2010, we come to a close

I've been thinking about this post for weeks now and I predicted that I would be prepared and know EXACTLY what to write, but the truth is I don't. There's just so many things I could talk about but I wouldn't know where to start.

I guess a good beginning is to say that I am not the same Karina coming out of 2010 as I was coming in to 2010. And that this blog post is going to be me, being completely honest, a lot of it is going to be rambling but I hope you stick with me.

The start of the year I was in a relationship which was going pretty well so far, it also lead me to Brisbane, where I spent roughly four months of this year. During my time in Brisbane I grew a little bit more independent. I had quickly learned that Centrelink are sometimes really difficult to deal with, I spent a lot of time not being able to support myself, which meant I had to learn to be reliant on others during some of my time there. I am so thankful for all the people that gave me a place to stay, fed me or gave me lifts in their cars.
But there are a lot of good memories from my time spent living in Brisbane, I made friends with people I now call my second family, even now after all the things that have come to pass I still treasure them and will be spending a lot of my time in the future with them, God willingly. I had discovered that youth work has a secured place in my heart, and through that I am now reaching towards a career in that something that I feel most deeply passionate about. I had the privilege a few times to discover God's beauty in nature, I got to climb through some stunning waterfalls in Mt Tamborine, watched gorgeous sunsets and got to see lots of wildlife just sitting in scrub not too far from suburbia. A lot of these things I don't have in Adelaide and I'm glad I got experience them.

At the beginning of true winter in Brisbane I discovered that even though I had a heck of support from people around me, I still felt incredibly homesick for Adelaide and living in Brisbane was proving to be more difficult financially, as I unfortunately discovered. So late May I packed my bags and flew home to the loving arms of Adelaide, my friends, my family and my church. In course of that, my relationship, with the one that held out his hand and asked "come with me", fell a part and that is something I struggled with for months. I can't say if it's good or bad that it happened, that I'm now a stronger woman in God or that I've actually now lost hope in love happening to me, but it happened and it's just something that made Karina the person she is now. I hope in due time I find that love can happen for me again.

The last half of the year seems like a real blur to me. Possibly because I was trying to regain the pieces of my life after it was shattered again and again, or it might have been because I felt like I had no real direction, or it's possible that I felt completely alone. All I know is that I'm here now and somehow I made it through these past six or so months. I got to go back to Brisbane for a short time to visit friends that were previously mentioned, the change in weather from Adelaide's dreary winter to Brisbane's sunshine couldn't have come at a better time. Though the trip was also a bit of a mess at times, I enjoyed it and it was good to be with those friends again.

I sound like a bit of a broken record, but all of this, ALL of this stuff that happened to me this year... I can say that I am thankful that I was brought through it. I am thankful for what 2010 did to me.

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Colossians 2:6-7)

Here I come, 2011.

Just a Quick Post

Please go to my video and comment (on Youtube, not here), every comment I will be donating a cent to TWLOHA (To Write Love On Her Arms), so far there's a total of $11.08 =]

Books!

Firstly, I failed with the NaNoWriMo, but it was a pretty decent try for my first year. Next year's will be even better!

Secondly, I'm a little behind with my Decembookathon, due to reading pretty intense books. At the moment I'm almost finished the Dead of the Night by John Marsden, of the Tomorrow series. It's a pretty great series so far, but it does pay to take a break from reading every now and again if you aren't into action-y books.

Thirdly, I wanted to do this...

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo