The roofs of ages come rushing down

This made for some interesting reading the other day. Our circle of homeschooling friends here in town include a lovely Orthodox family, the husband of which is also an Orthodox priest who is establishing a church here in town. Towards the end of the evening, a few adults lounged around the family room kibitzing about politics and whatnot. He commended the article to me, and so I commend it to you.  It’s an interesting counterbalance to articles like this one, which is no doubt prompting widespread cases of the howling fantods in an entirely different population.

I think some of the observations in the first article are spot-on. As for the second…I’ve read a few of Jeff Sharlet’s other articles on fundamentalists. Frankly, I think of few of his subjects would benefit from a serious, heavy throwdown with St. Augustine, especially Civitate Dei. My money would be on the Bishop of Hippo.

As for myself, I’d rather see a revolution along the lines of this one, described by Chesterton at the conclusion of What’s Wrong With The World:

I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

Now that’s a platform I could get behind.

Outsideness, rabbits and Alice Cooper

We’re now in our third year in this house and yard and it’s only just now starting to feel like our place, if you know what I mean. We’ve done quite a bit of painting and so on inside the place, and we have most certainly spread ourselves (and our stuff) into every available corner. The outside has been a little behind, though, and this is the year that we started fixing that: vegetable garden, herbs, and so on. It’s nice, occasionally, to slip outside during the day and take a look at things – maybe pluck a weed or two. Working from home does have this perk, unwilling though I may be to take advantage of it. There are plenty of days where I go into my office at around 7:30, emerge for about 10 minutes at lunch, then disappear again until 5 or 6 in the evening. Other days I’m on the road seeing prospects and customers, and may be gone for a day or two at a time.

Yeah, I know. Cry you a river. After all, I’m still not commuting on a daily basis.

In any case, my point is this: it’s too easy for me to see the outside as someplace as a destination for escape, rather than as The Real World that I have to leave periodically in order that I might work. It ought not be so, especially when the weather has been so agreeable of late. My job, like many, has a fair amount of nonsense associated with it, and it’s clear to me that an occasional re-rooting outside is essential. It might be just a few moments of studying the sky – I’ve become pretty good at predicting coming rain by watching cloud patterns. Or it might be a few minutes turning – blech – the compost mound (which is still over-hot and over-green, and so it smells pretty bad at the moment).

Our landscape is rich with opportunities for nature studies and observation. True, we live in a suburb, and while it’s not as wooded as our last place, our home is near the edge of town, and so we’re on the cusp of some of the area farmlands. The buffers between the fields, along with the streams and river forks, form a sort of webwork of ecological boundaries. I’ve seen deer, turkeys, rabbits, skunks, turtle, snakes and all manner of songbird on my occasional bike rides. What might be seen at a slower pace – or even standing still – beggars the imagination. Cultivating the habit of mindful observation of natural and built landscapes is something that we – I -  need to work on.

In other news, the tomatoes had aphids. I sprayed them all with soapy water and that seems to have knocked them all out for now. We’ll see. I’m still catching the occasional rabbit in the yard, though I think it’s because the wee ones are leaving the gate open. The neighbors (and my spouse) are occasionally subjected to my suddenly breaking out in a screaming arm-waving  run, and there’s  be some rabbit, sitting there and chewing on a leaf, not taking the least notice until I’m just about on top of him. Then he bolts, and I chase him around our yard widdershins until he can find the gate and make an escape. Great fun for everyone except the rabbit, who crosses the road then resumes eating, nonplussed.

The almanac says that tomorrow will be one minute and thirty-seven seconds longer than today. Use the time wisely. Use it to say an Ave, a Salve Regina or an Alma Mater Redemptoris – May is the Marian Month. The current moon is waning gibbous. The next full moon is the Full Strawberry Moon – go eat some strawberries! We bought some as part of a Mother’s Day brunch around here and they were gigantic. Since I know you’re wondering, the children are fine. Two of them are off with my parents, so we’re down to only five right now. The house seems a little too quiet, but we know they’re having fun.

Finally, an absolutely, positively random item. I listened to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies all the way through for the first time in 20+ years and was surprised at two things. First, it holds up pretty well. Second, the songs came off like the soundtrack of some modern theatrical musical. Something about the production quality and the lyrics. Just need a quick libretto and a few million in financing. Hey – if they can do it for ABBA, I can do it for Alice. Any angels out there? Call me.

Home again, home again.

