I’ve had a long week of back-to-work activities. Zut alors! I’m still at home.
I thought this was interesting, written by a fellow Episcopalian.
God has made us know what we always sorta knew: that we are not in charge, no matter how much we take charge of what God has left for us to do.
Indeed, we are not in charge. Sometimes I guess we need to be hit over the head to be reminded. But I choose to believe that all is not chaos and that God is in control. This helps me persevere.
I also try to keep things in perspective and stay grateful. We have much for which to be grateful, don’t we?
Our families, for one thing, far-flung as they may be. They keep us close in their hearts, as we do them. My niece sent me this video because she thought I might like it (and I do, of course)…
Our friends who stand by us…
Our churches, such as they are, even the virtual ones.
@thebabylonbee
We have our memories of summers past…
…and visions of the future…
I am grateful for good work to do even if I have to do it in an upstairs guest bedroom/office…
Keep being grateful and thanking God for whatever comes next. We can handle it. Have a good weekend!
“Be cheerful—the problems that worry us most are those that never arrive.”—Benjamin Franklin
Well, Katiebelle continues to be the sweetest baby alive. When we wake her up in the morning, she just seems so thrilled to be with us. No matter how fussy the day before has been, she wakes up full of smiles. Happiness really is a full tank of gas, and she has been filling up on long nights of sleep and, shall we say, enthusiastic nursing come morning.
“Hooray for a new day!”“No one told me that rainstorms could be so captivating!!”
In news from our never-ending semi-quarantine, we recently laughed about the rather dour direction of one of my sing-songy chats with Katie. I must have stepped or looked away from her for a minute, so in response to a brief fuss I sang something like, “Mommy’s still here / Mommy’s still here / Mommy didn’t go anywhere,” which eventually morphed into “Mommy never goes anywhere.” Is singing to your baby free therapy?
Katie’s advice for coping with COVID stress:
Lay on the floor and kick at the air a bunch. Gets rid of any pent-up tension.
Nothing like a little Bobby D to start a blog post.
A little bird told me that after my post last week, some readers were concerned about my mental state. What? Everyone isn’t pounding skittles and wine and worried about their waistline?
Well, try not to worry too much. There are still things that make me laugh. For starters, how much I sounded like this guy when I typed the above:
If quarantining and doing this blog have taught me anything it is that I relate far too much to Jim Gaffigan and Homer J. Simpson. This could explain my waistline situation, though.
I watched Lover Come Back, my least favorite of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson collection, this weekend. It has a plot that is similar to Pillow Talk but is irritating rather than funny. However, it was worth it to see this hat:
I mean, Doris looks like she belongs on a Star Trek set, not in the Hamptons.
The weather has been a lovely break from the upper-90s where we spent most of July. I took a walk yesterday and spotted this:
We’ve got modern art in Jefferson City now. This is a recent addition. While quarantined and allowed out once a day for a walk, I ventured up Capitol Avenue almost everyday. It was nice to get back and see the progress on the revitalization going on on the otherwise dilapidated street.
I also continue to improve my sewing machine skills. I made this tote bag on Sunday and it is a great size.
You can really learn anything on YouTube.
Happy Wednesday!
“Do all you have to do without complaint or wrangling. Show yourselves guileless and above reproach, faultless children of God in a warped and crooked generation, in which you shine like stars in a dark world and proffer the word of life.”
When I walk in my house I see pictures, bought long ago, framed and hanging — de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore — that I’ve cherished and stared at for years, yet my eyes keep returning to the masters of the trivial — a white stone perfectly round, tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell, a broken great-grandmother’s rocker, a dead dog’s toy — valueless, unforgettable detritus that my children will throw away as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips with my dead father. Kodaks of kittens, and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.
by Donald Hall
Trivial, we all know, means “of little value or importance.” Yes, it is true, most of my things are of no monetary value. But trivial in any other sense is in the eye of the beholder. To each his own, I say. I love my trivial pursuits.
The OM and I watched a great movie the other night–Kes (1969), an English film directed by Kenneth Loach and based on the novel A Kestral for aKnave by Barry Hines. It is ranked seventh in the British Film Institute’s Top Ten (British) Films.
The story is about Billy Casper, a neglected working-class 15-year-old who finds solace and meaning training a kestrel, and it packs quite a punch. It is not an easy film to watch–so dreary and sad and sometimes it’s like watching a movie in a foreign language, so hard to understand are the Yorkshire accents–but it is well worth the effort. A wonderful film. The boy is perfect. We had DVR’d it on TCM, but you can rent it on Amazon Prime.
The world is more than we know.
“He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England; it was the caring about little things–the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread of the seagulls or love.” ― John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Yes, today I am back at work–still at home of course–but doing my thing remotely.
The gospel lesson yesterday was the loaves and fishes story in Matthew 14:13-21, a straightforward telling of one of Jesus’ miracles.
(I have been to this site near the Sea of Galilee where the loaves and fishes episode took place. I have the magnet to prove it.)
Five thousand fed and baskets of leftovers–all from five loaves of bread and two fish. There will always be enough if we share with our neighbors as Jesus commands us. Remember, Bunyan’s rhyme is true spiritually as well as providentially:
“There was a man and some did count him mad, The more he gave away the more he had.”
Here’s a sermon on the topic from Charles Spurgeon.
In other news, not much has happened on the homefront. We’ve had a lot of rainy days and so I haven’t ventured outside much and I haven’t seen the wee babes in weeks except for a brief visit when they dropped off my belated Mother’s Day present.
Thanks, guys!
I finally ‘drove my Cooper’ after three weeks of not in order to go to Michael’s for a curbside pickup. It was easy-peasy. We also took a drive to Lone Elk Park for something to do, but never saw a single bison. Ho hum. Par for the course.
FYI August is always “Summer Under the Stars” month at TCM, so there are lots of good movies to DVR this month. Olivia de Haviland has her day on August 23.
Try to enjoy your Monday.
*It’s home from work we go…(Frank Churchill and Larry Morey) The expression “heigh-ho” was first recorded in 1553 and is defined as an expression of “yawning, sighing, languor, weariness, disappointment”.
Well, another week has flown by and I struggle to recollect what happened. However, I did (almost) accomplish one thing. After my kitchen valance success I wanted to make an oven mitt with the leftover material. I ended up opting for something even easier — a potholder — which I’m making with fabric samples I ordered some time ago from Spoonflower.com. Before I got started I bought a bobbin winder, the one on my sewing machine being broken. It’s a nifty little gadget that certainly beats doing the job by hand.
I also purchased a small cutting mat, regular cotton batting and special heat-resistant batting called Insulbrite. Then I cut the batting to go with the sample pieces and started quilting. I’ve done about half of the right piece in the photo below. The lines are supposed to be evenly spaced and straight, but who cares? It’s my first potholder.
After a lot of swearing I finished sewing the two sides together, trimmed the edges and ended up with this:
Now if I can manage to sew the trim on the outside I’ll have a pretty potholder! Next, I’ll try an oven mitt, though I’m a little daunted by the thought of all the curves involved.
The potholder has been a nice distraction from work and colleagues who are so worried about getting Covid from returning students that they are actually writing wills. I kid you not. I’ve nothing against will-writing in general; it’s the panic behind it that gets me. What they need is a little perspective. I’d like to send all of the doom and gloomers this wonderful passage from C.S. Lewis. I’m not sure of its origin because I got it from a (sensible) friend who posted it on Facebook, but please read the whole thing:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
We could all use a big dose of common sense right now, don’t you think? When the world starts getting you down, pick up a needle or a book, bake a cake or clean out a drawer, take a walk or write a letter — every routine behavior is an act of defiance. Choose to live your life as normally as possible (though please do wear a mask and keep your hands away from your face).
It is the last day of July. Baseball has (kind of) started and I can’t say I care much. But here’s a throwback from 1966 when our Big Brother was in 9th grade and played on the CODASCO “C” team.
They look so young. Our BB is in the front row, third from the right. His best friend is next to him in the middle of the row. He has at least 7 inches to grow! His other friend Mike is directly behind him (obscured) and had about a foot to grow! Such babes. Our brother played third base.
I remember going to see several Cardinals games at the old Busch Stadium with all three of those boys. It was always so much fun to be around them! Though pushing 70 now (!), they are still nice boys.
Well, besides looking nostalgically backwards, I have been reading more Lovejoy.
“Cheerful adversity is vaguely entertaining, but even friends steer clear of doom.”
(Gold By Gemini)
I also searched high and low for my copy of Knowing God, having read about the passing of J.I. Packer last week. I have yet to find by book, but I have read a lot about Packer and listened to an interesting interview with Packer and John Piper. Packer was an evangelical and a lifelong Anglican, someone with whom I can identify. He spent the first half of his life in England and the second half in Canada but was perhaps most popular in the United States. He is widely recognized as one of the most influential theological popularizers of the twentieth century. Like the Puritans he loved, Packer believed that the Christian faith is based on clear thinking while at the same time engaging the heart. According to Justin Taylor, he saw himself as “a voice that called people back to old paths of truth and wisdom.” His entire life was spent resisting the idea that “the newer is the truer, only what is recent is decent, every shift of ground is a step forward, and every latest word must be hailed as the last word on its subject.”
Knowing God was given to me in 1976 as a Christmas present by a young man at Williams College who was in a Bible study I attended. He was a little older than everyone because he had taken a year or two off to travel in Africa. He was certainly not your typical Williams student. He was the first person outside my family who recognized that I was perhaps spiritually deeper than the flakey chick most people saw. I’m not sure what became of Joe, but I’m pretty sure he was headed to divinity school. It is good to be reminded of such people–the ones who encourage and nudge you along the way.
My mother kindly sent me her copy of Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, which I am reading a few pages at a time when I can. I am here to reiterate that reading Towles is a true pleasure, and that this novel feels particularly relevant at this moment:
Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them, the Count thought it worth considering how one was most likely to achieve this aim when one had been sentenced to a life of confinement.
