Cedar

There is a type of cedar on my lawn. My dad planted it as a little shrub, but he does not like to prune or trim plants. He likes them to grow naturally. So here's what it looks like now.



You can just see the roofline of the house on the left in the lower side of the picture.

On the side of the cedar that faces the deck, I cut it back enough to make room to walk and stand.



So, from this side, you can see into the network of branches.



Birds love it in there.

A couple things

Chopped the red-twig dogwood back summer before last. Now it has new growth, and you can see why it has its name.



Swans flying overhead.

Roast this

On my way home today, I stopped at the drug store. While I was browsing, a Christmas song came on the loudspeaker. The Christmas song was "The Christmas Song," sometimes known as "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire." For me, the most familiar version is that by Nat King Cole, which I've embedded below.

But this was not the familiar version. It was a female singer who was putting her own mark on the song. For instance, she was not bound by the melody but felt free to improvise her own tune. And, whenever a slight increase in volume might be called for, she would bellow and belt the lyrics. Finally, she had that manner of singing high notes that you hear so much today from women pop singers: she would sing the note, then slide her voice down, as if to indicate that she could hit a high note but not sustain it, then up and down, up and down, like a roller coaster, until one was praying for the next syllable so that she could get off the vocal carnival ride. I don't know who she was, but I'm not a fan.

Palate cleanser:

First Sunday of Advent

From the Catholic Lectionary (I bolded what I liked best)

Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7:

You, LORD, are our father,
our redeemer you are named forever.
Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,
and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?
Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
with the mountains quaking before you,
while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for,
such as they had not heard of from of old.
No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you
doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Would that you might meet us doing right,
that we were mindful of you in our ways!
Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful;
all of us have become like unclean people,
all our good deeds are like polluted rags;
we have all withered like leaves,
and our guilt carries us away like the wind.

There is none who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to cling to you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and have delivered us up to our guilt.
Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.

1 Corinthians 1:3-9:

Brothers and sisters:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus, that in him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Mark 13:33-37:

Jesus said to his disciples: “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch. Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’”

My thoughts: The day of Christ's return is not a scary threat, a day to be dreaded. In Isaiah, the prophet longs for the Lord to come suddenly, acknowledging that, if he did, he would not find his people doing right or being mindful of his ways. The prophet wants the Lord to manifest his power and majesty and in so doing to rescue his people from their sinful ways. Jesus tells his disciples (that's us) that God has given each of us work to do and we should be found doing it. It's like a surprise inspection in the military, or your boss coming back a day early from vacation, or your parents coming home earlier than they told you when they left you in charge. The apostle Paul praises the Corinthian church for their diligence in God's work and assures them that God will keep them faithful, so that when Christ returns they will not receive reproaches. Our very faithfulness is possible only as a gift from God. He is the potter, we are the clay, the work of his hands; he keeps us firm to the end.

First snow

I heard the wind picking up last night, then at around 11:30 p.m. saw a traffic warning online for snowy driving conditions on the freeway not all that far from here. So I looked outside and, sure enough, snow.

This morning some was still there.



More than just snow--it was cold. The pond was frozen.



The northeast wind--a cruel blast from the Fraser Valley--blew all day.

Semper Fido

Knitting, cleaning, blogging, whatever, I have a faithful companion.

Purls of wisdom

Okay, after joking about it many times, I'm literally going to knit a ravell'd sleave, and this time I mean it. (Anybody want a peanut?)

Since about the age of 10, I've known the knit stitch. My grandma taught me to cast on and knit, and that's as far as I ever got. I never learned to purl. My one completed knitting project was a coaster. It was rather rectangular, too short one way for setting a glass on it, too long the other way. Such as it was, I gave it to my mom as a gift and who knows but that it is in a drawer or a box somewhere in the very house in which I now live.

