Author Archives: Donna

Expired

My Dad believes in keeping things beyond their ‘use by’ date if he feels they still have some use or effectiveness. When staying with him last week I was looking for some mentholated chest rub and grabbed a small jar from the bathroom cupboard. It was quickly returned however, when I read that the contents had reached their ‘use by’ date in 1996 – that’s 12 years ago! Even if the menthol still had some use, I am one to opt for a newer batch, and I’m hoping most of you will agree with me :).

Companies decide how long their product will be useful for and they set the expiry date accordingly.

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Pulling Weeds

This week I went for a bushwalk with a very special friend of mine. It was about an hour of strolling in our gumboots over 40 acres looking at the scenery, checking the water levels, catching glimpses of wildlife, removing fallen branches from the horse trails and … pulling weeds. In the middle of the bush.

I didn’t realise this was a necessary part of living in the bush, but apparently the best way to keep the land healthy and free from being overgrown, is to keep on top of the weeds as they sprout up.

My bushwalking friend had a keen eye for plants and knew that those pretty little flowers would grow up and end up killing all the native vegetation that we were currently enjoying, making it uninhabitable.

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Score!

Today, something exciting happened… I got 200 in Ten Pin Bowling! That was one of the goals I set at the start of the year. I have some other goals still pending but I think taking a photo of a soaring eagle and writing a book will take a bit longer to achieve.

Do you know what your goals are in life? When you look back on your life, the events that will stand out the most are not the times you were involved in the most ministries, or successful at work, or excelling at study, or had the most well behaved children, but it is the moments that you took time out from the busyness of life and decided to do something different.

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Floatin’

We have seen a lot of flooding and swelling of rivers with recent monsoon rains. I was sitting by the river just out of town and noticed many clumps of water lilies jutting out of the fast flowing, murky water. It didn’t interest me much until about half an hour later when I realized that these clumps were slowly moving down the river. They were not anchored to the ground, straining to keep their heads above water, as they seemed. They were actually floating and slowly but surely making their way downstream, to be re-planted again somewhere else. I thought that was quite an exciting mission for the little water lilies, having been used to quiet river-side inlets and suddenly thrust into raging waters, to be re-planted downstream where the river deposited them.

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