Hailstones and coals of fire

Life has gotten so busy that I am keeping a calendar for the first time in my life. No longer can I depend on keeping it all in my head, and so I write things down, and good thing, too. It leaves a distinct paper trail of exactly how busy we are.

Last weekend my dad and three brothers drove down to help install a central vacuum system in our house. What ease and convenience! Daddy has always installed one wherever we lived, so I’ve grown up with one. Being without and dealing with clunky upright models for the past two years has been quite the rude awakening. Some people, when I tell them about it, have never even heard of such a concept, and others tell me horror stories of people who tried vacuuming out the still-smouldering ashes from their fireplace and burned the house down. I think the worst I ever did was to stick the nozzle in the toilet (when I was very young) and watch the water get sucked away.

Last night we had a terrific hailstorm. It was loud and almost frightening, and I was greatly relieved not to lose electricity at all. Michael made a bowl of truly excellent guacamole, which we devoured entirely, and we watched Fried Green Tomatoes. I was disappointed that I was too tired to think it through thoroughly, because it begged further reflection. It reminded me strongly of Gone with the Wind, with the parallel story line of an unlikely friendship between two women of very different personalities, one extremely strong and rebellious and the other meek and good-spirited. There was the same sense of desolation and poverty, of sadness for an era gone by and a frustration at the sense of social injustice. Then there’s the question of why two wrong don’t make a right, and whether it’s right to threaten a man who’s beating his wife. Was it right for her to leave him? Why was there no legal protection for her? Why was the jury so prejudiced against her, insisting that no good Christian woman would leave her husband? Why was the law so corrupt as to prevent innocent bystanders from prosecuting ruthless vandals who attacked their private property? If I had lived in that era, what could I have done to fight against the wrongs of the system?

Happy Birthday Oregon!

Which, of course, is the real significant thing about February 14th.

Three years ago yesterday we were in the throes of the 2002 Winter Olympics. I went to a girls’ party, where we watched a cute musical, ate lots of food, painted our nails, and each parted with a yellow rose (for friendship). The next morning there was a flurry of She Said Yes emails and gem studies, and Amy recounted how at dinner SHE was reminiscing about last year, when SHE went out with the girls, watched chick flicks, and painted her nails, whereas here she was, one year later, getting engaged.

Two years ago yesterday I was in Oregon for a wedding and spent the whole evening online exchanging emails with Michael, who observed, ‘Midnight on a Friday night all alone in my apartment reading Emma and writing emails and not feeling a bit depressed about Valentine’s Day? Must be in love.’ There were a dozen roses waiting for me when I got back to Virginia, which was quite the comeuppance for someone who had expressed her sentiments on fresh flowers rather explicitly in years past:

Don’t send me no flowers;
The effect will fall flat.
Flowers will die in a couple of hours.
What lame allegory is that?

One year ago yesterday we went out to dinner with several of our couple friends and had a lovely evening.

Yesterday two dozen NON-red roses were delivered to me at work. It brightened my day and cheered my olfactory senses. We cooked an elegant dinner and drank sparkling cider.

Life just gets better and better, I decided.

A question of great doctrinal import

(…as pronounced by Jane to Mr. Collins in the A&E version of P&P.)

I’ve just begun meeting with a small group of girls on a weekly basis. It’s a mentoring/discipleship program sponsored by our church, and we’re doing a Bible study called Undercover Princess, written by one of the youth interns at the church. I’m very excited to be doing something like this; it’s my first such involvement since AWANA, and I really missed the challenge and the discipline.

Last night was our second meeting, and I think our group is really going to click. There are four girls, all fourteen, and we had such an interesting conversation. The lesson was on getting to know you: WHY is it so important to build a relationship with God? Because we only trust that which we know. And then the lesson took us on a whirlwind tour of the Old Testament sacrifice system, in order to set the stage for WHY the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was such a necessity and what a burden it was that He freed us from.

When the girls came, I told them we were going to start off with a game, and forthwith played a few rounds of Tri-Bond to set the stage. Then, without further explanation, I directed their attention to three items I’d set out on the table: a tube of concealer, a tin of tic-tacs, and a picture of an Old Testament sacrifice. I was so delighted at the end of the evening when one of the girls suddenly got it!

Anyway, at one point the topic of Christ’s location after His death came up, and we wondered where He was during that three-day interval. Somehow all of us had had the impression that He spent those days in Hell, which was what made it all so awful: the separation from God the Father, the reason why He so wished to have the cup pass from Him, etc. We pulled out our Bibles to find a verse to support this theory, and couldn’t exactly nail it down, but all of us had the distinct impression of being taught that Christ spent the time between His death and resurrection in Hell. Then followed the logical question: how could He promise the thief on the cross that that very day he would be with Him in Paradise? If He wasn’t going to be there for three more days Himself? Hmmm. Very puzzling.

Black Magic

At long last we have our 'new' car. We picked it up last week, after nearly a week of Michael dropping me off at work each morning and me hitching a ride home each night because the rental car had to be returned the previous Friday. (Long rabbit trail potential here: did you ever stop to consider how much better off we are than our parents? In so many ways, we are standing on their shoulders. I was all of fifteen years old, I think, before we got a second vehicle in my family, and here Michael and I take our independent forms of transport SO for granted! And cell phones, and computers, not to mention size of starter houses...anyway, a good thought for a spare five minutes.)

The good news is that it is black, sleek, about the same size as Black Rider, gets good gas mileage, and has a CD player. The bad news is that I had to spend an extra $20 at the tag office to buy a WHOLE NEW TAG, even though I had the old license plate and completely unexpired registration in my hand ready to transfer over, because the car dealer had typed up the title with both our names on it, Michael's coming first, whereas on the old registration, my name had come first, since it was my car first and we added Michael's name to it after we got married. So, in other words, I had to pay for a whole new license plate and registration, instead of a mere title transfer, because of a minor bureaucratic hang-up. Whatever. After I'd fought traffic on my lunch hour and waited over fifteen minutes in line, trying to look as pathetically pregnant as possible in the feeble hope that some good soul would volunteer to give me his place in line ('You look pregnant, Ma'am. Here, take my place and step right up to the counter.' Yeah, right!), and discovered what my options were, I decided to fork over the extra $20 instead of trying to track down the dealer, get him to print out a whole new title, sign all the forms and paperwork all over again, and come back another day. It will only take me another fifteen years or so of picking up pennies in parking lots to make it up.

Anyway the new license plate was your standard-issue plate, because pretty plates and vanity plates cost far more than they do in Virginia, and at first I was mildly puzzled by the unassuming AGC. Suddenly on Saturday it hit me. We were out shopping, and had driven separately to drop off Michael's truck for tire rotation, and as I walked up to my car it dawned on me: Agincourt! This was so marvelous that I just about called Michael on my cell phone to tell him about it, but I decided against it since, after all, it was a proper name. Then Michael himself came up with the brilliant, elegant, devastatingly simple tour de force: Magic. Aha! Of course! How could it have escaped us? What better word can you make with the letters AGC?

It does put us in a bit of a dilemma, though. The obvious conclusion, judging from the colour and all, is Black Magic. I'm not really sure I want to name my car that, though. How else does one propose to top Black Rider, though? I've already decided emphatically against Black Rider II or anything of that sort.

I sit in solemn silence simmering stew on the stove while my husband works late. And it's only Monday already!

Introducing Baby

…who for the present remains invisible but clearly noticeable.

October 2004
This is the last time I wore my silk party dress in quite some time, the one I traditionally wear each year to a wedding and for my birthday. It was long after this picture was taken that I began to realise that I wouldn’t be wearing this dress for THIS birthday, at any rate.

October 2004
Our first in the ‘cute couple pregnancy’ series, which we decided to start taking once a week to document progress. We’ve missed, well, a few weeks here and there. Sara ably observes the halo above Michael’s head, aptly illustrating his cherubic nature in posting the pictures for me as well as his general all-round….thing-ness (as Bertie would say).

November 2004
At this point there was really nothing to see on the front front yet (ha, ha!), but there was a whole series of pictures I cut from the roster circa this month because I looked so second-trimester from the pose.

November 2004
The week after Thanksgiving.

January 2005
Second week in January. This wasn’t part of our scheduled Sunday series, but after a birthday party when everyone remarked how not-pregnant I looked, I had to get a picture of the I-will-never-look-this-good-five-months-pregnant-again me. Michael is very forbearing. Does he think I am vain because I beg him to whip out the camera every time someone tells me I look nice? Nooo, he whips out the camera and tells me I look nice.

January 2005
Third week in January. And after this point, Baby went on a big growth spurt. I am officially into maternity clothes now.

Overheard late one night

Michael: I love you. Good night.
Me: I love you too. Good night.
Michael: I love you more, ’cuz I’m bigger!
Me: I love you more, ’cuz there are two of me.
Michael: No, there aren’t.
Me (sleepily): Oh. Well, anyway, we both love you.

Let it snow

Yesterday we came across the name Peter Beagle, in reference to some literature anthology or other. Michael asked me, ‘What does the name Peter S. Beagle mean to you?’ Instantly I quoted, ‘“Long before ‘Frodo Lives!’…”’ and Michael chimed in, ‘“…began appearing on subway walls…”’ Peter Beagle wrote the introduction to the Ballantine edition of The Lord of the Rings, which it turns out we both have read (many times) cover to cover. ‘Amazing,’ I told Michael. ‘Who would have guessed that in addition to everything else, each of us would have found someone so absolutely compatible in every way, right down to the passion for Tolkien?’ I mean, if you start quoting an obscure line from an introduction to a specific printing of a specific book, what are the odds that someone else will recognise it to the extent of being able to finish the quote with you??

Warnings of wintry weather swirled around us as we hurried home Friday night. It was time to return the rental car, and my ‘new’ car wasn’t ready for pick-up yet, so Michael met me at the rental place and we drove home together. On the way I happened to spot a Ledo’s Pizza, as of the days of yore. Many the happy mealtime I spent at the Ledo’s in Leesburg. We pulled over and went in. It had just opened, and the food was as delicious as I remembered. What a happy blast from the past!