Anyway. I asked my talented sister-in-law if she would teach me to purl. I've tried looking at drawings and videos, but I can't learn a three-dimensional craft from a two-dimensional instruction. She said she would, so I ordered some yarn and knitting needles off Amazon. I ordered cotton yarn because if I succeed in making a scarf, for instance, cotton won't make me itch like wool does. My sensitive skin--it's that delicate flower thing. (I recently read that Wagner needed to wear silk clothes because of his sensitive skin.) It was a large skein, which I wound into a gargantuan yarn ball, and yesterday after our Thanksgiving dinner, I learned to purl.



I cast 40 stitches onto a size 10 needle and knit a row, then purled a row. Knit a row, purl a row, and so I've been going on.



I've made noticeable mistakes, but I try to recover them on the next go-round and in any event just keep knitting.



One side.



And the other side. It is not inconceivable that I shall master this.

The day after

It's the day after Thanksgiving, a quiet day for myself. Yesterday was the time spent with dear family members, and I loved it. I have dedicated today to much-needed housework. Already I have filled the dishwasher and set it running. I have a portable dishwasher, if that's the correct term (it is on wheels, and if I moved out of this house I could take it with me), that renders the kitchen sink inaccessible while running because it has to be hooked up to the faucet.

The dishes were piled high in the kitchen. This happens not because I am averse to loading the dishwasher but because I am lazy about unloading it. After it runs, it tends to become the place I go for clean dishes, while dirty dishes pile up in the sink and on the counter. Today I am remedying that situation. I will have to empty this load out and run another one.

I also plan to do multiple loads of laundry. And clean out the fridge. Vacuum the floors. Put stuff away. Clean the bathroom.

But, of course, right now I'm taking a break. I stepped outside to take a picture recording that on this date one can see the creek from my deck, which means the water is high.



See it? One can also see the sheds and buildings of the lumber yard on the other side of the creek. During the summer the trees' leaves hide them.

(I notice I'm saying "one" instead of "you." That's because I've been reading Mitford books.)

And so we have entered the holiday season and the journey into the heart of winter.



No sitting outside drinking coffee in the sunshine on a Saturday morning for the next four or five months.



The pond is full of rainwater and fallen leaves.



The vines among the leaves and frozen flowers are like tattered streamers after the party is over.



St. Francis keeps a solitary vigil until spring.

Oh the world!

I recently read a "biography" of Nancy Mitford that was composed mostly of excerpts from her letters. Her friend Harold Acton put it together not long after she died. Nancy Mitford is the author of the incomparably English novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate yet she lived from 1945 to her death in 1973 in France.

The two novels I mentioned are hilariously funny, yet poignant. Later, she turned to writing biographies, and I am now reading her life of Madame de Pompadour. What I've read by her has not shown much interest on her part in religion (although no antipathy toward it either), so I was interested to read in her letters, in the years of the illness that eventually took her life, the remark "The longer I live the more Christian I become—Christian civilisation with all its faults has been by far the best in historical times, do admit."

Sometimes she had so much pain from her illness that she longed to die, but when she had relief from the pain, she wanted to live. She said, "Oh the world! how much better off we shall all be in the next one. And yet one’s pretty house, the sunshine, the bird’s moving in for the winter, Hassan and his niceness and all one’s friends can’t but attach one to it." (Hassan kept house, cooked, and cared for her in her illness.) I relate to that because I often think that this world is so beautiful that I wish we didn't ultimately have to leave it, even for a better one, and what I like best are my yard, my deck, my neighborhood, my dog, my family. Simple pleasures are the best, as the baked beans commercial used to say.



