Lift Up Your Hearts!

Driving home late last night we were treated to an unusual privilege:  seeing a Delta II rocket—this one carrying NASA's Kepler satellite—soar into space.  At first I thought it was an airplane...but at such an odd angle...and the color of the light wasn't right....  Then Porter remarked that it looked more like a rocket, and I remembered the Kepler launch.  Soon the flaming tail became obvious, and we delighted in the sight until it turned; the rocket must then have been moving directly away from us, as we were able to follow the bright glow until it winked out.

The beauty and wonder never gets old.

  (Nasa photo)

Although we couldn't fully appreciate it at the time, being neophytes who didn't know any better, we sang for several years in one of the best small church choirs ever.  It has been downhill since then, meaning no disrespect to our various choir directors nor to our fellow singers, but times and situations have changed and we have been mostly reduced to singing music that would never have enticed us into choir if we hadn't been already hooked.  But—O frabjous day!—this Lent we will be singing John Stainer's God So Loved the World!  I believe it has been a dozen years since we last had that privilege, quite long enough to make us not mind so much that we have neither the voices nor the rehearsal time to do it anything close to justice, and simply rejoice in being able to sing such music again.  Here, for your listening pleasure, especially those of you for whom this will bring back lovely memories, is a performance by the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir, which is a tad better even than our best.  :)

Sitting with us on our back porch, enjoying our porch swing, our neighbor announced that no one should be inside on a day like yesterday (low 54, high 82, sunny, breezy, low humidity).  When I'm working I'm afraid I hardly notice the weather, unless a breeze sweeps through the window and disturbs my papers.  But she was quite right.

We began the day with a trip to the Winter Park Farmer's Market.   Farmer's markets are not as much fun in Central Florida as I've experienced in other places:  for the most part, agriculture has moved too far away from us, and if you look carefully at that fresh-looking piece of fruit you just might discover that it was harvested in Guatemala.  Some so-called farmer's markets resemble a craft show with food vendors more than a place to find the ingredients for your next meal. (More)

RIP Paul Harvey.

As someone relatively new to the Liturgical Year, I have nothing authoritative to say about Lent, but I love this season.  As a penitential season it is much easier to celebrate than Advent, which gets entangled with the secular celebration of Christmas.  And Lenten disciplines have all the fun of New Year's resolutions but with a statute of limitations.

Why would anyone share something as personal as Lenten disciplines with the world?  Three reasons. (More)

Did you ever wonder where your Ash Wednesday ashes come from?  Traditionally they come from burning the branches from the previous year's Palm Sunday, but these days the ashes that mark your forehead on this first day of Lent might be from right here in Central Florida. Read about 84-year-old Ralph Higginbotham's family ash-making business in this Orlando Sentinel article, which also includes a good explanation of Ash Wednesday and Lent.

Under Higginbotham's direction, the family makes several hundred pounds of the smooth, black dust from sabal palms every year. He makes the ashes by slowly roasting palm trees in steel drums.

He uses no flammable liquids in the roasting and no pigments to darken the finished product.

A single 25-foot palm, cut and left to cure in the sun for two years, will yield about 5 pounds of ash. After grating and sifting, the ash goes off to suppliers in California, Illinois and Rhode Island, who sell it to churches and dioceses across the country.

I'm trying to digest and document the genealogical data I gathered during my recent visit to the NEHGS Library in Boston.  There's much too much to handle all at once—and too many other duties calling—but I am focussing at the moment on getting into publishable form some significant progress I made on one of Porter's lines.

This line includes the first set of Welsh ancestors I've found for Porter.  He's happy with them, even though he worries that Wales is uncomfortably close to Ireland.  He's afraid I'll eventually find Irish ancestors in his tree—not that he has anything in particular against Ireland, but because he will no longer be able to blame my quirks on my Irish blood.  :)

These Welsh ancestors are making my head spin.  I have Welsh lines, too, but haven't yet tried to carry them back beyond the immigrants.  This line of Porter's goes much further into the past, well into the time—which actually isn't all that far back—when Welsh names followed a patronymic system rather than having fixed family surnames.  So I am struggling with names like Gruffyd ap Einion of Gwyddelwern ap Gruffyd ap Llewellyn ap Cynrig ap Osbern Wyddel of Cora y Gedol.  Granted, one gets a lot of genealogy worked into a name that way, but entering it into standard genealogy software is a bit of a challenge.

I think I'll go clean the house.

After all the travelling we did in the last quarter of 2008 and in January of 2009, I, the homebody, was really ready to enjoy a few months with nowhere to go. But "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley," and in this case I'm thrilled.

