Comments

I have a new morning routine all of a sudden.  It involves cleaning up all the undesirable comments which are left on this blog by fairies and gremlins during the night.
I am now averaging 6 weird comments every morning.  One recurring type of comment always includes three particular words amongst some other text, all of which adds up to nothing comprehensible at all.
The other undesirables are basically Asian porn.

What a drag, I say.
It's like having my house spray-painted while I was sleeping.
If anybody wants to leave me a helpful comment, a good solution for how to winnow these cyber vandals out....I am all ears.

Like Eliot and E.T.

Jon has been in Norway for nine days now, and I have somehow, unwillingly adjusted to the time zone he's in.
I am awake almost all night, and then half asleep all day long.   This is not good for my health, or anyone's well being.

I watched E.T with the kids the other night  (in which Eliot the human shares the feelings  and experiences of the adorable extraterrestrial guy) and thought "Hey, that same crazy connection has occurred in my marriage!"
How great is that, that we are so close now...after so long....and won't it be even greater when he's home!

For all you guys who watch "Lost"

I saw something over at Gene Veith's blog, and I had to snatch it up and paste it here.  I have only seen a few episodes of "Lost".  Not enough to get hooked or even marginally informed.
But just enough to be amazed by its implausibility.
When it's on, I am there musing out loud, to the great annoyance of my goggle-eyed kids, "Who on earth has time for this?".....well, apparently the very cerebral Gene Veith has time.
I will go off and quietly check my assumptions.
I do love his eclectic collection of story wrap-up methodology...Samsara to Scooby Doo:

Here's what he has to say:

 I don’t watch much TV. I really don’t. But I did get hooked on Lost. This season that convoluted narrative comes to an end, and the producers say that every loose end will be tied together, every mystery solved, and every plot line resolved. So how do you think it will end? Will it be. . .
(1) The Bob Newhart ending? (It was all a dream.)
(2) The Sixth Sense ending? (They are all dead.)
(3) The Matrix ending? (They are all characters in a computer program.)
(4) The Hamlet ending? (They all get killed.)
(5) The Samsara ending? (They get caught in a time loop and have to live through the story again.)
(6) The Dante ending? (They are in a purgatorial afterlife.)
(7) The X-Files ending? (A few things are resolved, but leaving room for a movie.)
(8) The Meta ending? (They all turn out to be characters in someone’s story.)
(9) The Scooby-Doo ending? (The key villain is in disguise, and it turns out there is a rational explanation for everything.)
How else might it end?

Maggie makes an announcement

You know what?
This is really just a "Mommy Blog"  all decked out trying to pretend it's a blog about something a free adult with an original thought in her head might do.
So, with that off my chest, I can share my favorite Mommy moment of today.
It just happened.

I'm sitting here drinking a glass of white wine (which tastes more like white vinegar, since I have nobody to drink with since my man left last week).
And in prances Maggie in a gigantic pink dress to tell me that I should lock Michael in the garage because he's trying to eat her.
So I said "Gee Maggie, I think you are so adorable, I just might eat you myself."
This was not the response she was looking for,
so she gave me that three year old frown that 36 inch tall girls do best, and said "I keep tellin' these guys I AM NOT A CAKE."

Men and Women, Flowers and Heavy machinery

This post is for my cute husband.   Does that gross anybody out?
PDA on the blog.  Yuck!

He gets a blog post all his own because
A) he is in Amsterdam, wretchdly sleep-deprived waiting for a plane to take him those last couple of inches (on my map) to Oslo, and  I miss him.  And....
B) he told me four times last night that I have to write this on the blog because he thinks
a)  it is much more funny than it really is, and
b) it reflects the universal breakdown in communication between Men and Women.