I was a little disappointed that, in my Kindle edition of Madame de Pompadour, the introduction, by Amanda Foreman, had several mistakes concerning Nancy Mitford. After mentioning Nancy Mitford's father's aversion to sending his daughters to school, she says, "Nancy was only half-joking when she claimed that the one novel she had read in her life was White Fang." Nancy Mitford never said this about herself, it was a line she put in the mouth of her fictional character "Uncle Matthew" (a character based on her father, Lord Redesdale), who said it was such a good book he never had to read another one. A couple sentences later, Ms. Foreman states, "She achieved instant fame with her essay 'The English Aristocracy,' a witty analysis of class-based habits of speech, in which she coined the terms U and non-U, meaning 'upper-class' and 'the rest.'" In fact Nancy Mitford wrote that essay some time after her novels had become wildly popular. Then, "After the war, Nancy moved to France and lived in a charming house in Versailles." Actually, Nancy Mitford lived in Paris from 1945 through 1966 and moved to Versailles in 1967. All these facts are in the book to which Ms. Foreman is writing the foreword. All she had to do was read the book to get it right.

Amanda Foreman, by the way, is the author of a biography I've read and enjoyed, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. I trust her research in that work was of a higher caliber than this.

Where is the answer?

We've been having windy weather. That seems to happen a lot in October, although, come to think of it, it's November now. Anyway, a couple days ago I stopped at Winco, the big-box grocery store, on my way home from work to pick up a few items. When I came back out to my car, I saw a shopping cart rolling across the parking lot with no visible means of locomotion. I said to myself, "The grocery carts are blowin' in the wind."

Naturally, this led to my singing "Blowin' in the Wind" (or such parts of it as I could remember) the rest of the way home. I knew it was written by Bob Dylan, and I've heard his version, but I prefer Peter, Paul, and Mary's rendition. I like close harmonies and melodic singing.

Judge for yourself. Here's Bob Dylan:



and here are Peter, Paul, and Mary:

Replicake

Today the wife of one of my co-workers "experimented" with making a carrot cake, and she brought the result in to our office. I had a piece, and I proclaim the experiment a resounding success.

Further studies are warranted, however, to make sure the result is reproducible.

Sunday noon

Today is a cloudy day with light rain. Washington rain. It's cool out, but the wind is not adding any extra chill. Wet leaves are all over the pavements.

Yesterday, Saturday, I slept in a long, long, long, long time, and it felt great. I didn't wake up until 11:00. One more week until we "fall back" an hour. Lucky Europeans already did so today.

In a little while, I'll go over to my sister-in-law's and we'll eat a nice Sunday dinner she'll have prepared and then we'll work on our stitching. I'm on the last flower of a pansy pillow, then I'll fill in the background. She is in the last stages of a large and complex needlepoint of Rembrandt's Night Watch.

This evening, I need to do enough laundry to get me through the work week. It's been many years now that my typical pattern is to do the most necessary weekly laundering on Sunday evening. That is because I tend to wait until the last minute to do almost everything. I don't know why I do that, I just do.

Oh, well.

Town sky

By the time I got into Lynden, about 6:00 p.m., the sky to the west looked like this:



In my back yard, this glowing hump of cloud showed over the trees:



When I took my dog for a walk, this giant thunderhead was due east, as I looked down South Park Street:



Here it is closer up:



And closer yet:



Cool.

Countryside sky

So yesterday we had exciting weather. Thunder, hail, and rain about lunch time, then the sky cleared up in time for a partial solar eclipse in the afternoon. I didn't know about it at the time, but in Longview, Washington, about 200 miles south of me, there even was a tornado. Those happen rarely in Washington. This is only the second one I've ever heard of.

When I was driving home from work, the post-storm sky was going through rapid changes, with stunning cloudscapes and even a rainbow. I pulled off onto a side road (Abbot Road, off the Hannegan, if you're local) and took some pictures.



Rainbow over the harvested field.



Dark sky.



The sky was dark, but everything on the ground was bright -- clean from the rain and with the westering sun making it glow.



The edge of the dark clouds.



The farm glowing against the louring sky.



A watery effect because the car window on that side had raindrops on it.

Beauty

P. Allen Smith, whose TV series "Garden Home," I enjoyed, has a Facebook page, and he linked to this blog entry  a woman wrote about her garden. She starts out recounting a time when some women said that their garden was strictly utilitarian and they didn't waste resources on things that weren't edible. So she wrote a blog about why she gardens and loves her garden, which has both edible and ornamental plants.

In Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the priest who saves Jean Valjean from going back to prison has a garden in which 3/4s was for vegetables and 1/4 was for flowers. His housekeeper told him that 1/4 plot was useless and that it would be better to grow salads then bouquets. He replied that she was mistaken and said, "The beautiful is as useful as the useful." And after a pause he added, "More so, perhaps."



Beauty is an intrinsic and valuable part of God's creation. When we plant flowers and enjoy them, we honor him.

Heat and humidity

I remarked earlier that it seemed quite warm today for mid-October. When I went to church this evening, when I sat in the fireside room, where we were meeting, I found myself feeling too warm and coated with sweat. I was embarrassed during the shake hands greeting time for fear I looked grossly sweaty. After a while I felt a little better, but always quite warm. At my small group meeting, toward the end, I was sweating again.

I was wondering, is it really hot? Or am I having hot flashes? Or maybe too much thyroid medicine?

When I got outside the wind was blowing harder than ever--it's been blowing all day, which makes it tolerable outdoors--and some large raindrops were scattered in with the wind.

By the time I got home, after 9:30 p.m., and looked up local weather reports, the current temperatures for my town were innocuous numbers in the low 60s (Fahrenheit). I finally found a site that said what had happened earlier in the day, and it turns out today's high temperature was 76.5 at around 3:00 p.m. At 6:00 p.m., when church started, it was still almost 70 degrees, and as my small group was winding down it was still almost 67 degrees, and the humidity was getting up near 80%. So, pretty gross.

About now, the temperature is down to just a little over 61 degrees, but the humidity has climbed to 94%.

Fortunately, the forecast is for cooler weather starting tomorrow, also rain, maybe even thunder, which is exciting in this region because rare.

Autumn

Today was a rather warm day for mid-October, but still had a feeling of fall because of clouds, wind, and blowing leaves. Yesterday I borrowed two of my niece's children to help me do some clean-up around the yard and deck.  One of the things I did was throw away all the annuals I had bought but never planted. This past summer was not a good one for beautifying my deck or growing flowers. But now that is behind me. Ahead is the dormant season, and by the time spring comes I may have regenerated the desire to grow flowers.

This afternoon I mowed the lawn. The grass has gotten greener and lusher since the weather cooled off and we got a little rain. Also there were leaves all over the back yard, so wherever I mowed I left a path behind me. I like that. I don't pick up the leaves and grass as I mow, but I have blades on the mower that chop them up to fertilize the lawn. It was a gorgeous day to be outside.

Now I'm back inside and the only fly in my ointment, so to speak, is that I have a fairly severe infestation of fruit flies in my kitchen. So gross. I will have to address that problem at a later date because right now I have to feed and walk the dog, take a shower to wash off the smell of lawnmower fumes, then go to the evening worship service at my church, and then to my small group. The small group right now is my chief source of spiritual help.

Survival

Q: Where was Moses when the lights went out?

A: In the dark.

Yesterday my power was out for about four or five hours. I got home from work later than usual because I had stopped at the grocery store on the way. As I turned into my cul-de-sac, I was following a PSE truck. I went around it to pull into my driveway, where I halted and pushed the button on the automatic garage-door opener on my visor. No response. Push. No response. Hm. I knew the battery was okay because the light on the device went on with each push.

I got out of my car and saw that no lights were on in my house or any of my neighbors' houses. The PSE truck had disgorged a workman who was approaching some kind of utility box on my neighbor's property. "Is the power out?" I asked. He seemed to look at me cautiously. "Yes," he replied after a pause.

I went inside my home and found my way through the gloom to let my dog out of his box. He starts to bark as soon as I put my key in the door. My upstairs neighbors must always know when I get home. Barkity bark bark. Yappity yap yap. I was flipping switches everywhere I went so that when the power came on I would know.

