Kate's Jerusalem

Sheep and Goats

2011-06-14T17:13:00.003-05:00

Hmmm, I see that I have already posted twice as many times this year as the last.

So, the Holschers went away for the weekend. To be nice to me, they decided to send the dog to the kennel. He is a bit high-maintenence when the family is gone. He feels lonely and neglected. The least I could do was deliver the dog myself. I took him in my two-door, and being a hot day I rolled down the windows. And put the passenger seat forward so he could stick his head out. All was bliss and restraint until Delhi was reached. We slowed to 30 mph and he decided that more than his nose needed to be outside the car- first it was his whole head, then his front paws. Then I came to a stop sign and he was gone- all of him. I really wasn't expecting that. In a panic I pulled around the corner and leapt out of my car in my bare feet. Thankfully 30 seconds was all he needed. He came right back to me.

We proceeded a little farther- with the seat back up and the windows rolled up. Things became quiet in the back seat. Too quiet, but I didn't notice. I reached back to grab the paper with directions, which had slipped to the floor behind my seat. My fingers encountered something sticky. What in the world? Maple SYRUP??? Suddenly I remembered- there had been a lonely pint jug of syrup under my seat. And Reagan had found it. And chewed off the cover. And all that lovely pint was on the floor of my car.

It was with a rather vindicative pleasure that I delivered him to his Doom at the kennel (he really hates that place). We are not best pleased with him.

Saturday night I did the chores. Somehow, since I only do this once every couple of months, I always seem to meet with disaster, or at least Great Trials. I managed to let out 10 chickens while feeding them, and spent a frenzied few minutes darting after them and trying to herd them back into their pen.

Worse yet, I couldn't keep 26 goats under control at all. If there are only two goats that actually need to be milked, be assured that 4 others will crowd at the door desperately trying to shoulder their way out as well. They have beady eyes, and all the inborn stubborness of a greedy and self-absorbed soul. They weigh about as much as I do, and have twice the physical stability. I cannot win in a shoving match. Trying it just makes me so furious that my heart-rate jumps and suddenly I am turned into the wicked witch of the west. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING can push me as far over the edge into sheer carnality as a goat. I found myself hauling them around by their collars and shrieking at them. God chose well when he used goats as examples of how not to behave. And at that moment I wasn't acting any better.

Then there is that nerotic goat who can't stand the milking stantion. She thinks its an instrument of the devil. You have to coax her with grain to get her front hooves up, then lift her back end up. She eats grain peacefully enough while you milk her. When she runs out she startles backwards as if she were suddenly confronted with the devil himself. She is only okay if you give her more grain. Somehow I feel manipulated.

And after it all I ended up sitting on a wet deck chair in the dark, staring at the fireflys over the lawn and asking God for forgiveness. My heart is still pounding, and my nerves are rattled. Is it a sin to scream at goats?

Tell Me the Old, Old, Story

2011-06-13T23:29:00.000-05:00

I love to learn, but find myself easily overwhelmed when trying to read deep theological works. For exapmle- I have tried and failed several times to get past the second chapter of C.S. Lewis' Miracles. At some point I find myself reading the same sentence over and over again. Each time I'll get to the end and say, "Nope, still don't understand what he's getting at". A little while of that and I put it down for another couple of years.

Which brings me to an interesting point about language learning (really, the two ARE related). Apparently Americans who try to learn a language tend to go at it like math: give them the foreign word + the English translation and it will = understanding. They get bogged down in the details of the language and never see the big picture. I know this, because I've done it myself. A better approach is to dive right into the language- fully expecting to miss half or more or what you are hearing- aim for the main point and forget all the words you can't translate.

After months of stuggling away at Hebrew, I found that I was slowly loosening my strangling grip on the need for translation and was aiming more for understanding. I remember this great conversation in class one day; the teacher was babbling away in Hebrew and I realized I was leaping through the stream of it- from rock to rock as it were,and blissfully unconcerned about all the words I was missing. Granted, if once I lost my footing I would have been lost for good, but meanwhile I was getting places- in Hebrew!

Okay, so, back to this review of a book I haven't even metioned yet. There is this ancient philosopher dude named Pascal. He wrote in French for one thing. For another, he had all these brilliant thoughts which he wrote down cryptically on scraps of paper. He intended at some time or other to bring them into order and write a book from them but he went to heaven instead (lucky man). So ever since, other people have gathered those scraps up and tried to explain them. Or they published them as they were, which was even worse for people like me. I mean, if I can't get through C.S. Lewis, a master at simplifying deep things, how was I going to 'get' Pacal?

Enter Peter Kreeft and the title of the book (finally). Christianity for Modern Pagans, Pascal's Pensees, Edited, Outlined & Explained by Peter Kreeft. Kinda long and wordy, nu? But the operative words are 'edited', 'outlined', and 'explained'. I like those words. Here be stones by which I can actually get through Pascal.

I really don't remember exactly why I bought the book in the first place, way back in 2007, but buy it I did, and started to read it. I found that despite all the helps along the way, it wasn't a book to be taken lightly or consumed like an Agatha Christie. It took me two full years to finish. But oh the richness!

Kreeft is a college professor who teaches Pacal, so he explainations are clear, conscise, and even I can get them! He arranges the Pensees under headings. Under these headings each Pensee is in bold type with Kreeft's notes on it following.

I think I started the book with a desire to learn more about a topic of which I was ignorant, and ended up feeling like somebody had walked right inside my heart and head and started rearranging the furniture. I don't know how to explain how deeply excited I felt about the book. I think it had a lot to do with the way it was arranged. It was like a retelling of an ancient and well-known story. Well-loved and precious, but suddenly made bright again by viewing it from a fresh angle.

Pascal and Kreeft together begin by talking forEVER about the Human conditon- the problem they are trying to solve. They discuss at nauseating length Wretchedness and Death, Sin, and Selfishness, and the Vanity of Human Justice, Dogamatism, and Philospohers.

It took me several months to get through this section, but I did so with a mounting sense of anticipation. I had understood the problem pretty clearly before I read the book, and felt like the two of them had hammered it home pretty thoroughly. Besides, I had read the Table of Contents and I knew that they were going to present a Solution at the end. :-) Like a mystery novel, I refused to read the ending before I got through the middle.

After that they talk about possible solutions to the Problem- Diversion and Indifference. Nice. Or not so nice. That section was shorter, but pithy and very humbling.

Next came the Way to a Real Solution and they talked all about Faith and Reason and Passionate Truth-seeking.

Then came the Solution. I can actually remember where I was when I read the end of this book- out on a rock in the middle of the woods behind Fairwood. Nice spot, except for the mosquitos.

What to know what the solution was? Too bad. Have to read the book yourself. Or you could just read the Gospel, if you are bored by my review. :-)

But who ever tires of hearing the Gospel story, and how lovely it is to meet it again, in other words, in a new setting, ever the same, and yet ever fresh and new?

I'll post a few short sections in another note for anybody who is still interested.

And no, you may not borrow my copy. Buy your own.

Sabbath

2011-05-21T20:43:00.003-05:00

When I was a child and all through my growing-up years we kept a Sabbath on Saturday. We observed this day of rest from Friday night at sundown to Saturday night at sundown. But really ovbservence started Friday morning, or even before...

We planned the week so that nothing ended up on Saturday that involved work, or much travel or committment. Friday after school was done we devoted our time to cleaning up the house completely. We had Friday-cleaning lists and the house would buzz with activity all the way until sundown. Often the lawn would be mowed that day as well. If I shut my eyes the memories come back in the form of sensory information- the smell of cleaner from the bathroom, the sound of the washing machine thumping from the laundry room, the sound of somebody snapping the wrinkles out of towels before they fold and put them away, crisp clean sheets on the beds, one of the boys vaccuuming the upstairs hall, Megan outside on the riding lawn mower- her hair in a bandana, singing loudly, the smell of cut grass, the smell of cinnamon rolls in the oven.
Our bodies tired from honest labor we would all rush about as the sun got lower, clean up, put on something nice if we felt inclined, or our night clothes if we felt tired.
We would gather in the living room for a little meeting- the only one where we were allowed to fall asleep if we wanted to. Sometimes we would bring a blanket and pillow and curl up on the floor. Somebody lit candles and left them burning on the coffee table- the overhead lights were off and everything was quiet except the hum of the dishwasher in the kitchen.

There were cinnamon rolls waiting on the kitchen counter, and a bowl of popcorn as well. Keeping 8 children still for long was a miracle, but somehow the atmosphere of peace would settle over the room. We prayed, and sang, and went around the room saying what we were thankful for from the past week. We laughed and talked in a relaxed way, and when we'd had enough Mum brought in Sabbath treat and we ate it. Someitmes we would leave to do our own things, but sometimes we would sit around the living room drawing or playing with toys while Daddy or I read out loud.

Sound idyllic? It was... sometimes. Of course sometimes we didn't want to be there, were bored, restless, cranky, or the meeting went too long. But that's just life.

I have continued to keep the Sabbath all my life. It is wrapped up in my soul I guess, and I can't get it out. :-)

Its an easy thing to see as just an out-of-date command, but I was just thinking on this Sabbath of all the lessons I have learned about the character of God from keeping this day.....

"For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are but dust." Ps. 103:14
I don't know about you, but I love this verse. I feel dusty sometimes, or dust-like. I can't keep up with the demands of life. Endless needs, endless work, endless cycle. We need something to break the cycle- to make it livable. A good friend of mind was talking about this. She has eight children, a hard-working husband who runs two businesses out of her home, and a small farm to boot. The work is endless. But Friday night she closes the phone message book, pulls the paperwork together, shuts off the office phone, closes the door on all her cleaning impliments and all her obligations, gathers her children about her and stops. It helps her feel that the task is not endless. Each week has an end, and her body can catch up.

" Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that
your ox and your donkey may rest and the slave born in your household, and
the alien as well, may be refreshed.

God desires our fellowship. I think of the Sabbath as a day apart, a holy day, but not in a solemn way as much as a joyful celebratory way. God desires our company. In this space of time we can set aside the mundane worries of the week and take time to be still and know that He is God. I'm not very good at doing that on my own. I would naturally rush on through life and arrive at the Gate of heaven breathless and exhausted. But God wants our attention frequently and to make sure of it, commands us to keep a day of rest. Its right up there with not killing people or committing adultery. :-)

I think he thought of me when he commanded rest and stillness. I wouldn't do it otherwise.

The Sabbath also makes me have hope for the future. Just the way it ends each week with celebration and peace, so I expect God to bring an end to this world- and bring with that end celebration and peace. The hope of the coming of the Lord. Each Sabbath bring a taste of that- an anticipation of better things to come.

I could keep on going... when have I ever lacked for things to talk about? But anyway, I am thankful for the Sabbath, for the fellowship of God, for peace, for joy, celebration, and anticipation.

Joel and Ferdinand

2011-05-02T19:27:00.002-05:00

Anybody remember that children's book all about a bull in Spain who would rather sit and smell the flowers than become a fighting bull? Well the other day Joel and I were out on the town and noticed it in a bookshop. He had never heard of it so I told him I would bring my copy back with me next time I was in New Hampshire.

A week or so later I was back with the much-anticipated book in hand. I was in the middle of cooking syrup for a batch of cream, so we sat on the floor with our backs to the fridge. Joel was curled up against me and hanging over my shoulder.

The text is simple and the pictures delicious. I love this particular book and was expecting Joel to as well. But I was forgetting my Joel. He is a man of action. A man without fear. A doer in the field of life. Strong and straight and very manly... even at the tender age of five.

At first he was entranced, then when Ferdinand first expressed a desire to smell flowers he made a small sound of disgust. Suddenly I realized how little he would appreciate a sensitive soul like Ferdinand's. After that it was just funny. Nothing Ferdinand did was right. Joel was revolted by his wimpiness and indifferent to his plight. The book was not a success.

I suggested they name their new baby bull Ferdinand. He rejected the idea out of hand.

Frozen Chicken

2011-03-24T21:48:00.004-05:00

I haven't been here in forever. Sorry. I guess. Anyway, I'll give it another shot. Maybe I should stop apologizing every time I disappear for a year and then pop back up again.

So lets start with something random to get my brain in a writing mode again.

Reagan the large and happy puppy who lives outside has found a new and interesting hobby. He chases chickens. On a small farm with many chickens who actually earn their keep by producing eggs, chicken-chasing is a deadly sin. Reagan knows this, but some deep and carnal urge within him keeps him at it.

During the winter its not so bad becasue the chickens are confined to the barn and Reagan is never allowed in. But as spring approaches the hens find their way out by hook or by crook and wander about looking for...whatever it is that hens are seeking in life.

Reagan found one the other evening and chased it under a car by the garage. He got yelled at and chained back up. We assumed the chicken found its way back to the barn.

The next morning I was out working in the woods. Mid-morning I came back down and noticed a chicken sitting on the ground in front of the garage. The chicken didn't move as I approached, which was a bit odd. I was practically on top of it before I realized the problem and the signifigance of its location- somebody had moved the car since the night before. This was the chicken Reagan had chased under that car. It had settled down in a puddle of water, too terrified to move. Overnight the water froze- with the chicken in it.

I was horrified at the thought of the wretched night it must have spent- and dubious that it was going to survive. I ran to the house and came back with rags and warm water and started to pry her up. She had been smart enough to pull her legs up into its breast feathers. So all that was actually frozen to the ground were her feathers all the way round.

It took several buckets of warm water and some gentle pulling to remove her. She never made a sound or flopped about. We wrapped her up in rags and brought her into the house to thaw in front of the stove.

Less than an hour later she struggled out of her wrappings and started to protest. Completely normal and healthy.

Crazy bird.

2010-12-11T21:25:00.000-05:00

Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea,
And East and West the wanderlust that will not let me be;
It works in me like madness, dear, to bid me say good-by!
For the seas call and the stars call, and oh, the call of the sky!

I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are,
But man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide a star;
And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the river calls and the road calls, and oh, the call of a bird!

Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away;
And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why,
You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road
and the sky!
-Gerald Gould

2010-07-15T17:15:00.003-05:00

You know how memories from childhood can linger such a very long time and have a huge impact on one's life? Well, I'm going to share one of those with you.

Every time I throw away the cardboard tube at the end of a paper towel roll I get this little twinge of regret. I feel a sudden urge to hoard it...

This is all because when we were children we traveled lots and couldn't have large pets like rottweilers or ponies. So we had rodents small. Mostly gerbils. Gerbils chew things- all night long. They chew them up and make nests out of them. So I would eagerly await the end of each paper towel roll, grab the tube and give it to my darling gerbils. They loved me for it. At least they loved my cardboard paper towel tubes.

But why should I continue to feel a need for paper towel tubes?

I'm just sayin'

More Donne

2009-08-27T11:10:00.003-05:00

A Hymne to Christ

In what torne ship soever I embarke,
That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;
What sea soever swallow mee, that flood
Shall be to mee an embleme of thy blood;
Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise
Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,
Which, though they turne away sometimes,
They never will despise.

I sacrifice this Iland unto thee,
And all whom I lov'd there, and who lov'd mee;
When I have put our seas twixt them and mee,
Put thou thy sea betwixt my sinnes and thee.
As the trees sap doth seeke the root below
In winter, in my winter now I goe,
Where none but thee, th'Eternall root
Of true Love I may know.

Nor thou nor thy religion doest controule,
The amorousnesse of an harmonious Soule,
But thou would'st have that love thy selfe: As thou
Art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now,
Thou lov'st not, till from loving more, thou free
My soule: who ever gives, takes libertie:
O, if thou car'st not whom I love
Alas, thou lov'st not mee.