Just got back into town after a week in Seattle, where I was holed up in a training root for 4 days learning a little more about the products that I’m supposed to be selling. Or assisting in selling – there’s supposed to be a strict separation of Engineering and Sales, though in practice, that wall is little more than a curb. In any case, I thought I knew the stuff pretty well but came away with a whole new bag of tricks and quite a few questions answered. I go back in a few weeks for another session, then a one-day deal in NY some time in September to round things out.

I’m not crazy about the cross-country travel, nor about being away from home for a week at a stretch. The choice in this case was sort of mine – as soon as I got the green light to sign up for training, I max’ed my schedule out just in case someone changed their mind down the road.

In any event, it was nice to re-visit Seattle. I haven’t been in years, though I have some cousins and such that we used to visit there every-so-often when my brothers and I were small. The waterfront area is nicer than I remember, and I was pleased to see that for all of the other development going on, institutions like Ivar’s and Ye Olde Curiosity Shop are still going strong. And, please – daytime temps in the mid-60s? During July? I actually saw some ads on TV with “Beat the heat with our summer savings” and wanted to laugh. Then I was reminded that few homes out there have central AC, so an 80 degree day is sort of a bummer. Oh well. It’s all relative, I guess.

In other news, our smallest boy hurt his arm on the trampoline on the night before I left town. Turns out that he has a small break and will need to have it re-set early Tuesday morning, for which they will need to put him under. The temporary splint and bandage don’t seem to have slowed him down at all, though he’s a bit peeved at missing out on the pool for now. The new cast, we are assured, will be 100% waterproof and safe for use in the pool and tub. Who knew? In any case, little guys heal fast and he should be right as rain in about 3 more weeks. Everyone else is just groovy.

I picked up The Once and Future King for in-flight reading and passing the evenings while away. I read it years ago but only remembered bits and pieces of it as I was in the midst of the Great High School Breakup period. I’m in the last section now and enjoying it, though maybe not as much as Pyle’s versions. Soon as I wrap it up, it’ll be back to Great Expectations.

Bug Powder Dust

I am furiously trying to wrap things up so that I can hit the road. Vacation is calling. Which means that I’ll…uh…be writing less than usual for the next few days. E and the brood will be loitering in Atlanta for an additional week visiting friends and family, so I’ll be back here solo next week.  I see quite a few meals eaten over the sink in my near future. On the bright side, NetFlix is bringing Apocalypse Now: Redux and Das Boot next week.

But that’s later. This week is the first trip E and I have taken together without the chillun in about 8 years. To say I’m distracted is putting it mildly. One more conference call and I’m off like a cheap suit.

Friday

…and the end of another busy week. At some point I may cease to point that out; all my weeks are busy these days. I was all over town like fertilizer this week, which included a trip to Memphis to do some client support during their maintenance window which, sadly, was from midnight to 5 AM. I rolled back to the hotel, went back to the room and passed out for a few hours. Got up, hit the road in time to join a 10AM conference call, drive for a few more hours and join up with my account manager, change into a company shirt and visit yet another client. I begged off the trip to Birmingham this morning, joining by phone instead.

This is basically how all of my weeks go. Client visits, conference calls, livemeetings and web-xes, demos, evaluations and occasional schmoozing. I wake up and it’s Monday. I wake up again and it’s Friday. It’s not a bad deal at all. I also have a bunch of training lined up for late July and August. It might be a good idea to know something about the products for which I consult.

I picked up a couple of books for vacation reading: Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian (book 5 of the Aubrey-Maturin novels) and Sharpe’s Tiger, the first book in the Richard Sharpe series, which came highly recommended by a customer. E is still reading Mansfield Park. Netflix brought us BSG and Meet the Fockers. I think V for Vendetta is up next.

Other things going on: we bought a big ol’ pool for the backyard from Wally World. It’s basically I giant bag with an inflatable collar. You fill the collar with air, the bag with water and you’re Ready To Swim in 30 Minutes! Well, not quite. It took about 12 hours to fill the thing up and that water was darn cold for a day or two. This thing even came with a pump/filter/skimmer system and we have to regularly treat the water lest it become sort of…you know…funky with microbes, algae and whatnot. Among other things, it’s given us a supreme bit of leverage over the children. Not finished helping clean up? Still not quite done with school? Well, if you want to go swimming later…This should last us until fall, with any luck. Still riding my bike in the mornings, if I can. I’ve gone up to a 20 mile loop, which I can knock out in just under 2 hours. If my schedule permits it, I try to do this first thing in the morning. If time is tight, I shave off a few miles or just use the stationary upstairs. Today would have been my day to do it, but I had some early morning calls and still felt like doo-doo from yesterday’s 24-hour work/driving session.

