All posts by David Todd

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: Betrayed

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An excellent read for anyone curious about Judaism and Christianity.

My wife and I continue to look through our bookshelves to see what books we have on hand that look good to read but that, for whatever reason, we have passed by. In some cases, these are books we’ve had for years. One she read and recommended to me was Betrayed by Stan Telchin. I read it a couple of weeks ago and am just getting around to the review.

It’s the story of a Jewish family, second generation Americans, who have settled into this country and given up the religious practice of Judaism for the cultural aspects. Their oldest daughter goes off to college in New York, falls under the influence of some Christians, and concludes that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. The parents are outraged, as is the girl’s younger sister. The older girl challenged them all to at least look into it and come to their own conclusions.

Stan Telchin

After the initial outrage at their daughter’s betrayal, the book is the story of Stan’s study of the issue. After a search of scripture, both Old and New Testament, he concludes that his daughter is right: Jesus is the Messiah foretold by the prophets.

I won’t make this a long review. Telchin does an excellent job describing the toll all this took on the family, what he studied, what he concluded, and the final family reunification. It is an excellent, relatively short and easy read (less than 170 pages).

I give it 5-stars. But, alas, it will not stay on the bookshelf, as I don’t expect to ever read it again. Off it will go, probably to be given to someone rather than just donated.

Here is a good write-up about the book and the journey it describes at the website “Jewish Testimonies”.

Health

A New Low

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Yesterday morning, I hit a new low on my weight. I was 187.4 pounds. That leaves me only 7.4 pounds to go to reach my goal, or, 12.4 pounds to reach my wife’s goal for me. That’s down from a peak weight of 304, reached in 2004 and 2006.

How did I lose over 100 pounds? Slowly, over 19 years. A little more exercise, a little more careful eating. Helped along the way by the health problems I went through last year.

The current question is, how do I keep it off? Check in again on this blog, where on occasion I talk about my health.

Bible study, self-publishing

Just Published: Temple Teaching

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Available beginning today. It may later be available at other outlets.

Today is publication day! Volume 2 of my Bible study series, A Walk Through Holy Week.  Titled Temple Teaching, it is available in both e-book and paperback on Amazon at the following link:

Temple Teaching (A Walk Through Holy Week Book 2) – Kindle edition by Todd, David. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Here’s the book description:

This is Volume 2 of the eight volume Bible Study series taking a detailed look at the gospel accounts of Holy Week.

In this book, Jesus continues his teaching in the temple that was covered in Volume 1. He confronts the Sadducees, Herodians, Pharisees, and teachers of the law. We have much to learn from these interactions. Even though these are familiar scriptures, taking a deep look at them can be newly illuminating. The book uses the scripture from the author’s harmony of the four gospels.

The book contains eight chapters, making it suitable as an 8-week small group study covering the Lenten season and a little more. Or use it as a personal Bible study at any time. Each chapter has seven sections that can be used as daily devotional readings.

 

book reviews

Book Review: Age of Fable

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Once a best selling book (in the 1860s-70s and maybe beyond), not one in 100 Americans now know about it.

Our dining room table is covered with boxes of books for sale. I have them listed on FB Marketplace. Sales have been good, though slower of late. All the better-known books have been bought. The ones left are more obscure, or are common and people already have them. The boxes include a number of books I’d like to read, but don’t see any way to get to them in the years I have left, so out they go. I’ve already started moving the $1 books out to the garage, to a donation pile.

One of those books I wanted to read I decided to read while it wasn’t selling. It’s The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch. Here’s how the Wikipedia entry on it starts:

Bulfinch’s Mythology is a collection of tales from myth and legend rewritten for a general readership by the American Latinist and banker Thomas Bulfinch, published after his death in 1867. The work was a successful popularization of Greek mythology for English-speaking readers.

It seems like bulls were the most common thing people and gods changed into.

I know very little about Greek mythology. We covered The Iliad and The Odessey in school, and Oedipus Rex, but I’m afraid I learned little and retained less. As an adult, I’ve read a little of Lucretius and Virgle but found both incomprehensible in the English translations available to me.