Seale then this bill of my Divorce to All,
On whom those fainter beames of love did fall;
Marry those loves, which in youth scattered bee
On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses)to thee.
Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:
To see God only, I goe out of sight:
And to scrape stormy dayes, I chuse
An Everlasting night.

Sometimes.

2009-05-23T19:39:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I wander around aimlessly; bereft. I feel as if I belong to no one, that I belong nowhere. Life is just not what my child-self expected all those years ago. Where is the wonder and joy?

Then I remember...

This is not my home,
I do not belong;

and some day soon I will arrive at the door of Heaven, see Him whom my soul loves and I will be at Home forever.

And on a trivial note: the quality of one's life is sometimes temporarily improved by the addition of one pair of astonishing striped knee socks.

Heaven in a birdbath

2009-05-19T15:38:00.005-05:00

Today Sarah and I planted a garden. You know that concrete bird bath in the little courtyard outside out door? Well, it has been problematic throughout the years. It grows nothing well- except moss. Last year it was lovely thanks to Aunt Robin. This year it fell to my lot to fill it up. First of all I grubbed it out completely and filled it up with some Miracle Grow stuff that had jolly well better be miraculous. It cost a enough.

Sarah and went to town this afternoon to pick out flowers. We weren't really sure what we wanted. Sarah was tired. I was crabby. We wandered around the outdoor part of Agway in Keene, pushing a poor excuse for a cart through the thick gravel aisles.

Sarah: (going past the herbs) Oh! We could fill it with herbs!
Katie: That's a good idea!

We walk past the herbs, not picking any up.

Katie: We need something tall in the middle, and something to hang over the edges, and then stuff in the middle. What about those pink flowers?
Sarah: Those are too tall.
Katie: no they aren't! (She picks one up)
Sarah: not the red ones.

We walk away. In fact, we abandon the cart and wander around and around in circles, alternately suggesting plants and rejecting the ones the other person had picked out.

Katie: maybe we should have some cool grass in the middle.
Sarah: No.
Katie: Oh, okay.
Sarah: People would wonder why we didn't weed our garden.

We finally had a collection of possibilities on our stupid cart. Sarah was sure they were all way too tall for our waist-height bird bath. I was sure they would be lovely. I won.

We practically carried the cart to the gazebo that served as a checkout. The lady in front of us was buying 13 rose bushes. The cashier was trying to ring them in without moving them off her cart. I was dubious that it was going to work; he didn't seem to be moving in a very orderly fashion. Sure enough- the end count was 15, so he started all over again; only this time she put them on the counter one by one. Sarah went to the car to wait.

I stood around with my feet on the ground. When the 13-rose lady finally left I checked out my odd collection of plants, minus the one that I rejected at the 11th hour because it cost 3 arms and two legs (as the saying goes). On the way to the car I became convinced that they were all too tall and that it was going to look horrible and stupid. Sarah would be right and I would be wrong- horror of horrors!

We planted them right away. And they looked beautiful. End of story. Only that I nearly cried they were so lovely- just like a piece of heaven.

Rachel Baglietto nee Adams

2009-03-11T11:46:00.006-05:00

I just finished packing away Rachel's wedding dress. It is now folded up, but not squished, into a large blue Roughneck container between layers of acid-free tissue paper. It hung in the door frame of one of the bedrooms for ages after the wedding. Then it was sent to the cleaners to get the mud off the front hem. That was acquired walking down the steps from the church to the van and from the van to the Dining Hall.

Slowly the last bits of the wedding and shower are being cleared away. The big poster board titled "Rachel's Brains" was pulled off the fridge, the last of the party favors made by Mrs. Sandford have been properly disposed of (yum!), the calendar no longer displays a carefully choreographed layout of the month of January with marriage counseling sessions, airport runs, arrival times, etc.

Maybe now that the details and reminders are disappearing, I can actually start figuring out what just happened.

My sister, Rachel, remember her? just got married. If you didn't happen to notice. Weird. And yet, so right.

But how did it happen? And will it really ever sink in? An Adams girl? Married? I guess we can ditch that idea of all being old maids together like the Bronte sisters.

Actually, that wasn't such a good idea anyway. I just read a quick bio of them- apparently there were 6 kids total- 5 girls and one boy. Eldest two girls died early, the mom died of cancer. Then the four remaining kids and their dad hung out together trying to piece together a living tutoring, pastoring, writing. Then three of the kids died inside two years. First the boy died of alcohol and opium abuse, then two girls of tuberculosis. They were all right around 30 years old. Charlotte, the one who wrote Jane Eyre, lived a while longer and even got married. But she died while pregnant with her first child. She was 38.

So... yay for Rachel getting married! Now we aren't doomed to writing novels full of angst or dying early of sickness or substance abuse. Thanks, dear!

2009-03-01T21:43:00.002-05:00

Hello, hello? Anybody still here?

The sound of my small voice is swallowed up by the darkness in the room. I open the door a little wider and hesitantly put in my head. When was the last I was here anyway? I flick on the light and blink in surprise. It really has been a long time! Everything is covered in dust. I see the footprints of friends who have come and gone and not found me at home.

Oh well! A good dusting, a little beating of the rugs, maybe make a pot of tea for myself and a pot of coffee for everybody else. Put out the welcome mat, turn on the music, pull up the shades... maybe they will come back.

Hearing Glory- St. Anne's

2008-05-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

Today I was hanging out at St. Anne's. How lucky am I- being able to just hang out in such places!

Anyway- I was admiring the way the light shines through the stone latticework windows, how the pillars are un-faced and have rugged seams in them, and the look of huge oak and black iron doors. There was an Italian (I think) tour group sitting in the pews (which, by the way, try to avoid them if possible- rare forms of torture calculated to keep tourists moving) in front of me. They were singing in Latin and enjoying the acoustics.

Remember St. Anne's? For those you who have been there it needs no explanation, but for those who haven't- you can practically sing three-part harmony with yourself because the notes echo around the dome so long. Very nice, as long as you stay on tune.

After a bit most of the group stopped singing. A few hadn't had enough and kept on going- a young man (in an exceptionally ugly hat), and sundry middle-agers with good voices. Fewer voices are really less confusing anyway, and I sat back in bliss to listen. How they sang! Controlled, slow Latin hymns with beautiful harmony. One exceptionally pure soprano would suddenly rise out of the steady flow of the harmony with a few notes of pure joy.

The young man with the ugly hat seemed particularly intent. He never got up and wandered around, and didn't even seem interested in looking around at the architecture. It wasn't until they all started to move out of the church that I saw why- he was walking down the center aisle arm-in-arm with an older man, and with a familiar rigid and focused gait.
He was blind.

As I watched him out the door I wondered what it must be like sight-see without being about to see, to tour and to need a guide for every step, to visit the Holy Land and not come home with a 1,000 photos to remember it by?

But what vividness some memories must hold- memories of sound, heat, the feel of the stones underfoot, the voices of people praying, singing, the Arabs on David's Street calling their wares.

No wonder he kept singing. All the rest could wander at will, and see, but oh how RICH that sound must have been for him!

Lucky man.

A Tale of Two Airports.... and Several Continents

2008-04-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

I'm an irritated state of mind right now. I'm trying to finish a project. The project has a goal to be reached. It should be reached soon. Sadly the goal is difficult to define. The steps leading to the goal are difficult to define. Nobody else seems to be able to define them for me. I can't define them for me. So I am lost in a sea of rabbit trails, loose ends, computer issues and circular thought patterns. I hate this.

So now I am sitting on the floor with the sun on my back listening to Valentina Igoshina play Chopin and I shall tell you a funny story to help me forget my troubles.

Once upon a time I flew to Turkey. I didn't really want to fly to Turkey, but hey, whatever. The day before I left the travel agent called to ask me if I minded taking by an earlier flight. I didn't....

wait a sec, Valentina is buffering and I must go pause her.

Okay, as I was saying, I didn't have a problem with that. Mark and Liz were going to pick me up at the other end and I was pretty sure 3 pm was better than 8 for them.

"Same airport, right?" I asked the travel agent person.

I put that question on its own line with extra spaces to make it stick out. It is the crux of the whole matter. Don't forget that I asked it.

The travel agent allowed as how it was the same airport. Or, maybe she really meant that my leaving and returning flights both left from the same airport.

Anyway, I flew to Turkey to see the king, or at least the Stamps.

I landed in Istanbul at 3 pm. If you have a moment, look up a map of Istanbul. You will notice that the city has two sides separated by water. That water is called the Bosphorus. The two sides are on two continents! Isn't that cool?

So Istanbul has an Asian side and a European side. What does that have to do with my story? Well, there is a tiny airport on the Asian side, a bigger airport on the European side, and Mark and Liz live sort of mid-way between them, but on the Asian side.

Ahhh, we begin to see why it might be important to know which airport we are going into!

Anyway, I landed in Istanbul and scanned the crowd for a familiar face. I was really looking for a guy who looked like Matt without a military haircut, because I hadn't really seen Mark since he was a small lad. And I had no idea what Liz looked like.

I saw no Matt-esque men. Suddenly I knew what had happened. I wasn't in the tiny airport on the Asian side. I was really in the larger airport on the European side.
But Mark and Liz were on the Asian side. Holding down the tiny airport and looking for me.

But I wasn't there.

Funny, I had worried about lots of things involved in this trip to Turkey, but arriving at a totally different airport wasn't one of them. Guess I'm bad a worrying.

Anyway I didn't have time for worry now. I went to the nearest information desk to double-check my location. Is there any non-stupid way of asking, "Excuse me, but can you tell me where I am?"

Then I changed money into.... ummm liras? Somebody (that would be me) did absolutely NO research about Turkey before they arrived. But I learned a lot, fast.

I found a phone.

I found a post office.

I bought a phone card.

I called Mark and Liz's home phone. I'm not sure why, since I knew they were at the airport. Not MY airport of course, but AN airport, which isn't where they live.

Then I took the next logical step and called my Daddy. He called Rachel in NH to get Roy and Lee's number in California. Daddy called California to get Liz's cell number. It was an old one. So Daddy called Mike who was on a business trip in China. Couldn't reach him.

While Daddy was continent hopping via phone, I was looking at ways of continent hopping myself. Take a taxi? I nixed that without a second thought. I don't trust a taxi unless I can speak the taxi driver's native language.
Shuttle bus? Some helpful Turkish guy told me all about it and showed me a map and was so polite. But I wasn't sure of the exchange rate and it seemed an awful lot of money. I called Daddy and had him run it through a exchange rate calculator. $115????!!!? Ummm, I don't even have that much cash on me! Maybe I should just walk. In a foreign country, after dark, in a city. Ha.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or the airport on the Asian side, Mark and Liz (being smarter than the average bears) decided there was problem. Their airport was so small that there were only three planes in the whole place. None of them were from my part of the world. So Mark decided to stay at the airport and Liz when home. Whooo hoo! Good has been done here!

Lisa meanwhile sent them a message on Facebook on my account. In essence it said:

"Katie's in the other place!"

To make a long story end soon:
Liz saw the message, called the accompanying phone number (Daddy), and got all the gory details.

Then she took a ferry, a tram and a light rail to pick me up. This was simpler and cheaper for all involved. Really. Its was just more time-intensive. Poor Liz.

I sat at the airport taking boring pictures and wondered what Liz looked like.

Thankfully she looked at my picture on Facebook, so she knew what I looked like. She found me and we went home via light rail, tram and ferry. Arrival time: 9 pm.

Bless his heart, Mark had bought pizza. Pizza, pizza, love of my heart, joy of life.... when was the last time I had real pizza?

Moving on...

I have been involved in fiascos before. I have done many stupid and clumsy things and have had to be dragged out of multiple scrapes by sundry people. But this is the first time that I have involved all the following in my ineptness all at once: family, friends, China, Turkey, California , New Hampshire, Israel, long-suffering relative strangers,Turks, Israelis, trams, ferries, light rails and large bodies of water.

This, my friends, takes the cake.

the moral of this story is: Never travel.
ha.

"That MUST have hurt!"

2007-11-23T12:04:00.002-05:00

Today in my English class we studied the various uses of must, may, might, and be able to. It was thrilling. Positively chilling!

Did you know that may and might mean exactly the same thing, but that may is slightly more formal? Does it mean that I am more formal because I frequently use the word may? How may times do you use may versus might?

On other fronts: I nearly met my death on the stairs this morning. Remember them? Those marble slabs descending in parallel order from the second to the first floor? Weren't they particularly cold and unforgiving? I came down them with my computer in arm, careless and unafraid. I even had socks with little sticky things on the bottoms to keep me upright. Was it enough? Oh no. It must have been a classically gorgeous fall- my feet flew out from under me just like Jon of Garfield fame, I came down hard on one hand and my posterior and slithered, bumped, fell down three or four stairs. All without dropping my computer, I might add. Good for me. But Oy Vay did I holler!

Okay, happy Sabbath to you all. I am off to an evening of laziness. :-)

2007-09-06T06:05:00.000-05:00

Last night I was standing behind the counter of the restaurant watching the incoming customers. Suddenly there was a crowd of fifteen or twenty policemen all in uniform standing in line. "What is this?" I thought, "County police vacation? Huge police meeting at Panera? How much food do twenty policemen eat anyway? It would have been nice if they had called first. Its going to take us forever to get them all fed."

But this is no time for idle speculation! I leaped into action just as the lights in the restaurant all went out...

and landed with a clatter on the plate and fork I had left on the floor beside my bed. The clock informed me it was only 12:30 am.

Serves me right for eating chicken pot pie for dinner RIGHT before going to sleep.

Books

2007-08-01T17:32:00.000-05:00

With birthday money burning a hole in my pocket and a book wish-list of decent length, I made my way to to the Amazon a week or so ago.

Then I spent the next several days checking the front desk every day- hey, you never know!

Today they were on Grandma's kitchen table and I was so excited I nearly cried!

I am now the happy owner of:

The Complete English poems of John Donne (beautiful hardcover edition- I have wanted this for so long!)

Christianity for Modern Pagans Pascal's Pensees(I am going to leave this around at the restaurant- Just Kidding!)

I am so happy about them I am going to leave right now for softball and take them with me. That way I can show them to Gretchen who will be suitably excited for me.

TTFN

Death, be not proud

2007-07-24T07:47:00.000-05:00

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more;
Death thou shalt die.

John Donne, Holy Sonnets X

Right back where I started from- a short journey up the East Coast

2007-07-03T21:00:00.000-05:00

Hey Guys,
I am moving again. Really, actually I didn't "move" away from NH, I was just paying my parents an extended visit. :-) But however I word it, the fact is that I am returning to the North. Immediately. Without further delay. Okay, in the next couple of days anyway. :-)

I have been re-hired at my previous place of employment, so come visit me there!

I am looking forward to days that are less than 100 degrees, and less humidity. More than that I am looking forward to seeing those of my friends who live up there!!! Yay!

See you soon.

Going Places With God

2007-06-30T14:11:00.000-05:00

Hey Guys,
Lisa is back from Jerusalem! She survived the killer trip and arrived in Atlanta around 10 pm. This series of flights was extra bad because the original round-trip ticket took her into Boston (where we had expected to be). We couldn't change the destination so we tacked on a one-way flight from Boston to Atlanta. Here is the list of cities she visited yesterday:

Jerusalem Tel Aviv Frankfurt Boston Baltimore Atlanta.

Pretty good, eh?

(Change of Subject coming up)

While I was in Israel and taking classes at UHL, I had a couple lectures and a couple field trips with one of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable teachers I have ever had the privilege of studying under- Todd Bolen. He's got a blog and a website for all you interested Beulah-lovers, and I have a couple of his compiled Israel photo collections (on CD). Most Excellent.
Several months ago he offered to send a limited number of copies of this book (Going Places With God) to anybody interested if they agreed to review it when they were finished. Lisa and I both responded, but I got the book because I was in the States and the books were being mailed from the West Coast. Lucky me. :-)

Here is the review. Careful, the first paragraph is a bit thick says Lisa. Apparently I shouldn't dump all the technical info about the book on you before I grab your interest. Maybe I just have great faith in your above-average intellects and attention spans.

