Unexpectedly lengthy...Sorry in advance.

OK. I have to stop with those Writers' Block things...They're kind of annoying.

So, as per usual, life has begun to get in the way, but to my credit I have a valid reason. On the 5th I have my Linguistics mid-semester exam, on the 17th I have to give a presentation in my JCTC tutorial on one of the outward signs of Judaism (I've chosen the mezuzah...For myriad reasons...And because I like the name :P) and then I have my JCTC essay due on the 25th (I think), which is what I'm reading the Gospels for. And it's making me crazy.

I'm part of the way through the Gospel of John now, finally, and I'm so happy to be through the other three. It's very strange for someone who's not a Christian - someone who's actually actively avoided organized religion - to be not just reading the Bible, but studying it. I can't say that I'm not enjoying it, because I am, but I won't be converting to Christianity anytime soon, lol. It's definitely an interesting read, although I got seriously annoyed with Matthew, Mark and Luke being much of a muchness. I mean, I understand that they are supposed to be accounts of the same events, but for real?! They could have been at least a little bit different. Thankfully John is different enough for me not to want to stick a fork in my eye.

A quick question for people who know a little more about this than I do: As I said, I've read the Gospel of John and so read the famous John 3:16...Why is it often seen at sports (especially wrestling) events? Because I'm relatively sure that it has nothing to do with sports....

What else?

Last weekend my brother and I helped my father and Co. to clean up my grandmother's place for her while she was visiting with a friend of hers. My grandmother used to be the most fastidious, proper person I had ever met - she was always well taken care of, there was always clean linen, everything was always dusted to within an inch of its life and you - quite seriously - could have eaten off the floor...But over the last eighteen months or so it's all really gone downhill...And her memory is going and she's not taking care of herself. It's all kind of sad, really. Oh, lol, and my dad called his eldest brother (Milos, or George as he's known to everyone outside the family) to get him to come around too so it could all be dealt with much more quickly and easily, and he made this big deal about how his Saturdays are booked and he can't spare the time. So my dad told him he didn't really have too much of a choice...So my uncle said, "OK, I'll be there at one in the afternoon." 1pm came and went...We'd done the dishes (which took an hour) and sorted through kilos of mail, and two and three pm sailed by in much the same way. A quarter past three he and his wife and one of his sons shows up, just as we are locking up and heading out. Two and a quarter hours late to help his family tidy up his mother's house. Prick.

Not that any of us were surprised, of course. Because that's the kind of guy my uncle is....And that really fucking sucked.

The thing that will be interesting (aside from my uncle's impending demise if he can't get it together) is what will happen when my grandmother's memory slips further. Now, she and my grandfather (God rest his wee bum, as Billy Connolly would say) left the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) with my uncle (the aforementioned uncle) and sailed to Australia in about 1949/1950 on a ship called the Anna Salen (the records of which are in the dusty recesses of the interweb)where she came to have two other sons, Vlastamil (Pat, the middle child) and my father, Daniel (no Czech name for him). My grandfather didn't say much about the war (WWII, fyi) because he really wasn't allowed to, lol, but my grandmother has spent her entire adult life glossing it over and forgetting...She's told us stories of picking wild blueberries "back home" and staying at her aunt's place when the war broke out and falling into a fishpond and hiding in some pipes when a bomb was dropped....All of which sounded very exciting to me when I was little, which I think was my grandmother's intention - to leave it as a story, you know? But with her memory worsening, I can't really even pretend to understand the possible damage it'll do when this stuff - the truth - comes back to the surface, which it most certainly will.

I can tell you, though, when it does I'll be there with a pen and piece of paper. There's so much that needs recording and working out. For example, I can tell you pretty much everything from my mother's side of the family...The useless third son of an Earl was paid to leave England and start his life somewhere else. But I can only tell you that my grandmother and grandfather came here from Czechoslovakia. That's it. I know that there were Jews somewhere along the line (I always assumed that my grandma's father was Jewish, but that's a story for another time...) and that both of my paternal grandparents were Catholic...Until they came here and my grandmother converted to Jehovah's Witness. Some of my earliest memories include sitting at someone's house, after witnessing, while they talked about the Bible and I ate chocolate covered sultanas, and sitting in the Kingdom Hall and being really, seriously bored. Until last weekend, I'd forgotten how religious my grandmother actually is....Whole shelves of Bibles and various texts.

Oy. That really turned into a whole thing there, didn't it? I'll have to go through all of that craziness at some point, but I'm a little worried that if I start it'll just unravel and consume me.

Tonight will be my first night trying a herbal sleep aide (because "sleeping pills" sounds so scary) because I haven't been sleeping that well lately and in order to drift off I've pretty much just been really abusing painkillers. It works, lol, being in the comfortable grip of way-too-much codeine and nodding off, but I want to try something that probably won't kill me. I've definitely been over using painkillers lately and I don't want to take them to sleep...Healthy, I know. 

So, I think that'll do for now, lol. I'm going to watch Johnny Depp in The Brave on YouTube (I hate watching movies that way, lol) and then I shall turn in. Nernight, all xox