It's cold and grey outside...

…and I had been planning on doing yard work. I did a little bit this morning (ran the mower on the front yard and filled up five and a half yard bags with leaves and such) but then it got nasty outside and Becky had a church event so I got to watch the kiddo for a while.

Since it’s not so nice to work outside (and since Becky has my long extension cord at church, so I can’t run the leaf blower), and since Laura is taking a nice nap, I decided it was a nice time to give the blog a facelift and watch football. So, Clemson is on TV beating Florida State, and I’m on the couch with the laptop working on the blog. Actually, it’s about done for now.

I like lots of things about this theme. I think it’s a big improvement over the old one. It was created by Clemens Orth, found by Google, and tweaked by me. The only thing I’m not totally happy with at the moment is the font on the header graphic… it could be better. Maybe when I have some more time to be patient with photoshop, I’ll give it another try.

Ender's Game

I am a voracious reader of fiction. I read a good bit of non-fiction, too, but fictional thrillers and sci-fi are my chance to escape for a while, so on any of my regular trips to the library you will find my stack of books weighted towards those genres. I was really in the mood for some sci-fi on this last trip, and while browsing the sci-fi shelves at the local library, I remembered a mention that Andy Osenga had made a while back about Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I figured it was worth a try, and so I picked up the (paperback!) book and added it to my stack. When I got home, I didn’t start it first; I had one book that was a 10-day reserve that I wanted to get out of the way. (Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, if you really care.) But before long it was getting dry and so I turned to Card.

Let me just get it out of the way early: Ender’s Game is a terrific book. The story is well-told. The main characters are exceptional children who, for the most part, sound like adults. Their childish emotional states, though, are crucial to the story. Card puts you right there, feeling what the hero feels. I had a hard time putting the book down. The twist at the end is just brilliant. I didn’t see it coming, but it made perfect sense given what you have been told in the story to that point. And when you find out, it’s one of those “wow” moments that sets your mind whirling.

I can understand why they classify Ender’s Game as sci-fi; the story is set in the future, with appropriately futuristic technologies and surroundings. But unlike much other science fiction, where the futuristic technology or science is at the core of the plot, Ender’s Game just uses the future as a tool to set up a story that resonates in any age. I also found interesting the device of using a main character who is a highly-intelligent child who sounds pretty much like an adult. It’s not a common device; the only other place I remember reading a story from that perspective is Bryce Courtenay’s much longer and more anguished The Power of One. But it works here. It causes you to identify with a protagonist that might otherwise be distant. And that makes the story work.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the story since I finished the book. The reluctant hero, the adults who keep him in the dark the whole time, the whole issue of the sacrifice of the unwitting to save the many; these are themes that will keep the book relevant for decades to come.

Pick up Ender’s Game sometime if you haven’t read it. It’s worth your time. I hear they’re talking of making a movie of it eventually; this is one of those stories where if the movie is done well, it could be a masterpiece. If it’s done poorly, yick, what a waste. I’ll hope for the former.

feeling young

Last night we had a neighborhood potluck dinner, organized by our next-door neighbors. It was a bit chilly outside, but fun to go to something like this where you only have to walk five houses down to get there.

I like the idea of community in the neighborhood. I’m not very good at it, though. Mostly, I’m just not so good at being sociable. Let me clarify. It’s easy for me to be sociable around folks I already know, and it’s easy for me to carry on a conversation with people who are driving the conversation, but stick me with somebody as quiet as I am, and it gets uncomfortable pretty quickly. I’m still learning how to ask the right questions, stuff like that. But over all, it went OK last night. The folks are friendly.

My other observation about the neighborhood folks, though: they’re old. With the exception of our next-door neighbors, who are in their mid-40’s, everybody else there was retired. Many of them long-retired. One of them was telling me that he was recovering from a stroke, and then about his son (or was it a nephew?) that was also recovering from a stroke. “He was really young, too…” the guy told me; “only 60!” I felt very young right about then.

After about 90 minutes and far too much food, everybody wandered off back to their own homes. Laura held my hand and walked all the way back home by herself. She was pretty tired when she got back. But I’m sure it won’t be long until she’s running the whole way ahead of me. Now that makes me feel old.

"A Separate Peace"

Peggy Noonan writes a somber column today. An excerpt:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding–the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

She uses the rest of the column to note that the “elites” who ought to be leading us out of this have instead made “a separate peace” and, rather than lead, have resigned themselves to doing what they want to do and just letting the thing derail.

It’s worth reading the piece just for its thought-provoking capacity. But then step back, take a deep breath, and give thanks for a Heavenly Father who is sovereign over all these events.

and he lifts up his arms in a blessing for being born again...