Going Places With God by Wayne Stiles
A Devotional Journey Through the Lands of the Bible

Just finished a winner of a book!
It is a 90-day devotional using the geography of the "connecting link between theology and humanity", i.e. the land of Israel, to drive home spiritual lessons. Each day has a verse, a lesson, a short prayer to help you actually internalize, and a quote from some well-known and classic sources. Interspersed throughout the book are reference maps and photos of various places in the Land.

I have been to Israel, so each lesson brought to mind some vivid mental images- all the way from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the springs of Dan, the desert hills of the Judean Wilderness, to the Temple Mount. But despite my familiarity with the subject matter, I found many fresh and unexpected lessons both from a geographical and a spiritual point of view.

The spiritual lessons were wonderful! It takes something more than just a good writer to make a devotional books more than just a feel-good experience. I found myself intrigued, educated, comforted, and more importantly, challenged to reach higher, trust more, complain less, and love God with my whole heart.

(I would be willing to farm out my copy, but I think Lisa or Daddy want it next. Sorry, go buy your own copy.)

Wooohoooo!

2007-06-29T05:58:00.000-05:00

Lisa is coming home today! We'll be picking her up at the airport late tonight.

Sarah is coming home tommorrow!! We'll be picking her up at the airport late Saturday night.

What a wealth of sisters!

tagged

2007-05-23T22:24:00.001-05:00

1. I bought glasses today and I LOVE them!
2. tomorrow and Friday we are having a yard sale
3. my Mom thinks my hands are funny looking- so funny looking that she laughs out loud at them sometimes. All my fingers stick out in odd directions.
4. I dreamed the other night that Andrea had a baby brother named Owen. He had black hair.
5. I have a hankering to drive across country with a pistol, a large dog, and stack of books on tape. Though it WOULD be more fun with a bunch of friends- anybody interested in planning a trip in say, 2008 or 9?
6. I love N.C. Wyeth's work
7. I detest peach yougurt.

What the World Needs is a Few More Rednecks (come get 'em- they live in my house)

2007-05-23T20:58:00.000-05:00

My brothers, none of whom own a car, live vicariously through me and my cars. I get all kinds of unsolicited advice on my cars, my driving, and how I could better spend my money in car-related ways.

Possible improvements to existing car, or better yet, a new car:

"Oh Katie! You should get rims like those!" says brother excitedly pointing to a low-slung boat of a car, driven by the coolest black guy ever (or so he thinks). The wheels scream glitz with miles of shiny chrome.

Okay dear," I reply calmly.

"Katie, you should really buy a Z X 679 Chevy Sports Model with factory conversion fuel-injected six cylinder wingdings."

"Whatever you say, dear."

"It costs $30,000 dollars. That's not bad, compared to a Lamborghini. It can go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds flat and reach speeds of 250 miles per hour."

This conversation is like bubble gum- it occupies the jaw of the user and annoys the user's neighbor (that would be me).

"That's all very well and good, brother, but where am I going to come up with $30,000, and besides, when do I ever need to go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds flat (or round for that matter), and for Pete's sake, WHEN will I ever get a chance to go 250 mph?"

Long-distance car identification:

"Oh, look at that Hemi!" says brother, pointing to a large white pick-up three lanes over and five cars up. How in the world does he know its a Hemi anyway? I can't even tell you if its a Chevy or a Ford from this distance. Besides, what's a Hemi anyway?

My identification methods are heavy on personification:
Pick-up trucks with double axles in the back have wide hips.
The Crossfire looks like it has suspenders when viewed from the back.
Some headlights look sleepy, angry, crosseyed, or bug-eyed.
One new version of the Thunderbird actually looks like its in reverse all the time because the back end looks like the front.
and....

"OOOOO! That's a pretty car! What is it?"

Technical information about cars:
I am completely in awe of the amount of car-related information my brothers have stuffed away in their brains, but mostly I can't handle hearing it. Nobody has ever sat me down and explained how an engine works. Until they do the relative number of cylinders, horsepower, and other details of brakepads, torque, etc, will leave me cold.

Thankfully, my brothers seem to handle my lack of intelligence with aplomb. They gently remind me when I am caught in a misstatement involving front or rear-wheel drive and sometimes remember to dumb down the conversation to my level.

Turn and turn about- after all, I have long since started talking about horses in car terms.

"Wow! That horse can practically take a corner on two wheels!"

Assistance driving:

Brother: "Want me to shift for you?"

Kate: "NO. And get your head out of the way, I can't see through it."

Kate: "Don't TOUCH my clutch or I'll beat you!"

Kate: "Don't you DARE touch the emergency brake, young man! Oh, it was on? Oh, okay."

Comments on my driving:

My brothers affectionately refer to my car as the Hyundai Accident. They should really call it the Hyundai Accident-Waiting-to-Happen. That I think, would be the correct name while I am driving. They think I'm a horrible driver.

"You almost squealed your tires around that corner!"

This is said in a tone of reproach and ill-concealed wistfulness. Laying rubber is an offense punishable by imprisonment in Georgia. Laws against laying rubber boggle the minds of Steve, Dan, Dave (and Kate) and are only made bearable by laws that allow one to carry guns anywhere one wants without a licence.

During one memorable parade this past year a whole line of cars were passing the police station where we were sitting on the curb. Some rednecks the next curb over started hollering for action. In one unbelievably loud and glorious moment one of the muscle cars reved their engine, shrieked their tires, and left behind a long line of black rubber and a huge cloud of smoke. We still talk about that day.

car-related gifts:
A couple Christmases ago they bought me wheel-lights. I think they would have gotten me hubcaps if they hadn't been so expensive. Wheel-lights are little things that attach magnetically to your hubs and light up when you go over a bump. These particular ones flashed blue and where very much illegal for street use. Sigh. I did use them one time- to drive down Old Marlborough Rd at 5:30 in the morning to take care of the horses.

Now they live in a clear plastic bag in my dresser and make me think fondly of my brothers every time I see an eerie blue light eminating from my middle drawer.

The day before yesterday David left a present on my pillow. It was a package of decals for my car- six 38 calibre bullet holes. He had heard me say I wanted them. (I did? When was I ever caught in such an indiscretion?)

We went outside and had a interesting discussion about where to put them: say I was involved in a drive-by shooting; I was driving at 60 mph and the guy with the 38 pistol was standing to my left shooting at me. Where would the holes be? Was it a an automatic, or a semi-automatic? Say 3 rounds per second. Hmmmmm. Daddy said they would all be at head-level which isn't practical for decals. After all, I can't but a bullet-hole sticker in the middle of my windshield, or even on my side-window for that matter.

Sidetracked from the really important issue, Daddy tells with great relish a story of seeing an Egyptian armoured car in Israel after the '67 war which had one bullet-hole right at head level in the windshield. Did the guy duck in time? Mom looks disgusted.

I get cold feet. I may be amused by bullet holes in other people's cars, but am I really willing to disgrace myself in such a manner, even for the love of my brother?

If I do, I'll post a picture (DV).

Katie vs. Goliath

2007-05-04T20:08:00.000-05:00

Meet Goliath- 1500 lbs, 17 hands tall, all muscle and bone. Not the prettiest horse around, but one of the more solid. In his prime he was a steer-roping champion. He was so fast he could out-run the steer, and when he stopped with the steer at the other end of the rope, the steer did a back-flip. Goliath can turn a corner faster than I can think, take off from a stand-still like an explosion, and run all out for the fun of it. He is also one of the gentlest horses I have ever ridden and very well-behaved.

Daniel took this picture. The fuzziness to the right is the fencepost he was hiding behind to avoid getting run down. The yellow thing is a wire attached to a telephone pole just out of sight to the left. I am thinking to myself at this point "I hope this horse decides I mean it when I asked him to move over because I am going to look pretty disgusting without a head. And I WILL be decapitated if he doesn't move over!"

Which does not explain why I am smiling.

Motherhood

2007-05-04T19:35:00.000-05:00

This is not a post about my mother, though Mother's Day is coming up.

I am doing a dry-run/ crash-course in mothering for a couple days. Mrs. and Mrs. L. left for the Gulf Coast to close on some rental property and I am taking care of their kids- Allison (11), Joseph (4), Benjamin (3), and Anna-Sophia (18 mo.)

Things are going remarkably well, but its so weird! We haven't had little ones in the house for years, and I forgot how time consuming they are. As in- they consume ALL available time ALL day long. Forget sitting down to read, forget eating food at meal times, forget thinking your own thoughts uninterrupted, or walking in a straight line down the path (no Sophia! THIS way!), or only managing your own food order at the drive-thru. Did you remember to wash Benjamin's hands? Sophia can't change her own diaper and she isn't going to remind you! Are they all crabby at once? Well, its your fault because dinner is late and they don't know how to be polite when they are hungry. Whose mess on the floor? Doesn't matter who made it-its mine now.

Suddenly I am thinking, planning and acting for 5 instead of one. I am responsible for their behavior and well-being, and naps are not an option (unless you think you can sleep and act as jungle-gym at the same time).

So wait, this is a post for my Mom- My word what a job! Thank you SO MUCH. I love you, and I think you are incredible.

Call it one or the other, or get a better gun

2007-05-01T20:17:00.001-05:00

I have been wandering about the house this afternoon wearing my latest acquisition- a pair of half-chaps. Chaps are leather things that wrap around your legs to protect them from whatever. I think motorcycle dudes wear them. Cowboys wear whacking big ones that go the length of their legs and flap about. English gentlemen wear boots, or jodhpurs (Province in India/riding breeches), or sometimes subdued, snobby versions of cowboy chaps.

Half-chaps are for people like me who would rather not wear huge things, or spend a couple hundred dollars on a pair of (gorgeous) riding boots. They only cover your leg from the knee to the ankle, but that's all that matters.

On a Western saddle the part where you put your foot (stirrup) is attached to the saddle with a generous amount of smooth leather against which your leg can rest comfortably. English saddles are more stingy. The stirrup is attached by two thin leather straps which move back and forth and pinch your legs abominably. Nasty English.

I've been doing more riding recently, and am planning on continuing through the summer- on an English saddle. So, to keep myself from sporting a permanent row of bruises I drove to yon local huge saddle store and bought me-self chaps.

I love riding, and I hope to continue riding for the rest of my life, but I think this is the first time I have ever invested any money in riding. I haven't bought anything related- not even a riding helmet. Which I really could have used. I remember so many summer afternoons (Rachel, Frith?) tearing madly through the puckerbrush on horseback, barefoot, bareheaded, and brainless. We jumped and swam and thundered about and fell off repeatedly. And at the end of the day we would compare legs to see who had the most scratches.... sigh. Them were the days.

Where was I? Oh yes! investment. I was saying I hadn't ever invested in riding. Wait! There was, I suppose, the time I tied that rather flighty Appaloosa mare named Marcy to the MacCauley's water pump spigot and then sprayed her with the hose. She leaped into the air like a Pegasus and I spent most of the summer paying for a new pipe to replace the one she bent.

Anyway! I am pleased as punch with my new chaps, and I am happily anticipating putting them to good use in the next couple days. Though I admit they kind of make me look like a biker.

On to surveying.

I am learning about surveying! Isn't that cool? Blake T. is the engineer for a new bridge going up at the park across the road. He has his own equipment, but no crew I guess, so he got, Daniel, and David and me to help him out.

Actually he had already surveyed for the bridge twice, but the client didn't like the placement and picked a new spot. Blake T was sure it wouldn't fit where he wanted it. Our job was to help him find out if there was the necessary 7 1/2 feet between two large trees. The client wants the bridge between them without cutting them down. Sounds easy to figure out? It wasn't. Because it wasn't just a matter of running a tape measure. The bridge is really long, so moving it a wee bit at one end can make a big difference at the other end; possibly bringing it up against other obstacles.

We spent three hours learning how to use a transit (15 minute gun, Derrick, and whoohoo don't I feel smart to know what that means!) to shoot center lines and angles and plot trees that might be in the way, and then how to use a level to plot the elevation of temporary bench marks and tree roots. So many interesting facts about plumb bobs and angles and degrees, minutes, and seconds and tenths of a foot...

I kept on getting confused about how to read the angles and was all nervous that I was going to get it wildly wrong. The transit we used was only accurate down to 15 minute incriments. That meant that when I called the measurement there was a wee bit of guessing. I had to decide if it was closer to the 15, 30, 45, 0r 60 line. So what if it was exactly between two lines?

"Call it one or the other, or get a better gun," was the answer. In other words, this instrument only gets that close, and if you wanted it any closer, you should have brought the more powerful instrument.

There must be some life principle in that, but if I work it out it sounds too much like 'Just leave it, its good enough,' or 'this isn't a masterpiece, you know.' Sort of a lowering of standards.

But that isn't what it meant.

Anyway, I had a blast! Blake T. is a great teacher and besides that, he did all the really 'interesting' math. I just got to peer through the instruments and yell at Daniel to plumb the rod. Poor Daniel; I think found it all less amusing because he was the rod man and had to stand in the hot sun keeping an 8-foot pole steady for ages. Or run around measuring the circumference of trees with David. And pick up ticks.

So yay for surveying equipment and half-chaps!

And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart...

2007-04-25T12:37:00.000-05:00

John Donne
Holy Sonnets I

Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?
Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I runne to death, and death meets me fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
Such terrour, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sinne in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh;
Onely thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one houre my selfe I can sustaine;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.

What a cutie!

2007-04-18T06:59:00.001-05:00

for your viewing pleasure and amusement

2007-04-15T14:41:00.000-05:00

Happy 16th Birthday Daniel!

2007-04-08T07:16:00.001-05:00

as if we hadn't had enough travel.

2007-03-29T20:46:00.001-05:00

We got back Sunday evening from Fairwood, hung around Monday, and left before 6 am on Tuesday to drive to Indy.

Yep. Crazy.

But Sarah was in need of a break so Mom, Megan, and I drove down, stayed there Wednesday, and drove back Wednesday night. We got back home this morning around 4 and fell into our beds happy, bone-weary, and slightly sick on iced tea, Starbucks double-shot espresso, sugar and Cheetos.

What fun!! We planned the trip as a surprise and we managed that (mostly). The chef picked us up and the front desk and brought us back to the kitchen of the training center just before dinner. She stopped talking to someone else mid-sentence and just looked at us, then said, "What are you doing here??" and burst into tears. :-)

She had Thursday evening and Wednesday off, so we ate dinner at the center, then took her to a hotel nearby. Wednesday we slept in, wandered around the center of Indy taking pictures and eating food. In the afternoon we hung out at the center. We visited Sarah's roommate, Megan helped out in the kitchen, and I tagged along with Kendra for a bit. We ate dinner out of take-out boxes in Sarah's room and left around 6:45 pm.

Wish we could have brought her home with us. Sigh.

For Lisa

2007-03-26T20:40:00.001-05:00

Home, James.

2007-03-26T19:29:00.000-05:00

I was going to write about our trip home before I left Fairwood, and in fact I did, but Blogger ate what I wrote and I hadn't the heart or time to repeat. Its just as well, because the trip is so much more 'interesting' in retrospect...

We are normally fast travelers, or at least Mom is. We don't hang around staring at the scenery at rest stops, we don't sit down in Wendy's to eat our meals, and we don't sidetrack. Sometimes we even drive through the night to avoid traffic. We like the shortest route between two points, the fewest stops humanly possible, and certainly no extra days for frivolous visits.

But in the planning of our south-bound journey Mom must have lost her head.