So, in order to get to this story you have to lean way back to May 16, 2002, on which day, Jon hopped into his fun little convertible on a flawless blue-sky California morning with the intoxicating scent of jasmine heavy in the air.  (His car would have been just in the driveway at the back of the photo above.)  And  before he drove out across the canyon to Loma Linda, just a little  too casually he asked if I would be home that day....as something was being delivered  and I should be there when it arrived.  
I smiled, nodded, and then hauled my 35 weeks pregnant/almost 40 year old hulk towards our house, which was almost entirely in the deep throws of major renovation, thinking "Flowers, he's sending flowers....what a guy"

So the day droned on, I and my four little darlings doing domestic things.......... the things we did on any ordinary California day.......like A-beka Math, fumigating black widow spiders in the Tonka trucks, shooting the odd rattle snake, shooing tarantulas out of the kitchen, and watching coyote packs drink out of the baby pool.
And after lunch I began to fill the large wash tub in the laundry room with water so I could bathe some animal or child.  
Then, I heard The Truck, which drew me, zombie-like, into the front yard.    It was a big giant truck trying to tie itself into a tiny knot so it could fit through the hairpin  turn  with gateposts on either side which was our driveway.   When the side of the truck kissed the gate and kept plunging ahead, the screeching of metal completely liquified my spine, and I nearly fainted.

It was at this point that I noticed  it wasn't a florist's truck.

I think the driver decided to off-load his parcel at the foot of the driveway, and bring it up on that machine that is some kind of cousin of a bob-cat, which you sometimes see crouching, clinging for dear life on the tailgate of an 18-wheeler.
I was spellbound as I watched him haul this enormous box, larger than the bob-cat thingy that was pushing it up the 45 degree incline to the house.   Without a word, he drove it into the garage, set it down,  handed me an invoice and left.

I marched down right behind him to see what he had done to the cast iron gate (which I had just finished painting)....and examined the chipped bricks which would need to be filled in and repainted, grumbling a little as I went along.  Here is a photograph of that gate, just to give you an idea.

 I read the invoice and saw that  a very, very nice table saw had just been bestowed upon us.
And so I trudged into the kitchen, thinking that a table saw would certainly help us finish the renovations more than flowers would have.  grumbling a little as I went along.
And then I heard water running.  And for a minute or two, I continued to hear water running, until it dawned on me that I had left the washtub filling.....I had completely and utterly forgotten it as I was so freaked out by that truck demolishing my gate post.

Well......the laundry room (where the water was running) was a long skinny room, with the ironing board along one side, and an iron on it, which was turned on.  It was plugged into an extension cord, and the connection was on the floor.
But I didn't think about that when I saw that the floor was 3 inches deep in the water
which had overflowed the sink.
So I headed straight for the faucet intending to turn off the water,
and planted my right foot squarely on the little bit of exposed electricity just at the connection between the iron and the extension cord.
And I felt the most astonishing sensation of electricity in my face.  It threw me back, and I grabbed the cord and pulled it out of the wall.

A few of us spent the rest of the day wet-vaccuuming the lime green carpet of that laundry room.  And later, I ripped the carpet out, before heading down the driveway to plaster over the missing chunk of my gate-post.

It turns out that I never told Jon that I was expecting flowers that day.
He  heard the story last night for the first time, and now he sees this as some kind of metaphor for all marriage miscommunication.
In addition, he laughed his head off.
It was one of those things where his laughter was funnier than the joke.
So then I was laughing at him, and he was laughing at this thing that's really no funnier than a whole lot of other days I can remember at that address in the desert in California.

I often look around myself in Canada, and California seems like another universe, entirely.

Oh...while there are palm trees around, let me share that I am reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is an amazing book to me, as it is a true crime story, set in Savannah, Georgia, during the precise time period that I was growing up in Atlanta and Macon,  Georgia.  It's almost like reading a story of my own family, there are so many bizarre familiarities.   Lots of godless hooliganism, and it all seems sort of creepy and connected to my childhood.
I'm also reading Calvin's Institutes and finding that far more edifying.
It's amazing to see how many ways the work of the Holy Spirit can be revealed......
I can see great works of sanctification clearly laid out in front of me as I see how my life has moved forward spiritually, and the eleven area codes I have inhabited along the way provide the most vivid points of reference to punctuate and reveal this work in vivid detail.
Marvelous!

Complaining Wives

While I am completely off the topic upon which this blog was founded, I am going to head off into a little exploration (not a rant, mind you) of a subject which is close to my heart.

I want to unburden myself of some heavy thoughts on women who complain about their inlaws.
Somebody else can write a post on men who are fussers.
This one is for the ladies, because I am pretty well convinced that women's complaining can absolutely destroy a family.  The collateral damage is then often permanent, or at least very slow and difficult to heal.