That’s about it, I think. Kids are just about done with school for this year, the grass is getting tall and it’s getting hotter every day ’round these parts. But the fireflies have come out, we’ve grilled a couple of times, and Bluebell spotted a hummingbird the other day near the butterfly bush. There’s still some homemade peach ice cream in the freezer and the frogs are out at night. A rabbit has taken up residence in the back yard and doesn’t seem to mind the children a bit. He (she?) galumphs around the yard generally ignoring them unless they get within 10 feet of him. In the hottest part of the day, he sometimes stretches out in the shade under the trampoline. He’s pretty cool, actually. Like a pet you don’t have to feed, or even name.

So summer seems to have  landed, and not a moment too soon if you ask me.

Day 8

Well. One thing I can say is that I’m no longer burdened by long periods of inactivity. I’ve been thrown in whole hog and am only just now coming up for air.

Working from home, pro: No commute. Duh. Except when I have early morning appointments and have to go downtown anyway. Home for lunch. I can do whatever I want in/to my office without getting permission. Well, within reason, anyway. I can start and end the day early, though in practice it ends when it usually did. I can go outside and look at the lawn, which I just did.

Working from home, con: It’s very difficult for me to turn it off when I walk out of the HO and close the door. This last weekend, it took me until around noon on Saturday to finally unwind. This will hopefully get better in time. I miss a little of the face-to-face, but IM has helped out with that.

As you can see, the pros are still winning. I gave up on the “no-shaving” bit, because even on our designated office days, I could still have to hit the road to meet a customer without too much notice. Just easier to knock that out in the morning, and it puts me into a better frame of mind anyway. The stubble feels more weekendish. Speaking of weekendish, here’s the recap:

Saturday we had dual-parties for our oldest son (7) and youngest girl (1). Both sets of grandparents were in town – Pancho and Bluebell stayed with one set on Friday at their hotel, all the better to use the pool. Here is the day in brief: swimming, breakfast at IHOP, home for presents, outside to try tackling the RipStick, go-karts and arcade time at the local Mini-Golf place, dinner at a local spot, home for ice-cream cake, close with a showing of The Incredibles. When we put him to bed, he said he wanted to rewind the day and do it all over again. I should think so. If there’s a better day for a seven year old boy, I don’t know what it is, unless we could have thrown in some fireworks or something.

Buttercup, for her part, went along with everything else. She munched her first cake and then crashed early. It’s tough to be one.

Sunday: Mother’s day for our mothers and Ezmerelda, Pancho went to Toys’R'Us to burn his gift card on Lego sets, lazing around until 4 and then the Life Teen Mass at 5. Home, dinner, bed.

We’re still working our way through the first season of BSG, and enjoying it thoroughly. The Richard Hatch cameo early on was a nice touch. I think we have The Thin Man in there, too. I finished Love’s Labour’s Lost and am well into Act III of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. I am no Shakespeare scholar, but I’m inclined to agree with the author of the introduction to LLL. It’s really not that great. MS-ND, on the other, gives us jewels like Puck’s response to Oberon:

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone;
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They willfully themselves exile from light
And must for aye consort with black-brow’d night.

(III.ii.400-409)

The wave of periodicals also landed. I seem to have missed an issue of The Atlantic during some renewal confusion. Got the latest. What a great magazine. One of the few that takes me more than a single session to get through.

Day One

Well. Today I start my new gig, which is going to be generally based here at home. I have an office, but no gear yet. I’m told it will show up some time today. I’m already booked on a there-and-back-again trip to Atlanta tomorrow, and my account executive has the next week pretty well planned out. It feels a little strange to be sitting here doing…well, nothing, but things will be picking up shortly and my downtime should be fairly minimal.

Unpacking all of my office paraphernalia at home had a curious collision-of-worlds vibe. On the one hand, I was at home. On the other hand, here were all the things that I’ve trucked from desk to desk over the years, some things for over 15 years. The lava lamp has been on every desk I’ve used since college. Some of the books date back to my first admin jobs. I’m probably not going to be managing any sendmail or usenet servers any more, but I’m loathe to get rid of the O’Reilly books covering same. Ditto for my copy of Concise Guide to MS-DOS Batch File Programming. You just never know. I’d rather have it and not need it than vice versa.

No, I have not shaved. Let the scuzzification begin.