Here is the planned itinerary:

Thursday: Leave Fairwood at 1 pm in two vehicles. Drive to NY. 4 hours.
Friday: Visit Dorothy A. Leave at 10:30 am in three vehicles. Drive to PA. 5 1/2 hours.
Saturday: Hang around PA visiting relatives.
Sunday: Leave PA as early as possible in one vehicle. Drive to GA. 12 hours.

Thus a trip which we have completed in a personal record of 17 1/2 hours has been stretched to cover four days.

I love driving trips. Somehow I managed to survive the harrowing years when my 3 brothers were small and completely dominated the van with endless bickering, silliness, constant need for food and bathrooms, and silly questions, and STILL enjoy road travel.

But even I know that dragging out a homeward-bound trip to cover four days is asking for trouble. :-)

Thursday: Due to procrastination and unforeseen obstacles I stay up most of Wednesday night working on Beulah photos. With less than 2 hours of sleep under my belt I am supposed to drive a car to NY. for Nate and Amy. We leave over a half our late and I have Megan in the car with me to keep my awake. Less than half way there the car starts doing weird things. Pretty soon Megan wonders out loud why the speedometer says I am going 0 miles per hour. I wonder why the car is slowing down even with the pedal to the floor.

Of course the horn stops working as well, and we were in a dead spot so we can't call: we watch the stern of the family ship disappear over the horizon as we drift silently to the side of the road.

They miss us pretty quick and came back. Daddy takes over the car and I crawl happily into the back seat and fall asleep.

We get the car to the next town, and with the expenditure of much time and money it makes it to NY.

Friday: Mom is to drive the van, me the resurrected car, and Daddy the Holscher's seal coating truck. We are quite the caravan. Friday is almost completely without incident. Oh yes, the truck has no heating, and with holes in the floor its rather drafty. Daddy spends the day in his snowmobile suit, and Stephen wrapped in blankets.

Saturday: Uncle Arnold spent Thursday night in the hospital with heart problems, but he is at the door to meet us Friday night. The time is spent in a happy family atmosphere of mutual love and harmony... have any of you met my Uncle Arnold? If not, I would be willing to introduce anyone interested to one the most colorful memebers of a colorful family. He is big of heart and of body, loud, happy, and sees life in black and white.

This visit includes at least 3 yelling matches, one tussle between Arnold and my mother, and a fair amount of verbal abuse flying between Uncle Arnie and myself.
He suggests that he join us on our next trip to Israel to give the Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Arabs a piece of his mind. Somebody in the background is heard to mutter "International incident."

Sunday: Megan, Melissa, Uncle Arnie and I decide to go out 'to breakfast' late Saturday night, since 2:30 seems a bit early in the morning. We return from breakfast at 11:45, and leave for GA at 4 am, packed into one vehicle.

8:30 the sun is up, breakfast is eaten, and it slowly dawns on the general assembly that we are no longer in the snow-bound north. The temperature climbs with the sun, and all too soon a horrid truth is realized: the air-conditioning does not work.

The van has this cool little screen above the windshield which gives the time, the vehicles direction, and the outside temperature. Kind of like displaying the temperature in hell. After cheerfully racing through the 70's and 80's it seems to level out at 89. Then it creeps higher, dancing around the low 90's and briefly touching 95.

All life is reduced to the basics: " Daddy, could you open the window again?" and "Could I have something to drink?"

Around 2 pm, with the temp. at a happy 93, the van starts doing weird things in the parking lot of Walmart where we are stopped to buy food. Apparently these odd behaviors indicated a problem with the fuel pump. We spend 1 1/2 hours in some southern town identifying the problem, tracking down a fuel pump and buying said fuel pump. But we don't put it in. Daddy decids to see what happens. He figures that if it actually gives out we will just buzz over to the side of the road, nip under the vehicle, and pop in the new pump. He spends the rest of the trip visualizing himself doing so.

Daniel has a GPS. Instead of marking our house on it, he marked his tree-house. So every so often he yells out our progress to the half-dead contents of the van- "265 miles to my treehouse!" "65 miles to my treehouse!"

Then gloriously "19.5 to my treehouse!" I love Daniel's tree-house, and I have seldom been so happy to be in such close proximity to it.

I could kiss it when we finally pull into the driveway, all warm, soggy, and glowing with honest sweat.

Home, sweet Home.

hi

2007-03-13T21:55:00.001-05:00

The nice thing about being gone from my blog for a really long time is that when I get back, it will appear on Aaron's clever blog list, and I don't have to worry about calling all my friends to let them know that I'm still alive.

I am.

I just got out of the habit.

It will probably take me a bit to get back in, especially since I'm at Fairwood and the Feast starts tomorrow night.

If you want to know what I've been up to, look at the picture of the front hall on Brandon's blog, or the pictures on Andrea's blog.

TTFN

2007-02-04T20:09:00.001-05:00

"If Saturday is a foretaste of the Millenium, is Sunday the aftertaste?"

good reasons

2007-01-04T17:45:00.001-05:00

Christmas+ New Year+ Computer crashed = no new posts

Peace

2006-12-09T19:41:00.001-05:00

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come, Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home,

When Jesus is my portion?

My constant friend is He:

His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me...

Superman does a drug bust, but Richard wins the day

2006-12-05T22:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, question for all you movie/comic/Superman experts (that means anybody who knows more than me, which is everybody); I have a question for you.

Tonight I watched Superman Returns. I never watched Superman Came the First Time (if there was one), and I never read the comics but Superman is just a part of everybody's childhood, so I imbibed some his histoy by osmosis.

But my question is... at the end of the movie did Lois go home with Richard, or did Richard drive off into the sunset all by himself while Lois went home with the kid to hang around waiting for Superman to "be around" every once in three blue moons?

WHAT IS THIS??!!!??

Okay, okay, I know this is Lois Lane, and he's Superman, but why drag a perfectly innocent bystander into the situation, make him a really nice guy (of super-human qualities actually), who actually saves Superman's hide, is a really good father, and loves her so much, and she ditches him to go for some muscle-bound dude in a cape who is never around? Besides that he has a sickening smirk and a stupid curl in the middle of his forehead.

Actually this really is a question, not just a rant. I really wasn't sure at the end of the movie which guy she stayed with. Can somebody tell me?

On to the drug bust:

So, my dad does interior painting for a living. I also make a living painting (myself, the floor, and other people included). Current job is in a low-income section of town. We were painting the dark panelled walls of a tiny house owned by a really sweet black lady of 75 or 80. She keeps a loaded pistol in her bedroom. I saw it- cute little thing.

So one day I was at home writing instead of painting. I called Daddy to ask him a question and he calmly starts telling me the neighborhood news.

He was minding his own business painting away, when he happened to glance out the window. And nearly dropped his brush, I'm sure. Across the street a full SWAT team was surrounding an ugly pink house. He counted 6 or seven vehicles and lots of big guys in full gear with large guns all around the house. Some suspect was hand-cuffed to a chair in the yard.

Funny thing is, he never heard them coming (which is the point, I guess). He just looked out the window and there they were.

And guess what folks, that's about it to the story. The SWAT team searched the house, left with on suspect- not the one hand-cuffed to the chair- and drove off into the sunset. End of excitement.

Just think if somebody had started shooting? Nice tiny house across the road made out of paper and cardboard? And Daddy stand at the window calmly telling me all this? RUN FOR COVER!!!!!!

I hate templates! but drug busts can be entertaining

2006-12-01T22:53:00.000-05:00

Argggh!!! Trying to find a template I like (and Daniel doesn't reject out of hand) is SO HARD. Good thing its the Sabbath and I don't have to worry about it. I can just go to bed.

...

But I'd rather post something since I haven't in absolutely forever.

I have a couple different jobs, both money-making and otherwise. I paint house interiors with my Dad, I write things for a Biblical Museum just starting up in the area, and I teach my brothers history.

The writing is basically paid education- I just don't get to pick my major. Right I am researching and composing overviews of the various archaeological periods. Sound dry and boring? Well it is!!!! :-) Words like Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Palaeolithic hardly penetrate to my retina, let alone travel to my brain, they are so boring.

But now I get to know all about them and I'm really happy about it. Interesting things really did happen way back then.

For example, there is this really cool cave in the Judean desert, about 12 km from Ein Gedi. It is part of a series of caves along a wadi. Recently it was explored and found to have been inhabited like 3,500 years before Christ. It wasn't somebody's permanent home but more likely the temporary hole-up for shepherds. Skeletons found inside weren't even native- they were from people all the way up in Mesopotamia (think Tigris and Euphrates, the Garden of Eden, and what in the world did find so attractive in the Judean Desert?).

Anyway, weirdos from Eden aside, they explored further in the cave and discovered a reed mat (nice dry air to keep it preserved) stuffed in a crack at the back of the cave. Inside were over 400 things made out of copper or bronze! There were things that looked like crowns and things that looked like mace heads and things that looked like poles that you would hang flags on.

But here is the cool thing- nobody really knows what they are! I think "they" just put their scholarly heads together and mutter things about religious rites, and symbolism, and blah, blah, blah.

Probably if they don't know what it is, they just say it must have been part of some ancient agricultural religious ceremony, or that the figurine in question must really be a representation of the goddess of war. Maybe it was just some kid making a clay doll of what their mom looked like when she yelled at them. :-)

Off topic. Back to dusty reed mat in stinky Judean cave.

Who wraps 400 bronze objects up in their bathroom rug and stuffs them in the back of a cave and leaves them there for 5,000 years? Just think- that cave hasn't been entered by any human for thousands of years!

Imagine a security camera pointed at that cave for all those years and we get to watch the videos fast-fowarded.....

First we see bats fly in and out. The wadi fills and empties, the grass is green for a split second and the rest of the time dead. Some Mesopotamian dude comes by with his nasty goats. He wanders in and out for 10 years. Then just bats for a few decades.... then wait! Pause the video... what is that?

Some dude running down the wadi? His sandals are loose and he is staggering with heat exhaustion (NEVER run about the Judean Wilderness without your water bottle!). The pack on his back clanks and rattles and must really weigh a ton. He keeps glancing behind him with a fearful eye. Suddenly he spots the caves! He climbs into the first one, hastily removes his pack, pulls out a reed mat wrapped around something (or 400 somethings), stuffs it into a crack, and runs back out. A few seconds later five evil-looking characters with iron weapons (hey, 3,500 is the beginning of the Iron Age) jog by the cave entrance.

But we don't see what happens to him because our video is aimed at the cave. Maybe they caught and killed him and the lions ate him.

Video is boring for the next 5,000 years because all we see are generations of smelly bats flying in and out with bugs.

Then the funny white guys with pith helmets show up... but we already knew that.

I mean, why would YOU hide 400 bronze objects in a cave? Especially if you didn't know what they were.

Okay, okay, I'm sure he did know. And my story is influenced by the fact that 12 km down the wadi is Ein Gedi, the site of a temple from that same period. It was destroyed and never used again. Maybe the guy was a priest running away with religious objects to protect them from the barbarians? Or maybe he was stealing them!!! and left them in a cave and lost the memo the identified the correct wadi and cave.
Maybe, umm, the Mesopotamians carried them around as bartering items and left them by accident?

Maybe we don't know what they are because it was just somebody practicing their molding techniques!

Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about?

Okay, as you can see, I am having fun.

And no, there is nothing about drug busts in this post. That was my other job and I'll tell you tomorrow, DV.

Happy Birthday!

2006-11-14T07:42:00.001-05:00

Hey Guys, today is Lisa's 29th Birthday.
She is spending the day tromping around the safe parts of the Old City by herself. Could you all take a moment to comment on her blog and wish her a happy birthday?
Thanks!

HP M-16s

2006-11-13T22:21:00.001-05:00

My parents' laptop recently gave up the ghost for the third time. It has outlived two warranties, a new motherboard, and other issues. The thing has been more problem than it is worth.

Multiple phone conversations with HP seem to have worn Daddy's patience down to a fine point- evidenced by the following phone conversation overheard this evening.

Bob Adams vs. HP automated voice activated customer service recording.

"Pavilion ZD7000."
"Laptop."
"No, its a laptop."
(at this point the recording is insisting that he actually has a printer)
"LAPTOP!"
"You are INSANE!"
(the recording says, I didn't understand you, what did you say?)
"M-16."
"I HAVE ONE AIMED AT YOUR HEAD! LAPTOP! LAPTOP! LAPTOP! LAPTOP! LAPTOP!
(Mom in the background- "Bob, stop it!)
"LAPTOP! LAPTOP! LAPTOP!"

CLICK.
(he hangs up)

(to the rest of us in the room)
"I think we got off on the wrong foot."

(Daniel breaks in with this happy thought)
"Daddy, sometimes they record these calls for security reasons."

Dinner

2006-11-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

Dinner conversation ranged far and wide tonight. We were calmly explaining to David that Daddy was not related to Mommy, and that yes, we were related to our cousins, but not people like the Murrays. I think he was struggling with the difference between blood relationship and marital relationships.

Suddenly in the middle of the discussion he said, "Do you know how you could stop an avalanche?" Always willing to leap from one conversational saddle to another we followed him. After successfully stopping avalanches and establishing various preventive measures, we touched lightly on the topic of blowtorches and the relative inflammatory nature of baking powder (or was it soda?), and swiftly passed to bigger and better things.

Would a 55 gallon drum of gasoline explode when lit, or merely burn forever?

Asked Daddy, "Well, is it closed or open?"
"Open," David answered promptly.
"It would light with a big woosh, then burn for a very long time."

So Daddy explained what would happen if you sprayed it with water, what would happen if it was closed and half full of oxygen and again we leaped a step higher.

Who lights oil wells on fire anyway? So we learned how to put out a burning oil well (place explosives all the way around and detinate them simultaneously to remove oxygen from the area). We were all very impressed until Stephen pointed out that it wouldn't work in the ocean.

"Well, there are underwater explosives."
"Nothing is going to be burning under there anyway!"
"Yeah, just oil rigs."
"And if they are on fire you can just sink them."

Moving right along we discussed the guy who was in the middle of a huge underground gas explosion and survived because he was in the center, kind of like the eye of a storm.

And the lady who got hit by lightning multiple times.

And the lady who was minding her own business sitting on her couch and got hit by a meteorite. For some reason we found this highly amusing.

And how Daddy saw a meteorite flaming across the sky while he was raking leaves with his mother and brother.

And that is the absolute truth.

From the Backseat

2006-10-31T16:38:00.000-05:00

David to Daniel in the backseat of my car:

"Often when I am in the car I imagine I am a gyroscope."

Me too, kid.

fun with mud

2006-10-26T09:37:00.000-05:00

Years ago, when our family first moved down here, I dug up a section of the back yard, mucked about in it, added fertilizer and eventually planted an herb garden. Most of the plants died, but two survived. Those two grew and flourished and took over the whole garden- a sage bush and a rosemary bush. More recently the rosemary bush has been pushing the sagebush over.

A couple Sundays ago I decided to dig up the sage and move it farther away.

So David and I went out dressed in old clothes, tied up the bushes, soaked the whole area with the hose, and started digging.

Pretty soon we seemed to be getting a bit too friendly with the mud...

Then Daniel wandered by all shiny clean and innocent. So we lobbed a few lumps of mud at him. He defended himself with this:

Things continued to degenerate:

but good clean fun was had by all involved (except maybe the photographer, who kept on yelling something about not getting mud on her Sunday outfit).

Conversation over dinner cleanup

2006-10-17T18:30:00.000-05:00

Katie is washing dishes while Daniel takes care of the food.
Katie turns around to discover Daniel mashing down the leftover rice to make more room in the container.

