Lift Up Your Hearts!

Is there anything worse than excruciating physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual torture and death?

It takes nothing from the sufferings of Christ commemorated this Holy Week to pause and consider a couple of other important persons in the drama.

I find the following hymn to be one of the most powerful and moving of the season.  For obvious reasons, it is usually sung on Palm Sunday, but the verses reach all the way through to Easter. (More)

"Cash for Clunkers," Appliance Edition.  I've been looking forward to Florida's appliance rebate program ever since I first heard rumor of it.  Our refrigerator was old when we bought it used in 2001, and I'm sure it uses up much more energy than a refrigerator should.  Plus, who knows how long it will last?

Actually, that question is spurious.  Our neighbors bought a new, high-end appliance a few years ago and it has required multiple repairs—even while still under warranty—whereas our old clunker is still going strong, albeit with strange nocturnal (and diurnal) noises.  Still, you never know.

However, this is no "shop carefully, get the best deal, purchase your appliance, and apply for the rebate" program. (More)

Today was a wonderful, sunny-but-not-too-hot day, perfect for the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival.  This is a huge annual event, with artists from all over the country, and Canada, too.  Northern states are particularly well represented, but they come for more than the weather, as the presence of David Levy from Davis, California attests.

David Levy.  Therein lies a tale.

Many years ago, some good friends from upstate New York gave us a gorgeous cutting board, made of strips of wood in a multi-colored zig-zag pattern.  Yes, we do use it as a cutting board, although it was a good two years I think before I could bring myself to set a knife to such beauty.  As we were strolling among the booths I suddenly exclaimed to Porter, "That's our cutting board!"  The pattern was unmistakable, although I'll admit I actually only thought it was like our cutting board.  When we returned home, however, I flipped ours over and read clearly, "David Levy, Davis, CA."  California, New York, Florida—this guy gets around.

I wore my Vibram Five Fingers shoes (which will eventually get their own post) and a Carnegie Mellon t-shirt, both of which drew interested comments.  Another fun thing was seeing the storefront which when the renovations are complete will house our very own Penzey's!

Our census form arrived.  In a word:  B-O-R-I-N-G.

It's a good thing for future genealogists that we have so many other forms of record-keeping, because they won't get much from the 2010 census.  Name, sex, date of birth, race in excruciating detail if you're Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander (Dominican? Hmong? Fijian?), relationship to head-of-household (now inoffensively called "Person 1" — also in excruciating detail, distinguishing, for example, between biological and adopted children, which genealogists will love, if no one else).  That's only if you're one of the first six people in the household.  For Persons 7 through 12 they don't care about your race or exact relationship.  And if you're the 11th child in the family?  Apparently you're out of luck, but I suspect that may be covered by the "we may call for additional information" caveat that goes with the questions for Persons 7 - 12, since there's also a place to indicate the total number of people in the household.

I wrote before about the interesting information in previous censuses, but I'll repeat it for this occasion. (More)

Not that we're anywhere near January 1, but I seem to have begun a habit of making a new resolution on the 8^th of the month, so why not?

If you look at the three I've made so far, it does seem as if I'm working on a book entitled, 12 Joyful Resolutions that Will Change Your Life.  Maybe I am.  Happy resolutions are so much more fun to keep!   Not any easier, however, especially when, like this one, they are vague and not easily measurable.

I was casting around for the next resolution—in fact, I had a couple of others in mind—when this one came to me, out of the blue.  It's a good one, though.  For more than 25 years, any complaints I bring to a doctor have been met with two responses:  (1) you're getting older, and (2) you're under too much stress.  The former no resolution will help, but the latter bears examination.  It's not so much that my life is stressful—even when it was far more stressful than it is at the moment—but that I let it control me.  I react badly to stress, carrying it around in my mind and body, as anyone knows who has given me a shoulder massage.  My blood pressure is edging up, too—not a problem yet, but I don't want it to become one.  Perhaps when I was younger my body could handle these assaults, but—see #1 above.  So it's time to get a handle on stress:  to learn to relax. (More)

Ralph Vaughan Williams:   Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Mozart:   Concerto No. 1 for Flute in G Major, K. 313 (285c)
Dvorak:  Symphony No. 7 in D minor, op. 70

The Orlando Phil's own Colleen Blagov proves once again my thesis that we don't necessarily need big-name performers at big-name prices.  Perhaps I'm not as picky/knowledgeable with flute as with strings, but I say she did a lovely job on the Mozart concerto.

We don't see robins much at all here, but when we do, they are almost always in flocks.  Having grown up with the excitement of one or two robins heralding the arrival of spring, to see a couple of dozen robins suddenly descend on our yard is always a thrill.  If these robins are working their way north, I think they're a bit premature.  But they sure had fun eating the berries off our trees.