Breaking The Galilean Spell

Stuart Kauffman writes about the shortcomings and ultimate failure of reductionism in science.

If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.

Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself.

[...]

Across our globe, about half of us believe in a Creator God. Some billions of us believe in an Abrahamic supernatural God, and some in the ancient Hindu gods. Wisdom traditions such as Buddhism often have no gods. About a billion of us are secular but bereft of our spirituality and reduced to being materialist consumers in a secular society. If we the secular hold to anything it is to “humanism.” But humanism, in a narrow sense, is too thin to nourish us as human agents in the vast universe we partially cocreate. I believe we need a domain for our lives as wide as reality. If half of us believe in a supernatural God, science will not disprove that belief.

We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol. It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural creativity in the universe.

via aldaily.com

Catholics – cf. CCC, 31-35. This is interesting writing. As a Christian, of course, I also believe that it’s seriously deficient, but interesting nevertheless. A god of strictly vegetative spirit is no god at all, but rather instead a convenient shorthand. A spirituality centered on it worships the painting at the expense of the artist. Prof. Kauffman gets a little close to Anselm’s ontological proof, but this is still a long way from the idea of Emmanuel, God-with-us. Still, he is to be commended for continuing to seek and knock. The section at the end about the “four injuries” bears particular scrutiny.

Painters, short-time and books.

We’ve had painters in the house for…days. They’re almost done, which is good. Our rooms have been discombobulated for over a week, stuff piled up everywhere. They’re nice guys, and they’ve done a great job, but it’s time for them to wrap up and get out. Now.

In other news…just kidding. There is no other news. I’m still wrapping things up at my old job, which means that I go to an odd meeting now and then for something called “knowledge transfer.” This sounds like I ought to be strapped to a table, with Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman hovering nearby. In reality I play 20 questions and try to stay interested, since the projects we’re covering will be completed in the After-time, when I’ve moved into the Great Beyond.

I wrapped up Lewis’ OHEL last night, after a short detour through Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he wrote about at length. I will probably renew my attack on the plays soon, though I’ve been seriously looking at starting Children of Hurin. I got it as a gift awhile back, but had just finished reading The Silmarilion and The Book of Lost Tales and needed a breather from Tolkien. Enough time has passed, I think. For big-kid bedtime reading, I’ve started Watership Down. Talking rabbits? Grand adventures? Fighting? There’s a little something in there for everyone.

Movies inbound from Netflix: The second part of Gormenghast and Pan’s Labyrinth.

House stuff

A couple of months back, we bought a new dishwasher to replace the one that came with the house. The old one just sort of stopped working one day, so we took that as a sign that, you know, it needed replacing. As it happens, I’d replaced a dishwasher once at our old house. There’s really not that much to it, since you’re only connecting three things: power, water supply and waste. Simple. I could have done easily done it.

But no.

Instead, I let the place we bought it from install it. I paid for this privilege. You know what happened next? It leaked. In fact, it leaked for a week. We didn’t know it was leaking because the hardwood floors in the kitchen did not extend all the way under the dishwasher. The water pooled there, then seeped under the planks and spread into a large, Africa-shaped stain that only became visible after a week. We called the installer, who declared that a “faulty part” was to blame, and this so that he could file an insurance claim for the repair of the floor.

That’ll teach me.

As it turns out, the floor couldn’t be fixed. It had to be replaced, in toto. This was fine by us for two reasons. First, we weren’t going to be paying for it. Second, the floor was dinged hard in a few places anyway. Sorting out the claim, estimates and ordering of the new floor stuff took many weeks, but the Flooring Guy showed up yesterday and will probably wrap up today. At least, we hope he’ll wrap up today so we can get our kitchen and dining area back.

While the Flooring Guy is working downstairs, the Painter is working upstairs and downstairs. The previous owners of our house had…attempted to paint. By “attempted”, I mean that drunken orangutans painted the walls. There were smears all over the trim, the ceiling and baseboards. Big ones, too. After we moved in, E. and I tackled the MBR and then I swore I’d never paint another room again. I lack the patience and, frankly, the attention span to do it right, so it takes us forever. You pay someone to come in, and he knocks out an entire room in a day – with razor-sharp trim and not a single spot on the floor anywhere.

The bummer is that I have to drain and move the aquarium so that he can get to the wall behind it. Ugh. Not looking forward to that. We’ll probably just house everyone temporarily in big rubbermaid tub for the day, then transfer them all back to the tank in the evening. Fingers are crossed that we don’t have any casualties in the process.