Lift Up Your Hearts!

They say trying new things keeps your mind young.  I should be in good shape, having recently ventured into two areas I was sure I'd never touch, finding them useless at best.  One is Facebook, which I had classed—along with MySpace and LifeJournal—as boring, yet time-wasting websites for teenaged girls to gossip and bully each other, and for sexual predators to troll for victims.  But Janet was invited to join by her oboe professor, so how could she say no?  Then she had so much fun finding people with whom she'd lost contact that I decided to see what it was all about.

No doubt it is a good place for teenaged bullying and dangerous liasons, but it doesn't have to be, and I've been surprised at how many friends I've found or been found by already.  I love sending Christmas letters, because it keeps us in contact with friends whose lives for the most part no longer intersect with ours.  I sense that this logic has no appeal to the Facebook generation, which may never lose that contact.  Perhaps the greatest danger (predators and bullies aside) is in being overwhelmed by trivial, shallow contact.  The signal-to-noise ratio is rather poor.  At least in a Christmas letter one is forced by space limitations to keep to the more important issues. (More)

[Part 3 will be the last, at least for a while, since the book must go back to the library.  Here are Part 1 and Part 2.]

[The best state of mind to promote if you want to encourage someone to be successful is] a fully realistic assessment of the difficulty of the challenge ahead of him, and, at the same time, an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it.

This one is suprising, and no doubt controversial, yet resonates so well with my experience that I am compelled to write about it. (More)

The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)

[This is Part Two.  Part One is here.] 

The mediocre manager believes that most things are learnable and therefore that the essence of management is to identiry each person's weaker areas and eradicate them.

The great manager...believes that the most influential qualities of a person are innate and therefore that the essence of management is to deploy these innate qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance. 

I find Marcus Buckingham's belief in the essentially unalterable effect of our genetic makeup on our abilities to be disturbing, to say the least.  However, that doesn't change my appreciation of his observation that we spend too much time and effort trying to shore up our areas of weakness, and not enough building on our strengths.  True, we can't afford to ignore our weaknesses, and well-directed efforts at overcoming them are often in order.  Spending the majority of our energy on our strengths, however, generally leads to the most progress, the most satisfaction, and the most achievement. (More)

The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2005)

Reading, for me, is not a luxury but a necessity, like eating.  Ideally, meals should be eaten slowly, savored, and appreciated, preferably in the company of good companions and interesting conversation.  So it also should be with books.  All too often, however, under the pressures of the day, we gulp a hasty meal and move on. Alas, I have not done justice to The One Thing You Need to Know, but when I read about it on the Prodical Kiwi(s) Blog, I knew I had to grab what I could from it now, and hope to give it a better reading later. (More)

I just posted my complaint that the movies are getting weirder and less enjoyable now that we've reached the last quarter of the 20th century in our Academy Award Best Picture survey, but the very next year (1979) gave me hope.  Kramer vs. Kramer is a great film, and not just because it followed on the heels of the horrible Deer Hunter.  Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep deserved the acting Oscars they won, and I strongly suspect the only reason Justin Henry did not win Best Supporting Actor was reluctance on the part of some to give an Oscar to an eight-year-old child.  But he was awesome.

Kramer vs. Kramer works so well, I believe, because of the dedication on the part of director and the cast to  making a true story.  In The Deer Hunter, truth was sacrificed for the sake of the story; here the director, someone else whose role I forget, and Dustin Hoffman spent months setting the foundation for the movie, in order to tell the truth about divorce. (More)

Our Academy Award "Best Picture" quest is getting squirrelier as we move into more modern times.  (Okay, so the 70s isn't exactly modern, I know.)  We were married but without kids when The Deer Hunter came out, and so might have actually seen it in the theater, but we didn't.  Now I know why.  We did see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest during that time, and I was haunted and depressed for weeks.  I'm a little more hardened now, I guess, or better at thinking of other things, or, more likely, too busy to be able to afford giving it much thought, but this one would have had the same effect.  I guess I can understand why someone would make a depressing move, but why anyone would want to watch one is beyond me.  It's not that there weren't some redeeming features about it—but not enough to induce me to see it again, or recommend it.

