Nature’s first cover is none
‘Til somebody wraps you in one.
Fastened beyond your power
But only so an hour.
Then clasp subsides to elastic
Loosing a change more drastic.
For freedom and not for display.
Nothing clothed can stay.
Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay
Apparently this fan site for Star Trek’s Jean Luc Picard was quite popular a while ago and I missed it. Made me laugh out loud though. http://picard.ytmnd.com/
Make sure your sound isn’t turned too high if you’re at work…the sound file they play on page load is a little loud but essential and otherwise safe for work.
Enough sites like this one have been created — featuring other actors and famous movie lines — that the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about them.
Wikipedia has an entry about them too.
I pulled out some old CDs the other day to listen to some stuff that I haven’t heard in a while. I’ve always enjoyed a wide range of musical styles, but lately I’ve been cycling through the same ten or so CDs and had started to feel like I was in a rut.
One of the CDs I retrieved was The Beginning by Michael Card. Michael’s stuff was on the contemporary Christian charts back when I bought this CD in 1989, but I haven’t really kept track of him (or much contemporary Christian music) since then. My own Christian faith died on the examining table in college — or so I had thought — but staged a remarkable comeback later; a resurrection, if you will.
The Beginning is a very hefty CD. It contains many well written, theologically powerful songs. The first five songs each deal with a major theme found in the first five books of the Bible. The next five songs are each fashioned around the life of a Hebrew patriarch. The song about Abraham, God Will Provide a Lamb, really got to me.
The Bible is not written like a modern history book or novel. The book of Genesis often seems to me to neglect the back story that would give its protagonists enough depth to make their actions seem more human and less mythological. Because of that feeling of mythology I never thought too much about Abraham as a guy just trying to make some sense of the rather amazing story he finds himself in. After waiting for years to have a child, he was told by God to sacrifice that child, and he did. Or at least he tried to: God intervened at the last second, after Abraham had proven his faithfulness.
My two dimensional view of Abraham had always made me see him as very different from me: he was a person who would kill because — why? — voices in his head told him to?
I’ve spent a lot of time worrying over the fact that when he believed God wanted him to kill his son, he decided to kill his son rather than question his beliefs.
We got a puppy today. I don’t know why: we already have a dog and a cat, and we’ve recently gotten rid of three birds and a cat. But regardless, we got a puppy today.
We had a little trouble deciding what to name the puppy. Cora wanted to name him “Wags the Dog” after one of the characters on the Wiggles show on the Disney channel. On that show, Wags — as you might have guessed — is a dog.
However, Tina clenched the name for the dog in a stunning combination of scripture and pop culture. One of my favorite movies — Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” — has a character named Rufus, the 13th apostle. Interestingly enough, our pastor preached last Sunday’s sermon from Romans chapter 16, in which the 13th verse says, “Greet Rufus, whom the Lord picked out to be his very own…”. That was enough to do it. “Henceforth, let him be known as Rufus, the 13th Dogpostle.”
This is my grandfather reading to my children. He always lived far enough away from where I grew up that I never got to see him too often, and the same has been true for the girls. It’s been heavy on my mind the past few years that I don’t know him very well at all.
I was delighted that he and the girls got to spend some time together. The girls had a great time listening to their great-grandfather read. He was very patient and funny.
I was delighted that he and the girls enjoyed spending some time together.
I’m not sure if Plato envisioned some idealized form for what a load of laundry should look like, but most of the laundry I oversee fall into one of five categories: adult whites, adult colors, kid whites, kid colors, and linens.
I’m not super strict about enforcing these categories — I don’t go all Rain Man if I find a black sock among the white tee shirts — but these categories have been in use long enough that I was struck by how unusual a particular load of laundry looked when I was pulling it from the dryer. There were adult and kids clothes present. Colors and whites. And a hat!
Then I remembered. This load of laundry was the result of a full-family sandbox-and-sprinkler fest in the back yard. This photo shows the aftermath. Everyone came inside covered in sand and soaking wet. Everybody’s clothes went straight into the washer.
Here’s a link to a passage from Don Quixote where the good Don engages in a fight with a windmill.
My favorite line—though there are several very good lines here—is “…if you are afraid, away with you out of here and betake yourself to prayer, while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.”
My wife left on a business trip today and Cora wanted to wave to her when she flew over our house. (We’re right on the approach path for BWI…Cora’s used to seeing planes fly over all the time, but I guess doesn’t understand that they’re landing and not taking off.)
Well, this is pic of the plane we picked to wave at as though mommy were on it. Nice pic, I think. Notice the moon behind the plane.
The title of this entry is an inside joke. We’ve been teaching Callie the names of facial features. She recently learned eyebrows.
At the same time Cora has been playing her first computer games: Winnie the Pooh, Reader Rabbit, etc. These games require her to use the mouse…move the pointer to some part of the screen and click.
I hadn’t realized how these games were preparing her for everything she’d need to know on the World Wide Web, but when I had a browser open to my home page she spotted a picture of herself in a thumbnail and she now knew enough about computer interfaces to use the mouse and move the pointer and click on the picture. That took her to Flickr.com, and from there she proceeded to browse my photostream.
Cool, my baby surfed the web. She browsed.