As it turned out, I had a long time to wait. I lit a candle, pondering the saying, "It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness" in the context of this comic strip:



Good old "Peanuts."

I opened up the computer I am now writing on, and the battery was fully charged. However, I could not get online because I could not connect to my wireless. The troubleshooter told me to turn my router on and off.

So I went on my cell phone. First I called my parents to chat about the situation. Then I went online, which always uses up the battery quickly. I made a post or two about the outage on Facebook and visited the PSE site, where I discovered it was a very tiny outage, affecting an estimated 7 customers. Soon my phone battery went dead, so I read materials already loaded onto my Kindle.

I made a couple trips down the hall to what my mother calls "that little room," but I did not flush the toilet. Because I am semi-below ground level, the downstairs where I live requires a pump to drain water. I don't know what might have happened had I flushed, but I imagine it would not have been pleasant.

Around 11:30, 11:35, the lights came on and the refrigerator started to hum. Just in time for me to turn the lights off and go to bed (after flushing the toilet).

This morning when I went outside to walk the dog, my sprinkler system was cycling through its business. I had turned the system off this spring, deciding to postpone learning how to operate it until next year. But I found the manual and it said that after a power outage it will default to a once-a-day schedule eight hours after power is restored. I think I will get a professional in to get it drained and shut down for winter so that if we have any power outages then I won't have complications involving frozen pipes. For the moment, I just turned it off again. I think. I'll know for sure tomorrow morning.

So that's just about the biggest adventure that's happened to me in a long time. Glad I made it through.

Lapping it up

So here I am, using my laptop on top of my lap, exactly as the name promises. I am sitting in my recliner, with my feet up, using the computer. This is the life. It's practically a beer commercial. I remember one where guys drove big trucks, caught big fish, camped out in the wild, and, of course, drank a specific brand of beer, and the tag was, "It just doesn't get any better than this."

I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. This week I've struggled with over-sleeping. Since tomorrow is Saturday, I can oversleep with no consequences. I do have to get out there and find some birthday presents for a boy who's turning 15. We have a party (well, just a family get-together) at 2:00.

And now, good-night.

Almost

So tomorrow is Friday. That's nice. That's very nice.

Snoozer

Goodness, I'm tired.


Lord Caversham.  Well, sir! what are you doing here?  Wasting your life as usual!  You should be in bed, sir.  You keep too late hours!  I heard of you the other night at Lady Rufford’s dancing till four o’clock in the morning!

Lord Goring.  Only a quarter to four, father....


Lord Goring.  You should go to bed, Miss Mabel.

Mabel Chiltern.  Lord Goring!

Lord Goring.  My father told me to go to bed an hour ago.  I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice.  I always pass on good advice.  It is the only thing to do with it.  It is never of any use to oneself.

Quiet night

I've closed and locked the door for the night. It gives me a feeling of security to be inside my cozy home -- light, warm, quiet -- with the rest of the world -- dark, cold, windy -- outside. Tonight I am of a mind to go to sleep early.

The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. Amen.

Huzzah

My new computer is here, and I'm using it. It will take a little getting used to, but it's already better than holding my Kindle up to my nose while trying to type on a tiny touch-screen keyboard.

After I came home from work, and before I unboxed the new computer, I mowed the lawn. The days are getting shorter, so that by the time I was done it was dusk if not later. I hope I didn't miss any large patches in the gloom. I did the front yard first, so that the most public area would look the best. For the back yard, I was zooming around trying to finish before dark.

Reminds me of a joke some guys used to make many years ago when I worked at a publisher of automotive information. British cars, such as Jaguars, had a reputation of needing lots of repairs. The manufacturer of the electrical systems for these cars was Lucas Electric, and its reputation was the same. The guys said that Lucas workers had the motto: "A good day's work and home before dark."