K. Daniel! Don't do that! That makes it nasty!
D. Well you can compress files.
K. It doesn't improve the quality.
D. If you compress a .tif file to a .jpg file it only changes the quality a little bit.
K. Rice is not the same as computer files. Besides, space over quality? We have plenty of space for it!
D. Well it cost more money to get more memory.
K. (putting the rice in the fridge) It's a temporary file, Daniel. We can alway erase it later if we need the space for something else.

2006-10-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

I have been messing about in the Valley of the Kings, learning how to mummify someone, exploring the interior of the Great Pyramid, and otherwise soaking up Egpyt. This is what I have to say: heathen though they most certainly were, they had a gift for beauty in design and detail. I hope God had some of them design part of my mansion in heaven.

This is one of the most delightful things I have found:

compilation of various inscriptions describing the Queen Nefertiti (her husband was responsible for changing the national religion from polytheism to monothesism- a step in the right direction, I suppose. I think she lived roughly the time of the Judges);

Heiress, Great of Favour, Possessed of Charm, Exuding Happiness, Mistress of Sweetness, beloved one, soothing the king's heart in his house, soft-spoken in all, Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, Great King's Wife, whom he loves, Lady of the Two Lands, Nefertiti.

Suddenly she seemed like a real person.

reality

2006-10-12T20:46:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed that I was at Fairwood. Mindy was there too. She was standing by the steps by the swingset. She saw me at the same time I saw her- we ran towards each other and hugged enthusiastically. Matt was behind her, smiling at her.

In the dream I felt no sense of incongruity. I had no uncomfortable feelings or remembrance of death. Mindy was there, as she should be, and I was glad to see her. That was all.

Some day, when we have been in heaven for a few minutes, I think the sense of surprise will wear off a bit. Things will be normal in a heavenly sense. I mean that it will not seem odd at all to find Mindy alive, any more than it was odd to have her around during Bible School.

She still belongs in the land of the living, just not our part of it. Some day we will see her anytime we want. Gloriously, the novelty of it will wear away to be replaced with the familiar comfort of shared memory, close and frequent contact, laughter and labour.

Guess what my friends! Mindy is alive.

the end

2006-09-21T21:12:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is my last day of work at Ye Ole Foode Place where I have been working for nearly a year. I have rushed up to it so fast that I am hardly excited, though definitely not sad at the prospect.

For those of you who didn't know, I am removing my person (if not all my belongings) to the South. I have no idea how long I will be down there, nor when I will return, if ever. :-) Just Kidding. And anyway, I'm not changing things like license plates or bank accounts so I guess I have to come back sometime.

As usual:
"Thou'rt come to lead me into paths I do not know;"

So:
"like dear Rebekah, with Thee I will go."

fenway

2006-09-18T22:19:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the impetus of other people and Rachel's willingness to take over for me at the old people's home I took my first trip to Fenway a few weeks ago.

We were too late to see opening ceremonies (if they have any) or the first pitch, we had standing room tickets over the White Sox dugout, it was hot and I had dressed for cold, damp weather, I missed the one Red Sox score of the game because I was in the bathroom, I missed almost every other significant play because I was distracted, when we finally did get seats, the guy a few seats down had a repetitive and offensive vocabulary, we lost 8-1, and yet.... I had a wonderful time!

I saw somebody with a רד סוקס t-shirt! Very cool.

Did you know that Fenway was so small? I think the best moment was when we first walked through the door and up into the stands. The crowds were so loud but so small- everything was close to me and there they were- right there! I mean that guy a few feet away was Ortiz! Doesn't get much better.

Did you know that a broken bat can spin off large chunks all the way past first base? How do the infielders manage stay focused?

And the Green Monster was such an odd structure. It made it really hard to tell if a ball was going to be a home run or an out.

I really know nothing about baseball game traditions- I mean, I know about the seventh inning stretch, but what was that song everybody started singing at some other point in the game? Never heard it before. And why do so many guys feel it necessary to propose to their girlfriends on the billboard? Wait... how come the White Sox lined up to high five each other, but they didn't do it with the Red Sox?

The guys selling peanuts and hot dogs were so loud! I wonder if they have to do a voice tryout before they are hired? They were also pretty clever about getting food to people down the line. Some guy ordered a hot dog and the vedor threw it to him- someone caught the outer wrap, the next person got the bun, and the third person got the hot dog. Okay, maybe it was just two people- one with the wrap and one with the hot dog, but it sounded better with three.

I think I'm glad we lost the game. If it had been a particularly exciting one, I still would have been to completely distracted by the people, the place, the noises, the wave and the people batting beach balls around to have gotten much out of it.

fascinating.

Anybody want to go with me again?

2006-09-18T20:37:00.000-05:00

I went to Fenway.

Going Back III- More Firsts

2006-09-18T19:47:00.000-05:00

Okay, so reallllllly quick because this was so far back I have almost lost interest:

We went to Six Flags!!! 14 of us all together! What fun we had. Well, fun in a manner of speaking. It was my first encounter with roller coasters and not really a case of love at first sight.

I went on some wooden thing called the Thunderbolt. It wasn't very big but it was pretty much the scariest thing I have done in a LONG TIME. It jerked around and shook and lifted off the tracks and seemed on the verge of sailing into the wild blue yonder around every corner. I nearly cried when I got off. Really.

But being a masochist I tried another. I also decided I was either going to follow everybody else around all day watching them have fun, or I was going to keep on trying. Maybe continued exposure would make me inured to the terror?

I tried Flashback next. It had the advantage of being all metal and not prone to scary creakings and groanings and gnashing of teeth. I hated that one too. In fact, I don't think I had my eyes open for more than a split second.

After that we tried a water ride or two, relaxed, ate food, etc. The fun thing was that we actually managed to stay together for most of the time. 14 can be an unwieldy number but everybody was relaxed and had similar interests.

Third time is the charm, right? So I decided to try the second biggest ride in the park- Batman. I think I might adopt him as my new favorite superhero or something. I loved it! Sitting in the seat before the ride started I came very close to climbing out the other side. But I procrastinated and then it was tooooo late. :-)
I rode Batman twice. The first time I had my eyes closed most of the time- in the pictures they took I looked pretty funny- all scrunched up with my eyes screwed shut and a death grip on the bars. The second time I had my eyes open most of the time and smiled at the camera!

I think I might actually like rollercosters.

But not Superman. Kimberly and I stood on the deck, waving soggy hankerchiefs at our departing troops as they ascended the slope of Superman. We even prayed. And one sight of Davy stepping onto dry land shaking like he'd drunk three cases of Red Bull was enough to convince me that shunning Superman was the best decision of my life.

So that was all good. Then I went to Georgia with Andrea the next day. We bounced from traffic jam to traffic jam all down the east coast, eating yummy food, reading out loud, and taking boring and random footage of the journey on her sister's video camera.

2nd first.... wait, this deserves a new blog with a title all its own.

Going Back II- Sailing

2006-08-30T19:30:00.000-05:00

I went sailing for the first time in my life!!! If I had a 30 by 30 list (which I don't) sailing would have been near the top.

My only experience with wind-powered boat travel was on the Lake several years ago. Mr. E.S.'s hair-brained shceme was to sail across the Lake using three canoes a, tarp, several stout poles, and a bike. He raised enough interest and we set off- Anna, Bria, Aaron, Ethan, Kim & George, Mr. E.S., myself, and possibly someone else I'm forgetting.

We lashed the three canoes together with the stout poles, put the bike in the middle canoe so that Ethan could ride back around the lake to get the van (our steering mechanism was too primative to think about tacking back), and arranged ourselves according to weight and skills. We must have paddled out a little way before raising our sail. For sail read Anna and I and the tarp. Yep, I was the mast. We stood up in each in the bow of the outside canoes and raised the tarp. It flapped about, caught the wind and filled to a beautiful taut roundeness and pulled us forward. We braced against it and our trimarinne shot forward, skimming across the lake at incredible speeds (cough, cough). I was enchanted!

At the other side we lowered the tarp and leaped over the side to enjoy a spot of swimming while Ethan biked back for the van and trailer.

Okay, so I went over to Bria's house a couple weekends ago for our first annual Shakespeare weekend, another story all to itself. But that got interruped when her father told us he was planning on going out the next day on his thirty-foot sailboat. Would we like to go? Would we ever! We dumped Shakespeare like a ton of bricks.

The sun was out, the wind was perfect, the boat was lovely. The sky was a gorgeous blue with little fluffy clouds. The sun was deliciously hot and the breeze refreshing. Since have I no practical knowledge of sailing (aside from knowing how to be a mast) and there were several other much more competent individuals aboard, my only responsiblity for the next several hours was just to keep from falling off the boat. :-)

I did actually steer for a few minutes while we were still under motor power coming out of the harbor. It was an interesting experience- nothing like steering a car because the whole boat is in front instead of behind. It had a delayed response to any turn of the helm, and was affected by outside forces in ways a car is not. Weird.

After my two minutes of activity at the helm I moved on to several hours of inactivity. We sat about the deck talking or being quiet as we felt lead, dangling our feet over the edge to feel the cool spray, learning to avoid the beam, eating snickers and granola bars, avoiding Cheech's crumbs, watching the waves, the coast, the clouds, the sails, dozing or just sitting. I wasn't scared at all, and I only felt slightly nauseous when I went below.

My cell phone was out of hearing, it was the Sabbath, and all obligations and worries were beyond my control. I wish the day could have gone on for a week at least.

I know that sailing can be pretty miserable in adverse weather or winds, but 100% of my sailing experience has been 100% positive. Pretty good, eh? I suppose I should stop while I'm ahead. I suppose the odds of ever having such a wonderful time again get worse with every sailing trip I take. :-)

Anyway, here are my words for sailing: peace, joy, beauty, intensity, light, grace, heat, cool, speed, movement, silence, stillness, timelessness, decadence, bliss, perfection, solitude, wonder, companionship.

Well-rounded

2006-08-30T19:25:00.000-05:00

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

-Lazarus Long

Food for thought and one more picture for the road

2006-08-22T21:17:00.000-05:00

This quote may seem random in the extreme, but it isn't- really! I have recently been rooting about in the topic of classical education. I've aquired a few new books and some new ideas. Rachel and I have even embarked on a project for the improvement of our minds with the aid of a book titled "The Well-Educated Mind" (blessing on you, Bria!). So really this quote is one of the long-handled spoons stirring up the pot of my brain (okay, its late at night). More to come on the subject later (maybe).

"For we let our young men and women go unarmed in a day when armor was never so neccessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. ... We have lost the tools of learing, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it."
-Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning"

And one more picture because I love it!

Going Back I

2006-08-21T17:46:00.000-05:00

Its been quite some time. Yep. So I'm going to go back a few weeks and work my way up through the blog-worthy events of my life.

A few weeks ago I was on my way home from taking care of the neighbor's horses. It was around seven o'clock and one of those misty mornings when the rising sun seems all the brighter or vivid for having to go through the moisture. The back road I was on suddenly became wonderful. I wished I had a camera. I don't own a camera. Sigh. I kept on driving. But wait! Rachel was in the car with me the other day, and I think she left her camera on the back seat! Sure enough, it was there, and isn't God good? I turned my car around to find the particularly lovely bit of road I had passed, parked, and leaped out. I stood in the middle of the road snapping pictures with glee. Here are some of the results:

Moving

2006-08-19T19:39:00.000-05:00

Photoguy is moving Here

Yes I got it! (a bit blurry though)

2006-08-15T17:49:00.000-05:00

A Buck and a Doe

Moon

2006-08-10T15:53:00.000-05:00

Both of these pictures where taken around the same time, the one on top was taken with a slower shutter speed [I don't remember exactly what speed] but the one on the bottom was taken whith a faster shutter speed [1/320] Click on them to see them full screen.

More pix [Sorry people with dial up]

2006-08-06T20:29:00.000-05:00

In the woods At the Holschers
Just flowers [i have no idea what kind]
Hawk in our backyard
Owl, Riverview Florida [the Demmes river house]
On the square in Mcdonough
It was 10:30 At night!

Here It Is!

2006-08-01T18:00:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are interested in the technical Stuff of my new camera, Click Here

News Flash!

2006-07-31T21:34:00.000-05:00

Okay everybody, I have added a new team member to my blog- my brother Daniel!

He just got a new camera (wicked cool digital thing with a big sceen and great technical features beyond my ken), and will be using my blog to show what it can do!

This is also possible because my family finally invested in DSL. They have been thinking about getting DSL for some time, but I think Lisa's new job pushed them over the edge. I am so thankful!

Cool Shots

2006-07-31T19:52:00.000-05:00

Rabbit in the park

Pink Flower

Train In the park across the road

Maybe we should get another one of these instead of the gray vans!

2006-07-31T17:33:00.000-05:00

Several months ago I transported the scanner up to Fairview and amused myself by sorting through Mrs. P's vast store of photo albums looking for treasures. I probably have old photos of most of you who read this blog at some stage in your lives. So, feel free to ask me to send them to you, or better yet, post them on my blog sight unseen! :-)

Jewels

2006-07-29T16:04:00.000-05:00

Lindsay took me out to dinner Sunday evening for my birthday. She also bought me these....

Pretty impressive ain't they? I wore them to the Texas Longhorn Steakhouse. They probably thought I was visitng royalty.

The jewel came out of one of the earrings and the clasp of the other one broke. Good thing I had them insured.

Bliss

2006-07-22T18:40:00.000-05:00

One rainy Sabbath afternoon by myself in my own little apartment.

And thanks friends for a lovely birthday celebration! Couldn't have had a nicer bunch of friends to spend it with. (I am wearing the cozy socks you gave me, Andrea)

Laughing in the Dentist's Chair

2006-07-13T21:04:00.000-05:00

Today I went straight from work to a dentist appointment. I hate dentists. I loathe them with a bitter and deep-seated loathing surpassed only by my loathing of burnt rice at the bottom of cooking pots.

But that isn't really what I wanted to write about. I'm going to focus on the one gem of humor in the middle of my otherwise rather torturous imprisonment in the dentist's chair.

So I was sitting in the Dentist's 'Lazy Boy' (sadistic sense of humor she has) with the worthy medico fishing about in my mouth. Suddenly she said "Oh my!" and my heart sank.

"Have you been sick recently?" This question didn't do much to relieve my fears.

"Ummm, no, I haven't."

"Because your tonsil is very large!"

"Oh." What does that mean? And wait, don't I have two of them? What about the other one?

She called a friend over. Suddenly I had not one but two curious dentists peering down my throat and exclaiming over the size of my tonsils.

"Wow! I've never seen one as big as that."

"It's really huge!"

Then they haggled over who I should have look at it to make sure it wasn't wildly infected or something. Yes, but what if I just have naturally big tonsils?

Anyway, the upshot to my impromtu throat viewing is that I have to go back in two weeks when the resident oral surgeon is in residence (possibly indicated by a large flag hanging outside the building and bearing the image of two pairs of pliers rampant). He will also peer down my throat to view the phenomenon and pronounce me either dead before dinner or just the possessor of really big tonsils.

But don't come asking to see them.

Boston

2006-06-27T22:12:00.000-05:00

For those of you interested:
I made it to Boston from RI without getting lost at all.
I also made it back from Boston to RI with only one side trip into the center of Boston for a few minutes.

