It’s hard work. Most of it is fascinating, all of it is challenging, and one subject is, frankly, frustrating!
College has kicked into gear. My first full week & I have already missed two lectures. It wasn’t my choice. Instead, I spent 5+ hour sitting in different parts of Cocord Hospital, waiting for the doctor, waiting for the X-ray’s, waiting for the same doctor again, then waiting for a Physio. Finally, after waiting for the fibreglass to dry on my new walking cast, I made it back to the second half of my big thursday.
On the whole leg front, it appears to be healing well. I have a walking cast now, so I can start to put a little weight on the leg. In the mean time, I could get used to having meals brought to me, chaufers driving meand the girls showering pity on me.
For those who are looking for some photos. They will be coming soon. Believe me, I haven’t stopped taking them, though my current lack of mobility has shifted my style from “roving reporter” to “rear window”. I still don’t have internet access at college, so that means I have to visit my bro to post pics.
So what do I do with my spare time at the moment?
Study: Greek is the main source of stress, though there are 8 different subjects for me to work on this semester.
Reading: Ok, this is part of study, but a lot of it is also fun. I think I am also going to try & read at least one book just to make me happy. My current reading list is as follows.
Gospel and Kingdom by Goldsworthy (A great work on Biblical Theolgy)
Concise Theology by J.I. Packer (Man, packer is the bomb!)
Biblical Preaching by Robinson (I kind of wish I boug the Martin Lloyd-Jones book instead, but this will do)
Church History in Plain Language by Shelley. (pretty good so far. I am looking forward to the rest of this one.
Introduction to Biblical Greek by Black (It’s a love/hate relationship)
God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis. (This is my fun reading at the moment. I really love C.S. Lewis & this collection of essays revolving around ethics, morality and theology is AWESOME! It is so much cooler than it sounds too!)
There are other bits & pieces of stuff that I have to read too. A couple of articles on things & sooner or later I will have to start some prep for essays. I hope you understand; those that live in Sydney that is, if I tell you that I don’t have enough spare time to hang out too much.
Games I LOVE risk. I have played it twice since I got to college & have been soundly beaten both times. I’m improving though, and it is only a matter of time. The world will be mine!
Just hanging out: The guys in my dorm are cool. We all went & had a beer last night at the Croydon Park Hotel. The girls who live on campus are cool too! Everyone hangs out a fair bit at the moment, but we all know how busy we are, so invariably we all get drawn back to the books.
So, here I am again, back at my church, ready for another awesome Youth Group! It’s busy, but it is all good!
In the mean time, I do have some basic email access on occasion at college, so I would love to hear from any and everyone who reads the blog on occasion. Words of encouragement, pleas for more pictures, suggestions for pictures! I’d love to hear it all. It makes you feel like people are thinking of you, when you are too busy to actually spend the kind of time you would like to with them! Just send them to tim at timgoldsmith.com
Man, I never know how to finish a blog. How about you just try & think of something that you find meaningful & pretend I finished with it here.
Thanks.

It is 4:15pm, Tim strides onto the oval for a game of Tip footy. I (changing for no apparent reason from third person to first person) walk gingerly for a few paces as I get used to the new brace I bought for my bad ankle.
The game starts, the pace is frenetic, but the enjoyment level is high. Half-time is spent helping some guy push a car up onto a trailer. Just the kind of thing that a dozen or so Bible college students do in their spare time.
Early in the second half, I cruise over the line for my second try. It is nice to score, knowing that I am no longer the fastest guy on the field. A minute later, I find a gap in the defence and I am streaming down the sideline, looking for try NO.3, but knowing I will get caught by a particularly fast defender. My brace is doing a good job of protecting my ankle.
If only it did as good a job for the bones in my foot.
So, there I am, running hell-for-leather, when I hear a popping noise. I slow up, pass off the ball & then sit down to check out my foot. It hurts. 5 minutes later, Sam, a lecturer at college, and a doctor to boot, confirms that it hurts (doctors have a way of doing this with their enthusiastic examinations) and tells me that if it is still giving me grief in 24 hours, that I should get it X-rayed.
27 hours later. I’m sitting in my ministers office. I have just been to the medical center & they confirmed a nice looking little fracture in my 5th Metatarsel. I should have a cast on, but I’ll wait till tomorrow, so I can get my car back to College.
Some people go through their lives having never broken anything. They often ask me how I manage to be so successful at it. I till them “once you get the hang of it, it’s a snap!”

Well I survived Greek week, I enjoyed an awesome weekend where I celebrated my Godson Thomas’ birthday, and now I am a week into college itself.
At the moment I am keeping my minister from his computer, so I better post a couple of pictures and run…

Congrats to Matt, Lisa and Thomas!

