Our good friends Andrei and Vanessa Cheng had a baby last week. Born at 1:27am on Friday 31 January was Laura Marie Cheng. Here are the other vital stats:

Weight: 3.35kg
Height/length: 50.5cm
Hair: dark brown (and lots of it, for a baby)
Eyes: dark blue (this is the same for all newly borns, or so I’m told)
Nose: Vanessa’s
Cheeks: Andrei’s

Here’s a couple of images I took with the digital camera on my phone when we visited them in the hospital (I never wanted one of those type of phones, but now that I have one I’ve discovered that it’s quite useful):

Both parents are doing well and expected Vanessa to be back home on Tuesday (yesterday).

We’re up at CMS Summer School in Katoomba this week. It’ currently Wednesday afternoon and we’re on our afternoon break. This has probably been the best conference I’ve been on since EU Annual Conferences during uni. We’ve heard Don Carson speak on 1 Peter, whichhsa been great – the overall theme has been, essentially, holiness. The talks over the last couple of days have primarily concerned suffering and specific outworkings of holiness. It’s been good.

Apart from that, the best things have been catching up with people that I haven’t seen since uni and finding out what we’ve been up to, especially ministry-wise, and hearing from a number of missionaries about their experiences, challenges and work in a number of countries around the world. This has included hearing about their experiences related to some specific topics, such as Economic Rationalim, using their homes for hospitality and ministry and the work of spouses wihout an ‘official’ job description.

We’re looking foward still to the next few days and we’ll write more when we get back to Canberra.

Oh yeah – and we had a good time over Christmas and New Years as well.

We went up to Goulburn yesterday for a Christmas gathering with Tim’s family. We had a great day at Grandma’s place, catching up with people, enjoying good food and exchanging gifts.

Continue reading →

And the answer is: lots, and not very much, both at the same time.

Life seems pretty hectic at the moment: work’s been busy for both of us, there’s church things happening as ususal, a moderate number of social events, and bits and pieces of helping people out. But when I stop to think about it – it’s all just normal stuff, and I don’t feel like we have anything interesting or exciting to report. Maybe that’s just life. Maybe that’s a normal thing for the lead-up to Christmas.

Speaking of which, we have Christmas festivities starting this weekend (and it’s still only November!) As the whole of the Johnson-Koscheneow family can’t get together on Christmas Day, we’re doing a Christmas event this Saturday with that side of the family. Should be fun, although it’s somewhat of a mental shock that Christmas is starting already.

What happened? Where did this year go? It can’t be the end of the year already, can it? In the immortal words of Charlie Brown – “Aggggh!”

Just saw this in the online opinion section of the SMH:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/21/1066631429212.html

Basically, it’s an opinion piece by Dominic Knight from The Chaser comedy team, in which he says much the same things I did in my Heckler piece a week or so back about having a celebrity replace Simon Crean. However, Mr Knight fails to draw any reference to Andrew Denton, so I still consider mine to be the superior piece.