Well, we continue to search for ways to master our current circumstances. It is not easy, and in the case of my academic workplace, I don’t even know what the circumstances are going to be when I return to work. It is driving me quite nuts as my leave draws to a close.
But that’s enough of that — who can complain when they get to stare at their darling daughter day in and day out? Lately, she has been staring back, which obviously turns me into a puddle of love:
Katie is now 8 weeks old! She is much more engaged with the world, paying more attention to sights and sounds. We know she is a Compton lady because she loves, in particular, to study brown furniture. (The secretary is her number one object of fascination!) While she is a champion sleeper at night, now only needing one feeding between bedtime and morning (!!!), naps are getting harder because she just wants to hang out with her mom. (I don’t blame her.)
She is getting lots of exercise on the play mat and brief stints of tummy time when she can bear it. Next week she will have her 2-month pediatrician appointment, and we’ll be able to report back with her new “stats.” In my mind, she’s bigger just about every time I pick her up!
So if you had a hard week, just remember…
Baby smiles are a thing!!
*Amor Towles. Katie’s usual is: dining, burping, kicking, sleeping. A good life!
Well, it’s Tuesday. And I don’t really have anything to write about. Things continue to be depressing. Everything at work annoys me. My wine consumption continues to increase. I am pounding Skittles as I write this. Sweatpants are all that fit me right now.
I recently finished watching all 15 seasons (plus the two episode conclusion in Season 16) of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. And I have to say, if you have Hulu you should really watch it.
I remember when CSI premiered–the year was 2000 and it was on Friday nights. It was a show that was unlike anything else on TV. The extended, detailed montages, the science, the lab guys as heroes. It was good. The biggest flaw was not having enough episodes with Nick as the primary character.
This picture makes them look like a Buffy spin off.
Like most shows, it lost its way at points, as happens when you have to keep up with the ratings. Some plots were too gross. There were too many serial killers. The series also prompted several spin offs–it was the Law & Order of CBS.
I will also say it was a remarkably pro-police show. There were flawed and corrupt officers for sure, but there were also good police officers. And it always came down to the evidence and not how things appeared.
Anyway, it has kind of ruined procedurals for me now, because most are so implausible and have no substance compared to CSI. When the final episode ended for me last week (with guest appearances from fan favorites who left the show), I felt like I was saying goodbye to friends. After all, I’d spent my evenings with them for almost a year!
We all have our coping mechanisms. People tend to credit me with being a very calm person, but let me tell you, that is only because I have been practicing/pretending to be calm for years. Indeed, I have become quite good at controlling my blood pressure, and if watching Steve McQueen drive very fast keeps me from crossing the line, so be it and yay me.
The thing is, metaphorically speaking, if SMcQ is the green Mustang, I am the green VW Bug that keeps turning up in this scene. Men like the OM wish they could be the Mustang, but I am content and happy to be the VW.
Lately I have been entertaining/calming myself by watching British war movies from the 1950s, mostly black and white ones starring John Mills and a host of great British supporting actors. I watched Dunkirk (1958) and TheColditzStory (1955), the latter which I had never seen. It is the true story of allied prisoners in Colditz Castle who made many attempts to escape captivity from the arrival of the first British prisoners after Dunkirk in 1940 until the liberation of the castle by the Americans in 1945. Colditz was a “special” camp, designed by the Nazis to hold high-risk and politically important prisoners.
Next on my list** is Reach For the Sky (1956), the amazing true story of RAF Group Captain Douglas Bader who, after losing both legs, flew a British fighter plane during WWII. He was also, coincidentally, a POW at Colditz.
Anyway, these are all good movies and I recommend them. Of course, if you prefer the Big Hollywood rendering, there is always The Great Escape (1963) which boasts a British cast and SMcQ.
Well, the point of this blog is to say that we all need to find our coping mechanisms during this more than usually difficult year and indulge in them. Hopefully you find some equally innocent and healthy way to deal with your stress. The following scene just says it all.
If that doesn’t help, maybe this little story from Henry Ward Beecher will:
I remember when I was a young person attending school in the vicinity of Mount Pleasant. One day I sat on the side of the mountain and watched a storm as it moved through the valley. The skies were filled with darkness, and thunder began to shake the earth. It seemed as though the lush landscape were completely changed, and its beauty gone forever. But the storm passed quickly and soon moved out of the valley.
If I had sat in the same place the following day and said, “Where is that intense storm and all its terrible darkness?” the grass would have said, “Part of it is in me.” The beautiful daisy would have said, “Part of it is in me.” And all the other flowers, fruits, and everything that grows in the ground would have said, “Part of the storm has produced the radiance in me.”
Have you ever asked the Lord to make you like Him? Have you ever desired the fruit of the Spirit and prayed for sweetness, gentleness, and love? If so, then never fear the fierce storms that even now may be blowing through your life. Storms bring blessings, and rich fruit will be harvested later.
(Henry Ward Beecher quoted in Streams in the Desert)
*Psalm 4:8
**These films are all available to rent on Amazon Prime for $2.99.