You may all think of me as Katie The Girl Who Always Gets Lost. Granted I don't think I have ever made it from NH to RI without some aberration. But instead why don't you think of it as creative driving? I mean, the whole point of a trip is to get from point A to point B. I have never failed at that yet. I may add vehicular flourishes in the middle but those are the creative part! When else am I going to be able to see odd sideroads in Mass. or downtown Boston in the middle of the night?

oh yes, I also picked up Lisa.
(haven't seen her in a quite some time)

Compliments and accomplishments of dubious worth

2006-06-20T17:44:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at work we ran into a lull in the general rush of lunchtime. Those of us making sandwiches were standing around, doing odds and ends of cleaning and amusing ourselves with rather aimless chatter. Somehow we suddenly found ourselves trying to see if we could touch our toes without bending our knees. I, being the oldest by far, should have been the least limber. Actually I was the only one able to touch my toes. I can even touch the floor. The 19-year-old and the two 18-year-olds could hardly get past their shins. How young and agile I feel! What a pointless exercise! How odd we must have looked from any customer's point of view. :-)

Today I was informed in heartfelt tones by my friend Kristen that I was the most Catholic-minded Christian she had ever met! I took it as the compliment she meant it for, but it does sound odd. I can just hear Andrea laughing...

Obligatory post

2006-06-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

My friends tell my I most post. They say I have not posted in a long time. This would be an obvious statement. I have not posted in a long time.

Let us explore the reasons for this.

Possible reasons for Katie's lack of posts:

1. I have nothing to say.
(highly unlikely. I always have something to say. Just ask my sisters)

2. I have more important things to do.
(well, I can think of few things more important than writing on my blog. Except right now. My friends are thinking about Doing Something. I have very low expectations for what Doing Something means. Some people really mean something when they say this. Some people say let's Do Something and then go Climb Mt. Everest. Some people say let's Do Something and then organize a peacekeeping task force and send it to Rwanda. In the case of my dear friends I am pretty sure that when they say let's Do Something they mean let's go watch Nanny McPhee.

3. Maybe I am lazy.
(Naaaaa...)

4. Maybe I am waiting to write a masterpiece of a post and until I do I refuse to write anything.
(Entirely possible. I am a frustrated perfectionist after all.)

5. Maybe I am involved in some vast covert operation under the direction of Donald Rumsfeld. I may be spending my weekends flying to and from foreign destinations gathering vastly important information using only a flashlight, a Buck knife, and my keen sense of smell.
(Well, it SOUNDS good.)

Okay, for whatever reason, I don't write very often. But I am not going to end this post by promising to improve this blog by either quality or quantity.

The end.

Size is Relative

2006-05-25T05:33:00.000-05:00

Okay, so this morning on the way back from taking care of the horses my car was attacked by a huge, scary, muscle-bound red squirrel. I'm sure it works out at the gym every day without fail.

Actually it was just a normal red squirrel, not even as big as one of those nasty grey ones. It was sitting in the middle of the Fairwood driveway coaching a baby squirrel across the road. Or maybe they were just sunbathing. Anyway, I stopped when they didn't leap out of the way.

The baby was about half the size of its mother (I assume it was its mother), with a rather pitiful bottlebrush tail. It seem to have no concept of either danger, or of obedience. The mother got pretty excited about my presence and seemed to be alternately urging her progeny on and trying to forcibly remove it. Then she abandoned the baby and ran straight at the car. She disappeared under it. I wonder if she was leaping up and trying to bite the bumper. She did that a couple times, in between encouraging her rather idiotic child on or standing with her paws around it glaring at me fiercely. Finally she picked him up by the back leg and walked off with him wrapped around her head.

Homesick

2006-05-09T18:45:00.000-05:00

I bought Gefilte fish and horseradish sauce at the grocery store today. Now to see if it tastes as good as the stuff I had at Herb and Rachel's Passover table over a year ago.

I miss Israel so much.

The Importance of Being Kate

2006-04-27T22:48:00.000-05:00

Embarrassing situation at work for your reading pleasure:

So the other day a lady named Meg came in to work. I knew she was someone important, but wasn't sure of her job description. She only shows up every few weeks and stays for a whole day. Turns out she is the training overseer for the area. She comes to observe us all and fine tune our procedures so we are all doing things right according to the book.

I was at a register in the bakery when she came up to me and started a conversation. It went something like this.

"Hi Kate. I'm doing position reports. I've been working on yours with Tim (GM)." She shows me the paper. "We'll look over yours together, and then I show you how I do them. I want you to understand them because I'll be having you do them in the future." (surprised silence from Kate).

Meg responds to my expression, "You are looking for promotion, aren't you?"

I am actually not sure what I said to Meg at this point. Probably something clever like, "Maybe," in a dubious tone of voice.

"We want you to be the training coordinator for the store. You won't necessarily train everybody, but you will be responsible for the paperwork and making sure that people actually get trained."

Kate's mind is racing, "Me? Umm, I haven't had much training myself! Sounds like fun, though. I'll kind of do the job that Lindsay does! I enjoy training people. But how come this random chick is telling me about this and not Tim (GM) or Brenda (shift manager)? Oh well, I'll reserve judgment until I see how the wind blows."

So throughout the day I thought about it and discussed it with my Dad during my break. After work I sat down with Meg to ask questions. We talked over the condition of the store's training, the various needs, and the upcoming training time which she wanted me to observe so that I could do future sessions. Cool. But Tim never said anything to me about it, which was still weird.

Next morning at 8 am I walked into the office. Tim turned to me and said, "So, yesterday Meg thought you were Kate F- (the new manager with MY name)."

Apparently Meg had called him the night before to report about her nice talk with Kate. She went on about it and then mentioned that I had been a bit unsure of extended hours because I was considering returning to Israel. At that point light dawned on Tim's head. He told Meg she had talked to the Wrong Kate.

Shift scene back to one awkward moment in the Wrong Kate's life. She is standing on one foot in the doorway of the office, feeling silly and rather younger than 26.

Sigh. I suppose I should have known. After all, I am a mere part-time cashier who has only worked at the store for 4 months. What was I thinking?

"Well," I replied, "that was a happy mistake! I think I really could be your man for the job. I love working with people, I love to teach new things, and I have had previous experience teaching a variety of age groups! I may be new, but I learn fast, I am detail-oriented and motivated. Please consider me, in the future, if not immediately."

Wow! Sounded pretty professional, didn't it? Alas, that is what Daddy would have said if he were in my shoes. But when it comes to salesmanship I am not my father's daughter.

This is really what happened: I did some hasty self-deprecating verbal backtracking, laughed it off, beat a hasty and sheepish retreat to my corner of the bakery, and avoided Tim for the rest of the day. Periodically I would start thinking about it and get embarrassed all over again. It was a great day.

God is GOOD!

2006-04-18T16:07:00.001-05:00

Warning- this post is all about shopping. If you find this boring you might want to just come back another time.

So yeah, Andrea and I went shopping yesterday. She wrote about it on her blog. You might want to go there first, because I'm not going to repeat what she said.

I have never enjoyed shopping so much, or had it be so productive! The best was of course J.Jill. I have always enjoyed looking at J.Jill catalogues and imagining how nice it would be to buy things from them. I was expecting to do the same thing in the store- just a chance to windowshop. But we bought so much stuff in there! We were in the store forever, looking at the racks, carrying loads of things to the dressing room, and trying them all on. The bestest for me was a cool brown skirt (retail value $99.99) which was marked down repeatedly until it reached somewhere under $20. It fit! It looked good! I loved it! I took it to the checkout and it was another 25% off! Yep, I paid under $12 for it.

We got out of J.Jill with bags of stuff and I said to Andrea, "Now I just need to sit down somewhere and cry." Cry out of sheer happiness of course!

But we kept going! More good stuff at the next store. In fact, I think I got almost everything on the list of needs I had started out with. And you should see the funky shoes I bought for $10!

Now I can actually understand all those girls who spend hours in the mall. :-)

Seven Stanzas at Easter

2006-04-17T07:44:00.000-05:00

I wanted to post a poem yesterday but copyright laws would have been infringed. It is such a good one! So, for any who have a moment, Google this: "Seven Stanzas at Easter" by John Updike. Come back and comment here if you actually read it, and tell me what you think.

Repeat

2006-04-06T20:32:00.000-05:00

I am almost positve (though I am too lazy to doublecheck) that I posted this sonnet once before. But, as it is still my favorite sonnet to date, and as I was freshly inspired by Bria to post literary gems, I am posting it again.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
-John Donne
Holy Sonnets, XIV

Stuff

2006-03-28T18:13:00.000-05:00

So Isaac, I found it amusing that you started using random names when you went to Panera for lunch! Yesterday I thought of a a couple that would be fun to try out:

Elvis- somebody actually gave me that name, and it was all I could do not to burst out laughing, or ask him if he was joking.

St. John- People really used to name their sons this, and pronounced it Singin kind of run together. It would be fun to see how people spelled it. :-)

Or how about Tintin! or Hezekiah! Endless possibilities.

Today contained several small pleasures, the sort of little incidents that make you thankful to be alive, and thankful to know Who to thank!

First of all, the weather was stunning! I can practically feel the bones of New England creaking with pleasure as they bask in the sun.

I drove with my shoes off and my windows down. Too bad my favorite tape is stuck in my tape deck. Otherwise I would have blasted loud classical music.

Today I got my paycheck for barn work, with and extra $10 and a note saying I was to celebrate spring. Don't mind if I do! So on my break I called Grandma and Sarah and set up an date to go to one of my favorite places- The House By the Side of the Road. Its a greenhouse for all those not in the know. It has everything from giant ferns and cacti to orchids and herbs. I LOVE it! It even has fish ponds down the center of one of the greenhouses with huge hideous goldfish swimming around lethargically in them.

I wandered about looking at all the beautiful plants and thinking about how dead they would be if I decided to bring them home. How I wish I had a green thumb.

I wanted to pick out something fairly easy to care for. I almost bought a huge fern in a hanging basket. But then I thought it would completely overwhelm my room so I didn't. Instead I came home with something that has thorns, needs fertilizer, pruning and full sun all day (which I don't have). Silly me! But it reminded my of Israel and I loved it and wanted it and that was that. It will probably be dead before dinner. Lets see if I can find out how to spell the name....

well, here is a picture: http://www.utexas.edu/rfsa/Assets/images/Copper%20Canyon/More%20Bougainvillea.jpg

Lovely, ain't it? Mine doesn't look a thing like it. Mine is small, skinny and scraggly: a close relative of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.

Okay, I have gone on about plants long enough. Next nice thing about today:

Regulars
I love the regulars at Panera! Thankfully we have no regular whiners. I guess that makes sense; if they whine they don't come back.
So ummm, where was I?

Regulars:

1. The middle-aged guy with very short hair who strides in with a purposeful air. Without a smile or a 'Good day' he says, "One Ginger Peach Tea, double cup, two bags, to go." After I get the tea and take his money he says, "Thanks kid," and walks out. Despite this brusque behavior I never get a sense of impatience or unkindness. I like him. I like being called kid. (I hope Clyde doesn't read this blog and start calling me kid.)

2. The classy lady who likes my cappiccinos. I find that I love making espresso drinks! In fact, I get much more pleasure out of making them than I do out of drinking them. Anyway, this lady is blonde, dresses to the nines with a lovely camel-colored coat, and has a delicious English accent. She also asks for skim milk in her drink, which makes a much better head of foam than 2% milk. Now you know.

3. Roger, the retired school teacher who knows my name, and wanders about the store like he owns it. He is part of the retired couples crowd which comes in most mornings and stays half the day. They all get their own pet things from the bakery every single day, pull tables together and sit around shooting the breeze.

Roger asked me today what I thought about the Israeli election results. We talked about it for less than two minutes, a good amount of time for political discussions, and went back to our respective meals (mine was a yummy bagel with raspberry cream cheese, an almond pastry and a cheesy, eggy, pastry thingy- think of all that fat!)

Enough about regulars.

Now I am going to go out in the dark and dig the dirt out of the bird bath by our front door. It has been growing moss and wimpy pansies for years. This spring I decided to gut the thing and start over.

Bye.

Quick Reminder

2006-03-27T23:21:00.000-05:00

Pray for a miracle tomorrow in the Israeli elections!

Golden Girl

2006-03-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Today (March 24th) is Rachel's Golden Birthday: twenty-four years old on the twenty-fourth of March!

I know I'm posting this on the 23rd, but it really is the 24th over there!

Happy Birthday O most wonderful of sisters!

Joy

2006-03-12T17:37:00.000-05:00

Saturday I walked down from my apartment to the Main House. On the way I saw Jeff Aldrich (2 yrs. old) at the end of the house all by himself. He was kicking a small blue plastic watering can and laughing. He would kick it, listen to it clatter down the driveway a few inches, laugh gleefully, kick it again, and laugh again. What blissful love of life!

I bet God likes to see Jeff enjoying the sound of a plastic watering can on pavement. I bet He likes it when he sees me enjoying the beautiful everyday things He has created.

Heaven... or Hell?

2006-03-07T22:25:00.000-05:00

Today my favorite manager, Brenda, informed me that she and Kaili (college-age girl who works morning shifts with me) had decided that I would go to heaven.
Despite this obvious opportunity to spread the gospel, I am afraid that my less than pious response was this:
"When I get to the pearly gates I just say, 'Brenda said I could come in.'" Brenda laughed.
"Come visit us!" yelled Kaili from the other end of the bakery.
"Where are you going to be?"
"Brenda and I decided that we were going to H-E-double toothpicks."
I allowed as how I didn't think that was necessarily true.
Kaili said I didn't know how wicked they had been.
She hesitated for a second, then said, "But that could all change, right?"
"Yes, it could."

Yes, Kaili, you can get to heaven, and it isn't about how many wicked things you have done, or how nice you can be to other people. It has all the world to do with how much the Crown Prince of heaven loves you, Kaili, and Brenda, and how he died to give you life that goes on forever, and a mansion in heaven as a gift of love.

pro-Bush, republican, pro-Israel

2006-02-22T18:34:00.000-05:00

I have discovered an evil side to customer service- one has to be nice all the time. Sigh. When I am sick I think my tolerance level for stupidity, meanness and fools in general goes down about a hundred points.

The other day I some lady was just plain rude to me. She was impatient, unsmiling, and talked to me like I was stupid. One side of me quietly served her, smiled, spoke cheerfully while the other was irritated almost to the point of anger. "She has NO RIGHT to talk like that to anybody! Didn't her mother ever teach her the law of basic kindness? Doesn't she know that she isn't the only person on this globe? Good night, she needs a spanking! I sure would have gotten wupped for that!" Me and my highly developed sense of justice. Someday I'm afraid its going to get the better of me, and I'm going to get fired.

Anyway, putting the rude ones aside, there is another frustrating class of people whom I find facing me across the counter- the outspoken liberal. Some comment or other sets them off, and there they are expounding anti-Bush principles to the smiling cashier. Of course she agrees, of course she loves to hear me say ignorant things about Israeli peace, of course she can have no objection to liberal principles. Who in their right mind does?

Today a customer told me how they had known another employee for years- and had had many a cheerful political discussion with her. He was always trying to convince her how bad those horrible Republicans were. He never did convinced her. Duh.

The only thing close to as irritating is when Yankee fans come in and expect me to serve them with a smile.

2006-02-14T23:32:00.000-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day!
I'm all cozy on the living room couch, drinking Yoplait banana yogurt and eating sesame bread. I just spilled my yougurt on the floor and down my quilt, but it has been One of Those Days and I feel philosophical about the mess. At work today I spilled one iced green tea all over the place and dropped four loaves of bread on the floor. I admit to occasionally spilling drinks, but I almost never drop bread. Some of those loaves are so expensive! On days like this I sometimes think it would be adventageous for them to just send me home; I must be losing them more in dropped breads than I am making in sales.

I have so many interesting things to tell you! But I won't write about them all tonight, and don't get excited because none of them are that exciting- just amusing anecdotes of work.