Ice covered the roads the next morning. All our plans for a busy Saturday were thus rendered moot, but it turned out to be a lovely weekend after all. We had a cosy time taking down Christmas decorations, cleaning the house, and baking. We did brave the roads and dash out to Target long enough to set up our baby registry. (Now that’s an adventure!) Then we curled up for a long winter afternoon. Toward evening the lights went out, and we spent three hours by the flickering glow of candlelight. I had ambitiously decided to make cinnamon rolls, and had the bread already kneaded by the time the lights went out, so I rolled out the dough and made up the rolls by candlelight. Church was canceled in the morning, so we baked the cinnamon rolls and had a leisurely morning. Ron and Catherine came over for dinner and two episodes of Bertie and Jeeves, and then we tried sight-singing some Psalms. We must try this again around a piano.

I told Michael, ‘There is no one in the world with whom I’d rather be snowed in than you!’

Michael and Math

Ah, the two extremes of my life…my dearest love and my private detestation. What do they have in common? (Besides the fact that Michael is very good at math.) Off the top of my head, I can think of funny anecdotes for both.

In the realm of mathematics…we finally settled with the insurance company on the auto claim (the personal injuries claim, the health claim, and the pain-and-suffering claim are all still to come). On Monday they called us and made us their initial offer. The loss adjuster gave me a series of figures to explain her reasoning, and I wrote it all down carefully, because it was very complex and logical. First she started with the initial cash value of the car, as determined by Blue Book averages and all that. Let’s say she called it $1,000. From this figure she deducted a loss for pre-existing damage (referencing minor scratches and imaginary dents), calling that, say, $100. ‘But I’m only going to take off half of that for you,’ she hurried to say. (This felt like sleight of hand to me.) Then she added in the $10 tag fee and the $100 taxes we’d need, to give us a grand total of, say, $1,060. (Non sequiter: do we see a pattern emerging here? For the sake of simplicity, my math story problems always tend to rely on factors of ten.) For some reason, the day she called I was not in my assertive mood, and felt like an absolute pushover as I murmured that that seemed rather low…I’d discuss it with my husband and get back with her – and then spent the rest of the morning berating my lack of backbone and rehashing what I ought to have said. So I had Michael call her back and deal with it from there, and of course he challenged her on the ‘pre-existing damage’ write-off, insisting that the scratches were minor and that we had never noticed any dents. Poof, just like that she agreed to take off that deduction. When we finally settled with them, the final notes looked something like this:

$950 agreed value of car
+ $110 tags and taxes
+ $50 misc. adjustments
= $1,110

Ha, ha, ha! Do you see the subtle psychology at work here? The implication is that they’re giving us a better deal, by working in the reverse loss as a credit. Note that the beginning figure is NOT the initial agreed-upon value of car, but THEIR final valuation of car, counting the (imaginary) loss, which they then generously turn around and give to us. Whatever. It made me laugh.

Now, on the Michael front…for some reason we’ve been getting a superfluity of junk calls lately. If they happen during dinner I usually let Michael take them, and then clatter my spoon as loudly as I can against my bowl to create the cacophonous impression that we are RIGHT in the middle of dinner. But if I don’t succeed in scaring them off at first, then it can be terribly amusing to listen to Michael’s response. Some of my favourites: ‘Wait a minute. You can’t even pronounce my last name. How can this be a special offer just for me if you don’t even know my name?’ ‘Oh, boy! It sounds too good to be true! Does it cost? What?? Oh, sorry. If it were free I might be interested.’ ‘You called me at 9:00 on a Saturday morning to tell me that??’

Yesterday morning I was borrowing his automatic shaver to work the tricky parts around my knees. ‘There you go again, running down my batteries,’ he remarked. ‘Batteries are expensive, you know. Yup. They don’t just grow on trees. We may have to cut down our ice cream budget just to make up for the extra money we spend on batteries now.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said sleepily. ‘I’ll buy you more batteries today.’ Only later did I realise that it was an electric shaver, which plugs in and recharges and doesn’t need new batteries.

We’re baaaaaack!!

Home at last, and it’s great to be settled once again, nice as the interlude in Florida was. We had a fabulous week. It was great to see everyone again, and we came back with great pictures and memories, suntans, and an addiction to Battlestar Galactica, which happened to be having a season premiere on the one rainy day of the week. It’s a terrible sci-fi series, badly scripted and acted, with impressive special effects and just enough of a plot to keep you guessing. We’re just dying to find out which of the supposed crew members is actually a cylon.

The camp had an archery range this year, a wonderful addition. Nearly every day found us out there dropping arrows. Michael perfected his bulls-eyes. I was happy when I hit the target. Michael actually won the midnight archery tournament toward the end of the week, although he insisted it was a very flaky scoring system. (Okay, so it could have been better organised, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was the best archer of all who participated! Basically they let you score your best three shots out of five, and pretty much let you have as many rounds as you wanted, so you could theoretically keep trying to improve your score indefinitely. Michael took one practise round and then two rounds of shots – same opportunity as everyone else – and won!)

Back to Real Life. We picked up our new rental upon our return. Now, I had joked that after the sleek Volvo we had the week before, anything would seem crummy by comparison, but this car actually is really crummy in its own right. Michael, sitting on the driver side, can touch the passenger door without even leaning over. It reeks of cigarette smoke. It gets terrible gas mileage. (We picked it up full, and within three days, it was empty. I growled that for it to have any kind of decent mileage, it had better have about a four-gallon tank, but no such luck.) And the sound system is pathetic. As Michael said, you know it’s a cheap sound system when you can adjust the volume just by moving your leg (it has a speaker on each door, which you can cover and thus muffle the sound). Hmm, that all sounds terribly whiny. Really, it’s more funny than stressful at this point, and we hope that its stay with us will be of short duration.

So we came back on Saturday, and went on to a surprise birthday party for Michael at Benjamin and Amanda’s place. I had really wanted to plan something fun for him, but it was tricky being out of town the entire week preceding, so I kept dropping ideas to divert his attention. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go out to dinner with Benjamin and Amanda to celebrate your birthday? Hmm, maybe we should just stop at their place and drive to the restaurant together.’ There were lots of friends to wish him well, and we had a great evening full of food, fun, and games.

Baby kicks quite a bit now. Sometimes I think I can identify a head or a foot, but that’s probably just imaginative projection. I am now officially feeling unwieldy and cumbersome.

It’s freezing out, quite literally as well as hyperbolically. Glad to be working indoors. Glad to be living in America, as opposed to Siberia, for instance.

Happy Birthday Michael!!!

Merely the briefest of en passant posts to proclaim the happy tidings that Michael's birthday is today! Happy for the world the day he was born. Happy for me the day I married him. Happy for me every day since then, too.

'First check,' said Pippin grimly.

All is not such sweetness and light with the insurance companies as I had thought at first. We found out this week that my car has been ruled a total loss. Black Rider will ride no more. And now, instead of providing us a rental car for up to thirty days while completely repairing the car and restoring it to us in pre-accident condition, the insurance company gives us an ultimatum of three days from the time we settle our claim with them to return the rental car, and offers us a mere pittance for the value of the car. Going out of town for an unavoidable week in the middle of all this does not help with the timeframe. So it had better really help on the stress front.

Gloomy thoughts. Here are some cheerful thoughts to counteract the despondency.

We opened our personal Christmas presents on New Year's Day. We had agreed, since we spent the big bucks on the TV for each other, to exchange only inexpensive but thoughtful presents for the rest of our Christmas gift. These were a great success. I gave Michael a picture of me for him to take to his office (he's been wanting one for over a year), which I got for free from a coupon, and which I framed with a $2 frame from Goodwill. Michael gave me a CD he burned of some of my favourite tracks from my favourite CDs, so now I have a Best Of collection that has exactly the tracks I want. See, half the fun of exchanging these presents was in gloating over how cheap they turned out to be. Efficiency and thrift are virtues as admired in our house as in the Gilbreth house (Michael read a few chapters from Cheaper By the Dozen aloud to his family while we were there over Christmas. What a great book!)

Baby is very active. Must be healthy. Some people are still surprised to learn that I am pregnant. This is very gratifying. It's not that I'm not glad to be pregnant, but it's terribly reassuring to discover that it's not so obvious as all that. This won't last much longer, I'm sure. But it's nice while it lasts.

I'm up 5+ games of rummy to Michael in the unofficial tournament we've had since getting back from Ohio. We haven't played any more Euchre since I kept losing that. Rummy is such a nice game.

We had such a time of it trying to calculate the total points possible in any given game of rummy. This discussion was started over breakfast one morning this week after a game in which all but two (non-face) cards had been played. One of us had scored 170 and the other 180, so we deduced that there must be 360 total points out there. But we couldn't get the math to add up. Tens through aces scoring 10 points each offered a total of 200 for all the face cards, all suits, and then the nines and below should add up to 180 (9 cards x 4 suits x 5 points per card). We were twenty points off. We laughed long and hard when we realised our error.

It's been such fun reading Christmas letters from friends. I love hearing from people and it's so nice to read my friends' letters just as if they were real grown-ups. Having a Christmas card list is such a grown-up thing. I really, really, really do mean to be good and do it next year. Quotha.

Off to finish packing. Let's see if going off and ignoring the pile of stuff to be done has improved the situation any. Sometimes just ignoring problems makes them go away. Maybe if I go back and look at the bags now I will have clearer insight into what I should pack and everything will be a breeze.

Aloha for now! Have a great week, y'all!

Speak not with a stiff neck

Getting hit by a car is a more grueling ordeal than I've ever suspected.

I've heard of people who do this kind of thing on purpose (like swerving in front of a semi, and then slamming on the breaks to get rear-ended) to extract settlement money from insurance companies. They must be crazy.

The first thing we're grateful for is protection and health. Baby seems to be unaffected and it appears that I am not going to be messed up for life. I'm hurting more than I was the day of (still in shock) but less than I thought I would be the day after. Nothing is broken or even misaligned and it seems to be a straightforward case of hyper-tensed muscles that are just going to take a few weeks to relax. Toward that end, I had a massage therapy appointment on Saturday and it was so helpful. I ended up feeling sorer than ever the next day, almost bruised from the kneading, but the stiffness seemed better. We'll see if I can get another one or two this week. I really don't want to turn up at our family reunion next week unable to tilt or turn my head without pain. ('I feel kind of like an owl,' I told Michael, 'except the opposite.')