Well, speaking of the dark, it's almost time for bed. As Bridget Jones said, "I'm headed for Bedfordshire." Or as the children's joke goes (in houses where kids know Bible stories), "Shadrach, Meshach, and To-bed-we-go." Or as my maternal grandmother used to say, "I think I'll hit the hay." Or as Samuel Pepys used to record in his diary, "And so to bed."

The ease of typing renders me garrulous.

En route

I have been notified that my  computer  has  shipped. Perhaps I will even receive  it tomorrow. I'm  looking forward to having a  keyboard  again.  This typing on the screen just isn't cutting it.

I remember watching a scene in a  Clint Eastwood  movie --  probably  Dirty Harry -- in which Eastwood is  playing pool while his workplace  superior yells at him. At the end of a lengthy tirade, Eastwood says, "I got one thing to say....Your mouthwash ain't cutting it."

Anticipation

If have ordered a new computer, but it will take about three weeks to arrive. Meanwhile, blogging from my Kindle is not as smooth as working with a keyboard. I just have to wait for better times.

Hair today

So I wimped out. The young lady who does my hair gave me a reminder call that I had an appointment Saturday morning, and that was enough to push me over the edge. After talking to my sister-in-law, I decided not to attend the Walk to Defeat ALS. Instead I got my hair done. It's a becoming shade of dark red now.

My computer crasheth

My PC seems to have given up the ghost. I'm doing this on my Kindle. I have to examine my bank account and determine my next move.

Year after year

Every September is the Walk to Defeat ALS in Bellingham. I've been there eight times now, and next weekend will be the ninth time, God willing. This year my immediate family did not set up our own team because, dreadfully, terribly, horribly, there is another family team we can join, that of my cousin who died of ALS last year.

Some years I have been the one to set up a team online at the ALS website. Always I do a moderate amount of fundraising. But this year I've been putting off even signing up at all. Every time I think about it, I feel an aversion, and I realize that the thought of it is depressing.

This evening, as I was walking my dog around the back yard, I wondered why I should find the idea of the Walk depressing, and the thought came into my head, Year after year I walk, but he's still dead.

He being my brother. I'm tired of my brother being dead. I've had enough of that.

The first time I participated in the Walk, in 2006, he was there.



He was there, but he had less than two months left to live. All the years since then, he's been gone.

2007



2008



2009



2010



2011



2012



2013



And, next week, 2014. Still gone.

I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting. Someday we'll walk together, again, forever. (But the wait feels long.)

Crisp

Fall was in the air today, for which I was heartily thankful. Windy, with leaves blowing around. There's something wild and exciting about that. I did hear a rumor of hot weather again this weekend, but I hope it's not true.

The cool sequester'd vale

The long, hot summer drags on. Yesterday I was so hot! During the night I woke up feeling too warm to sleep, so on my cell phone I looked up Lynden weather. It said that Sunday was predicted to be much cooler than Saturday--yet the Sunday predicted high is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Saturday it was over 90! For my international readers who think in Celsius, that means that today it is going to be about 27 degrees and yesterday it was about 32 degrees. High humidity yesterday, too.

No wonder I felt crabby and irritable in the afternoon. Even my dog was getting on my nerves.

Right now on Sunday morning, it feels fairly pleasant indoors with the windows open. I am once again missing church. It's just so tempting to sleep in and have a slow, quiet Sunday morning by myself.

This is how I feel about almost every gathering except family:



I don't mind socializing at work, although even there I talk more to off-the-cuff knots of 3-4 people than at the full staff meeting. At church, I keep moving through the after-church coffee time, but I am happy to get together with my small group. And I like having extended brunch with one close friend, where we talk for hours. But I must say that I do love staying home alone and sometimes wish I could do it far more often, though I suspect it's a wholesome discipline for me to have to go out and interact with others.

My longing both for quiet and solitude and for cooler weather makes me realize why I so like these lines from Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

I want to keep the noiseless tenor of my way along the cool, sequestered vale of life, far from the madding crowd.

New possessions

There are two things I've bought lately that have pleased me very much.