Interesting name watch:
1. Hammer
This guy had a foreign accent which I couldn't place, and which was very difficult to understand. Our conversation went like this:
"What name do you want on the order?"
"Hamma"
"What was that?"
"Hamma, like the tool."
Katie looks confused. "Could you spell that please?"
"H-a-m-m-e-r"
"Oh!" Katie looks embarrassed.
2. Clover
3. Odelia (actually one of the employees)
4. Athena
5. Tiberius

That last one was middle-aged gentleman with a well-developed sense of humor. I asked for his name, he gave it, and I was instantly curious. I asked him if he was named after Tiberius, the place. He said yes. There was a momentary pause, then he said, "For today," in an explanatory tone. I looked properly astonished. Apparently he randomly chooses a different name whenever he comes in, and today just happened to be Tiberius! Some people have all the fun.

Random observations on names and height:

How is one supposed to respond to really weird names anyway? One wants to be frank and say, "Whatever possessed your parents to name you Hammer?" Or, "For Pete's sake! Why Pepper, of all things? Was your mother fond of sneezing?" But I suppose they get inane comments all the time and are always spelling their names or explaining their origin. I think I am going to name my kids John, Chris, Jared, Lisa, Michelle, and Nichole. Nothing unfamiliar about those.

Here is another group of people who excite my desire to say stupid things: really tall men. Every once in awhile some gentleman of NBA proportions will come order a sandwhich from me. I am in awe of them. I feel stunned by the sheer overwhelming height of them. I suddenly feel small and insignificant. I want to take a step back, crane me neck, and say, "Wow! You are really tall!" Now isn't that brilliant?
It isn't as if I don't know any tall men. But I guess I'm not as aware of the height difference if I know them well, and I really don't know any 7-footers. Once in Israel I stood in line behind a family of Dutch Afrikaaners. The father, the mother, and the two teenage boys were all well over six feet tall. Behind them I felt dwarfed in a way I rarely experience. I loved it! I had gotten used to feeling large in a sea of Middle Eastern smallness. I think I'll move to South Africa.

Have you every heard of singing valentines? Early afternoon, when things were fairly quiet in the restaurant, I suddenly heard a humming, and somebody said, "They are going to sing!" I looked up to see six men in a semi-circle by one of the other registers. Somebody found the pitch, and suddenly they were singing "My Wild Irish Rose" barbershop quartet style. What a delightful surprise! Everybody gathered round to listen and clap. They sounded so good! One of them explained to me what they were. Apparently you can hire them to come sing to your true love ( for a fee) as a valentine. They had around 176 appointments today!

Okay, goodnight to you all. Must needs get up sooner than I want.

(feel free to tell me if there are any gross grammatical or spelling errors in this. I am too tired to go back over it.)

More paint

2006-02-12T23:06:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed that I was married to a middle-aged polygamist who looked exactly like Agatha Christie's Poirot. In the dream I also had just had thirteen boys- at once. And you though septuplets was bad.

Maybe I should have realized this morning that after a dream like that my day could hardly be normal.

After church was all set to charge right into my latest amusement- getting my room ready to paint. At the rate I am going I'll be prepping til doomsday with nary a drop of paint to show for it!

Megan came up to help me and we merrily banged in nail pops, filled dings and holes, sanded bumps, and washed walls. The number of things I have to do before I actually get to the walls keeps growing: I need to finish prep, sand and paint the ceiling, sand the woodwork (of which there is a considerable amount), prime woodwork, and tape things up. One whole wall of the room is actually wood doors to my closet. I took down all of them and was working on sanding down the varnish on the framework when the real excitement began.

Sanding the frame had the funniest side affect- things on the upper shelves would vibrate to the edge and fall off. A small can of paint hit me on the shoulder, and a little while later a aerosol can of static stopper hit me right on the head. That was mildly amusing (and painful), but I was blissfully unaware of darker evil lurking above, just waiting to be vibrated off....

I had just sent Megan down to the Main House for more dropcloths and was on a stepstool continuing to sand the framework, my head safely above the danger of falling objects, when I heard a thump. I looked down at the floor to see what else had fallen and roared in complete horror. A quart can of brick-red paint lay on its side on the carpet with the lid off!

Now most of you probably don't keep random quarts of paint in your clothes closet, but I do. I had bought it on sale at Home Depot, and was hoarding it until the right surface came along. THIS WAS NOT IT!!!!

There, in the middle of my tan carpet was a spreading, oozing pool of very red paint. Disaster of the first magnitude! Pain! Agony! Frustration! This kind of thing is not supposed to happen! I leaped down, grabbed the nearest receptacle- a purple mop bucket- grabbed the paint can and dumped it in. Then I found a putty knife and started scooping, using the knife and my hand. Ridiculous! Nothing comes out of carpets. I ran to the intercom to call the kitchen of the Main House, told Sarah to tell Megan to grab rags and GET UP HERE RIGHT NOW!!!! I was feverishly scooping paint when she arrived.

She called Dad on the cellphone for advice, while I continued to roar (and pray) in the background. Suddenly from the other side of the closed door Grandma asked, "Are there people dying in there?" Silence. "No Grandma," I answered, "Not many people, just a couple." That satisfied her for the moment. Megan got me a bowl of soapy water and ran down to the garage for the shop vac.

The place looked like a particularly dramatic scene from ER, with instruments scattered about, and blood everywhere.

I kept playing with the paint- pouring on soapy water to keep it all wet and trying unsuccessfully to transfer it to the bucket with my hands. At one point while I was waiting for Megan to return I had one of those brilliant moments of inspiration which come to me under stress. The end of an extension cord had gotten into the paint. I grabbed it with my painty, soapy wet hands and used them to clean out the holes. Of course it was plugged in, and of course I got zapped. I put it down.

Megan returned with the shop vac. While she continued to dump water on the spot, I sucked it up with the hose, and the shop vac spat it out onto the wall. We abandoned the shop vac in favor of wailing to Gerry for help. At this point I could no longer hide the situation from Grandma. Thankfully she didn't hit the roof (she rarely does). In fact she had the brilliant idea of using her rug shampoo machine.

Megan left for dinner, Gerry went to look up advice for the situation on the internet, and I started vacuuming. Dump water on rug, scrape rug with putty knife, suck up water with vacuum, pull out water container and dump in toilet, fill bowl with water, dump on carpet, scrape, vacuum, dump, fill, dump, scrape, vacuum, dump.... two hours later the water was still coming up painty and the carpet stubbornly blushed a pale pink.

Fine, I like pink carpet.

Points on removing paint from carpet

1. DO NOT let it dry!
2. Get as much of it up as you can before you start dumping on water. Try blotting it with rags.
3. When you do start dumping on water, pour it around the edge of the spill, then use something to scrape it in toward the center. I didn't do this to start with, and the result was a six-inch spill spreading over three feet of carpet.
4. Rug shampoo machines work great! We have one, so let us know if you ever plan to dump paint on your carpet. We would be more than happy to lend it to you.
5. Putty knives are a great tool for scrapping water around and encouraging the paint up.
6. 1/2 quart of paint can discolor a large section of carpet, and tint endless gallons of water.
7. No carpet is worth bursting a blood vessel over.

Interestingly enough, I think the bigger the physical catastrophe, the more relaxed I become. It is so clearly beyond me to fix, that I find it easy to turn it over to God. There are few more permanent combinations than dark paint and a light carpet, and I felt so helpless as I started to scrape it up. BUT there is something almost refreshing about a mistake of this magnitude- I really cannot go back in time to change this, nor can I be sure that the end results are going to be perfect. I will now do my best to fix the problem, but the results are ultimately up to God. It was funny how cheerful I felt during those two hours. When Grandma came in to sympathize my response was,

"You know what? God is good!" What is one old carpet and two hours extra work compared with his goodness and love and care of me?

Now I am going to sleep, and pray I do not have any more weird dreams.

Russia

2006-02-08T22:19:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched the movie K-19 The Widowmaker. I enjoyed the movie as entertainment, but was more detached than I usually am when watching intense movies. Which was a good thing because when people are drowning, burning, or sloshing around in the malfunctioned nuclear reactor plants of submarines it is better not to be too involved emotionally. But that isn't really the point of this post. What I really want to say is that

I really have a hard time understanding why God created Russia.

I know, I know; that is pretty harsh. But I'm not saying that there isn't a good reason, I'm just saying that I am having a hard time identifying it. I guess watching that movie helped me suddenly focus on how negative I was about Russia.

Here's why:

In my mind Russia has gotten the short end of the stick in a number of ways. Russia has pretty much the worst weather of any country in the world. Russia has one the stinkiest governments ever. Russia seems to be spiritually depressed all the time. Russia is one of the ugliest places ever.

All of my mental images of Russia involve snow, grey skies, barren wastelands, and subzero temperatures. How's this for an incongruous sentence: "Sunny Russia, favored holiday destination for millions, is basking in yet another glorious summer day- bright sunshine, blue skies, and balmy temperatures will continue all through this week and well into the next." I bet they don't even have a word for summer in Russian.

Of course, I don't equate good weather solely with warmth; I do appreciate crisp, clear winter days, and even English foggy days have their appeal. But Russia seems to have this perpetual grey, dingy look, as if all the buildings had been built poorly 20 years ago, with only economy in mind, all the natives dressed in shades of brown and grey, and the sky had that sort of heavy feel and color to it which comes from smog.

Russia means gulag, Crime and Punishment, communism, fruitless, endless, mindless suffering, vast emptiness, slavery, faceless masses of people with no personal identity, dishonest politics, mass deception, tortured history, uncertain future, mind and body-numbing temperatures and basically everything bad I can think of.

In conclusion I'll add that Russia is absolutely the last place on earth I would ever voluntarily visit or live in. Bar none (except possibly Amsterdam).

Having said all that, I would sure love some balancing opinions. Do any of you have anything good to say about Russia? I would LOVE to hear anything good! I don't really want to think so negatively about the place, but I can't help it. I think I have watched too many movies. :-)

I think I might do some research on my own. Surely lots of good things have happened there. Maybe there are some spiritual giants who originated in Russia. Of course there is Russian literature (even there, I can't really think of any happy books written by Russians), and Russian music...

paint

2006-02-08T22:16:00.000-05:00

My room has been taken over by wallpaper. It hangs about the room in damp, curling strips, occupies the recliner, armrests and all, it wanders across my bed, clings to my clothes, sticks to the bottoms of my feet, lies in drifts againsts the walls, and follows me out the door. I hate gunky wallpaper stuck to my socks.

But, once I have it all banished from the walls I shall be so much happier! The wallpaper really wasn't particularly garish or offensive, but I never liked it. I put up with it all through my stay in the same room (under Mrs. Sweet's occupation) and survived. This time I decided that it was me or the wallpaper. Right now the wallpaper is winning, and I am sleeping on the couch. :-)

Monday I visitied most of the paint shops in town, comparing prices and collecting lovely little paint samples to bring home. I had so much fun wandering around Fairwood subjecting other people to viewings and soliciting opinions. I must have come home with over thirty different color choices. Most of them are shades of green, pumpkin, gold, or maroon, with a couple gray and true orange thrown in. Not a blue among them! I may even decide to paint the room two different colors, if I can't narrow it down to just one. Oh the joy of endless possibilities and nobody to say me nay! What fun to be able to paint it anything I want, even if I hate it afterwards! :-)

You shall all have to view the results when I am done. I may even borrow a camera and post a picture. I bet you are all thrilled and can hardly wait.

Beauty in the Unexpected

2006-01-17T18:36:00.000-05:00

Here is a link you really need to check out. It's an advertisement I actually discovered via somebody else's blog and I loved it! Melissa, I thought of you especially. If possible do the extended version of it, but you really need wireless. It took forever to download even with Gerry's highspeed connection.

www.bravia-advert.com

How come I can't get this to publish as an actual link?

Cookies!

2006-01-11T22:18:00.000-05:00

We are having a cookie selling contest among the cashiers at work! I am ahead, but feel free any of you to drop in and increase my lead! Just make sure you get in my line so I can get credit for selling it to you.

I am also going to start keeping track of the odd names people have. Here are my first two:

Kully (guy)
Pepper (girl)

The "E"s

2006-01-10T20:38:00.000-05:00

Meet Emma and Evelina- the two girls from Sweden who spent Christmas with us. What fun we had! They had been sight-seeing all down the East Coast, so when they arrived at our house they were all ready for some quiet days. Neither of them had ever been away from home for Christmas, so staying with a real family was ideal.

We spent ages sitting around talking, laughing, discussing languages, discussing cultural differences, and generally enjoying each other. They had never eaten turkey before except in deli form, so out grand bird was a big attraction. I think they even took pictures of it! They had fun adding new words to their already excellent English vocabulary (such as pine needles) and we learned tiny bits of Swedish. Did you know that the name Thorpe is the Swedish word for a certain type of house in the woods? Or that the Swedish word for knife is knive?

I had previously decided that Swedish was an unexpectedly beautiful language and was glad to be exposed to it again. The two of them chattered away with each other in Swedish, leaving us clueless but amused. The funniest was when their Dad called them from home. They were in the living room with us. One would be on the cell phone while the other kept up a patchy translation for our benefit. "Evelina just said that..." "Our Dad is teasing her because..."

Christmas trees are very similar in Sweden, but Christmas dinner is a different kettle of fish (quite literally). Swedish traditional Christmas meal consists of sausages, omelettes, various fish dishes, mashed potatoes, and I am forgetting the rest. Most of it was equally gross. Christmas morning they have cooked rice for breakfast. In the evening they mix the leftover rice with cream and serve it for dessert with fruit sauce. Sounds lovely, what?

Okay, enough on Swedish/American Christmases.

And the title? My family called them the "E"s before they arrived because they couldn't remember their names. It stuck even after they arrived. :-)

Observations on my life that have little or no import

2006-01-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

1. One of my (managers) has the dubious distinction of being named John Brown. I find this highly distressing because every time someone uses both of his names my mind instantly supplies this phrase: "John Brown's body lies a molderin' in the grave."

2. Pet peeve- turning signal blinkers that blink twice as fast as normal ones. One feels like the car has ADHD or is high on caffeine.

3. The wind patterns across the rear window of my car are fascinating. As I was driving home from work today I noticed them because tiny, wet chunks of snow kept sliding down from the roof and getting trapped on the glass. They would track aimless but rather graceful patterns across the glass, chased by small eddies of wind. Good thing I didn't get into an accident while I was watching them in my rearview mirror.

4. Snow costs money. People have to get paid to plow, people have to fix their cars after they crash because of snow, and in the restaurant business one loses money because you staff the whole place waiting for customers who never show up because of the snow. This restaurant worker was bored all day long because nobody came in. There are only so many things you can do to keep busy if you have to stay by your register. I wiped counters, straightened stacks of paper bags, and restocked pastries repeatedly. Then I was left to contemplate the dust bunnies near the ceiling and talk to the other clerk (who doesn't have the gift of the gab). Thankfully they let me out a half-hour early.

5. I want to read Ann Coulter's book, How to Talk to Liberals (If you Must). The second-hand bookstore down the road has it. I know, because I have seen it on the shelf the last three times I have gone in their. Alas, I haven't the guts to buy it because the title makes me nervous. I don't want to get into a political discussion with the bookshop owner. I also don't want him to get the impression that I think all Liberals (including himself... wait, I don't even know if he is or not) are so foreign, and so illogical, that I need Ann Coulter to tell me how to communicate with them. Maybe he will be offended. How is that for wimpy?

6. Actually, I also don't buy it because I think Andrea has it, and I could always borrow it from her if I really thought I would actually read it.

7. The End.

2005-12-27T22:32:00.000-05:00

What is it in a person that enables them to make ultimate, or at least huge sacrifices in the name of some cause, or religion, or the greater good? I am thinking of really big things like giving up an unsuitable true love to become king (the opposite of whatshisface who abdicated), or give up a cherished dream to become a farmer and pastor in Goshen, or become a cloistered nun who never sees the world again? Or the guy who leaps onto a hand grenade sputtering on the floor in the middle of a crowded room?