But back to Bulfinch. I enjoyed the book but am somewhat afraid I wasted my time on it. I mean, who care about these mythical god named Jupiter and Juno, and about the humans they interacted with? Who cares that they had conflicts that make our world seem dull, or that they changed form to bulls, rabbits, birds, or fish to get out of jams? People keep dying and are brought back to life by some god who takes pity on them. The stories are ridiculous. Nothing in this book makes me want to pick up one of those ancient books and read it in translation. The ones I have left (a few have sold) will remain on the dining room table in hopes that someone will buy them before they go to Goodwill or wherever.

Here’s more from Wikipedia:

The book is a prose recounting of myths and stories from three eras: Greek and Roman mythology, King Arthur legends and medieval romances. Bulfinch intersperses the stories with his own commentary, and with quotations from writings by his contemporaries that refer to the story under discussion. This combination of classical elements and modern literature was novel for his time.

Don’t forget the Pegasus. That came from Greek mythology.

Much of the book was about how poets of a more recent age, such as Milton, Pope, Keats, Shelly, Tennyson, made reference to these ancient myths. I skipped over those lines of poetry, making my read faster. I’d say Milton was probably mentioned most, which may explain why I’ve had so much trouble reading, and have never finished, his Paradise Lost.

I give the book 3-stars, and cannot recommend you read it. Part of the problem is the number of character names to wade through. The first chapter alone was enough to get my head spinning. The 3-star rating is because it’s a well written book. It just turned out that the subject matter was borderline uninteresting and, as I said before, ridiculous. I’m glad I grew up after the era where knowing this stuff was considered a “classical” education.

Health

Wiped Out

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My plan for today had been to post a review of a book I recently finished reading. But last night, shortly after bedtime, I had a low blood sugar incident. My blood sugar went from 112 (a v. good bedtime number) to 33 in just 40 minutes—and that with having a small snack. I got up and barely managed to take a sugar reading, get a glucose pill, and go to the kitchen for food. In theory, the glucose pill should have been enough had I just waited for it to take effect. But, in that condition, which I’ve had before (but not for a couple of years), I feel like I’d better get some food in me.

But, because of that, I’m wiped out this morning. That kind of low blood sugar takes a physical toll. I’ll push my intended blog post out until Monday. Hopefully I’ll feel up to doing a few things today. I have a physical therapy evaluation appointment this morning that I will keep. But not sure I’ll do much more today.

Health

The Best Laid Plans

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Oh hail!

Friday was to have been a celebration, of sorts. That was my last day of cardio rehab. 35 sessions from Nov 20th± to March 14, with interruptions for Thanksgiving, Christmas, my seizure, and two trips to Massachusetts. I did not see an improvement on my weight or waistline, which I attribute to two weeks of restaurant food in Massachusetts, but the muscle tone in my legs sure is better. Since Dec. 22, Lynda’s had to do all the driving (20 miles each way) for all these, since I’m not allowed to drive due to the seizure.

Friday was a windy day. We were southbound on Interstate 49, Lynda constantly fighting the wind. At one point, she was driving in the left lane on a 3-lane stretch when a box blew out of a flatbed truck just ahead of us and a lane over. The box bounced in our path, and it seemed we could not miss hitting it. But the wind blew the box across the lane in front of us, with debris spilling out on the pavement. We missed the box but ran over the debris, whatever it was.

By the time we got to the rehab place, the low-pressure light was on. By the time I got out of rehab an hour later, the tire was flat. I called AAA. They sent a truck, but I had trouble using their online locator guide and had him going to the wrong place. We were in a huge parking lot for the hospital/dr offices building. The guy found us, actually fairly quickly, aired up the tire, and it wouldn’t hold air. So AAA sent a tow truck, which also came fairly quickly. I had them tow us to the Dodge dealership we use, which was only 3 or 4 miles away. In the process, we learned that our minivan did not have a spare tire in the place allotted for it.

The dealership mounted a new tire and had us on our way in an hour and a half, me downing two cups of coffee and one package of peanut butter crackers during the wait. Just before we pulled out of the service garage, it started raining—pouring, actually. At times, Lynda couldn’t really see the road. Then came the hail, really hard and probably grape size. We passed several churches with drive-unders, but other cars had already parked under them before us, so we kept going. By the time we got to the main road through Bentonville, the hail had stopped, and the rain tapered off to a fine mist. By the time we got back onto the Interstate, all rain had stopped. Our neighborhood was dry, as it was west of the storm line. We drove right through that line.

By this time, neither of us felt like celebrating the end of rehab. But it was 5 p.m. and we also knew neither of us would feel like preparing supper. So, as planned, we stopped at our nearest Mexican restaurant and got take-out fajitas.