A few weeks ago I ordered a silver bracelet from Monastery Greetings. It has the most famous saying of Julian of Norwich stamped on it:



"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." From the 13th revelation of the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich:

But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is needful to me, answered by this word and said: It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

or:

Synne is behovabil, but al shal be wel and al shal be wel and all manner of thyng shal be wele.

I first encountered this saying in college, in a seminar on T.S. Eliot. In Little Gidding, one of his Four Quartets, he quotes it. I always liked the singing, round feel of it, as well as finding it a comforting saying.

For the past two years, almost, I've been looking for a renter for the upstairs of my house, so that I can continue to live here. In July, that was accomplished, so in August I bought myself this bracelet as a celebration.

The second new possession, which I just bought this week, is an oak sideboard for in my kitchen.



My kitchen has less than ample counter and cupboard space, so I was looking for such a piece of furniture. I searched the local craigslist under "buffet table," but realized from the search results that I needed to look for a "sideboard." One of the first things that came up was this beautiful oak sideboard.

I had received an oak table from my parents when they moved into their retirement home, and I felt that this sideboard would go with it perfectly. I wanted it so badly that I almost wanted to pray for it, but I didn't know if it would be right to pray for a material possession just because it is beautiful. Anyway, the Lord blessed me with the ability to buy it, and with dear family members who helped me move it into my house, and I love it.

So I hope I am not materialistic to love these things. Instead I will claim the rabbinic saying that God will hold us accountable for every good thing he provided that we did not enjoy.

Knitting up that old ravell'd sleave of care

Tonight I hope to sleep the night through and wake refreshed. Lately, I either don't fall asleep or fall asleep for a few hours then wake up for a few. It doesn't help that I can't resist turning on my phone and opening my Kindle to see if anyone in my family has written an e-mail or if any friend has either posted something on Facebook or "liked" a post of mine.

I got back out my light-thingy, as the technical jargon goes, to help regularize my sleep schedule.



After I came back from my travels in April, I had favorable jet lag, and then the days started getting wonderfully long and the mornings beautifully light. Now the sun does not come up quite as early, and it's been a long time since I travelled into an earlier time zone, so I need to train myself to wake up again with this light.

It has a timer so that the light turns on after my alarm (aka my cell phone) rings. I see that and think, "Oh, good, now I can wake up," then my eyes roll up in my head and I start snoring. Fortunately I have a small furry backup alarm that sticks its nose in my face and perhaps even gives me a hearty kiss. Being woken by a kiss makes me just like Sleeping Beauty.

Anyway, I am mostly getting up on time, but I want to get up more easily and feel less tired during the day, so I'm trying to train my body to sleep for 8 or more hours a night. Here I go.

Mowed the lawn

That always gives me a sense of accomplishment.

Ordinary time

In the past two weeks, I've had beloved visitors, first my brother then my sister and her husband. I've been relaxing and enjoying the family time.



Yesterday, my sister and her husband left, bringing a close to the family visits for a while--of family out of town that is; the nearby family is still get-at-able. Now the festive season is over, and I return to ordinary time. Fortunately--or I should say providentially--my ordinary life is one that I enjoy.



Today I went back to work. A good number of my co-workers are on vacation, so it was a relatively quiet day, a good day to clear paperwork off my desk. Over the next few days, co-workers will return, and soon work will be busy. That's good, too.

So I guess I have many blessings to count.

All living things are messy

A cousin of mine put up a quote on Facebook by someone named William Leal: "It's all messy. The hair. The bed. The words. The heart. Life..."  It reminded me of something I used to say to myself at a certain stage in life, which was, "All living things are messy." If you have living plants in your house instead of fake ones, the pots will leak when you water the plants and ruin rugs and wood finishes. If you have a dog or cat instead of a stuffed animal, the dog or cat will pee on the carpet, poo on the floor, vomit on the upholstery, and shed their hair on every surface in the house. (Also, I can testify, smear their nose on every window in your car.) Babies are messier than dolls. You and I are messy. We do all the same things dogs and babies do, albeit in a more contained fashion. (Okay, maybe we don't smear our noses on the car windows.) So, if we are going to have any living things in our lives--plants, animals, friends, family--we will always have messes. And if we are alive, we will be messy.

