Lift Up Your Hearts!

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.

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)