The second thing we're grateful for is provision. It looks like one way or another, between them, the insurance companies are going to cover everything and we won't end up being out anything out of pocket. That is a real blessing, since had we been at fault we would have had a steep deductible.

The third thing we're grateful for is the convenience. The day after the wreck, I dropped my car off at the insurance-recommended repair shop (no running around and wasting our whole Saturday getting multiple quotes and estimates to submit to our insurance) and picked up the rental car which was on-site and ready for me. It was all so smooth and painless.

The thing that astounds me the most is how the insurance industry operates. I have the equivalent of a whole essay jumbled up in my head, which I want to write but don't have the time to organise into coherent thought, on the topic of insurance fraud and ethics, just based on my conversations with the claims processors with both insurance companies. I'm sure this is old stuff to my lawyer friends out there, but no wonder insurance costs are so high!!!

So between running around to the doctor, auto place, and getting ready for a week out of town, the blog has been and is going to be sketchy. Don't worry. All is well.

Speaking of thoughts that must be uttered but that require more space and time than currently available (like Rosie Cotton's question that required a week's thought for an answer, or none), having just bought our tickets to Holland this past week at long last, do I ever have a piece of my mind to air about our skymiles credit card!!

Providence

Sometimes it’s the big miracles that catch my attention, but as often as not it’s the little things that make me catch my breath and recognize God’s hand of protection in my life.

For instance, a few months ago, I was driving home from work stressing over something that obviously wasn’t important because I don’t remember it anymore. Probably something ended up costing more than I wanted it to, and I was mentally whining over all this money I didn’t want to be spending, and how stressful my life was. In the midst of my thoughts I felt a slight bump, and realized that I’d let my foot off the brake and drifted gently into the car in front of me. We pulled over, got out, examined our cars, and found not even a scratch. So we didn’t even exchange ID, just ascertained that the other was fine, and drove our separate ways. All the way home I was struck with gratitude at God’s protection of me. He could have taken it all away from me if He had wanted to, but He didn’t. I could so easily have been involved in a major accident that cost us lots of money and endless hassle, and quite honestly, drifting off into thoughts while driving (or looking into the mirror instead of at the road) is perhaps not as uncommon for me as it should be, so the truly amazing thing is that nothing bad had happened to me yet, not the other way around. It was a very welcome reminder that my life is in God’s hands at every moment of every day; it was an experience to put tangibility to the verse, ‘It is of the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed.’

Yesterday on my way to work I was reminded again of the frailty of our earthly security and how our fortunes can change in the twinkling of an eye. I was driving to work and had stopped behind a line of traffic while we waited for what Grace Matte once referred to as a yellow incarceration vehicle (school bus). I heard a wild squealing of brakes and almost immediately felt a jarring impact as a car slammed into me from behind. It was the most serious accident I have ever been involved in, and I was shaking as I pulled over to a safe place. I was about to get out and exchange info with the other driver, and had visions of getting stabbed and left for dead in a hit-and-run….better call someone first to alert them to the situation, I reasoned, so I’d have a card up my sleeve if the other driver proved eager to cover his tracks. (I’m full of instincts about bluffs and cards up your sleeve, and know you never, EVER say ‘no’ if you’re revealing a secret to someone, no matter how much you trust them, and they say, ‘Interesting. And you haven’t told anyone else this yet, correct?’ because that’s the obvious cue that they’re the double-crossing traitor and are going to silence you, so instead you bluff them and say, ‘Actually, I have written out an entire synopsis of my theory, along with proof, and it’s sitting in a safe-deposit box and the key is with a person I trust along with instructions to open and read the contents in the event of my mysterious death or disappearance…’ Yes, all this was going through my head as I pulled over and decided I really should call someone, just in case I ended up dead or missing.) So I called Michael and gave what, in retrospect, probably was not the most comforting or helpful news bulletin. ‘I’ve just been in an accident, but I think I’m okay…don’t worry, I’ll call you when I get a chance.’

It was pretty scary, actually. The back of my car was all smashed in, and we were both rattled as we tried to remember what you do in this situation. I thought we should write down each other’s license plates. But wasn’t there supposed to be an exchange of insurance information, too? (By the way, everyone should read an article about what to do in this type of situation. I thought I had at some point or another, but I didn’t know for sure exactly what to do. Were we supposed to call the police? But no one was hurt, as far as we could tell.) Michael called back then and said that we were supposed to call the police, simply so they could file an accident report. A police officer arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, wrote everything up, gave me his card with the accident report, and told me I could go if my car was drivable.

The really amazing thing is how God has protected us in spite of the serious circumstances. Everyone at work was very sympathetic, supportive, and full of good advice. My boss told me to check in with my doctor even if I felt all right, so I was able to get an appointment with my OB. They were concerned about trauma and possibly premature delivery, so I spent the rest of the afternoon resting in a back room hooked up to a fetal monitor and listening to the soothing sound of Baby’s heartbeat. (Have you ever put a stethoscope over your ears and tapped the sensor pad with your finger to hear the thump? Baby kept kicking the monitor and interrupting the heartbeat with static – sounded very similar.) The insurance company has been great, and is providing a rental car while mine is in the shop – I drop it off tonight at their recommended repair shop, and pick up the rental car that they will have on-site for me. It is all so painless, so easy, so stress-free.

Despite my best intention of not suffering from whiplash, because that seems like such a cliché, and I was positive that if I felt any soreness yesterday it would only come about from the power of suggestion, I really am hurting. More so today than yesterday, my neck and shoulders are really sore and stiff. However, I’m grateful that it wasn’t worse; I’m grateful that Baby is so apparently all right; I’m grateful that everything is being so well taken care of by insurance. Yet another reminder that God governs in the affairs of man.

Sunny days

After the cold and snow of Ohio, this past week back in Atlanta has seemed incredibly breezy and balmy. Of course, with temps in the 60s and the sun shining every day, that perception isn’t far wrong.

Another exciting feature about Christmas this year was that the day after, Michael got to feel Baby’s kicks for the first time. We were sitting on the couch at his parents’ house watching The Court Jester, and Baby started in with a workout routine that I felt certain simply must be perceptible externally. Sure enough, he caught the action, and pronounced it absolutely staggering. Sometimes, when I think it’s big enough to be noticeable and get all excited, Baby takes the cue and falls silent. But Michael catches it enough to notice, and sometimes even provides helpful dialogue – ‘Help! Help! Let me out! I’m trapped!’

2005 has been a wonderful year so far. We rang in the New Year with fun and merriment, had two long weekends in a row, slept in substantially through the course of it all, enjoyed every single Christmas present, and the house is clean and the larder stocked. We’ve played two-handed rummy practically every night while eating our surfeit of Christmas chocolates, and we are getting in the habit of going for a walk around our neighborhood every night. Most nights are clear, and we mean to brush up on our constellations so we can admire them eruditely together. This past week it’s been so mild that we don’t even need jackets, even after dark. Two weeks from now we’ll be in Florida for a reunion with my family, and two months from now – if all goes well – we’ll be preparing to leave for two weeks in Holland with my grandmother. Life is good.

Happy New Year!

Here we are in the brave new world of 2005! Last year was a fabulous year, and it went by so quickly that I fully expect this one to do the same. But the plan is to savour it while it lasts.

We had a wonderful Christmas in Ohio with Michael’s family. Lots of snow. Very cold. We ate lots of good food, watched scads of movies, introduced Michael’s family to The Court Jester, and learned to play euchre and another version of rummy. Came back mid-week, on a much-delayed flight (but I asked for and got a meal voucher, so we got a free milkshake out of the delay), and had only two days of work before it was another long weekend. (The trouble with all these three- and four-day weekends is that they absolutely ruin us for Real Life. I actually feel ripped off that I have to work every blessed day this week.)

Deep thoughts on shallow topics

On Saturday we went to the theatre (yes, the full-price theatre, because we were too impatient to wait for it to come out in the cheap theatre) to catch the matinee of Ocean’s Twelve. Okay, so maybe the plot was less believable than the first time around, but the movie was still incredibly well-made. I kept my eyes open, expecting a surprise at every turn, and still didn’t know what was really going on. Very funny, too. But what strikes me as odd about modern movies is that no matter how general an audience the feature presentation is intended for, they always manage to sneak in at least one scary preview. As soon as the scary people started showing up, I closed my eyes. Michael leaned over and whispered, ‘I don’t care what it’s about – I don’t want to talk about it later!’ Ha! He is referring to my habit of analyzing things that don’t make sense until I have them figured out. (For instance, recently I woke up early on a Saturday morning, struck by a brilliant thought. ‘Michael! I know how you could avoid getting attacked by hordes of mating anacondas in the middle of the jungle if your numbers were dwindling and you couldn’t count on your buddies to shoot them before they latch on to you and start squeezing!’ The problem, you see, is not the venom – they bite you only to get a good grip, so they can wrap themselves around you and start crushing. Usually they are too quick for you to get your arms free, so your arms are pinned to your side and you can’t fight them off or shoot them before they crush you. The solution, obviously, is to strap sharp metal discs to your arms, such that anything that wraps itself around you and starts tightening slices itself to death in the process.)

Later, however, a thought re: latest scary preview occurred to me. ‘You know what the problem was with that movie? The basic premise was that heaven wouldn’t accept him, and hell wants him. That construct doesn’t provide any dramatic tension. For any story to be effective, there has to be conflict and tension. Now, it would be different if BOTH heaven and hell wanted him, or if NEITHER would accept him. But as it stands, there is no dilemma, and hence no story or plot.’ ‘Good,’ Michael said. ‘So we’re not going to talk about it any more, are we?’

A light shineth in the darkness…and the darkness comprehended it not

Hurray for sunlight and laughter on the shortest and darkest day of the year!

Here are some interesting facts about today:

Today is the winter solstice. After today, the days will get longer, although the change in daylight from day to day will be gradual, picking up speed as we approach the equinox. The winter and summer solstices come from a word meaning ‘To stand still,’ because the sun seems to stand still on the plane of the elliptic. Hence the gradual change in daylight.

