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.

I bought this car about six or seven years ago.
The owner shafted me big time. He had driven it hard and cooked the motor. They do run a little hot the Vitaras, especially with their small 1.6l motor needing to work pretty hard.
I did not check it out enough, some of the hoses had obviously been cooked, and after three months I discovered the head was gone.
The mechanic gave me the bad news.
We replaced the motor with one out of a Baleano (exactly the same motor) which had done about 30 thou. I saw the car, it was wrecked, and saw the speedo.
Since then I replaced the radiator and a couple of other parts such as alternator and starter motor, and have had years of relative free and happy motoring.

We have taken the Suzuki many places, Cervantes, Jurien Bay, Bremer Bay, Denmark, Albany….Wherever I could find a beach to drive on, I did. The tyres were over oversize, especially for such a light car. This meant that I replaced the front ones, and they hardly look worn after more than 30 thousand K’s.

. It was the first car we bought after Clem was born, he was about 3. Ruby came shortly after. They have really only known me driving that car, its dads car. Clem put a dent on the roof when he was four, climbing over it, Ruby and I sang along to songs while we were driving along….and as a family we used it to tow our little trailer down to Bremer Bay…But it’s gone now, sold to a man with his own daughter, for far less than I paid for it. Time to buy something else.

Ruby on the 'Vitardis'