This is my new car, new for me anyway…
Lady I bought it off is a teacher, and just bought herself a Mercedes.
She had taken it up to Karinjini and also lived in Lesmurdie, with a dirt trail driveway, so I have spend the morning cleaning it.

It has done 70,000 K’s and after negotiation cost us $19 grand. Pretty happy with that to be honest. After years of driving a Automatic 1.6l Vitara, I was determined that I would get something with a decent sized motor, and not an automatic. The old one was a good car, but limited. We used to tow a trailer down to Bremer Bay, and it made it okay, but struggled with hills and heat. I don’t think this one will even notice the trailer on the back to be honest.

Good condition, motor and clutch are good. Needs one new tyre, which does not sound a lot, except she had spent money on it, and it has the best tyres you can get for this model, Coopers, and one is going to set me back $280. But it has a good Haymen Rheese Towbar so there is nothing else to spend on it.

It goes like a scalded cat…plenty of power, and the air conditioning is fantastic.

Best car I have ever owned, and am looking forward to years of family vacations and fun in it.

Happy Mark in front of his car

Bryan Duncan was one of the first Christian musical artists I really got into and enjoyed. Love his passion, sense of humour and spirituality.
Holy Rolling, whistling in the dark….so many classic and great songs.
The sort of stuff I listened to LOUD in my Mazda RX4 with the $1000 (1988 prices) stereo.
One of my friends sat in the back while it was on 5…and complained of bleeding ears…wimp.
There is really only one volume for Bryan Duncan…and that is ‘cranked’.

You can download 5 free songs from him by subscribing to his newsletter.
Go here

About three weeks ago I changed from Blogger to this new self hosted site, using WordPress as my publishing tool.
It has gone incredibly smoothly, and I would recommend it to anyone who is still persisting with Blogger.
Blogger was great for me. I could upload videos, pictures, and it allowed some creative license for template design.

However WordPress really is a better tool. Great functionality, SEO functions, many open source widgets and of course, whatever template you can design, with plenty of free ones out there.

I also signed up with Crazy Domains and purchased my own domain name, ‘markedly’ which is the name of this blog. I could not get .com, but managed to secure .com.au, which was a compromise, but acceptable.

Since the changeover I saw an initial drop off of hits, but now, I am averaging about 70 unique hits a day, with a couple of days hitting 100 unique hits a day, which is okay I reckon for this type of blog.

My series on ‘My Ministry Years’ has proven very popular, with about 60-80 people reading each post, and reading it…with the average stay on that particular page about 8 minutes. That indicates they have read it, not just glanced at it. I am aiming to be frank with those posts, but as I hit the next couple, will need to be careful.

I really enjoy this blog, it gets some thoughts out there, provides some great interaction, and I hope is helpful to people.

Some key recommendations if you are coming over from blogger…
Be patient, it takes a while for your internet history to catch up with you.
Keep your blogger account and blog. Put a link from there onto your new site.
After about two weeks, make it an immediate switch. What I mean is that there are ways for people to come direct to your new blog from your old blog, without having to even click on anything. Click on my old blog to see what I mean.

My wife, my kids and even myself have fairly pale skin, and are susceptible to sunburn. Melinda wanted her car windows tinted, and since I am without a car at the moment I drove her to work, and then stopped in at Tint a Car Morley.
They offered to do the tinting on the spot, were competitively priced, and finished it before they said they would.
The tint looks really good, got ‘Midnight Express’ all round, including the back window…

Just wanted to recommend them.

Tint a Car Morley

There are some good clips that can be downloaded for free and used in Christmas services.
Here is one of three you can grab.

Download Here

The next post in my series, “The Ministry Years’ is up. It deals with how I started at Bedford Baptist Church, 17 years ago.

Here

We had a massive day at Inglewood Community Church today.

Big crowd in for the Kids Celebration Service. Lots and lots of visitors and extended family.

The kids from Jets Senior (upper primary) were inspirational as they discussed raising awareness and finance for poverty. Their great idea was for each of the Pastors to put a ‘bounty’ on their hair.

The price for our embarrassment was  $1000 each.

As it turned out we raised $4500, but Eliot only got to $950 so he was very fortunate! The rest of….not so much. Quentin in particular (our Children’s Pastor) was the most keenly bid…most people wanted his hair off.

Here is how it worked out.

Thats James on the left, youth pastor, sans hair, myself in the middle with coloured hair and beard, and Quentin, childrens pastor, also follicly challenged.

The good news though is that $4500 was raised for Elim kids, Kiva and Free to be kids At the end of the day the lessons learnt for future generations to take hold of are immense, and the short term goal of helping was also achieved.