The other thing was more about self examination, and the idiocy of baiting your learner friend to keep up with you. I wouldn’t have done it to most other people, but with a bit of pride involved, thought process takes a bit of a beating.

Anyway. It was a perfect day. Great weather, two near misses, and a nice long scoot to get your confidence back.

And the other. The coastal road to Apollo Bay is good. Nice turns, all that.
But the inland road from Apollo Bay to Forrest is freaking awesome.

Josh out.

In the different sense.
There were so many changes, and so many things to adjust to.

My mum doesn’t wash my clothes anymore. And I can’t just leave my dishes about the place, because you actually run out of plates. And forks, usually first.
I have no idea why we seem to have so few forks. Or why it took either of us so long to get some more out of the three or four different sets of beautiful and somewhat expensive silver cutlery that were graciously given to us. Along with the four different dinner sets, fifteen odd wine glasses and one million and five cake platters.
We had so, so many gifts. We still have gift cards, unspent, a year on. It does get to the point where you have nothing left to buy.

It was a good year.
There was a lot to learn. Jem and I had spent plenty of time together, one on one, but our first year seemed less like the first wonderful steps in a lifetime of marriage and more like a crash course in tolerance, economic drainage and family relations.
It’s probably taken a year to reconnect with friends.
Nice to find out in our modern secularised society that people actually respect marriage. People gave us space- it didn’t matter if we were late, or if we tended to be a bit flakey when it came to actually attending functions- (Or at least, everyone but the football club) we were newlyweds, and we had our own agenda.
It more difficult establish to some people that yes, things have changed in a big kind of way, but we still like them, and seriously value the part they play in our lives.

If marriage was respected by some, it was certainly feared by others.
I still can’t quite work out the polite and truthful response to a person who is amazed at how I could be ready to commit to one person at such a young age, when all they do is live with/bear or raise children with/buy a house with/sleep with their boyfriend, girlfriend or partner. Trust, it seems, is expressed in different ways for different people.

Trust…
Trust is both a wonderful aspect to the love we share and an enormous weight to carry. If I am trusted with not just someone’s heart, but someone’s future, then I’d sure better prove myself trustworthy.
Being trustworthy is difficult when you’re also impulsive, somewhat immature person who is prone to occasional bouts of selfishness and sprouts inappropriate humour in serious situations.
And I’m supposed to be the head of the house.

Am, I mean.
I am the head of the house.
My house.
It’s tricky. It’s My Household, My Wife, Our Dog and Our Savings. Not to mention Our Future.

All new things.

This year has brought about the realisation that my life is going somewhere, and regardless of whether or not I know where that is, I’m going there with my wife.

And I really, really like her.

That, I mean. I love her, I like that statement.

It was a good year, two thousand and nine.

The first year of our marriage.

I decided I lack motivation. I have a ute in my shed, which is in a later stage of re-assembly. It’s by no means a particularly challenging project, or rather, for someone who has made their living by working on cars it’s not insanely difficult.
But it’s not finished.
I have the parts. I have the tools. I have the ability to finish it, and I should have the motivation: I have no working car, I like utes, especially ones with V8′s in em (just like the one in the shed)  and yet?

I’m working in a small business. There are certain things that I could do to earn more money for myself and also for the business. Good for the business is good for me, and if I got into gear I could make some real money for me and my business running friend. But I already make good money. I get home, at midday, and sit around for a while, relax, potter about the house… I actually did housework the other day. My wife was stoked.

It’s situational, I told myself. I’m very happy with my life.

It’s mostly true. I like being married. I don’t feel awkward anymore; it’s done wonders for my actual self confidence. Not just how much confidence I pretend to have. But being happy in a relationship is actually de-motivating. If she’s happy, I’m normally happy, and I don’t need to go out of my way to change anything.
And she’s mostly happy.

And my job? Well, I’ve never confessed  to being especially motivated by money.
Which is just as well, really. My mechanic job didn’t pay much, but I wanted to finish my apprenticeship, so I stayed at it. Then I switched job locations. I was possibly motivated by working around the corner from my house, so when I moved houses, the job was never going to last very long.
My new job makes (comparatively) lots of money. But I think I’m actually more motivated to work with my friends… which I am. When I work, I’m motivated to finish, so I can go home and work on my car/walk the dog/practice bass/clean the house, maybe make an early dinner… none of which seems to happen.

And my car?
I have recently bought a mountain bike, all shiny and new, and I love riding it. But bikes are probably 50/50 on practical/totally impractical, so surely that can’t be all there is to it.

I have always been a tad lazy… no, surely not just laziness.