As a result, I lost the entire afternoon for work, and two items on my 4-item Friday to-do list didn’t get done—still aren’t done. And neither of us even want to look at what damage we might have to the car from the hail.

Bible study, miscellaneous, Writing

Progress As Hoped For

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Back when I was a working man—that is, working for a company—making to-do lists was both a blessing and a curse. The tendency for me was to make a comprehensive list of daily tasks, around 10 to 20 items. These often became a distraction. Which should I do next out of the twenty on the list? Most of the time I would tackle the easier, less important item just to cross something off the list, rather than the harder but most important task.

At some point I learned a trick from some efficiency expert. Your daily to-do list should have only four items on it. They should be the most important ones. Do them, cross them off your list, and then, if you have time, move on to other things. I adopted this practice with one modification: I put the four most important tasks above a line and four other tasks below the line. This gave me more of a plan to make the day really full of accomplishment.

I’ve never adopted that practice for the many things I have to get done in retirement. But since my health problems of last year, with the Dec. 22 seizure being the concluding event, severely interrupted my work, I’ve had trouble getting back to it. As I posted before, I began writing again not so long ago. I’m still working on decumulation. And our stock trading partnership taxes are due March 17. It was all becoming overwhelming. When I made a to do list, it didn’t help.

Then I remembered the four-task rule. About three weeks ago I started to begin each day making a four-task to-do list. The things I thought most important to that day went on the list. While I had big, on-going tasks, each day’s four were different. Partnership taxes were on it every day after about 3 March. But on 1 March, the first item was “Call Ezra”, #2 grandson on his birthday. I put one writing/publishing task on the list each day, and one decumulation task.

Yesterday’s four were:

  1. finish partnership taxes
  2. AWTHW V2 cover
  3. transcribe journal sheets
  4. storeroom organization

Alas, due to most of the morning being taken up with five errands, I didn’t have the full day to complete them all, and I did only 1 and 3.

Today, my four tasks are:

  1. AWTHW V2 cover
  2. mail partnership taxes
  3. mark boxes in storeroom
  4. Cheney fam photos

We’ll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I have found a use for all these pads that accumulate from unsolicited give aways. The one I’m currently using, with enough space for six days on a sheet, was given to us by the realtor who sold us our house before this one in 1991. I found it in the desk in The Dungeon a couple of months ago, and decided it was high time to use it. From the size of the pad still left, it will probably last for 3 or 4 months.

Bible study, Health, Writing

Writing Again

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Soon, Volume 1 of AWTHW will not be an orphan.

Last Saturday (3/1, that is), for only the second time since my seizure on Dec 22, I wrote. Wrote on one of my books, that is. I’ve been doing a little journaling in Jan and Feb, but no real writing. A Walk Through Holy Week, Volume 3, lacked only one chapter and the Introduction of being done. Even earlier parts of the book had been through one edit.

But I just wasn’t feeling up to writing. I would go downstairs to The Dungeon each morning, feel overwhelmed at decumulation and decluttering tasks, feel my slowness at the keyboard, and do other things than writing. Any other things. The last time I had written was around Jan 22, and I added very few words that day.

But that Saturday, it felt good. I wrote the first section of the last chapter. It took less than an hour, and it felt good. That day I had already spent an hour transcribing entries from an old field book into my e-journal. That felt good, and so did the writing. I took Sunday off, but then wrote each weekday last week. That brought me to Saturday with one section and the Introduction to do. I got the one section, for which I had not done any planning, done in 45 minutes or so, and decided to shift over to the Introduction. In another 45 minutes, I had that done as well. An hour and a half was probably the most writing I had done in one session since my stroke on Sept 3.

So, AWTHW V3 is now ready for finishing round 1 of edits and moving quickly into rounds 2 and 3. AWTHW V2 is ready for typing of final edits, and the input of beta readers, if I can find any. The later volumes scream at me, asking me to please get to editing them and move on to publishing. I have to keep shushing them, saying, “All in good time, all in good time.”

Meanwhile, brainstorming is in progress about what comes next. I know what the next three, or possibly four, books will be, but not after that. I just can’t help thinking and planning ahead.

What about it, friends? Anyone want to be a beta reader for Volumes 2 and/or 3? Just let me know with a comment and I’ll be in touch. Or reach me through Facebook.