When my  husband and I first married, I had the same temptation most other women have to pick away at the habits, tastes, food, holiday traditions.....you name it....of my in-laws.  I think I might have thought that I could pull all his loyalty over to my camp by enlightening him to the shortcomings of his ancestors and his home country.
Jon very wisely told me to just cut it out, as they were not only His family, they were now My family.

The result of this is that I have a really lovely relationship with my in-laws.  All of them.
By not complaining about them and by purposefully looking for the best in them, I have really learned to love them.   Had I complained about them on and on for the past 17 years, I would certainly have built up such a stockpile of reasons not to be kind to them, that there would be no harmony at all between us now.
And as some of this family are growing older and in need of extra doses of respect and kindness and understanding, I am so thankful for habits of respect and kindness with them.
These make it less difficult to figure out "What is the best way to love them in this hard time....."

As wives, if we complain to our husbands about their parents or siblings, if we try to "help" by shining a brighter light on the failings and inconsistencies of the ones who raised them and prepared them for life with US.....we are destroying the fiber of their families.  One thread at a time perhaps, but we are destroying it.   The casualties of this will be elderly parents who don't receive the best care, and also our own children who don't have that blanket of loving family.  And when it is the turn for those children to look after us, how lonely we will be if we have trained them to complain and criticize the family?

I know families where this is the accepted practice.
I was raised in such a family.  And it's in pieces now, primarily because of  the complaining of a couple of women.
My inlaws, who I would have been so pleased to love less in order to promote myself, have become the family where the bonds are strongest.   Because Jon told me not to complain.

All of life besides books and running

Reading and running.....ug!

I cannot possibly blog about these two topics.

I am running just so badly....and I know why but I don't want to tell anybody.  It's because I'm old and fat.

And I am reading John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, about which I am just too woefully inadequate to even think of writing a comment.
 He's talking about how we understand God better as we see ourselves rightly and at the same time we learn to see ourselves correctly in the light of the holiness of God.  It is all true, and I will perhaps one day have some good thoughts on it.
 I am also reading the book about the Potato Peel Pie Literary Society ......
 post world-war II in the  Channel Islands,
it is such a delightful little book,
and not on any book list, as I am in rebellion and reading books off list.
Shame.

But......
 today, I am educating my children,
teaching subtraction with borrowing,
multiplication of two two digit factors,
how to construct a good cohesive paragraph,
how to compare two pieces of literature without revealing which one you hate and which one you want to pretend you wrote yourself,
and, where did the Catholic Church fall off the rails,
how could  a white dwarf star be created from the explosion of two red giants,
and what does it mean to be long-suffering and merciful when your sibling is singing jolly songs about your dying hamster.

I have also learned today, as I e-mailed some of you earlier, that the quickest and most certain method of clearing out a room full of teenagers is to say "let's talk about sex"  or "menopause".....it's like magic, and I am suddenly all alone.

I have spoken on the phone today to all the elderly relatives on my side of the family and my husband's family too,  and I am hardly able to bear up under the load of senile dementia.....
 I can already see it bearing down on me like a freight train.
Just ask anyone at my house if I have any short term memory at all.
They will respectfully roll their eyes.

But,  my favorite unexpected discovery today was this:
If you take a bite of crab-stuffed salmon in butter sauce and follow it right quickly with a nice mouth full of Penfold's Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet, 2008
....then inhale immediately,
it is precisely the same aroma and taste you will get at the very lowest level of the New England Aquarium just at the back corner when the rockhopper penguins are being fed.
I am absolutely sure of this, as I tried it several times, and David and Audrey even joined in to confirm.  Amazing.  Like a trip down memory lane. I think I spent about two years on that level in 1992.

And I know this photo is of the Macaroni Penguin exhibit, but it's not far from the Rockhoppers......

A Theater of Envy

 

I have spent the past two hours reading Rene Girard's A Theater of Envy .
I was reading this book in my bed with Maggie and Daniel alongside building a fort for dolls and stuffed dogs under my covers.  So I will have to skim over this first two chapters and a bit again, to pick up what was missed.

I must just say that reading this book is very much like running in subzero weather with an injured hip.  I will continue with it, I will complete it, I will benefit from it, and there will be moments as I go along where  I realize the great genius of the work in my hand.  And as I move through this piece of work, there will be times when it feels like an assignment.
Assignments are good.  I'm glad to have one, here.