Last week Becky and I were able to leave Laura with my folks and take a couple days of vacation up to Door County, Wisconsin. We’d never been there before, but had heard that the scenery was terrific. We weren’t disappointed. We knew it was going to be dicey as to whether the leaves would still be on the trees at that date, (hey, we’re cheap, we didn’t want to pay peak-season rates for the hotel) but we figured it was worth a try.

Simply put, the scenery was magnificent. We drove down more little roads that were covered by archways of red and gold than I can recall to count. The weather was beautiful, even on the last day when it was raining. We had a very refreshing time, relaxing and taking in all the little towns: Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Sister Bay, Bailey’s Harbor, and some little places whose names have slipped my mind by now.

Friday night we ate at a restaurant that had live jazz all evening. Saturday morning we had pecan rolls at a bakery/restaurant that were “hailed as the best pecan rolls in Wisconsin”. They weren’t kidding. Door County has no chain restaurants or hotels any place north of Sturgeon Bay. It was refreshing to be able to choose between a bunch of unique cafes, restaurants, and supper clubs, rather than asking myself “so is it Subway, McDonalds, or Applebees tonight?”.

Two establishments particularly caught my eye on the trip; sadly, I only got a picture of one of them: The Pudgy Seagull Restaurant. (I’ll post the picture ASAP.) The other was for somebody’s “Ho-Made” bakery items. For that special personal touch in baking… OK, I won’t go there.

So it was a great weekend. It was no fun to wake up this morning and realize it was Monday and that meant I had to go back to work…. but it was at least nice to be well-rested while doing it. :-)

priorities of time

I wrestled in an earlier post with issues of time and busyness. I’m still wrestling with it. I think I’m making progress this time… maybe. Becky and I have talked about things quite a lot. She’s supportive (no suprise there) of my desires to get the schedule cleaned off and getting my time priorities changed, and she’ll help keep reminding me so that I don’t just forget about it after a while and drift back to the same old way of doing things.

My “ideal situation” right now is still what I mentioned before: I’d like to just dump everything church-related for a while and see how my schedule settles out. Then I could slowly put it back together the right way, and see how much time I have to do church-related things.

Let me reiterate here that I’m not trying to get out of church responsibilities; I just need to act on what I’ve recognized: that the church can make do without me for a while, but my family can’t.

I don’t think my “ideal situation” is going to happen - it’s just not fair to everybody at church. I think there’d be too many hard feelings and misunderstandings to make it comfortable to continue attending if I just totally dropped my responsibilities there. So I need to find a tolerable compromise. One has suggested itself here recently that just might work.

  1. Turn all my responsibilities for video and sound over to someone else. I don’t know why I even had them in the first place, other than that they loosely relate to the music aspect of the Sunday service. We need to find somebody else to be responsible for making sure the overheads with song lyrics are ready, and that someone is available to run them. It’s a stress that I don’t need on Sunday morning. My fear is that we won’t be able to find someone with a level of responsibility high enough to actually ensure that it gets done correctly.
  2. Drop my elder apprenticing role for now. While my gifting and desire is still to be an elder and to participate in church leadership, I’m appreciating more and more the counsel my dad gave me this summer: that while there is no real age restriction on eldership, there is a “season of life” where your time is needed elsewhere. Family responsibilities have to come first.
  3. Spread out the worship team leadership load. Right now I’m responsible for planning the service every week, then leading the practice and then both Sunday morning services. Every week. We have two teams of musicians/singers, but only one leader. I’ve taken maybe 3 weeks off in the past year. That’s just not enough. What I’d like to do is find someone willing to take leadership of one of the two worship teams. That way I’d only be responsible for planning and leading every-other week. I think that would be do-able.

I’ve put these plans of abdication on hold for a week or two since I promised my pastor (who is also a good friend and has really been my mentor for the past several years) that I wouldn’t make a decision without discussing it with him again, and he’s on a well-deserved vacation to Florida until the end of this week. We discussed it on the phone back before he left; he expressed his desire to talk it over so he could give me some “objective” advice. I laughed out loud. I hope I didn’t offend him. Good advice he will have in abundance. Objective? Not for a minute. He has a stake in this as well; if I dropped everything musically at the church it would have a big impact on Sunday worship services. I know it sounds conceited, but, sadly, it’s true.

What I need to hear him say is this: “I don’t want you to leave things totally. I think there are ways you can reduce your responsibilities without dropping everything. But, if you think it’s what God is calling you to do, then I will support you on that.” I think I will hear it, but I haven’t heard it yet.