Bible study, Health, self-publishing, Writing

A More Normal Schedule

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As I write this on Wednesday, March 5 evening, a feeling of normalcy has descended on the Todd household. Not completely, for we still have health issues we’re dealing with. Lynda has headaches almost daily; our son is, tonight, dealing with a possible break-through seizure; and I’m getting ready to start physical therapy for my right knee. But yesterday I saw my hematologist. My iron deficiency is corrected, and I don’t have to go back to him unless my regular blood work shows my iron dropping. And my cardio rehab will end next week. That is going well, and I’ve increased my workload most days as I’ve been through it. My weight is either steady or inching downward, and my blood sugars are mostly within goal.

But normalcy is close. Saturday, I returned to writing. As of today, I’ve written on four days, with the ideas and words coming easily. I have only three days of writing left on this volume—well, four including the introduction. Then, of course, the editing starts. Meanwhile, I continue to edit Volume 2 of the series. I should finish that on Friday, the day this post goes live. Typing will take less than a day, then publication tasks start.

I’m finding time to do some typing of things that go into my journal—loose papers that will later be discarded. Meanwhile the storeroom is better arranged so that I know where things are and will be able to find them again for decumulation consideration. My work table is marginally cleaner after I went through a desk-top box of hanging files and got rid of a bunch. Some were left for scanning or transcribing, work that is in progress. And speaking of decumulation, every couple of days something sells based on Facebook Marketplace ads.

But the thing that makes me feel most normal is beginning the process of closing out finances for 2024 and beginning to track them for 2025. Today, Wednesday, I did this for book sales, which is a business for me. I was up-to-date with my sales and finances spreadsheet when I had my seizure on Dec 22, so I didn’t lack much to catch up. I finally did that today, reconciled everything, created the new spreadsheet for 2025, and recorded my sales to date. I’m running a little ahead of 2024, which was a record year for me. On Thursday I plan to do this for our stock trading business, allowing me to start on our partnership taxes, which are due to be filed by March 15.

This all feels good, working on familiar things and seeing things getting done. I’m not ready to resume regular yardwork, but will slip some in once in a while. Going up and downstairs to The Dungeon is still painful, but I am able to do it several time a day.

Oh, and Tuesday I took down the string of Christmas card we received this year. A little late, but another part of the house is back to normal.

Bible study, home improvements, Writing

Closer To Normal

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Dateline: Sunday, 2 March 2025

This may not be a terribly long post—we’ll see how it goes.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve felt a little more like my normal self, settling into my normal routines, getting normal things done. When I wrote on Friday, I felt overwhelmed by the things I had to do. But by the time Saturday wound down, and I looked back on the day (and on Friday), I realized I had accomplished things close to normal, as well as having completed a couple of special projects that would allow for doing normal things. Here’s what I got done,

  • Worked 15 minutes out in the yard. That may not sound like much, but that’s the first outdoor work I’ve one since Thanksgiving.
  • Did the final edits on A Walk Through Holy Week, Vo. 2.  I did that over Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Since I’ve done writing only one day since before Christmas, I can’t tell you how good this felt. I figured, If I can’t wrap my mind around writing, I have much editing to do. Perhaps that will be a stimulant toward writing.
  • Finished transcribing some journal sheets from 2014-15 that I found in an old file cabinet. This took a lot of effort. But getting it done was a huge relief. I have a couple of small journal books still to transcribe, but somehow these don’t seem as daunting.
  • Got a smallish batch of family photos (21, I think) sorted, saved electronically, and agreement reached on how to dispose of them.
  • Completed some major reorganization of the storeroom. We have sold off enough things that we have a little extra shelf space available. This allowed me to fairly easy to move things around, getting like things together, exposing some things I hadn’t seemed for years. We still have a long way to go at decumulation, But it’s looking a fair amount better.

Despite doing all this, and working my hardest at a cardio rehab session on Friday, I felt good. My energy level remained good. I took sitting breaks when I needed to, as well as a reading break at midday.

This week I plan on getting AWTHW-V2 ready for publication and actually publish it, maybe by Wednesday. After that, I hope to get a start on the last week of writing to go on the next volume followed by editing and publishing tasks.

And tomorrow morning a woman is coming by to pick up some surplus office supplies for her non-profit. It will be nice to have some surplus materials gone and space recovered.

Well, it’s one to finishing a good Lord’s Day with reading. Nothing better.