Although the days get longer, the cold intensifies through January and February. You can remember this little aphorism:

When the days begin to lengthen,
The cold begins to strengthen.

It is dead week at the office. Fortunately vendors and reps are still bringing us edibles on a daily basis. One need hardly bring in a lunch anymore.

A party is a party…but a Christmas party! –

Catherine, having been thwarted in her plans to wear a long blonde wig to our Valentine’s Day party, is planning with all enthusiasm a costume party for New Year’s Eve. In theory I love the idea of a masquerade, although I can’t think of a suitable disguise. It would be really clever if Michael and I could find a theme and dress up to match – like the husband and wife from American Gothic, only that’s way too much trouble. I think I’ll dress up as a pregnant woman with a small pillow stuffed under her shirt.

Catch a falling star

Last night we went for a walk to catch a glimpse of the famed meteor shower. This was rumoured to be the best of the year, better even than the one in August. Although the peak was supposed to be between midnight and dawn, during which there were supposed to be in excess of two shooting stars a minute, we hoped to see a good show before bedtime.

It was bitterly cold. We bundled up, and we were still shivering. But the wonder was well worth the effort. It was a dark and moonless night, and the winter sky shone brightly. (I loved learning, in astronomy class long ago, why it is that there are so many bright stars in the winter sky: because in the winter we are facing outwards, toward the dark emptiness of space, but since our solar system is located on the edge of one of the spiral arms of the galaxy, we are close to the stars in the spiral arm. In the summer, we are facing into the centre of the galaxy, but first we gaze across a vast emptiness of darkness before the Milky Way. So in the summer, you have a splendid sprawl of hazy brilliance but not so many stars of high magnitude, whereas in the winter you have a spectacular line-up of bright stars.) We walked for three minutes before the wind became bitterly cold and we turned back. Before going in we stood for a little while gazing up at the sky. And there was a glorious shooting star which we both saw quite distinctly! It all seemed very magical. 'What are we supposed to do, make a wish or something?' Michael asked. 'I don't know, something special,' I said. So we kissed, and then ran indoors to warmth, blessed warmth.

Speaking of which, plans are underway (we're 2.5 weeks out now, that's a head start compared to last year) for some kind of New Year's Eve party for our circle of newly-married friends, a.k.a. People Who Have Someone To Kiss At Midnight.

Overheard in front of the mirror

Michael: That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing. And a lovely lady inside.
Me: Ha, ha! Maybe two!
Michael: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. We could have a really ugly kid.
Me: How can you say such a thing? Of course our child will be beautiful!
Michael: You never know what kind of recessive genes we have floating around inside of us, love.

Christmas parties, past and present

For the second year in a row I missed the HSLDA Christmas party. I heard it was really great. I hope y'all enjoyed it.

Through no fault of my own Michael has never been. I invited him two years ago, but he turned me down (like a bedspread, as Bertie would say). Something about having to attend a friend's wedding that weekend.

Friday night found us well consoled for missing out on the biggest party of the year, though. We went out to dinner with Benjamin & Amanda and Ron & Catherine to celebrate Benjamin's birthday. The subject of the HSLDA Christmas party came up, and Catherine and I revisited her intern skit of '99, HSLDA Pages of History. 'Remember Mike Smith's page about Scott Woodruff and Doggie Auschwitz?' Ron and Michael looked on while we dissolved into laughter trying to explain how you could always tell when a Mike Smith page was about to come over the airwaves.

Recent history of HSLDA Christmas parties and respective highlights:

1999: The Y2K bug skit. Intern Pages. The first of Tech's unforgettable GroupWise Guys skits (Answer: three walls and a door. Question: What's all that John Moore needs to have a complete office?). Receptionist Jam, where Sherri Wilson donned sunglasses while we jammed to headphones.

2000: In Re: Bear Family, with Darren as a judge, Amy as a redhead, and Dana as a ditzy blonde. Tech's NitWit Mover's spoof of our traumatic move. Sara's first HSLDA Christmas party, and her 'surprise' announcement.

2001: The Twelve Working Days of Christmas ('Yes, that's H as in Harry Potter, S as in Shrek, L as in Legally Blonde, D as in...hello? Hello?'). The conference skit (Kerin Bloom as a gum-chewing Chicken a la King sales rep - 'Elvis Brand chicken'; Jonathan Bechtle as the Airline Nazi - 'No strangulating objects, including shoelaces - this is a velcro-only flight').

2002: New Employee Orientation ('You don't want to work down that hallway. Here's a can of Romance Guard - $10.99 on E-bay.') Tech Dept. runs HSLDA for a day (John Moore pours MiracleGro on Bill Bloom's head; John Bullock pays members to join HSLDA).

And that's where my first-hand experience drops off. I did hear, however, that this year's party was the biggest yet, that the skits were funny and my own brother did a cameo in one of them, and that Jim Mason won the Co-Laborer of the Year award. I sincerely hope, since all the skits were taped this year, to get a copy someday.

Sunday night found us at our Sunday school's Christmas party. We met at the church, had more than enough food (as always happens at potlucks), and enjoyed a rousing white elephant gift exchange. It was so satisfying, because we brought two gifts that seemed pretty blah to us - but which were a surprising hit and got stolen to the limit - and came away with a brand-new DVD. 'Tis the season!

On the ancient Greeks

As part of their schoolwork, my brothers are now presenting some form of public speaking every week: their choice of a speech, a recitation, a poetry reading (yeah, right), etc. 7-year-old Thomas wrote out his own speech:

GReeKS WeRe PeOPLe WHO WeReNt EXACtLY SUPeRStItIOUS BeCAUSe tHe AZteCS AND MAYANS SACRIFICeD HUMANS BUt GReeKS SACRIFICeD ANIMALS WItH tHeIR GODS tHEY WeRe A LIttLe BIt SUPeRStItIOUS BUt tHE MAYANS AND tHe ASteCS WeRe BAD tAKING OUT BEAtING HeARtS tHe ANIMALS tHAt tHe GReeKS SACRIFICeD WeRe SINLeSS BUt tHe GReeK StILL KILLeD tHeM.

In a recent email, Joseph told me, 'We are now studying the ancient Greeks, soon to be ancient Romans.' Apparently he thought the ancient Greeks actually turned into Romans, instead of being conquered by them.

Road rage and deadly force

We had an interesting conversation while shopping over the weekend. Traffic was busy, and at one point Michael switched lanes, where there was a perfectly good opening. He used his turn signal, and traffic was moving slowly enough that no one had to slam on brakes to make room for us. However, the driver behind us did not appreciate our invasion of what he apparently considered his privacy bubble, and expressed his disapproval most strongly and sustainedly. He honked loudly and repeatedly, flashed his lights at us, and gunned his engine while tail-gating us closely, for perhaps fifteen seconds. 'Temper, temper!' I said. 'Bite me,' Michael said.

Nothing further came of it, fortunately, but Michael remarked later, 'So if he had started ramming us, would that have occasioned me hopping out and shooting him?'

'Surely not!' was my first reaction. 'I don't think that would count as self-defense.'

Michael pointed out that the supersize truck was substantially bigger than our car, and could have totaled our car had it gotten violent. Such aggression would constitute deadly force. I wasn't sure that we would really have been at risk of death under such a circumstance. After all, we were seatbelted in, right?

'If he had really started coming after us, he could have rammed us, set the car spinning, and easily crumpled through the body of the car, killing us. Or he could have rammed the car off the overpass.'

'Well, but by the time you had jumped out of the car to shoot him, you would be free of the car and the imminent danger would have passed, right?'

'If we were outside of the car, we would be sitting ducks. It's much easier to run down and kill a pedestrian. So if we were getting out of the car, it would be to stop him.'

Next I thought that jumping out of the car, smashing the driver's window, and yelling, 'Stop or I'll shoot!' would be enough to halt his rampage. (I'm always of the opinion that the mere sight of a gun should stop an attacker dead in his tracks. Michael always reminds me that the only way you can be sure of stopping an attacker dead in his tracks with a gun is by shooting him. 'If you pull a gun, you have to be prepared to use it. Pulling a gun without intent to use it is worse than useless - it's an invitation to wrest the gun from you.') I also suggested the possibility of dialing 911 as soon as the attack started - 'Help! I'm being rammed by a vehicle - license plate ### - if I get out he'll run me down and if I stay he'll wreck my car, not to mention me - what should I do?' Michael observed that there wouldn't be time to get any police help from a 911 call, and that you don't call 911 to ask permission to shoot someone in self-defense.

Hmmm. Is puzzlement. If I were certain that we were at risk of being killed, then certainly shooting in self-defense would be justified. Next I thought that the problem arose from determining the intent of the aggressive driver. But even that doesn't cover it. He could be so angry that he was actually out to kill us, or he could just be expressing his anger such that killing us was an unintended side-effect. 'Deadly force' doesn't mean force applied with the intent to make you dead, but force with the capacity to make you dead.

Well, I guess it's a good thing he didn't start ramming us.

A study in exasperation

Last weekend Michael and I finally purchased a 'new' TV. This is something we've been looking forward to for the last year, ever since we decided that a TV didn't make the first cut of priorities from all the wedding present gift cards and such. We wanted to get the right model, so we took our time and planned carefully and saved up and researched for the perfect TV that would meet our needs, be nice enough to want to keep for many years, and be modern enough to accommodate the changing technology demands of the next few years without being so close to the cutting that it would be horrifically expensive. Our current TV turns ten years old this year, and isn't compatible with modern DVDs - older videos that have been made into DVDs without getting digitally remastered, such as our A&E P&P or Bertie & Jeeves, work fine, but most new releases flicker badly, so we pretty much have to watch anything on DVD on the office computer. So this will definitely be a welcome Christmas present to each other.