Annie, Caitlin and Emma. Three little angels.

A butterfly that I chased for 4 minutes. Even now, he/she is a little out of focus.

Apparently college is all about love & beating each other up!

All quiet at timgoldsmith.com?
I do apologise. I moved into college on Sunday afternoon & I have no real internet access there, so things are probably going to have to slow down to about 2 entries a week. Bummer! I am looking into wire-free internet at the moment though, so hopefully I will get myself online properly soon.
Exciting times at the moment! I just survived Greek week. It is amazing how much you can learn when you really have to. I started the week thinking that if I could get the alphabet in both cases, then I would be happy. By the end of the week, we had covered Nouns of the first & second declention, done a bunch of verb conjugations & all kinds of other crazy stuff.. Man it is messed with my mind though! If any of you see me, you can ask me to explain my phonetic song of “loo-oh, loo-ehs, loo-eh, loo-omen, loo-ete, loo-osen, loo-soo, loo-sehs, loo-say, loo-somen, loo-set, loo-sosen”
The guys in my dorm are pretty awesome. We bonded pretty much straight away, over a game of “Risk” and have been up to all kinds of hijinx since. Lots of games, lots of encouragement to study & (thankfully, for my future fitness levels) lots of tip footy to be had!
On Tuesday night I got to go and see “Third Day” play live at Hillsong. It was a pretty good concert (though very loud! Even the young people said that) and I also got to see “Rookie”and “Audio Adrenelin”. It was also a nice time to hang out with N8 and Amy and Kirsty, who then came & took pictures of Sydney Harbour with me afterwards.
Today (Saturday) is another busy day. I have had an early morning, heading out to “Office works” to pick up some bits & pieces, then to Chatswood to get some memory cards for Greek Vocab & a proper keyboard for my laptop. Now I am hanging out at my brother’s place before I head to y Godson’s first birthday party! good times!
Here are a couple of pictures that capture a little of what the week has been about.

SMBC. My home for the next three years.

There will be many late nights under this light globe, studying away!

The object of my attention. for the last week. Greek vocab.

“Third Day” rocking it out on Tuesday night!

All work & all play would make this a dull blog! Tip footy is a nice break from study. It is also nice to see smiles on the faces of the players!

One of the few occasions where a Photoshop filter looked much cooler than the original. The top of lamp in my room.
Keep on reading people, more blogs to come!

I have written about how cool my brother Phil is before, but I have to do it at least this one more time!
When I used to live with my parents, the room I slept in had a Norman Rockwell painting in it, and every morning when I opened my eyes, I could look above me & be gazing at “Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas”.
Of course you can’t live at home forever & parents who are willing to let you keep your bed usually draw the line at you taking the art of the walls.
Cut to 5 or so years later. I am still in Scotland, and my brother is together with the rest of the fam trying to think of a birthday/Christmas present, when Phil remembers my love of the print. A couple of months later, Tim arrives home, just in time to get the newly framed print that Phil (with the generous support of the rest of the family) tracked down all the way in the states & then had sent over to Australia for me.
The long and the short of it being, when I move into college at SMBC, I get to take a bit of home with me.

Phil & my print!
I also have a new love, in the form of a Silver Chrysler PT Cruiser. It is a pretty awesome car, very “Tim” in its very different style. I could write more about it, but my excitement of it is curbed by the enthusiasm I have for a gift like Phil’s which is both awesome and mind-numbingly thoughtful. Love your work Boffo!

The PT (whose beauty pales in comparison with the little beauty you can see Phil holding on the left)

I have always maintained that the real love that I am looking for is less about intense passion & more about an enduring ease & comfort which is felt when you are around your beloved. Less of a craving for a person & more of a feeling that they are part of you, that it is just natural that your hands should gravitate toward each other. This is why I love to see my close friends, as they find people they love, express themselves in their casual comfort.
I really like these pics of N8 & his girlfriend Amy, because N8 is not always a ‘contact’ person, so when he looks so comfortable as Amy whispers something to him in a loud pub, that makes me feel happy for him.

Chatting between songs.

Casual comfort

I am pretty sure that if I went through my archives, I could find a similar post about having beers with Stu “Capt’n Stubbing” Beattie. A true champ among men. Again, we found ourselves at the “Vicar of Wakefield” tonight, catching up on 6 months of movements & just enjoying good Christian fellowship. Any night with the Capt’n is guarenteed to be a highlight of the week.
In other news, I have a new interest in taking black and white photos. It is something that I haven’t really done much of previously. You will all have to live with my initial fumbling attempts to capture something interesting.
Oh, and thanks to a majority vote, I will continue giving explanations with my pics. They are long ones today!.

