Interests, Hobbies and other Obsessions

Since retiring, my interests can now be pursued without guilt! And now there is not enough time in the day.

My interests include:

Connecting

I am not one for large groups and parties! But I enjoy visiting my scattered family in Brisbane, Ballarat and Cairns when I can, and coffee/meals with close friends at least once a week. I belong to a local church (whose web site I maintain), and to several e-mail forums. I am on the committe of ClubMac, a local Macintosh user group, but generallly resist being on committees - I have had enough of them to last a lifetime!

Reading

I have had an interest in reading since I can remember. My tastes are a little eclectic ranging from novels (I like those English female detective writers), classics (mainly out of curiosity to see why they are classics and what they say about their times), theology, philosophy (of religion) and some history.

Theology

My recent interests focus on the work of Lloyd Geering, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Elaine Pagels and of the FaithFutures Foundation. This is "progessive" theology and comes from three perspectives. One is to look at the Bible not only through the eyes of the biblical writers, but also the other writings of the time both religious and secular, and archaeological, social, political and economic context. Crossan is superb in this work. The second perspective is to examine religion through contemporary eyes with our exponentially increasing knowledge of our world, and to focus on our increasingly global village and consequent environmental and economic forces. Thirdly, thinking philosophically about meaning and language, such as what we mean by "god".

Genealogy

Both my brother and I have pursued family tree research. Perhaps it was the early death of our mother. Perhaps it was the discovery that her pedigree can be tracked back to tenth century Normandy and arguably beyond that. There is a separate page on this subject.

Web sites

Family tree research eventually led me to web page design and then on to running my own web site. There is a separate page on this interest.

Gardening

Bev is our chief gardener (see her pages), but I have always had an interest even if I can never remember which plant is called what! It started when my family was living with my grandparents after my mother died. Aunty Peg allotted my brother and I one garden bed each in the back yard in which we were shown how to grow vegetables. Today, Bev's townhouse does not lend itself to growing vegetables - the size of the front and back courtyards and the sun's orbit do not help much. However, Bev has allowed me to play with the front courtyard - an autumn view illustrated at right.

Please get in touch if there is something we have in common you would like to share.