There we were in the electronics department, and Michael found the perfect model - big enough, but not so big as to be pretentious; HDTV compatible, which is apparently going to be important a few years down the road; sleek and silver; and best of all, discounted at a great price. It was an open box model, meaning that it had been purchased and then returned, so it couldn't be re-sold as new, even though it was essentially brand-new. I do love bargains. We tried to take it home that day, but it didn't fit in my car, so Michael came back the next day with his truck. When we finally got it home and unwrapped it, Michael noticed several scratches and other minor cosmetic defects on the front and side panels that certainly weren't there when we saw it in the store. Obviously, this must have occurred when they tried unsuccessfully to load it up the first time - I must admit, I had my doubts when I saw them trundling the TV out there on a barren dolly, with no padding or wrapping at all. 'I wonder whether we could call them up and demand a further discount?' Michael pondered. Good idea - we even looked at the label, and it was clearly labeled Used but clearly NOT labeled Damaged. Certainly if it had looked defective in the store, we would have asked about getting a cosmetic discount. So yesterday when I got home from work, I gamely sat down in front of the computer and dialed the store.

By the end of the next hour, I had decided that, regardless of how willing I was to overlook or forgive any cosmetic imperfections in our new TV's sleek silver exterior, I was by jingo going to demand a discount just for the time spent in addressing the problem. The saga became reminiscent of The Place That Sends You Mad, from The Twelve Tasks of Asterix. The trouble was that I was deeply into the mire before I fully grasped the absurdity and ridiculousness of the situation, so it wasn't until about half an hour in that I started writing down times, phone calls, and names.

It started innocently enough. 'Hi. I need to talk to someone in the Electronics Department,' I said brightly enough, after spending about three minutes navigating the phone system and finally getting a live person, the operator. I was transferred and the call was lost. Repeat scenario (another three minutes). This time I made sure to ask that she call over there first and make sure someone was there to answer. Turns out the electronics department's phone was out of order (at this point, early on, I was still amused enough to chuckle privately at the irony of the electronic department's phone being out of order, who of all people should be able to fix or replace it) and all the associates over there were busy anyway. 'Well, then I need to speak to a manager.' I was told I was being transferred to customer service. Hold. Then, 'I'm sorry, but that line is busy. Please hold while I try again.' (A recording.) The attempt was not successful. 'We are unable to transfer your call. Please call again later.' Argh. Another three minutes. This time the question of the TV was shadowed by the question of the phone system. 'Hi, I called just a moment ago. I need to speak to someone in electronics, but don't transfer me there because their phone doesn't work. Please get me a manager and make sure someone picks up.' 'Of course, ma'am.' And we had the same scenario all over again. Three more minutes. This time I am more explicit. 'I need to speak with a manager, and I need for you not to transfer me, but to put me on hold. I have called several times, and each time I call the call is lost.' So I finally got to talk to someone, and was about a minute into explaining my tale - to which he was sympathetic, at least: 'Oh, dear. That's not good. Yes, let me look this up for you. Do you have your receipt? What was the transaction ID? Let me put you on hold a moment while I look this up'- and there I was, cut off by the same busy recording. The situation was clearly becoming unreal. I called again. At this point I began taking names, so that there would be a clear paper trail should history repeat itself. I started from square one again with some other manager or sales associate, who was likewise sympathetic but with whom my conversation was again cut short by the untimely interruption of the busy recording. At this point I became convinced that it was not just the electronics department with a defective phone. 'Hi. I have been trying to call for the last forty-five minutes-' 'I'm so sorry, ma'am!' (Very friendly, helpful people! All of them! They just have a wretched phone system!) 'That's okay, but I just need to get through to someone. Please page a manager, make sure someone live picks up, and do not try to transfer the call.' No good. I am halfway through explaining my situation when the phone cuts me off. By now I am more than a little pipped. We go through the whole voice mail saga again. Once again I talk to a live person, who asks cheerfully, 'How may I direct your call?' Okay, a normal conversation is obviously not going to happen on this turf. 'Hello. I need you to take my name and number, and have a manager call me back immediately on a cell phone. I have spent the last hour on the phone trying to reach someone, and your phone system has consistently cut me off. Please have a manager call me back immediately.' 'All right ma'am, hold just one moment.' 'No, don't put me on hol....' No use. Busy. I repeat this scenario a few times, until I can get someone to believe me when I say, 'Do not transfer me and do not put me on hold. I need you to take my name and number and have a manager call me back.' Then this paragon of a helpful person reveals to me that it is not a function of the hold, nor of the transfer, but of the fact that the phone line cuts off after three minutes when the call comes in through the switchboard. I am floored. My problem cannot be explained in less than three minutes. 'That is why I need you to take my name and number and have a manager return my call on a valid line.' She transfers me to someone who offers to page a manager for me, and I barely manage to leave my number before the phone cuts off. At this point I conclude to leave well enough alone and hope that someone with whom I left my number will make sure a manager calls me back.

I cannot recall ever experiencing a runaround as bad as this before. And I was glad to note that even though I was frustrated with the situation, I was never inclined to be mad with the people themselves. Michael came in toward the end of some of my conversations, and I even asked him, 'Did you think I sounded mad? Because I wasn't, really, and was trying to achieve the right tone of firmness without irritation.' I've been on the answering end of a phone enough to know that angry callers accomplish nothing by belligerence or impatience, besides making helpless underlings who had nothing to do with the original problem feel miserable.

Perseverance pays off. Later that evening I did indeed get a call back from a manager who apologised handsomely for the confusion and offered an additional 10% off the purchase. I think that was worth an hour of my life.

Remember Pearl Harbor

Also remember Earl Hall's birthday, which falls on a most memorable date. Well do I remember decorating his office four years ago today with Lindsay, Kevin, Nathan, and Megan - no, no, we decorated his office with streamers and balloons and confetti. His first comment on coming in the next morning: 'What a mess.'

Also memorable is Daniel and Rachel's wedding, two years ago today. Were they the first PHC students to get married? Well, to each other, anyway. A winter wedding is such a gamble, but if it comes off - as it did splendidly - it can be so grand. Snow on the ground and sun in the sky and Christmas decorations up all over the dining hall...it was the perfect day for it.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

...but judging from the previews, the new Tim Allen movie Christmas with the Kranks looks really, really stupid.

My cell phone battery has been running down something awful lately. It seems unable to sustain a charge for any length of time and is constantly running on low battery. Apparently this is because of something called battery memory retention, or something like that, which I knew about in the context of laptop computer batteries because I once sat through a whole meeting on it but which I never thought to apply to cell phone batteries. Basically if you plug in your cell phone before the battery is completely run down, your battery will remember how low it ran and set that level as its new 'dead battery' level. So gradually you lose battery charge. This does not make sense. I don't want my cell phone battery to remember things like this. How about if my car worked like this? I explained this to Michael. 'Say I'm half a tank down, and it's not going to be convenient for me to fuel up for awhile. So if the car worked like my cell phone, if I fill up the car now, I lose half my tank capacity! And every time I decide not to tempt Fate by running as close to empty as possible - poof! That much more tank capacity gone! What this battery memory thing does, in essence, is to punish thinking ahead! By that reasoning, the Foolish Virgins were on the right track after all, not buying extra oil until they had run out of the current batch!'

Rudolph the Unlikely Social Hit

The legend of Rudolph and Santa’s sleigh is charming, if you like that sort of thing, and as long as you don’t believe in it; and it’s kind of fun to be able to rattle off all of Santa’s reindeer. But the song itself has always annoyed me for being a completely unrealistic portrayal of human social interactions. (Perhaps that’s a bit of an unfounded gripe, considering that the song is actually about animals. Okay, okay! But start imposing human characteristics on animals, and it’s impossible to miss the role-playing.)

These beastly little beasts are obviously portraying young children, perhaps at the junior high stage. They have their snobby little pecking order and their exclusive Santa clique going strong, when along comes an outsider who wants to play with them. Not only is it an outsider, though, but it’s a problematic outsider, who sports a very obvious physical abnormality. You just know Rudolph couldn’t be any more of an outcast if he had worn glasses. So far, so standard. But then along comes an authority figure and picks out Rudolph to be Special, and suddenly all the little beasts love him? How ridiculous is that? The sharks circling for blood are only going to be more likely to despise and reject him now that he’s become Teacher’s Pet. Did Santa really think he was doing Rudolph a favour by picking him out for special attentions?

What bothers me about this yarn is that little kids who don’t know any better are going to identify with poor little Rudolph. Who wouldn’t? He’s the underdog, the unlikely hero – of course we’re all rooting for him. But the Santa myth holds out the illusion that the answer to unpopularity lies in securing the attentions of someone important, someone who cares, someone who can elevate you to prominence, at which point social affirmation and adoration will simply pour in. So this insidious little jingle reinforces the notion that it matters what other people think, that it’s important to be liked, and that our self-worth is directly linked to how important and accepted we are in the eyes of our peers. Why can’t the poor little lambs be taught, instead, that their identities are not irrevocably linked to who likes them or to temporal external physical characteristics, but are inextricably rooted in the truth and nature of their Creator? Why set them up to dream about the great Santa tapping them to lead his sleigh and put an end to all their troubles when the Lord of all Creation has already chosen them from before the beginning of time to be His children?

So I guess what really bothers me about this song is that the Santa myth attempts to cover for the stark realities of fallen human nature with humanistic feel-good platitudes about universal love and peace. It’s substituting a false god for the overwhelming greatness and sufficiency of the Creator, and that wears a little thin.

Whew. I don’t know where all that came from. I’m sure it’s a perfectly harmless little jingle.

Ah, distinctly I remember...

Wednesday night is my office Christmas party. Nothing spectacular, just going out to dinner at a nice restaurant, which of course is fun and all that but doesn't involve any skits or barbershop quartets. I looked up the place - Little Gardens - online this morning, and it appears to be quite the pacifist place - the website described in great detail the 'anti-bellum' plantation-style estate, which was perfect for weddings. Hmm. Well, it looks elegant, anyway, and should afford a good feast. We don't know yet when Michael's office Christmas party is because it still hasn't been decided. Last year I think we found out the week before.

Christmas shopping and decorating continue apace. We have made great strides, but my attention span has waned considerably, and we still don't have the tree up. We decorated up at the office on Friday, and that put me into a jolly holiday mood, all enthused and inspired to do up our house. Somehow the weekend slipped away without much progress on that front, though. On the plus side, the house is clean and we're supplied with a fresh supply of edibles for the week. Priorities, priorities!

