Lift Up Your Hearts!

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.

So states an Orlando Sentinel article with the bizarre and ominous headline, "Hong Kong Tests Toys for Date Rape Drug."  It appears that the Chinese manufacturers of a children's arts and craft item called Spin Dots (also known as Bindeez), instead of using the non-toxic compound 1,5-pentanediol, substituted 1,4-butanediol, which metabolizes into the "date-rape" drug gamma hydroxy butyrate when swallowed.

Surely the article's author was being facetious, for it is abundantly clear why the substitution was made; as the article states, the non-toxic compound is between three and seven times more expensive than the dangerous one.  It is the Chinese-made toothpaste scandal all over again, in which toxic diethylene glycol was substitued for harmless, but more expensive, glycerin.

I came upon this Sheep Dash game in an article on sleep cycles.  Supposedly it provides a measure of how sleep-deprived one is, though they admit reaction time is slowed by aging as well.  I've found I score "Bobbing Bobcat" pretty consistently, and it tells me to go get a cup of coffee.  I only score worse when a head-bobbing sheep tricks me into jumping the gun.  Once I achieved "Rocketing Rabbit" but have not yet repeated the feat.  Maybe after a nap....

I'd be interested in seeing how you video game players score.  I expect you'll do much better, though it won't be a fair contest since none of the video gamers I know are as old as I am.  :)

Natsukashii!  There's no sound like it.  I had lost track of Discovery while out of town, but the familiar twin sonic booms as I was fixing lunch alerted me in time to turn on the television and watch the landing.

It had actually been quite a while since I'd heard that sound—even if the shuttle doesn't have to land in California, it sometimes takes a path other than one that goes over our part of the state.  This time it was quite subdued, though still obvious; at others it has been known to wake us from a deep sleep.

Heard in passing:  Money you pay in taxes doesn't come out of your pocket.

There's a chance I missed something critical here, since I just walked by the radio and didn't hear the whole story.  But what I heard was the results of a survey of people in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and some other countries, about which the reporter stated, with a serious and worried tone, that people in the United States pay about $1000 more per year in out-of-pocket health care expenses than those in most of the countries surveyed.

Most of the countries have socialized medical care and their people pay heavily in taxes for their services.  I should hope they'd be paying less out-of-pocket!

But somehow, if you pay money to the government, rather than to a doctor, it doesn't count.  As an economist I know keeps reminding me, "A dollar is a dollar is a dollar."  And so is a pound, a euro, or a franc.

After a rainy day, the weather cleared in time to encourage the trick-or-treaters to come out.  We had more than usual and I was afraid we'd run out of Mounds bars, so a couple of times I gave out one each instead of two.  I needn't have been so parsimonious—the flow dried up at 9:00 as if someone had thrown a switch, and I turned out the porch light at 9:30.

It was a more pleasant group of people this year, too.  At least one, and usually all, in every group said "thank you"; only one, very young, asked, "Can I have more?"; most were young children escorted by parents; and the only group of older kids (middle school, I'd guess) had costumes and were polite.  Very encouraging.

It's an old trick, I fell for it, and I'm glad.

Grocery stores love to put attractive displays in the checkout area, in hopes of luring shoppers to add one or two more items to their carts while waiting.  Albertsons has large displays of fresh, hot French bread, particularly irresistable to those who come to the grocery store on their way home from work.

I rarely give in to the temptation, but today I saw something new:  Nabisco's Honey Maid Gingerbread Graham Crackers.  I recommend you all go to your nearest tempting grocery display and buy some!  It's hard to imagine why anything this good can get away with being called "cracker" rather than "cookie," but hey, at least it's whole wheat.  :)

Hmm, guess I'd better find something to work on in a part of the house closer to the front door.  Trick-or-treaters are starting to arrive, and the frequent interruptions make writing difficult.

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (Free Press, 2003)

I must send this book back to the library without a proper review, but it deserves a few comments.  After hearing a friend's summary, I had to find out more.  I'm afraid I was somewhat disappointed, but I think that was more because my friend's summary was so good, causing me to expect more than was there.  I almost, though not quite, would have been as well off with just the summary.  I also might have appreciated it more if I had not already read so many books by Stephen Covey, of which this book reminds me very much.  I think Covey's books are well worthwhile, and this too, but there wasn't as much new as I had expected. (More)

I wasn't one of the ones she "tagged," and I generally think "memes" are generally inane, but Liz over at Smithical posted this one, and I like it, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.