The pictures don't do the sight justice (a video would have been better), but you can see them a little better by clicking on the images.

  

This is SO typical of our wonderfully nerdy family that I had to share Jon's birthday cake here.

Having made my first New Year's resolution on January 8, it is fitting that I add my second today.

At first glance, resolving to rediscover feasting sounds about as painful as resolving to read more books, but bear with me a moment.

There's a lot of wisdom in the church liturgical year, with its fasts (e.g. Advent and Lent), its feasts (the grandest of which are, of course, Christmas and Easter), and its large swaths of so-called Ordinary Time.  For most of our modern, American society, however, it is Christmas Every Day.  To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from The Incredibles, If every day is special, no day is.  (More)

A night launch of the space shuttle is always worth waking up for, even if you have to do it two days in a row and put on a coat against the cold.

As usual, we watched the liftoff on television, then walked outside to catch the view as it rose above the horizon in the east.  We were able to see separation of the booster rockets clearly, with a little low-tech optical enhancement.  I gazed in wonder—and with no little sorrow to think that this is the last night launch, and nearly the last launch, period—until Endeavour slipped beneath the northeastern horizon, then returned inside to watch the shuttle's liberation from the external tank.  Here's the view from our front yard.  (Click to enlarge.)

It may not look like much with my little camera, but it's a thrill that never gets old. You can see much more at the NASA main site, and NASA television.

You'd think that being freed from the 9 - 5 routine, Mondays wouldn't bother me.  (What's with 9 - 5 anyway?  When I was employed I never worked that few hours in a day!)  And normally that's true.  This week was another story.

It began when the alarm went off at 4:30...a.m.  That's when I took Porter to the airport for a week out of town on business.  Still, that was only bad in hindsight; normally getting an early start imbues the day with productivity, and I was looking forward to digging right into my many awaiting projects.  I returned home, drove into the garage, walked through the door, entered my office, and turned on my computer.  Which promptly turned itself off.  Further attempts disclosed the unsettling warning, "Fan error." (More)

Sometimes the difference between a useless tool and a helpful one, or a good tool and a great one, is merely a matter of imagination.

I dislike decorative trinkets, and most especially if they must be dusted.  My mother-in-law, however, loved them, and we received many gifts that were more in line with her preferences than mine.  Thus I wasn't entirely pleased when she proudly presented me with a Charleston, South Carolina sweetgrass basket, beautiful as it was.  But inspiration hit, and instead of hanging it as a wall decoration, I put the basket on a desk in our entranceway.  Not only does it look lovely, but in an instant I solved my perennial "where are my keys?" problem!  Because the basket gets continual use, it never needs dusting, and its presence must have saved me, over the years, hours of searching time.  The right tool in the right place. (More)

Is there a word, in any language, for "my daughter's husband's cousin's husband"?  That's what Kevin Michael Johnson is, and I'm proud to claim the family relationship, however distant and awkwardly-phrased.  Kevin is an actor, living in New York City with his lovely singer-songwriter wife, Steph Shaw.  One of his recent triumphs was in the show Wild Black Yonder, which a number of members of our family (but, alas, not I) were privileged to see at "The Kate" in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Kevin's latest venture is The Raid, a documentary about the tremendously popular online game, World of Warcraft.  Everything I know about WOW I learned form the Foxtrot comic strip...at least until I watched Kevin's promotional video.  The embedded video below is from YouTube, but the link will take you to a video on the official, more informative site, where you can also get involved in the project if it excites you.  You can also check them out on Facebook.

Ah, a glass of red wine, bruschetta (made with homemade bread), and a Porter-made salad with spring greens, scallions, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and rosemary and sea salt focaccia sticks with sun-dried tomato spread, dressed with a dressing concocted from balsamic vinegar and a marvellous lemon-olive oil from Italy that was a gift from Stephan's parents.

A perfect accompaniment to Shakespeare.

Having waited at home for an expected delivery, it was late when I was finally free to take my accustomed walk.  By the time I was on the homeward stretch, but little of the lingering twilight illumined the trail.  What's more, I usually walk with my glasses off to rest my eyes, so when a small animal scooted across the trail in front of me I was not immediately certain of its identity.  I thought "cat," but when it turned around and came back, it moved more like a rabbit.  Except that rabbits don't move toward people; they scurry away.  I was sure it would be gone by the time I fumbled my glasses out of my belt pack, but it was still hopping around; definitely a rabbit:  small, and as cute as a rabbit can get—and in my mind, rabbits go rather far in that direction.

Then the game began. (More)