Although I did recently pay my sister to prune a lavender bush in my backyard that I meant to trim nine months ago. And if she had’ve stayed longer I had the mower set up and ready to go…

So lazy or just content?

Hmmm…
I guess some things do change.
Because now I’m going to bed…

Better late than never tho, right?

I like writing. I think a lot, writing helps me expand on thoughts and clarify things. My main problem is what to write about.

Politics is too frustrating. I’d never sleep. The whole thing is just so corrupt… and frustrations don’t improve when you think that the voting public doesn’t actually know what’s good for them.

Consider this. 20 million people with their own lives, ideas, world view, motives, fears, and insecurities are asked to pick one person in the faith that he or she will know what’s best for not only the economy, but also for the people in all their mostly selfish ways, backed by a team of advisers that no-one actually knows, without any form of public accountability(excepting, of course, the ballot box).

Consider also that a politician’s No.1 priority is actually employment, and not the good of the country.
After all, you gotta eat.

I like what Agent K said on the people thing. “A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
Now let’s think of the likelihood of one person in 20 million figuring that out, and working it to their advantage.

See? You can be a christian and still be a skeptic!

I’m sure some politicians have good intentions, but they’re in somewhat of an unworkable system.
And there’s just so much that defies logic. For example: Nearly everyone runs their cars on petrol. To do this without permanent and irreversible damage to the ozone layer, and to prevent the release of wonderful things like carbon monoxide and benzine and all those other goodies that make your skin turn grey and your lungs grow cancer, the exhaust fumes are forced through a catalyst, which looks a bit like honeycomb. It probably doesn’t taste like it, however, though it might just taste like burning because it’s full of nasty heavy metals that turn poison into water. Great stuff, not good for efficient fuel use, as it’s a bit like breathing through a sock whilst you’re running. Yet- it’s pretty neat, really.
With the technologies we employ, we can now produce cars that emit less fumes when idling than a seventies or even eighties car puts out when switched off.

This is great, but:

Problem one: we’re apparently running out of oil.
I mean, even if we’re not all the oil companies just LOVE us thinking that we are, because it means we don’t mind that much when they push up prices. I doubt we’ll ever run out of oil, it’s just that one day no-one will be able to justify filling their tank for eight hundred dollars. Don’t worry, it’ll come.
Face it: we’re at the mercy of fat company executives who can pretty much do what they want. Just cos last time I checked, I didn’t have an oil well in my backyard. Pity.

Problem two: The cleaner (and nicer, for that matter) we make our cars, the more fuel they’ll inevitably use.
Our catalyst friend only works in one temperature range, so how do we heat it in a hurry? Easy! Inject fuel into it! What if our low-grade petrol makes the motor too hot, risking an internal meltdown? Inject more fuel in it! Want the aircon to work? More fuel! Nice Territory! But weighs heaps more than a Falcon, so it uses more fuel. The more we plug up our cars, be it to lower the emissions or make it quieter, the more petrol it will use. It’s that simple.

Blow them up I say! I hate cars anyway, but there is a point to be found here.

Without the use of catalytic converters, an LPG powered car releases around ten percent of the carbon emissions of an otherwise identical petrol powered vehicle. Sure, a good (and by good I mean as good as petrol) LPG injection system costs somewhere under $5000, but if they were built at the same rate Holden builds Commodores then the price would drop enormously.

So anyway. You might not be a greenie. You might like the thought of scorching the earth every time you plant that foot… Why bother?

Because LPG is 100% home grown, no nasty internationals involved, thankyou very much. So the government can control the prices.
The massive saving to the average householder in their stupid 4WD then goes back into the economy, creating growth, more jobs, less debt, less emissions, more birdies and the like. All good stuff. And all moral requirements, really, when you consider how much we drive our stupid cars across the sparsely populated brown land.

Plus it’s basically a waste product, that costs comparatively nothing to refine.

And the low carbon production causes less engine wear in a properly tuned engine.

And did I mention we can run big set-route diesels (that’d be mostly buses) viably on compressed natural gas? That gets pulled out of Bass Straight? Without the choke-smoke fest? Removing some more of the reliance on imported diesel?

Great stuff!

So why isn’t all of this commonplace?
And why is there legislation in place (thanks John!) to tax LPG at a rising percentage over the next 10 years to bring it to the same price as petrol, thus making it (due to a lower kilojoule rating than petrol ie. less efficient) economically inviable for anything but BBQ fuel?

And why isn’t Kevin 07 taking up this opportunity to separate us economically from the somewhat unstable world market?

And why on earth do our governing friends sell one million tonnes of LPG a year (a quarter of our current production) to Japan for 5 cents a litre?

So it’s good thing I’m not blogging about politics. I’d be in a bad mood all the time…