Girard has written here a book which reinterprets Shakespeare's plays  within the context of his theory of mimetic desire.  "Mimetic desire" describes our human tendency to desire a particular thing simply because we see that someone else desires that thing.
It is a real human trait, no doubt.
 I think of how we all will choose any number of things....shoes, vacation destinations, hobbies, dog breeds, educational tracks....and our choice of these items was inspired or even provoked by the fact that someone else, or many other individuals, demonstrated a desire for the same item.....or menu choice, or funky new phrase, or inessential technology.

Isn't the success of Twitter proof of this?  
I can just see Girard shaking his head and moaning "THAT's not what I meant...."  But it's helpful to dumb it down for my better comprehension.

So, Girard makes some excellent arguments in this book that Shakespeare's characters were inexorably  driven by mimetic desire.
I have not read every Shakespeare play, but I think I had four Shakespeare courses in college.  Not one of them covered his plays from this narrow perspective.
As I think through the plays I do retain in my old brain,  I can see that his idea that any of Shakespeare's protagonists, upon seeing desire in the eyes of another, will predictably respond with an  outsized  display of envy.
This then brings the life of the envier into  a downward spiral from which there is no redemption.
Think of Troilus and Cressida.  I have not gotten to his treatment of this one, but I almost feel like I know what he's going to say.  In T and C, it's going on everywhere, with Cressida observing Troilus's neglect of her and then trying to reignite his affection through jealousy.  And the various manipulations of Ajax, Ulysses, Achilles.....all just responses to their jealous need for what his held or desired by another.
Anyway, Girard certainly gave a good argument for it in The Two Gentlemen from Verona and The Rape of Lucrece.  How could The Rape of Lucrece be read as anything else, though.

Pastors are like mothers

Still no list, and I begin to think I won't make a list.....at least not a list of 100.
There is a pile of fiction left to read, and I finally finished Spurgeon's lectures.
I really do enjoy reading Charles Spurgeon.  He has such a way with a phrase, and a great wisdom and insight to the hearts of men.
These lectures were intended for pastoral students.  There is all kinds of great wisdom for the man preparing himself to minister to the numberless needs of a church full of souls.
I actually read this book because Somebody, Somewhere.....and I don't remember who it was......said that it's easy for a pastor to get into  the rut of thinking something like "I could get so much real ministry done, if I weren't so continually bogged down by all these annoying people and their tedious needs!"
And my little heart froze, and I felt a little naked as if it were my own selfish unspoken thoughts being shouted out loud.
How often have I thought of all the really excellent things I could accomplish if I didn't have to wash yet another sink full of dishes, or delay my important plans in order to restore peace, fold laundry, check over an algebra test, change somebody's wet pants (again), or listen to another really really long story.
Spurgeon reminds me that I need to get my heart right, before I try to set my kids hearts right.  That I need to be sure I am using the tools and resources God has provided for me to the very best of my ability so that I can provide my little flock with the best possible care.  That, as their educator, I cannot fail to prepare and then hope that God will just pour a thick layer of Grace over a mess I have made.  That obedience on my part means diligent study, a right understanding of my own tendencies to fail and also of theirs, and good courage and faithful obedience.
 Knowing that these, with gentle perseverance, will bring rewards which I may never see, but which are a fragrant gift to God.

With these ideas in mind, I am taking a closer look at each day as it begins.  Taking greater care to look at what's on the schedule, pray over it, ask what could be left undone and also ask for wisdom to do the things I find least pleasant FIRST.  It is astonishing to me to see how many times these past months, as I am praying early in the morning for good insight about how to proceed with my day and what to do and what to leave undone (as it's not possible to do it all...) I will look up and find Jon is there with a few little requests for things he would very much like for me to do.  I know for certain that this is an answer to my prayer.  He is helping me prioritize, and it takes such a weight off my shoulders some days!

And as for my little story teller......I have found that, rather than suiting up and going outside to RUN,  if I just get on the LifeCycle upstairs a couple of days a week, and let him sit alongside and tell a story for 45 minutes, we manage to kill two birds with one stone, and I don't have to brave the cold to do it.