I decided to take a picture of the leaves on a tree that I was walking under. It never seems to work well in colout. This old Japanese guy appears from nowhere (I was next to his block of flats) and asks me what I was doing. I thought he was going to tell me off for something, but we ended up chatting for 10 minutes as he told me all about the camera he likes to use & how I should join the APS (Australian Photographic Society). I wish I had have taken a picture of him now.

Killing time in Hornsby, I was taking pictures of this fountain (none of which turned out) when I spied this kid trying to till a bottle by holding it over one of the spray-jets. He actually drank what he caught. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it is supposed to be recycled water…

I was taking pictures of Stu, then he took some of me. I think I like his pictures better, though it is definately not because of the subject matter…

There is a whole lot that I could write about the last three days that I have been home. I could happily write about how much I have become aware of the smells of Australia, like Eucalyptus when you pass some trees, or the smell of ozone floating up from a hot road when the rain starts to fall, but such thoughts, like the smells themselves, just evaporate tonight.
There is lots of stuff to write about stuff happening at church, my new role as the youth minister, and all of the parish movements over the last 6 months, but for a rare change, my thoughts about Church can wait till tomorrow.
Even telling stories about the new car that I bought on Saturday & will be picking up tomorrow can wait till later.
The pages I could dedicate to excitement I have at looking back at 6 months of photos, or the volumes I could write about how my heart aches when I see my niece Charlotte smile at me? It all pales into insignificance. Stories to be filed away for another day, or possibly forgotten all together!
What could make this happen to Tim today?
Cate, one of my oldest & bestest friends, and her awesome husband Dan told me that they/she are pregnant!
Congrats Cate & Dan! Awesome news!

Cate & I on the day of her wedding!

Charlotte & I yesterday morning.

I wont bore you with the little details of my last day in Bangkok. The basics of it were only having 3 hours of sleep the night before, dodgy breakfast because it was really bust at 9:30am, having a new suit delivered at 11, and running into my old mate Doogie at the airport.
My 9 hour flight “flew” by itself. Definately aided by “I Heart Huckabees” and “Napoleon Dynamite” (you’re right Mic, I don’t really dig it). I had my first bad meal with QANTAS for breakfast though. Everything had either Pineapple of milk in it, so I had to survive on Orange juice.
I didn’t have to worry too much about not eating on the plane, because, after struggling through the usual convoluted Australian entr process, my parents picked me up & the first stop was a cafe for breakfast! We went to “Xenos” in Crows Nest. We all used to live near there only 5 short years ago, so Mum & Dad could share in the wierdness of being gone, but now being back.
Half an hour later I had already found the car I’m hoping to buy (We’ll find out today), and I had fallen in love in a major way! I had already met her when she was a baby, but to have my 6 month old Niece Charlotte in my arms again was unbelievable! I don’t think I can put into words the joy I feel in my heart when I see my nieces and nephews.
Well now it is 6:22am on the Saturday morning. I woke at 5:20 & got the feeling that that was the only sleep I was going to get. I’m loving being back to summer. After Edinburgh’s windy days & frosty nights, it is good times to have dinner out in the cabana (sp?) and then go for a swim with my little bro Phil. I was worried about feeling sad to have my big adventure over. I certainly do miss quite a few people in Scotland, and if I weren’t living in OZ, then Scotland would be my No.1 choice, but I have to say, rather than feeling sad, I am excited at the opportunities that lie before me for the next year and beyond!
No end to the blog for me. Time overseas is always exciting, but when you have an awesome family, gorgeous nieces and nephew & the worlds best friends, who could blame a man for being more excited about coming home?

Well Bangkok really is just like the title of this post. There is lots of fun stuff to do & see & some nice little bargains to find, but at the same time, everyone and I mean EVERYONE wants to rip you off. I am pretty sure I have been taken for a ride on several different (and sometimes elaborate) occasions, but to a certain extent, there is nothing you can do….
I am one of those guys who likes to quietly browse, so to make me really happy in a shop, all I need is for someone to let me know that they are there for my questions & then just leave me to my shopping. It doesn’t work that way in Bangkok. Every street has people grabbing at you. If you make eye contact with someone, they are likely to be a Tuk Tuk driver who will follow you for 3 blocks,tell you that you are going in the wrong direction & then try & cut you off with their vehicle (it actually happened to me).
I think I am feeling a little like I did in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It has been a long 6 months & I am looking forward to going home, so I am just not that interested. Couple this with not having someone here with me to share the experience & I am pretty much over Bangkok!
Of course, at the same time, it is all worth it! After many years of waiting & looking, I finally found and bought a “Calvin & Hobbes” T-shirt.
Simple things….