The director did state that he wasn't particularly interested in historical accuracy—to me a fatal flaw if you're going to have a historical setting—but he could at least have gotten the mountains right.  Substituting a steel town in Ohio for one in the Pittsburgh area is one thing, and Thailand can do in a pinch for Vietnam, but using the Cascade Mountains in Washington to portray Western Pennsylvania?

I have extracted this, completely out of context, from an e-mail in which it made total sense, because nonetheless it amused me. I can so sympathize with the sentiments it expresses, even though they weren't those of the writer.

I am not ready for Christmas. Not only in a secular, material sense (cards to be written, cookies to be bakes, presents to be bought, wrapped, and shipped), but spiritually. As one for whom Christmas has 12 days, and doesn't begin till December 25th, I know that we are now in Advent, that powerful, yet neglected, season of repentance and contemplation, of preparation and anticipation. I'm ready for Advent hymns, not Christmas carols.  (More)

I found this great site while procrastinating doing research for our Christmas letter and want to share it.  Did you ever want to know how far it really is from Orlando to Basel?  Or the path your airplane would probably take from New York to Paris?  Check out Great Circle Mapper!

Lemon and honey as a cold remedy?  I don't know about the lemon, but a new study showed plain honey to be more effective (and safer, and less expensive) than over-the-counter cough-suppressant drugs, at least for children.  Sounds good to me!

I normally don't mind that most news stories are bad news.  After all, the different, the unusual, that which makes "news" should be bad; good should be so common that it doesn't make headlines.

However, I'm beginning to suspect that some folks actually enjoy reporting bad news, as stories that have both good and bad sides always seem to be reported in the negative.  Take the latest housing "crisis."  Yes, I know, people who should have known better, and bankers who did know better, behaved stupidly and even wickedly, which led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and I understand how that's a problem for a lot more people and businesses than those directly involved.

I certainly sympathize with those who are trying to sell their houses and find that prices have fallen and they have to sell for less than they could have received a year ago—maybe even less than they paid.  But this is not news.  There have always been "buyer's markets" and "seller's markets," and I grew up knowing that one is more likely to be on the wrong end of the swing.  Yet now the headlines scream disaster because housing prices keep falling.

Sure, this is bad news to some.  But a few years ago the headlines cried woe and doom because housing prices kept rising, squeezing people—especially first-time home buyers—out of the market.  We certainly felt that way when we looked at buying a house in the Boston area.

If it must always be bad news, if the country is headed toward disaster when housing prices rise, and again when they fall, I'm likely to cry, "A plague on both your houses!" and toss the paper over in favor of my World of Puzzles magazine.

Hooray!  I love Advent!  And I love being home at our church where the season is recognized in all its glory, and we don't plunge suddenly into Christmas.  Purple is the order of the day, not red and green, and repentence and renewal more than celebration.  Heather, tell your paster I thought of him today, as we started the service by chanting the Great Litany.  I particularly like this beautiful, ancient prayer.

Is there anything one can't find on the Internet?

One of the reasons I like Advent is that, like Lent, we sing particularly good and meaningful hymns during this season.  The Sequence Hymn was and exercise in sight reading (The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns), but the Communion Hymn was the glorious O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and the Recessional was Rejoice! Rejoice, Believers."

Our choir director greeting us this morning with, "It's great to see you back.  Do you know we are singing today?"  Fortunately, it was not a difficult piece, and it's a good thing I'd actually rehearsed the alto line a time or two, as I turned out to be the only alto present.... 

Dear far away, liturgy-loving children:  I hope this comforts your hearts, and doesn't make you terribly homesick.

P.S. Our "for schools" prayers today included the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. :)

Today our computer network stopped working.

I needed to access a file on our laptop from our Windows 98 machine.  Nothing.  Nada.  The helpful message from Windows told me the nework was unavailable and I should contact my network administrator.  Hello, that's me, and neither I nor me had any clue.  Even more helpfully it told me to start the network troubleshooter, which then presented me with a totally blank screen.  Apparently it had no more clue than me or I.  For the record, Porter was equally stumped, though he manfully plowed through our home networking book for a while. (More)

As Smithical well knows (we all laughed when she tagged me), I find most memes silly, so I'm breaking the rules by breaking the chain and not tagging anyone.  But I respect her and love reading her blog, so I'll play along a little bit.  Besides, it's easier than writing about more important matters, and all I feel up to in the 40 minutes I have before going to the dentist.