Mitch came up to Michael at Sunday school yesterday and said, 'Hey, if you need any help with putting up your Christmas lights...don't call me!' Apparently they had a real decorating push this weekend, to mixed success. Mitch described renting an extension ladder to string the lights along the peak of the eaves, and recounted how he had finally attached the last of them, climbed down the ladder, and pulled it away from the house...only to have the ladder catch on the lights and rip them off. The lights came crashing into the driveway and half the bulbs shattered. Our Sunday school leader chimed in that the exact thing had happened to him, too! So, Christmas light enthusiasts, take warning!

Over the weekend we went out to the cheap theatre to see Captain Sky and the World of Tomorrow. It was a very cleverly done 40s-era comic book adventure. I loved the classic 40s hats and styles and the black-and-white gritty cinemactography: it was a unique juxtaposition of futuristic technology and retro culture. There was an occasional big, big D, but overall it was very clean.

Get it right already

BlogSpot has apparently been having some problems lately. Earlier this week I had the dickens of a time trying to post comments on various blogs, and ended up giving up on most of the attempts. For the last two days I've been trying to Enable my Profile, to no avail. I wasn't going to make much of it, just show my real name and specify my gender (both already apparent), but it doesn't take when I click the Save My Profile button. Do these people think I have no life? I may check my blog ten times a day, but do I have the time to mess with the behind-the-scenes nonsense? As if!

I do love hearing non-stop Christmas music all day long. I love the Christmas carols and the jolly holiday spirit dispensed. But I wish some of the recordings wouldn't try so hard to push the envelope of creativity. I suppose they're trying to give a unique twist to a song that's been released in at least thirty other Christmas albums already - give it some deformity so it will be personalised with a mark of ownership. But honestly, the reason the song is such a classic must be that it was written right the first time! Therefore it is not necessary to scatter rests, holds, and (most annoying of all) innumerable superfluous flourishes and warbles wantonly throughout the music. Any artist who tries to cram more than three notes into the one-syllable 'of' from 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' is overusing his poetic license, in my opinion.

So...do you approve or disapprove of going up a whole step on 'This' in 'What Child is This?' as opposed to the traditional half-step?

Growing and glowing

That's how one pregnancy book describes the second trimester. Well, we have the growing part down all right. We have officially moved past the 'Blah stage' into the 'Ravenously hungry stage.'

Speaking of food (though it doesn't take the mention of food to make me think of it) I am all set for the Christmas festal board. Right now I'm in the mood for eggnog and almond roca. I am heartily missing this season from the days of yore when I'd breeze through the office every day and not even need to pack a lunch for the over-abundance of treats scattered throughout the various lunch rooms. Ginger assures me that very soon, the vendors here will start bringing in Christmas baskets. I hope the vendors have good taste and bring us a sparkling array of crackers and cheese, nuts, meats and sausage balls, cookies, chocolates, popcorn, and fruits. I could certainly do with an overflowing cornucopia.

More Random Lists

Names I Was Surprised to Discover Were In The Bible:

Malcolm
Jared
Jason
Jemima

Useful Things I Have Learned From Michael:

* Do not throw away the plastic liner from the graham cracker crust you buy from the store. When you finish filling the pie crust, the liner, inverted, becomes the lid.
* Use knuckles instead of fingertips for pushing things like microwave buttons, elevator summons, etc. This not only preserves the cleanliness of your fingertips in case you need to rub your eyes later on, but ensures that you won't go around leaving your fingerprints on surfaces.

Not-So-Useful Things I Have Learned From Michael:

* Two of the friends on Friends are brother and sister.

It's a lo-o-o-ng day in the world...

The afternoon is slowly crawling by, as if it just emerged from the primeval sludge and hasn't fully developed its legs yet. Molasses and tar pits! Why can't it be 5:00 already?

At least the radio is playing Christmas music. At last.

I really like secular Christmas music. I love the Christian Christmas carols, of course, but there's something catching about the classic Christmas tunes. Two years ago we watched the movie White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. It was a great movie, although the song I remember the most wasn't the classic White Christmas but Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me.

Love, you didn't do right by me.
As they say in the song,
You done me wrong.

Somehow it suited my cynical streak, delivering just the perfect dose of Bah humbug.

Which reminds me, we have to go log a Christmas tree this weekend and it's going to cost us at least five times as much as trees cost in Oregon. Can you believe that when we lived next to a tree farm, we could cut our own tree for $1/ft? It's almost enough to drive one to artificial trees with fake fresh pine scent. And we also need to string white Christmas lights on our house. Why didn't we string lights up last year and just leave them on? Blah humbug.

Unmetred verse

For some reason I felt inspired to toss off a few lines of rant and rave, a la Ogden Nash.

Why do people approaching doorways at the same time as me feel compelled to give me such a wide berth?
Do they automatically assume that just because I am pregnant, I must necessarily have a substantial girth?
It’s so much nicer when people tell me I am not showing at all.
Such compliments are calculated to bring a pleased flush to cheeks that were not glowing at all.
It’s said that trials and tribulations and such experiences can expand our borders, metaphorically;
But that that principle is turning out to be a bit too literal in my case I can state, categorically.

Dragville

There is a home video that Leah and I watched when we went out to Oregon for Thanksgiving 2001, of Uncle Brad and Aunt Rosanne doing a 'candid' interview. With typical quirky Brad humour, the scene in question consisted of Brad and Rosanne sitting side by side staring blankly at the camera; somehow Brad had manipulated it so that there was the clip art of a big red heart cut-out surrounding them. 'Well, here we are, Rosie,' Brad began. 'Sitting in the middle of a big red heart.' 'Oh, groan,' Rosanne said. 'It's Monday tomorrow. Blah. Pit City. Dragville. Monday!' 'You might as well get used to it,' Brad said. 'I bet you spend at least 1/7 of your time on Mondays. In fact, you probably spend ten years of your life on Mondays!' That's a great line to quote whenever I'm inclined to feel azure about Mondays. This Monday wouldn't be so bad if it didn't follow up on four days of partying and laziness. There's nothing like a four-day weekend to spoil a good work ethic.

On Thursday morning we got up (not too early, thankfully; last whirlwind visit to Virginia we swore off early morning flights once and for all) and finished packing, and flew into Reagan National Airport. It was only the second time I'd ever landed there, and the first time was unintentional. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner of turkey and co. with family, and then sat around digesting all evening. Michael and some of the boys set up a game of Axis and Allies. Toward the evening we ran out to HSLDA to look around and see how much had changed, and endeavoured to buy a paper on the way home to ascertain the sales. There was no paper to be had, not even for ready money. We spent nearly an hour chasing geese, and finally returned empty-handed. So much for the biggest shopping day of the year.

Friday we spent with relatives and friends alike. Saturday the menfolk went to see the Air and Space Museum Annex while we ladies had tea with Mrs. Smith. I shall never fail to be impressed with Mrs. Smith's hospitality, graciousness, elegance, and cultivation. You recall Darcy's definition of a woman of accomplishment - the cultivation and improvement of her mind by extensive reading? Mrs. Smith exemplifies this to a nicety. The spread laid before us recalled to mind the glory and splendour of book tea, dearly cherished and keenly missed. It's amazing how filling trifles and tidbits can add up to be. On Sunday we went to church and got to see so many dear familiar faces. The time was far too short and I wish we could have lingered longer. However, we had a pleasant afternoon of eating popcorn and playing Scotland Yard. Michael was introduced to this game two years ago, during the first Thanksgiving he spent with my family, and made so bold as to play Mr. X this time. He did quite well, attaining the bottom of the second column before capture, despite being dealt an inconveniently located starting tile. Benjamin also took a turn at villainy, evading us for an impressive length of time. His final demise lay in failing to notice that a bus line ran between two critical points. Well, the web was tightening, anyway.

Our flight left at 8:05 from Reagan. Not sure of what to expect in terms of crowds, we left in plenty of time. It turned out to be a breeze. The airport was dead and security a veritable walk-through. We reached our gate well in time, and then Michael had the happy thought to wander over to another gate where the 7:05 flight to Atlanta was boarding, and ask whether we could fly stand-by on that one. Genius! Amazingly enough, they had room, and we arrived home an hour ahead of schedule, with no rush or frenzy and no wasted time on the front end. It was much the pleasantest flight in recent memory, in terms of ease of boarding, comfort level of the plane (cosy to my thinking, stuffy to Michael's), selection of beverages (whole milk!), brevity of flight time, and deliciousness of airport food. Despite saving an hour, though, it was still far too late when we got home and brutally early this morning. Yawn. Well worth the weekend, though.

Gratitude

On Monday we went to the doctor for my monthly checkup. We had so much other stuff to take care of (dental appointments, courthouse stops, etc.) that had to be done during business hours that we both took off the whole day to knock it all out at once. The benefit was that Michael was able to see the sonogram too. It was truly an amazing experience. Even more so than the first time, Baby is now very distinctly human. The technician was on a mission to get all the shots she needed, so she kept stopping at shots and typing in ‘Stom’ or ‘Blad’ with little arrows pointing to the pertinent parts. In between the freeze frames, while she was vying for the right angle, we got to watch live time images of our baby kicking, curling its fingertips, and pursing its lips. It was amazing to watch all the activity going on and to admit, ‘I can’t feel a thing.’ ‘Shouldn’t I be feeling that?’ I yelped, as Baby took a big swing upwards and kicked away with both feet. ‘How oblivious could I be?’ Apparently Baby is not very strong yet, and the environment is so cushioned and weightless that the impact is minimal.

Life is full of ups and downs, of course. I try not to wait until Thanksgiving each year to count my blessings, but endeavor to cultivate a spirit of gratitude and contentment whenever I’m tempted to do a little wistful gazing down the road. Sometimes it’s easier than at other times to maintain a level perspective, or what I call ‘a good dose of Pippin-style unquenchable cheerfulness.’ (‘There is a crumb of comfort in all this, at least, and perhaps more than a crumb: now we can sit down to breakfast.’ This after the Black Riders ravage their rooms and set loose all their ponies and spoil the start of their secret journey. Why can’t I always look on the bright side of things like that?)