2005-12-26T23:23:00.000-05:00

I thought about writing a long post about Christmas. But no such luck for you guys; laziness won out. You will have to be content with a short random post about work and wait longer to hear about the interesting things we did in Georgia.

I have come up with a mind game to fill up free thought time as I ring up orders on my register. After taking each order I have to ask the customer to give me their first name so they can be paged when their order is ready. So I think about names. The number of different names I get is surprisingly low and most are very common. Sometimes I get Kates and Katies, sometimes there are several Eric's or Ryans, sometimes people spell their names for you, and often I have to get people to repeat to make sure it was really Joan and not Jane. One older lady named Polly and I have a happy little connection going on because I told her I loved her name and thought I might name one of my own children that someday. Today I got two women with guys names- Danny was one, can't remember the other.
Anyway, my mental game is very simple: everything I type in a name I think of a person I know with that name. Surprisingly, there are few times when I can't do that! Paul, Diane, Joan, Ryan, Mary, Terry, Katie, Margaret, Bob, Tom, Connie, and on and on.... I feel so rich! How many people have such a wide circle of friends, family, acquaintances, and distant far-off cousins? Today I suddenly realized that I didn't have to stop with thinking warm, fuzzy thoughts about them- I could pray for them! I can pray for the "Jan" standing in front of me, and I can pray for the Jan I know who lives next door to me. Cool!

change of subject

Speaking of distant far-off cousins, we just found one! My father's father was the youngest of three sons- his brothers were ten and twenty years older than he. They were not devoted Christians, and in fact the oldest, George is usually described as "George, the horrible man,..." He was an alchoholic and not a really pleasant person. But he did have one advantage over the others: every member of Grandpa's family tends to drop dead of heart-attacks before their time. George beat that particular gene by pickling his insides with liquor. One of Daddy's sisters actually asked her doctor what she could do to keep her heart healthy and he suggested following in the footsteps of good 'ole uncle George (and I kid you not). So if any of you find beer bottles stashed in the back of fridge, please remember why they are there. :-)

ANYWAY... getting back to the point... Due to religious and other differences, Grandpa didn't keep in close contact with his brothers, and didn't talk about them much to his children. For years now my aunts have been poking about in the dark corners of the internet, looking for cousins. This Christmas we found one!!! His name is William (my last name) and he is the son of the infamous George! That makes him Daddy's first cousin and my first cousin once removed! As soon as I found out I was so excited! I didn't realize I would feel so interested but it is different now that there is actually a flesh and blood relative. What if he looks like us? Does he sound like us? Walk like us? Is he a Christian? Does he have children? Etc. We do know that he was actually looking for us as well. We haven't e-mailed back yet, but are planning too- and maybe meet him sometime! Again, cool.

Okay, I want to read my book for awhile before bed. Goodnight.

Christmas

2005-12-24T09:07:00.000-05:00

Just a quickie- Christmas break has been lovely! Mostly it has consisted of frequent naps at all times of day, frequent doses Christmas shopping, and a lovely chance to interact with my sisters! There is truly nothing like just doing whatever with three sisters (except maybe doing whatever with four sisters). We get each other's humor and can talk about anything and a blue moon.

(If it makes you feel any better Craig, since I was one of the guilty parties whining about your excessive break, I DID recognize the fact that it wouldn't be much of a break working at the bank for five and a half weeks.)

Last night we drove north of Atlanta to rendezvous with the Swedish girls coming to spend Christmas with us. We had a lovely time laughing and talking, looking at pictures, comparing Christmas traditions, and getting to know each other. Of course I already knew Emma from Israel, so we had plenty to talk about. Fun to have two more girls around for Christmas!

and a Merry Christmas to you all. Mom needs me to get off now so she can use the phone. :-)

2005-12-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

The phone rang this morning while I was still in bed at 10 am. I listened to Grandma answer it, "Hello, this is Mrs. Anderson, how may I help you? ... Lisa?" I was out of bed like a shot!

Yes! I got to talk to Lisa in Jerusalem! She is doing well, is happy but still suffering from jet lag compounded by the tail end of a cold. Mostly she has been recovering at the apartment, and hasn't been out anywhere much yet.

SO GOOD to hear from her! The connection was horrid, but that was okay. I miss her so much and I wish I was there SO MUCH but it is just so good to have her there.

I got of the phone and howled. As I said to Grandma, Everything is good and right and just as it should be, but I reserve the right to cry anyway. :-)

Now I am going to go ride my fat brown pony named Llewie, and if he bucks me off I shall be very mad indeed.

Happy Sabbath to you all! It is truly a lovely one.

the right word?

2005-12-02T16:57:00.000-05:00

I was in the kitchen at work the other day, washing dishes and listening to a couple coworkers talking. One of them had just gotten a new shirt with the company logo on it. When he ordered it there were no pictures to show color choices. He chose lime green. The shirt was truly astonishing and the other guy was teasing him about it. At the end of the conversation the owner of the shirt declared,

"This shirt is ravaging!" Good thing I had my back to him so he couldn't see me laughing. I am really not sure if he meant what he said, or he really meant ravishing. Either way he certainly charmed me! :-)

Scattershot

2005-11-30T20:16:00.000-05:00

1. So sorry for the crabby post last night. I am really glad Lisa is going, and I'll be fine. :-) She is in the air right now (8:00 pm of the 30th) and won't land until 2 pm on their local time. She has been sick with a cold recently but it has proved to be a blessing. She felt too sick to worry!

2. Today's story #1
Equine Mayhem, or a story of mud, manure, and vicious animals.

If we were to compare each person's experiences between the hours of five and six this morning and judge them for the highest level of excitement I bet you all that I would win. Hands down. To begin with, probably most of you were still sleeping at that hour. :-) These days I'm up around five to take care of my horses and this morning was no different.

It all started when the culottes I normally wear were still in the laundry. I threw on one of my long Israel skirts and ran out the door.

I like being up so early in the morning, except that you can't see anything. I hate it especially after watching movies like The Fugitive or the Borne movies. Good thing Daddy taught me how to use my big Maglite flashlight as a weapon! I dare all Treadstone operatives or one-armed men to stand up to that!

The horses had decided not to come in from the pasture, which meant I had to go out to get them. In the dark. At least it's all wide open in the pasture- that way nobody can hide behinde trees and sneak up behind me.

I loaded my jacket pockets with carrots, grabbed a halter and lead and trudged out, flashlight in hand. Right where the pasture meets the barn area there is a mud hole. There must be 20 or 30 yards of it with no choice but to slog through. I slogged through and found the horses near the back end of the pasture.

Then the fun began. Mix muddy, wet weather, pitch blackness, four overly active horses, one nervous girl and several carrots and what do you have? Well...

All of them crowded around me- eager for carrots. As I passed them out one of the wretched animals bit me in a fit of ill-temper. I returned the favor with a hard wack to the head with just as much ill-temper. Then I put the halter on the pony and decided to ride him back. He is fairly short, so I can usually jump and slither onto him pretty quick. Only just as I performed the first half of this manuver and was drapped over his back the other horses took off. Naturally the pony took off too. And naturally he didn't want me to go along. So he bucked me off. Thankfully I wasn't too far off the ground to begin with and managed to keep my hand on the lead rope.

I decided to walk back.

Back through the mudhole we went. Slog, slog, slog... slop, slop slop. Now my skirt was six inches deep in mud, and suddenly my shoe came off. But with four jumpy horses in tow I was in no position to do anything about it. After I got the horses into the barn I shed my other shoe and headed back for the first in my stocking feet. In fact, though I did find it, I didn't bother to put them back on. Want to know one benefit of darkness? One can't see what one is stepping in, in one's stocking feet. :-) Now isn't that an edifying thought?

So, while you were all sleeping soundly in your warm beds (except Andrea of course) I was being bitten, bucked off, and generally attacked by mud and manure. Anybody want to trade jobs?

3. Story of the day #2
Nasty Lady at Work
I am loving this customer service thing. I love starting to recognize the regular customers- I even know a couple names, and will soon be able to match them with the items they always get. I enjoy bustling about doing a myriad little things, being cheerful with people, fixing hot chocolate on wet mornings, and endlessly ringing things up on the register. I might even eventually be able to decifer all the weird abbreviations on my register screen and have to stop whining for help from the nearest coworker. I am so happy!

But then, in the middle of my blissful existence steps the Nasty Lady. I've had some negative or slightly snobby input over the last few days, but thankfully no truly horrid 'scenes'. But today She came in. I rang up her order, and took her gift card to scan. Only it didn't scan. Run get the manager. Manager says O, just enter the number on the back. Said number is ninteen digits long. I enter it incorrectly two times before getting it the third. Then the customer looked at her receipt and informed me that I had given her the wrong coffee, merely pennies more in price. That was my fault, I admit, but now I was well and truly rattled. She compounded the problem by informing me in a nasty voice that she had told what she wanted four times. She wanted the different corrected. Guess what- can't do that after I ring up the order! Thankfully the manger was standing at my elbow.

Manager to Nasty Lady- Do you want me to give you back the extra eleven cents?

Yes she did (most emphatically) And look! Now my buzzer is going off and my soup is ICE COLD!

Manager- do you want the eleven cents in cash or back on your card.

YES I want it on my card! (DUH!)

Manager- do I still have your card? Nope, its in her wallet. She digs it out and continues talking about FREEZING soup. Meanwhile I had reliquished my position to the manager and stood in the corner, rattled to the core. The lady stormed off without her card to fetch her freezing soup and the manager procceded to re-type the ninteen digit code so she could add the eleven cents back on. Meanwhile she cussed the lady out under her breath, something I am sad to admit soothed my nerves more than it should have.

Sigh. The wonders of customer service. I suppose I'll learn to deal with them with more aplomb and less nerves, but you know what I really want? I want to learn to deal with them with more love. Maybe that lady had had a horrible morning or was depressed. Maybe her cat just died. Maybe she doesn't know if she's going to heaven or not. OR... maybe all excuses fail and it is just sheer carnal bad temper? Can I learn to love them even then? It is so easy to cuss people out under your breath or in your heart, but how do you get Christ's perspective on that individual soul- eternal, infinitely precious, loved by God?

Anyway, I am going to stop writing now. Tata.

Left Behind

2005-11-29T20:59:00.000-05:00

Okay Guys, so if you hadn't already heard, Lisa is leaving on a jet plane tomorrow.
And you probably all noted the fact that I will not be on that flight.
So all along I have been pretty sure of my decision to stay on this side of the puddle. I mean, it wasn't all my decision anyway, but however it happened, here I am in the good ole US of A and happy to be here. I want to go back to Israel sometime, but I want to go when I'll enjoy it again. Right now if I went I would probably end up in multiple pieces and held together with a straight jacket.

Fine. So let Lisa fly away tomorrow. She's only one of my dearest and closest friends. She is only going to the spot in the world that I most love. She's only going for her third trip without me.

Houston, we have a problem.

As some great sage would say; "I HATE MY LIFE."

So you can all write nice goodbye notes to Lisa on her blog or e-mail. You can write me notes of condolence-kind of like the kind you would write to somebody who unexpectedly had to go in for open-heart surgery because half of it was ripped out and flown overseas.

Okay, okay. I am being a tad bit dramatic. But its been a long day full of new and interesting mistakes at work and very sore feet. I am tired and I really, really am dreading tomorrow.

I guess now I will have a chance to look at one of our Israel trips from everybody else's perspective. Sigh.

Praises Be!

2005-11-18T20:31:00.000-05:00

Guess what Guys, I'm employed! At long last I have go me a job. Now you can all come visit me at the local friendly eating establishment where I work. Umm, not going to post the name here.

God was so good in working out what seems to be the perfect work situation for me. I am really looking forward to working with lots of people I don't know. I have met a few of them already and was favorably impressed. The hours are perfect- I am working part time but can do as many hours as I want. The weekly schedule is flexible, so if I need to take Grandma to an appointment I can notify them and switch days or something. They have plenty of college and high school students to work evenings and weekends, so I need never feel pressure to work on the Sabbath, or any other time I don't want to.

I am also starting work at slightly higher pay than normal because, get this, the manager was impressed with my volunteer experience. Hallelujah for Dining Hall Coordinating! :-)

I am so thankful and happy!

I start work on Monday morning around eight... hey!I might be in the running for earliest riser awards! I have to get up in time to take care of the horses for an hour, read my Bible, get ready for the day, and be at work at 8. What fun!
Anyway, come in sometime and I'll sell you yummy food. :-)

One More

2005-11-08T21:30:00.000-05:00

Here is one more for you to guess... I think it should be fairly easy.

Hey, hey, it finally worked!

2005-11-03T18:39:00.000-05:00

(I am not asking you to identifly the person, just the place)

NOT a New Photo

2005-11-03T17:08:00.000-05:00

Okay, you were all right- the last photo was of the British Cemetery.

Here is Photo #2
Well, its taking forever to upload, so I'll talk while I'm waiting.

The local library has my been my home away from home these days. Every evening I take my laptop down to make use of their Wireless connection. I am working on a project (and hope to finish tonight) for my ESL certification. It involves hours of checking out ESL websites, sifting out the chaff, checking each one out, evaluating, categorizing, and labeling them. The end result should be a short listing of some of the best ESL websites. Not that I know much about it since I've taught a grand total of four hours in my entire existance.

Hmmm. something seems to have gone wrong with the uploading of that photo. Let me try again.

Taking forever again. Oh well, I can talk more...
Last week sometime I aquired a pair of boots at a consignment store. I had been eyeing them forever, trying to make up a good excuse to buy them. Mom came up from Georgia and we went thrift store shopping. I showed them to her, I recited my 'reasons' for needing them, she agreed, and now they are mine. I'll wear them down for the weekend get together so you can all see them. I call them my combat boots. :-)

Blast! WHY won't that silly picture upload? One more try.

Okay, so the reason I told you about the boots was because they led to an amusing situation in town today.
Background: Mom and Dad informed me recently that the clearest memories they have of my extreme youth had to do with my bumping into things and telling long boring stories liberally sprinkled with 'UMMMs' and 'ands'.

So as a result of thise early and uncorrected fault I still bump into everything. I can't go through a doorframe without hitting my watch on it, I sometimes trip on perfectly smooth surfaces or over my own feet, and I have cracked the back of my head on the ground because I was walking fast and flatfooted on ice.

I also pick up scuffs on the toes of my black combat boots for no apparent reason. These I actually have a hard time accounting for. Am I walking to close to the baseboards? Do I randomnly misplace my feet enough to kick white doors as I open them? Anyway, they don't come off. I can't come up with a preventative measure (stopping ingrained and unconscious habits of clutzy behavior is a major undertaking), so I need a good scuff remover.

I went to the Dexter shoe store in town to find one. A fairly normal individual told me they didn't have anything, but he thought lighter fluid should do the trick. Then his less than normal co-worker showed up. His voice was pitched rather high and had the most nasal sound I have ever heard! It was classic and I could hardly keep from laughing.

He agreed about the ligher fluid, grabbed a bottle of it and a paper towel and came around from behind the counter dumping some onto the towel as he went. He then procceded to kneel on the floor in front of me and spend a couple minutes scrubbing a white scuff off my shoe! He also continued to sing the praises of lighter fluid in his wonderful voice.

"Once I had paint on my car upholstery. Lighter fluid took it right out!" I mummur polite interest as he continues to scrub my shoe.

What an odd position to be in! What do you do? You can't really bend down to help, kick him to make him stop, or ignore him! His co-worker didn't seem to have anything better to do than hover around, peering at my shoe. That made three of us.

When he got done, I said thank you and walked out the door, barely containing my laughter until I got outside. But hey, the scuff mark is gone!

And the picture didn't upload. So all you get is a long, wandery story about essentially nothing. :-)