Five random and/or odd things about me:

• I grew up thinking that genealogy and family history were unutterably boring, and that anyone who cared about such things must be a snob.   About five years ago I discovered that genealogical research is more fun than a World of Puzzles magazine, and learning about my ancestors has made history (once an exceedingly dull subject) come alive for me.

• Make that history and literature.  My direct ancestors (nth great-grandparents) include Duncan I of Scotland (think MacBeth), Edward I of England (Braveheart), King John of England (Robin Hood and The Lion in Winter, and the Magna Charta), King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Becket and The Lion in Winter) as well as William the Conqueror and Charlemagne.  I suppose that makes me one of those snobs I despised, if it counts as bragging to be related to so many scoundrels.  :)  However, this is nothing particularly unusual; such ancestry is common to many people with early New England ancestors.  Eminent genealogist Gary Boyd Roberts (formerly of the New England Historic Genealogical Society) has said, "Living Americans with 50-100 immigrant ancestors in New England (or Long Island), in Quaker (but not German or Scots-Irish) Pennsylvania, or in the Tidewater South (but often not the Piedmont, Shenandoah Valley, or mountainous "backcountry") can expect to find a royally descended forebear."

• Nonetheless, I have not yet been able to find any for Porter, despite his extensive New England ancestry.  He has at least three separate Mayflower families in his line, however. 

• We have friends in France who live on the site of one of the above-mentioned Henry II's fortifications, and not far from where he and Eleanor of Aquitaine are buried.

• Ancestors aside, We have the best family and extended family in the world!  (None of them scoundrels.)

That's it.  No tagging, no pressure for anyone else.  But it was fun to think about.

I've much to write about, but since I just returned from a lovely Thanksgiving+ visit with family and friends, and had a full day's work worth of travel today, I will begin with just a few random comments about my trip home.

Pittsburgh is a lovely airport to wait in:  they play soft classical music and real Christmas carols, without the accompaniment of blaring television sets.

If you print your USAirways boarding pass at home, the pass is printed twice on the page, with a dotted line between and instructions to "cut here."  If you do that, be careful which paper you pull out to show at the security checkpoint, because if you give the guard the one labelled "customer copy," she will make you hold up the line while you dig out the other one.  It seems logical to me to keep the one I'm going to need to get on the plane in a safe place, and use the other copy as the one I'm likely to drop and/or lose in the shuffle of coat, shoes, laptop, luggage, and clear plastic bag.  But the TSA doesn't agree.  At least not in Pittsburgh, at least not today.

The bus ride between the airport and the stop nearest home takes two hours during rush hour.  If one has a World of Puzzles magazine, the ride is no worse than the flight, though without the free drink and pretzels.

Ah, yes.  The free drink.  Usually I ask for tea or water, but since this time it was an ersatz lunch, I felt the need for something more substantial and nutritious.  So I asked for "spicy tomato juice," which sometimes gets me V8 and sometimes, like today, "Bloody Mary mix."  The attendant generously gave me the whole can, so I was able to check out the nutritional information on the label.  Sure enough, it promised to provide 25% of my daily requirement of vitamin A, and a few other good things, and for only 70 calories.  So far so good.  Then I notice the sodium level....   Nearly two grams!  As much as an entire 10-12 ounce bag of potato chips.  It tasted very good at first, but I couldn't finish it.  Since coming home I've been drinking lots of water and tea to try to flush some of that salt assault out of my system.

It's hot in Orlando!  The overly-air conditioned bus and the dark sky almost convinced me that it was cool outside, but not for long.  After the 30-minute walk home I had to resist the impulse to put on the A/C, but it was really only 70 degrees inside, so I just needed to change out of my jeans and long-sleeved turtleneck, which were much more appropriate for Pittsburgh's below-freezing temperatures than Orlando's 80 degrees.

Tomorrow I begin the assault on Mount Mail, Mount Laundry, and Mount All-That-Stuff-I've-Been-Avoiding-For-The-Past-Two-Weeks.  Um, well, not until after a visit to the dentist for a double-coronation ceremony.... 

 

 

Thank you, veterans, and all who are and have been prepared to give the "last full measure of devotion" for our lives and freedom, whether we honor, despise, or ignore them.