So I’m grateful for the adventure that lies before us. We knew that having a baby would change our lives, but it’s impossible to grasp the full impact – it still keeps dawning on us in little ways, like when we were setting our next dental appointments for six months from now, and at first we went for the same time slot: just like on Monday, if we have simultaneous appointments, then we can drive together, save time, and be more efficient. Until I remembered, ‘Oh, wait, we’ll have the baby then…we’d better stagger our appointments, so we can take turns with the baby.’ That’s a consideration we haven’t had to make heretofore! And yet, though we could choose to see this as an impingement on our liberty, I am finding it an exciting and incredible chance for adventure – this is uncharted territory! All those years when I was pretty generally happy, content, perhaps occasionally complacent, even bored, what I most feared was falling into a rut. Now change is inevitable, and that makes Life very interesting.

I can’t help cataloguing all the specific things to be thankful for this year – good jobs, nice house, healthy baby, satisfying election results – and yet these are all part and parcel of the big picture, which is simply to acknowledge that God is sovereign. If it were a rotten year, if times were tough, wouldn’t it still be incumbent upon us to give thanks in all things? So not only do we have the underlying assurance and comfort of His blessing, come what may, but we also happen to have the temporal and very gratifying blessing of happiness in our present circumstances. And that’s just icing on the cake.

A blessed Thanksgiving to one and all!

Of strawberries and cream

Several days ago Baby decided that we desperately needed some fresh strawberries. Baby has rather limited capability in this regard, so I was commissioned to carry out the venture. There followed a long, epic-like strawberry quest, which rivaled the strawberry caper conducted by the Roman centurion in Asterix the Gaul. Fortunately I was able to identify the exact context in which the strawberries were required: fresh, ripe, sweet, and ground up into a milkshake. On Saturday I spotted a lovely picture of a strawberry shake at the Atlanta Bread Company. We were on the right track. But no strawberry-flavoured drink would do: we had to make our own, from fresh, ripe, sweet strawberries. Michael was very impressed at how refined Baby's tastes were, and offered to run to the grocery store and pick up a carton of strawberries. This wouldn't do, however, as grocery store strawberries are notoriously expensive and unripe. We decided to hold out until Monday, when we would be going by the farmer's market in hopes that fresh, ripe, sweet strawberries could be found.

Yesterday was a day unto itself, but the upshot of it was that there were no fresh, ripe, sweet strawberries to be found, not even for ready money. This was a crushing blow indeed. As a final resort, we stopped by the grocery store to look and found pitiful, pathetic little flats of unripe, greenish, sickly-looking strawberries for the iniquitous price of $4.99 per carton. Baby wasn't very impressed, and I wearily concurred. The quest ended in failure, arduous and fruitless.

Upon returning home, Baby decided that the idea of a milkshake was a sound one, despite there being no strawberries, so we decided on a chocolate-peanut butter shake as consolation prize. No recipe exists for this shake, but we knew what to do by instinct: we poured milk, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, peanut butter, and leftover vanilla ice cream into the blender, and ended up with a really smooth, delicious, chocolatey-peanut buttery milkshake that almost made up for the lack of strawberries. Almost. In the process we spattered the counter and cupboards with chocolate spray (Duh! That's why the side of the blender is clear, so you can see the progress without opening the lid!), burned the 7-layer bars we were baking for my office Thanksgiving party tomorrow (Moral: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush = a dessert in the oven is worth two in the blender - never neglect the one in your excitement over the other), and broke the ice cream scoop in our eagerness - back to using the melon-baller we used when we first got married. We retired from the field of battle victorious but weary. Oh, well. It's a short work-week, and there will be good food aplenty on Thursday.

Posted on our vending machine

Typed up nicely: Out of order, sorry.
Scrawled underneath: That's okay.
Scribbled underneath that: No it's not.

Largess

I've discovered a new line of graft: simple, highly effective, seemingly endless potential for returns. I've decided to share my success story only upon the reflection that the majority of my readership are (is? are? Arrgh!) not local and thus in no danger of cutting in on my market. The scheme is this: Get pregnant, and wait for the returns to come rolling in.

Suddenly people are flooding me with attention, food, services, and, most importantly, clothes. At least once a week someone offers to stand me lunch, and hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't offer to bring me something from the snack machine. Or they're sharing their bag of chips. Or making sure I have enough to drink, or eat, and of the right nutritional composition. Most amazingly, though, is the clothes situation. Somewhat put off by the steep prices - albeit cute styles - of maternity clothes that day we went shopping a few weeks ago, I fell into a brown study on the topic of my maternity wardrobe, contemplating with almost wistful regret (O me of little faith!) the thought that, if we were living in Virginia, no doubt the stones themselves would rise up and flood me with maternity clothes - but alas, starting off in a new community, with friends of the right size mostly in a stage of life not to be getting rid of maternity clothes...well, it was too bad, but there you had it. And yet, this past month has positively been a meteorogical study in the phenomenon of the opening of the windows of Heaven, as several ladies from work have brought in assorted collections of pants, sweaters, and dresses that more or less work, and should work for at least the next three months. It's like Christmas every day!

Pictures forthcoming

This is to assure Sarah that we do have pictures to post. They are saved on our computer at home, and we even spent a few minutes last night trying to figure out how to put them on the blog. We signed up for something called Picasa, which promised to make emailing and posting pictures easy, but after three disillusioning minutes of following directions, wearily clicking on Yes after Yes, only to have no pictures magically appear on the blog, we gave up and decided it was time for bed anyway. If some kind soul who has managed the trick would like to post a comment with instructions for simpletons, it would be much appreciated. Ideally there should be a post with a link to click on to open a photo gallery, as opposed to pictures splat on the blog homepage, which might make things too slow for those with slow computers.

Quid? Quid?

A great shout of rejoicing ought to be going up throughout the land, because for the first time in a generation – perhaps the first time ever – the Asterix books are being re-printed in America. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get Asterix books in the States? Most of my collection comes from England or Canada, procured through E-bay or Amazon. Now Orion Paperbacks is rising to the occasion and printing the whole series, the English translation, at a very affordable price. This is the original series all right, with a few minor typographical changes, the most lamentable being the lack of diversity in the type (in the original English manuscripts, the Goths speak in Gothic script, the Norwegians speak in Norse script, and so on. Obliterating this twist removes a small but funny joke from the series).

Asterix can readily be described as high-class comic books, highbrow humour in a classic form. Each time I read through one of these books I discover something fresh to laugh at and am amazed anew at the profundity and wit, not only of the authors, but of the translators, who managed to pull off the most brilliant puns and classical allusions from the original Italian.

What I would really like to see, someday, is a complete annotated and footnoted Asterix collection, to explain to me things like the following:

In 'Asterix the Legionary' the pirates' ship is sunk by Asterix and Obelix (again). The image of the pirates on a raft in mid-ocean is derived from a 19th Century French Romantic painting, now in the Louvre, 'The Raft of the Medusa' by Géricault. In the French version the pirate captain says to the reader 'Je suis médusé' ('I'm stunned'). In English this is rendered equally cleverly as 'We've been framed, by Jericho.'

Even if these details escape one at first (or seventh) reading, surely the most unclassified mind can appreciate such lines as ‘This is a bitter pilum to take, by Jupiter’ (from a legionary about to get speared) or laugh at an Egyptian named Ptennisnet. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of perusing an Asterix book, I offer you the advice of Scrooge re: the prize turkey: ‘Go and buy it, my boy.’

Brrr!

Frost is on the grass every morning now, and today there was mist on my way to work. Yesterday I wore sandals, and my toes froze. I knew it was a foolish notion, but I had just painted my toenails; 'And what,' said Lasaraleen, 'is the good of a new dress if no one's going to see it?'

The nice thing about the second trimester is that I'm not really into maternity clothes yet - next size up, normal clothes, works fine on most things, especially with low-rise pants and skirts. Yesterday Becky brought me a whole bag of pants she no longer wore, and it felt like Christmas as I dumped them out across the bed. Michael stood by and offered commentary - 'No good - those don't have any belt loops. How do you expect them to stay up?' This in reference to an ongoing conversation we have about belts, begun in an IM chat once when I remarked, 'Weirdness. Can you imagine pants not staying up without a belt?' I contend that belts are a mere accessory, nothing more than an ornamental flourish, while Michael thinks they actually hold pants up. One morning, soon after we were married, I told him, 'You know, girls don't put on their pants that wasteful way, one leg at a time. We jump into them both feet at once! Twice as fast!' I haven't managed to convince him of this yet, however.

A merry heart

1 Chronicles chapter 4 is a really funny chapter. In fact, it's absolutely hysterical if you read it late at night in a silly mood. This we discovered last night as we read our daily Bible chapter together. It started off in verse 3 with the most priceless name I can recall in recent history: Hazelelponi. Michael pronounced this as 'Has-a-lil'-pony,' and we both erupted into laughter. Throughout the rest of the chapter one of us would suddenly think of the name, and start laughing again until the tears came to our eyes. Then there was Coz. Inspired by our spoiled little rich girl whose daddy bought her a pony, I giggled, 'Why did his mother name him that? Just Coz!' Ha ha ha! Er, of course, we had already met in Genesis, but I had never noticed before how stammery his name sounded. Next we met 'Just jokin' Jokim, who lived 'among plants and hedges' (toadstools maybe?) Ah, me, and I thought 1 Chronicles 4 was all about Jabez.

Parents’ rights – but which parents?

Recently I’ve been considering an overhaul of our country’s adoption laws. I admit I’m not terribly familiar with the details of the laws. But I know of at least one state where, up to six months after the adoption transaction is completed, the birth mother can change her mind and demand the baby back.

Now, I know this is a terribly sensitive issue. We should all want what’s best for the child, and a rational viewpoint demands the assumption that individuals (read: the child’s parents) can make this decision far better than the State. If a child’s biological parents decide to keep their child, isn’t that their decision, regardless of whether we feel the child will be better off elsewhere?

I’m all for parents’ rights. And I certainly applaud those mothers who choose to keep their children. My concern is for the prospective adoptive parents who go through the agony and the ecstasy of believing that they were finally blessed with a child, only to have the baby torn from them, even after they have taken him home.