Five Good Things

Silence  This blessed commodity is very hard to come by these days.  I don't mean total lack of sound so much as freedom from mechanical, manmade sounds and loud sounds in any form.  As I sit here in my office, it is "quiet":  Porter is reading, there is no music, television show, nor telephone conversation to hear.  And yet I am still assailed by noise at significant volume:  the chug of a hard drive, the whirr of a fan, the whine of a monitor.  If I sit on our back porch early enough, I can avoid the noise of pool pumps, air conditioners, and power saws, but the birds, bugs, frogs, and squirrels don't quite drown out the roar of the highway two and a half miles away.  Waiting at the doctor's office, driving down the road, eating at a restaurant, getting one's hair cut, grocery shopping—whatever we do, we are bombarded with sound.  And when was the last time your church allowed any amount of time at all for silent prayer and meditation during a worship service?  At one of ours, we designed a Maundy Thursday service that included a full minute of silence; it seemed an eternity, but was very powerful.  Without silence, we will lose our ability to think deep thoughts.

Hugs  In our sex-obsessed culture, we have forgotten the critical importance of non-sexual physical affection.  Without it, infants "fail to thrive"—they die.  As we grow, we learn to endure that deprivation, but we die inside.  Only young children give their affection freely; perhaps that's why they are so beloved.

Books  Our connection to the Great Conversation, to the past, to the wide world, to worlds of fantasy.  How could we live without books?  Whether a dusty genealogy tome in the library, a delightful novel with a comfortable chair and a cup of tea, or a children's book and a grandchild in my lap, I love books!

Water  Was there ever such a wonderful element?  Cold water, the best drink ever for a thirsty throat; cool water to swim in on a hot day; water for washing away the grit and grime of life; no wonder God endowed this symbol with such rich spiritual significance.

Making Music Together  Music, itself, is a Good Thing, but the miracle of coming together and making music for the joy of it is a Very Great, Powerful, Healing Thing.  With our professional music groups, our concerts, and our CD's, we have access to music of a variety and quality no other era could imagine.  But we have almost lost what it means to make our own music, and that is tragic.

Porter had to get up early this morning for a 7:00 dentist appointment, but that didn't stop him from staying up late last night.  Now his beloved Boston Red Sox have won the World Series twice in his lifetime, which until now few living Red Sox fans could say.  He's been too busy to watch all the games, but he enjoyed a few, especially last night's.

Congratulations to the Red Sox, and to those of our New England relatives who are enjoying this victory!  Condolences to S, the Yankee fan.  (No, not that S -- the other S.  I know the one S is a dedicated Red Sox fan!)  I hope T&B are happy -- I've forgotten where their loyalties lie.

I've been waiting for The Good Shepherds to become available online ever since I read the print version in Christianity Today magazine.  This positive, upbeat story resonates with me in so many ways, it well deserves a post.

[Insert the usual disclaimer here:  This way of life is not for everyone; it not my intention to offend, nor to imply disrespect for other people's life situations, much less push anyone into a lifestyle that is far from mainstream—albeit that it would have been considered normal by most of our ancestors.  But I can't help considering this a very cool life choice indeed.] (More)

Apologies to those of you who are waiting for the story of last weekend's adventures in Sarasota.  That will come, but in the meantime it's been a while since I posted, and I just came upon the essay I wrote for a genealogy contest with the less-than-inspiring title of this post.

The circumstances were interesting, however.  Because the sponsoring organization was Irish, I thought my story might be of interest to them.  Maybe it was, but not enough to win. However, a blog owner can be her own publisher, and since they didn't want it, I'm sharing it here.  :) (More)

It's been a while since I've posted anything in the RETHINK category, but I was inspired by this article on the differences in chilbirth between the United Kingdom and the United States. As much as I have come to appreciate midwives and the option of home birth, the point of this post is not to tout the British socialized health care system, which I know has significant problems. Nor do I wish to make the all-too-common mistake of assuming that an idea is better just because it's not American—or because it is European—an error which is just as dangerous as its opposite.

What strikes me as so vitally important, especially for Americans who, thanks to the size and historical self-sufficiency of our country, tend to have less contact with other cultures than most educated people, is the great benefit of listening to and exploring other people's views on topics that are so well-ingrained in our own lives we never question them. Ideas that are so much a part of us we imagine anyone who would think otherwise as uncultured, uncivilized, and ignorant: "They do such-and-such because they don't know any better. When they see our way they will know it is best." Most of us wouldn't actually say that, but it's a strong gut reaction. It's a good thing, then for all of us to encounter people who have equally deep-seated feelings that their ways, very different from ours, are superior. Whether we come away from the comparison with our minds changed, or more convinced than ever that we are right, we benefit from the encounter.

Not many people can learn this lesson by living in another culture, as Janet has. But the Internet can be a great eye-opener, and most of us probably have neighbors, co-workers, and church or school friends who would be happy to share a different cultural view.  Not to mention that getting married, even to someone from one's own culture, can be a surprising introduction to the thought that ideas, habits, and customs we take for granted are not necessarily universal. :)

Far be it from me to champion the inane and dangerous idea that all cultures and customs are equally valuable.  But I think most of us are much more likely to make the opposite error.  I preach to myself most of all.