Ever since we moved away from Boston, I'd been waiting for Porter to get a job assignment back there so I could stay with him while doing research at the New England Historic Genealogical Society Library on Newbury Street.  He's been all over the country, but never to Boston...until now. (More)

Why do I like our church?  Well, for one thing, during yesterday's service there was not one mention of the Super Bowl.  :)

I did afterwards, in the form of a friend who is a florist commenting that she had the day off because no one schedules a wedding during  the Super Bowl, which led Porter to comment that Super Bowl Sunday may be the only holiday truly observed and respected in America.

Although we watched only about 30 seconds of the game, that half-minute included the game-winning touchdown.  Porter feels towards the Steelers only slightly better than he does towards the Yankees, but I send congratulations to all of our Pittsburgh-area, and Pittsburgh ex-pat, friends.

With a hat-tip to Bill H., another Steeler fan, here's the Super Bowl ad you didn't see.  I believe NBC should have the right to choose the ads it shows, but I like this one, so you can see it here.  No ad revenues generated.  :)  It's safer to watch it right from here; if you go to the YouTube site itself, I recommend avoiding the viewer comments, and I don't vouch for any other videos that might be suggested.

For the amusement of our friends and family, particularly those who were in New Hampshire last week, we are under a hard freeze warning.

All persons in east central Florida venturing outdoors this morning... should dress in layers and wear a hat.

Okay, okay—stop throwing things!

Heather and Jon gave us a gift certificate for the El Bodegon restaurant, because they know we've been mouring the demise of our favorite tapas restaurant.  We thought we'd celebrate our anniversary again tonight (the first celebration having been in Switzerland) and try it out.

Our intentions to use the gift certificate went by the board, however.  We arrived during tapas happy hour, and learned that we couldn't use both discounts.  We couldn't resist two-for-one tapas, so we'll need to return to use the gift certificate.  This is a good thing.  :)  The meal was thoroughly delightful: (More)

Insofar as I care about the Super Bowl, which isn't any distance at all, actually, I did think it would be cool to have an all-Pennsylvania matchup.  Failing that, I'll give condolences to my Philadelphia friends, say congratulations to my Pittsburgh friends, and hope the latter were safely away from downtown last night.  :)

At this moment, the temperature is the same in Orlando and Basel, which means that Orlando is having a "cold snap" and Basel has warmed up a bit since we were there.  Hillsboro, on the other hand....  Stay warm, all you Daleys!

Diplomacy.  It was Henry Kissinger's favorite game.  It was also a significant part of our lives in the early 1980s, back when Porter thought he had time to spend on interminable strategy board games.  He played in person; he played by mail.  He designed and implemented a multi-tiered rope-and-pulley game board system for our basement, so he could keep track of several games at once.  By far his favorite—no doubt because it is all skill, no luck—was Diplomacy.

I doubt the number of games Porter persuaded me to play exceeded two, but that didn't stop the whole family from being sucked into the vortex.  Somewhere in the process of all the conventions, fanzine activity, and of course, game playing, we made some lifelong friends, including two for whom Porter would subsequently be best man at their weddings.  Heather gave Porter his less sinister nickname, Dippy Daddy.  (The other, bestowed by one of his favorite opponents, was Porter the Knife.)  Two of our close friends published their own "Dipzines"—small publications with a few articles that primarly served the purpose of managing play-by-mail games—to which I occasionally submitted an article.  In one of them I even had a short-lived cartoon, which I called Dip City. (More)

Li'l Writer Guy has return from his monastic retreat (we picked him up on our return from The Wedding), but is still experiencing re-entry, so you'll still mostly be getting quick takes and pointers to what others have written.  Probably lots of both, however, as the number of comment-worthy events and posts has multiplied almost out of control.  The most efficient way to deal with them is probably to present them with a simple "here, you might find this interesting."

I'm also working on a restructuring of this blog, so please bear with me as I play around.  For the first time in months I haven't had the immediate pressure of travel/new grandchild/wedding/holidays driving my life, and I'm looking forward to some signficant housecleaning in many areas of my life.  This feeling of reduced pressure is probably a fool's paradise, as there are still major wedding plans to work out (for the U.S. ceremony in the summer), other travel coming up, and the backlog of important work that was set aside for the more urgent (but also important)—but let me enjoy the moment.

Li'l Writer Guy completely understands that what you are all waiting for is the story of our trip and the reason we made it, and plans some serious work on that once his desk is dusted and the piles organized.