It seems that in an effort to protect the interests of the biological parents, the State (using the term generically, since I’m still not sure if it’s mostly federal or state legislation) has erred on the side of doing wrong to adoptive parents. Why do we feel compelled to install such a failsafe plan in our adoption process as to enable someone to change his mind after the fact and back out of a contractual agreement? Is it based on our society’s fascination with no-risk, money-back guarantees, the notion that if you change your mind, you can still get what you want, at whatever cost to the other party? It seems that those considering adoption should be warned, as are those contemplating marriage, that this is a serious decision, not to be made lightly but soberly and reverently; and that, once the die is cast, they are left with the consequences.

Tempus fugit

Last Christmas Michael's 12-year-old nephew Jacob gave us a can of ant & roach spray. According to the package, it 'Kills up to two weeks.' This is a very useful function for, say, Eric, who, due to his Iraq tour last year, has accumulated far more vacation time than he is likely to need and which he needs to use up by the end of the year. He was even planning a visit to see us in an effort to use up some of this time. Michael offered to send him the can of spray if he needed to kill any more time - guaranteed to kill up to two weeks - but Eric didn't seem to think it would help. Meanwhile Stephanie is coming to town tonight to pick up her stuff, now that she has her own apartment. It's been nice storing her bedroom set all these months, but this is good as it will enable us to get the room ready for Baby. It's nice how it all works out.

Not long now until Thanksgiving!

Sailing by ash breeze

Michael and I have now finished reading Johnny Tremain. It was a very good book. (Upon breaking his arm, Joseph had nothing to do but sit around and read books, so he read it too. It made for interesting conversation when I'd call every night to see how he was doing.) We have now begun to read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It's a children's book, but a great one, simply written and well narrated. It's full of interesting concepts and ideas - being becalmed at the chandlery, losing your anchor to windward - and provides some amazing insights into the development of navigation and 'scientific sailing.'

Either I'm coming down with a bad cold again or I'm reacting to the air from the vents now that we've turned the house on its winter head mode. It's gotten to the point where, whenever I sneeze, Michael will just say, 'Yeah, yeah, you just want more attention.'

It happens that I will drop the occasional cynical remark about Institute. This does not stem from malice aforethought but simply happens because the observation was begging to be made. Michael is pretty tolerant of my perspective, though, not having gone through that gauntlet himself, he doesn't always appreciate the finer points of my wit. Recently I made some reference to my theory on the Institute's subtle agenda for the discouragement of the higher education of women on grounds of eligibility. 'Madam, you go too far!' he said to me. 'Oh, come on,' I protested. 'You have to see the funny side of laughing at an establishment so full of customs and rituals that they even teach you the proper way to raise your hand!' And demonstrated it forthwith. That got his attention. 'You have got to be kidding! No one could be that obsessive!' It took a lot of convincing to persuade him that I wasn't making it up.

On the design defects inherent in capes

Sunday night our church had a special evening service at the end of our missions emphasis week. Heather Mercer (missionary to Afghanistan captured by the Taliban) gave her testimony, and then we had an international food bazaar to honour our missionaries. Marcela was very excited about doing a table for Costa Rica, and spent all day Saturday baking in preparation. She enlisted Amanda and me to help serve, and so we slipped out of the service early and served tamales, pineapple empanadas, and papaya picadillo. Very yummy food! Michael, meanwhile, browsed the bazaar and brought me back baklava, pita, and feta cheese, German chocolate cheesecake and sausage, Jamaican jerk chicken, and indian rice and garbanzo beans. So I got the best of both worlds: the satisfaction of helping out combined with the opportunity not to miss out on a thing! Husbands make such wonderful butlers.

Last night we went downtown to meet some friends for dinner and a movie: The Incredibles. If I still lived in Virginia, I'm sure I would have gotten a full review from the Hall kids. As we sat down, Amanda groaned, 'Oh, no! Who put Ron in the middle?' He kept up an entertaining commentary through the previews, but no comment was necessary for the duration of the movie: we were all laughing hard enough already. Quite the evening of jollification and merriment.

Happy days

We’re still basking in an aureate post-election glow. It seems that nothing can go wrong. Winter weather is here, the thermostat is set to a toasty temp, and we may have to build a fire in the fireplace soon.

On Saturday we had absolutely nothing planned, and so for the first time in many weeks we had a big breakfast of French toast and bacon and eggs. I mixed up the egg and milk batter and dipped the first slice of bread in before realizing that I wanted to fry the bacon first so I could decide if I wanted to fry the French toast in the drippings. Hastily I got out the skillet and merrily fried the bacon. This would have gone more quickly if the bacon hadn’t been frozen solid (next time I will plan ahead better, quotha). By the time I was ready to fry the French toast, I discovered that the egg and milk mixture had disappeared! I had used four eggs this time, and they were all gone. The piece of bread, meanwhile, looked somewhat waterlogged but nothing out of the ordinary. I whipped up more egg and milk and fried up the French toast.

By the time it was done, the first slice was noticeably bulkier than the others. It looked like it was on steroids and tasted rather like quiche. It was funny and would be a great practical joke to play on someone if all slices served were uniformly swollen: without the wimpy-looking slices for comparison, it looked almost normal.

Our young married class is doing a series entitled Marriage on the Rock, about communication. This Sunday our teacher was talking about different avenues for good communication, including I Feel Lists, The Conference, and Word Pictures. Instantly my mind was filled with word pictures, which I started scribbling on my notes for Michael. Most of them are a bit hard to convey in straight text, but examples would be gegs (scrambled eggs) or RETUrns (diminishing returns). Then it turned out that the teacher was really talking about Analogies (‘When you don’t fix the dishwasher when I ask, it makes me feel like we’re not on the same team’) instead of Word Pictures. Oh, well.

Boys will be boys

Apparently my younger brother Joseph fell out of a tree last week and broke his arm. (Actually, I found out last night that it was in fact a honeysuckle bush.) I've been calling him nearly every night to see how he is doing and to keep his spirits up. The first few days were pretty painful for him, and he was on a lot of ibuprofin. When I would call, this was reflected in his conversation - or maybe not.

There's a scene from one of the Asterix books when Getafix is on the way to the Druid convention when he is stopped by a cohort of Roman legionaries, challenging the group because there have been Goths sighted in the area. To prove that he is a Gaulish druid, and not a Goth, Getafix performs some of his magic: he gives a bunch of herbs to one of the legionaries to eat, at which the legionary can only say 'Hee-haw!' The cohort marches off, with the legionary braying every so often, while the commander remarks, 'Funny, it doesn't seem to have made that much of a difference...'

That was exactly how I felt after my conversations with Joseph. 'As you can see, he's really doped up on ibuprofin...funny, it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference...' I told him that Michael was taking my car in to get my tires rotated. Pause. 'Oh.' Faraway voice. 'Doesn't that happen when you drive?'

Hip hip hurrah!

Let's give three cheers and one cheer more for the winner in 2004!

Masterfully done. The perfect finishing touch to give Kerry respectful space to bow out gracefully. All is most happily concluded.

Victory is sweet.

What news from the north, Riders of Rohan?

Michael and I both voted early this morning, and stood in long lines to do so. Maybe it wasn't just all hype about early electioning and prognostications of overloaded polls.

Just saw a clip of Kerry saying something like 'It is time to take America to a new and safer place.' Ooh, like someplace where the terrorists won't find us? Someplace safer than North America? Why didn't George Bush think of that one?

Fall back

Always before, my rest and relaxation quotient has gotten such a boost from the reversion to Standard Time. But this time it seemed that the extra hour was no help at all. Instead, my flagging constitution simply absorbed it. My body woke up this morning and said, ‘Okay, that was nice. Need more sleep.’

We went out to catch a matinee on Saturday. Alas, we pressed our luck too long and The Village is no longer playing, even at the cheap theater. So we went to see The Bourne Identity instead, and fortunately got there in time for the previews. I am such a sucker for previews. I don’t feel as if I’m getting my money’s worth out of a movie if I don’t get a sufficient sampling of the other movies out there while I’m at it. When we rent a movie and there are no previews, I feel so ripped off. But there was one preview that is still bothering me. Well, first of all, I thought it said at the beginning that it had been approved for ALL audiences, so I wasn’t even in the mindset of closing my eyes until toward the end, when Michael leaned over and whispered, ‘You know, you can close your eyes.’ But I had still seen enough to puzzle me. I kept saying things later like, ‘Now, wait a minute. There were the zombies, and then there were the gargoyles that came alive, and then there was that creepy alien-like tentacle. How could a bio-chemical experiment gone awry give normal humans all of those properties?’ ‘Rose,’ Michael would say patiently, ‘it’s just a B-grade horror flick. I’m sure it doesn’t have a reasonable plot and it’s not supposed to make sense.’ ‘Oh.’ And then, a little later, ‘Why didn’t the man with the gun notice that alien tentacle curling around him? Don’t you think you’d notice something like that? And if you had a gun in your hand, wouldn’t you shoot it?’ ‘Rose! It’s just a movie! He stood there stupidly because he was scripted to do that!’ ‘Oh, that’s right.’ And then, later, ‘Hmm, well, since it said at the beginning that they sealed the vault, then all the action takes place in the sealed vault, so it’s a contained disaster, so the subtitle is really inaccurate right? I mean, apocalypse means total destruction of the whole world, not just a localised disaster.’ It was a very puzzling preview. Somewhat less puzzling in plot, but just as mysterious in premise, was the snake movie. Supposedly a team of explorers braved the wilds of the jungle and the wrath of mating anacondas in search of the Blood Orchid, a rare flower that was supposed to have healing, fountain-of-youth properties. ‘But,’ I told Michael, ‘why go off into a dangerous jungle for that? Why not just breed it from the comforts of the laboratory, as they did with the black tulip, or the blue tea rose?’

Much more satisfying is A & E’s Pride and Prejudice, which we are watching together for the third time. Once again, it was at Michael’s instigation. He remarked on Friday night, ‘I think it’s time to watch Pride and Prejudice again.’ With my current sleep requirements, we only get in one episode per night, but it’s such a good movie! When the ominous music played as Mr. Darcy rides through the woods - and you just know he’s going to come face-to-face with Elizabeth any minute - I patted Michael’s hand and said, ‘See, this is the kind of scary music I like! This is exactly my level of tension!’