I will be continuing to pray for God’s leading in this area. I need wisdom. And Lord, if You want to just send a couple good worship leaders to Noelridge, that would be fine with me, too. :-)

So I call you my country, and I'll be lonely for my home

And the coal trucks come a-runnin’
With their bellies full of coal
And their big wheels a-hummin’
Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman
Who hid the spies who were lookin’
For the land of the milk and the honey

And this road she is a woman
She was made from a rib
Cut from the sides of these mountains
Oh these great sleeping Adams
Who are lonely even here in paradise
Lonely for somebody to kiss them
and I’ll sing my song, and I’ll sing my song
In the land of my sojourn

And the lady in the harbor
She still holds her torch out
To those huddled masses who are
Yearning for a freedom that still eludes them
The immigrant’s children see their brightest dreams shattered

Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the
Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral
And they stoop in the silence
And there their prayers are still whispered
And I’ll sing their song, and I’ll sing their song
In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

And down the brown brick spine of some dirty blind alley
All those drain pipes are drippin’ out the last Sons Of Thunder
While off in the distance the smoke stacks
Were belching back this city’s best answer

And the countryside was pocked
With all of those mail pouch posters
Thrown up on the rotting sideboards of
These rundown stables like the one that Christ was born in
When the old world started dying
And the new world started coming on

And I’ll sing His song, and I’ll sing His song
In the land of my sojourn
“The Land of My Sojourn” Rich Mullins (c) 1993 - Edward Grant, Inc., 1993 - Kid Brothers of St. Frank Publishing

I was prompted by Kari’s piece the other day to revisit Rich Mullins’ A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. I have long counted this as one of my favorite albums, but it tends to be one of my forgotten favorites; I don’t listen to it for a while, and then when I turn it on again, I wonder why I ever forgot about it.

I can’t pick a favorite song of of this album, but the song I quoted here is one of the best. Rich nails the feelings that I have about the land where I live with these lines:

Nobody tells you when you get born here How much you’ll come to love it And how you’ll never belong here So I call you my country And I’ll be lonely for my home And I wish that I could take you there with me

Not much else to say about it… but if you haven’t listened to this album for a while, get it back out. You won’t be disappointed.

it's a Monday...

…and stuff is a bit crazy here at work. Fortunately for me, I’m taking vacation this afternoon to help a friend move, and then Wednesday afternoon through Friday as we take a short vacation to Door County, Wisconsin. It should be beautiful this time of year - most of the leaves should still be around. I’ll have to post some pictures once we get back.

[end of random thoughts]

OLN Hockey Blackout

Yesterday night I sat down in front of the TV, looking forward to watching a hockey game. The Dallas Stars were playing the Phoenix Coyotes, and according to the TV schedule, it was slated to be broadcast on OLN (cable channel 69 in our area) at 7:30 PM central time. I was bewildered to find that rather than the NHL, OLN was showing some cheesy show about the “25 scariest animals” or the “10 worst jobs” or something like that. Where was my hockey?

A quick check of the OLN website confirmed that they were showing the NHL. They even have a cool graphic that says “NHL on OLN: We believe in hockey.” I double-checked the TV listings at Excite. Yep, it was supposed to be on. I checked nhl.com. Yep, they agreed that the game was supposed to be on OLN, and even gave an in-progress score. So what the heck was going on?

Next I did a Google search, and I found this article from Newsday. It ends up that OLN is in a wrestling match with several major cable companies, apparently including my local provider, Mediacom. They want OLN to be a first-tier channel, i.e. have it included in the “standard” cable package that the company offers, rather than have it as part of a second-tier, pay-extra package. And so they are using blackouts of NHL games to try to blackmail the cable companies into switching around their cable packages.

The end result of all this: a whole bunch of really mad fans. Check out the OLN forum, for one. The funny part (OK, it’s not so funny, maybe ironic?) is that the people that paid extra to get that second-tier so they could watch hockey are the exact ones that are getting screwed. No hockey for you! If I were Gary Bettman, I’d be getting pretty upset with OLN - why, after already almost killing your league with a cancelled season, would you want to further alienate your fan base by blacking out TV coverage and not explaining why?

I will be contacting all three parties to express my frustration. I doubt it’ll accomplish anything, though. I should check… does some other network have TV rights for the Stanley Cup playoffs? If not, I may miss another whole season. Arrrrgh.

more odds and ends

I’m getting a cold. I’d forgotten how much I hate colds. You can’t breathe, and your throat feels nasty. I’m thinking I might head home and try to take a nap.

On a totally unrelated note, there was a fun little episode with Laura last night that’s worth relating. We were heading out to run a couple short errands last night, and she really didn’t want to get in her carseat. But she finally did, and we ran to the video store and then to pick up cheesesticks from Papa John’s. In both cases, Laura and I just sat in the car while Becky ran in.

While we were waiting at Papa John’s, I could tell she was really getting bored just sitting there, not getting to do anything. So, I grabbed a little toy rabbit and proceeded to play peekaboo between Laura and the rabbit, a game that she’s enjoyed on previous occasions. After bemusedly considering the rabbit, she looked at me with a tired look that seemed to say “thanks for trying dad, it’s not really that interesting, but I appreciate the effort.” Hard to explain, but one of those mundane yet priceless moments that make parenting such a joy.