And so to bed

Today I mowed the lawn.

I was going to write more about my day, and although the events were mundane, the writing would have been light and amusing, even witty. Take my word for it.

But I'm kind of tired, so forget it. Instead, good-night.

Rain and Wind

I guess I was so tired the last time I posted that I took a 2-week break. We had a lengthy spell (several weeks) of hot weather (hot for Northwest Washington), but today we're getting well soaked with rain. That'll green up the lawn again.

My dad seems to be doing fine with his pacemaker.

I'm having good developments in my own life, but some of my friends and relatives are facing challenges. I have lots of reasons to pray for lots of people. I told one of them last Saturday night we should remember that when we don't know what to pray for the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words. Then the next day I went to church, and here was the text:

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)

The preacher pointed out that the text does not assume that most of the time we do know what to pray for but on those occasions when we don't the Holy Spirit intercedes for us; rather, it says simply, "We do not know what we ought to pray for." That's our state of being. And all the time the Spirit intercedes.

He also pointed out the Trinity in this passage: God the Father is listening to our prayers, God the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness and intercedes for us in accordance with God's own will, and God the Son, Jesus Christ, is "he who searches our heart" (cross reference Revelation 2:3: "I am he who searches hearts and minds"). The preacher suggested much of our praying should be listening for the Spirit to teach us the will of God so that we can pray for it. Also, that God chooses to act through the prayers of his saints -- thus we are his partners in accomplishing his will.

Good stuff.

Courage

Sooooooooooooooooooo tired. Saturday took my dad to the emergency room, and yesterday he had a pacemaker implanted to regulate his heartbeat. Today he came home. I've been spending a lot of time away from home, either at the hospital or with my mom at my folks' place. My sister-in-law (my hero) is still with my parents tonight.

I can remember an era when my bedtime was 8:30 p.m. I'm going to revisit that scene.

Happy Fourth

This evening I had a very relaxed, low-key celebration of the USA's Independence Day. My dad and mom came over, and so did my sister-in-law, and I made dinner: spaghetti, salad, warm French bread with butter. The spaghetti sauce was Prego traditional; I browned some mild Italian sausage meat to put in it. The French bread I simply buttered generously, wrapped in foil, and warmed up in the oven. My sister-in-law can't digest garlic, so I didn't make it garlic bread. The salad was a pre-made green salad, and I put out some different dressings, some croutons, and some sunflower seeds to put on it. For dessert, we had vanilla ice cream with raspberries and blueberries on it, to strike the red, white, and blue note. (I added chocolate syrup to mine, which has no symbolic significance. I just like chocolate.) The berries were local and in-season. The ice cream was from a local dairy business, Edaleen. My dad likes their ice cream the best, and he ought to know because he grew up on a dairy farm.

I had bought a nice Chianti to go with the spaghetti. While I was opening the bottle, I broke the cork, so that half was still left in the neck of the bottle. I went back in with the corkscrew, and when I managed to pull the remaining cork out, some wine splooshed out of the bottle, with some drops going on the floor and a few on my shirt. While sitting at the table, I at one point dipped my sleeve into the sauce on my plate. And during dessert, as I discovered afterward, I dribbled some chocolate on the neckline of my shirt and even inside my shirt on my bra. So, basically a typical meal for me.

My shirt and bra are in the washing machine even now.

Now it's later in the evening, and fireworks are popping all over the neighborhood. My dog, who is utterly neurotic about some things -- such as being left alone -- has no response at all to the booms and bangs. He is sleeping quietly.

Flowers, saint

I put two pots of New Guinea impatiens behind Saint Francis.



I think it looks nice.

Bob, bob, bobbin'

Two robins on the lawn.



That's all.