The child-watching and pet sitting gig is on-going. I don’t know that I can say that I’m having fun, however. These are not the same as the previous child-watching gigs. I suppose they will never be the same again. The world moves on in not always pleasant directions.
On Friday we took our youngest grandson to the nearby planetarium. It turns out it’s a mere three or four miles away from our daughter’s house. I have good memories of school trips to the planetarium in Rhode Island. I think it was in Roger Williams Park, though that memory is sketchy. I loved how they slowly brought the lights down and stars emerged, how the stars rotated in the night sky and at dawn were in a different place than where they started. Those are good memories.
Elijah, spaceman in training.
So when I discovered that we had a planetarium so close to us, I knew that would be our “field trip” for the week, even if we didn’t have to go far. We entered the room, which was more or less how I remembered it. Around 18 people filled only a fraction of the 72 seats. A speaker up in front told a little about the planetarium and had the technician darken the room to the night sky. She told about a few constellations and told about some stars. They then shifted into a movie projected onto the domed ceiling. The moved was the basics of our solar system.
Elijah liked it enough that we went back on Saturday. First was a story time in the lobby, with Elijah being the only child to show up. Then into the star room for the opening (which was identical to Friday) followed by a cartoon movie, Accidental Astronauts. It was good, though sometimes hard to understand what was said. Elijah seemed to like it.
The facility included a lot of display cases of space things. This included scaled models of the different rockets that have gone into space, including the Artemis craft that will take humans back to the moon. That was well put together. Of course, there were computer stations in the lobby where people could see various educational videos or games.
Lauri Cruver Cherian, author
On Saturday, the woman who did the story time in the lobby, just before we went into the star room, handed me a bookmark. It turns out she’s an author. I said we would have to talk after the show. We had a good conversation after, told of our books, and determined to keep in touch. Her name is Lauri Cruver Cherian. Here’s a link to her website. I’m looking forward to exploring her items. Check out her website and books.
A fun time at the library. Elijah is the one in the gray t-shirt in the middle.
Some things you can’t post to your blog, no matter how much you want to. This is one of those times.
The “gig” I referred to in my last post is watching grandkids and their pets in their home. Their parents and the two middle children are on a mission trip to Belize. They have their own difficulties, dealing with a severe water shortage resulting in their camp having running water only one hour a day. The pictures sent out show them doing good work.
75 pound dog named Nuisance tests strength of restricting gate, Details at 5.
Us, at the home front? It’s going. A few moments of excitement:
Yesterday, a coral snake (venomous) in the front yard. The dog found it, but fortunately I wasn’t the one walking it this year. My shoulder still hurts from last year’s snake-dog interaction.
Also yesterday, an altercation in the house between the dog, affectionately nicknamed Nuisance by me, and a cat or two resulted in a gate that restricts the dog’s access to the second floor. Took me a half hour to put it back in place.
Monday, as the mission team was leaving, a wallet went missing in the house. After an all hands search, they had to leave without it. Five minutes later we found it (a long story) and we rushed it to the rendezvous point so they could make it to the airport on time.
The dish I made on Monday we are still eating. The trying-not-to-be-seen teenager ate only one meal of it, then has been having cereal.
Found a missing library card. It was in the garage. I found it while gathering up recyclables yesterday. No idea how it got there.
Elijah and I went to the library Tuesday for a program, only to find I misread the schedule and it was on Wednesday. So we went back Wednesday. It was a good program and Elijah liked it.
Tomorrow we go to a 1:00 p.m. program at the local planetarium. If it’s good, we might go back Saturday and Tuesday for other programs.
Meanwhile, I’ve been unable to get much writing done. I won’t make my goals for this month.
So that’s the news about my gig. We’ll still be doing it on Monday, when no doubt I’ll have more excitement to report.
It’s watching two of our four grandkids, the four cats, one nuisance of a dog, and the house. Cook, taxi, housekeeper. Doing okay, though I keep forgetting about one step down from the entry to the living room, which is dark and dangerous. May have to put a rug down or something.
Saw our daughter, son-in-law, and two middle grandkids off this morning on a 10 day mission trip to Belize. Here’s hoping all goes well on their end, and ours.
Tried to write today but couldn’t get much done after the hubbub of this morning. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.
And hopefully my Friday post will be better as well.
I continue to work my way through the writings of C.S. Lewis, hoping to get through them all in my lifetime. I got a late start on it, so am having to read them a little faster than I would like. Thus, I’m not sure I have the comprehension I want of his works.
The most recent book of his I completed was God In The Dock. This is a collection essays Lewis wrote over his lifetime, many of which were published in magazines, a few being pulled from things never published. The book itself was published posthumously by Lewis’s editor, Walter Hooper. The book is divided into four parts: theological essays; semi-theological essays; and essays on ethics rather than purely Christian. The fourth part to the book is excerpts from a number of letters that Hooper felt made a good addition to the book, consistent with the other subject matter.
I read this book in three different time spans, one each for parts 1 and 2 and a third for parts 3 and 4. I think this was a good way to do it. It kept me from becoming bogged down reading the same kind of things all over again. And the short nature of essays made it easier to concentrate on what Lewis was saying in them, as compared to his longer works that caused me to zone out.
One essay that particularly stood out to me was “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”. Lewis wrote it in 1949 when the U.K. was debating whether incarceration should be retributive or healing. Lewis makes a good case that maintaining a prisoner in jail until he is “healed” can be a form of tyranny. Never declare the patient healed and you can hold him forever. The article, which was published in an Australian magazine, prompted response letters and a rejoinder by Lewis. Oh, he did live to argue and debate! I intend to study this sequence of article and letters more to get a better handle on the subject. It’s always good when you can
I think Hooper did a very good job in putting this anthology together. But it does get a little confusing. The version I had was in an even larger anthology titled The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis. But God in the Dock was also published as a stand-alone book. But as I look at the contents, it seems that several essays varied depending on the edition of the book.
Also, Lewis had one specific essay titled, “God in the Dock”, from which the book title is derived. That creates some difficulty. When someone says, “Lewis said this in God in the Dock, are they referring to the essay or the anthology? And which essay within the anthology? It makes citing the work somewhat difficult.
I give the book 5-stars. Although some of the essays weren’t stellar, that will be true in any anthology. I’m keeping the volume in my growing C.S. Lewis collection. Most likely I’ll never read it again cover to cover, but I’ll re-read different essay in it and perhaps write my own in response.
All our letters from the years in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps not the best way to preserve them, but I think it will work.
Time for my Monday blog post. I recently finished reading one book, and abandoned another. But I’m not quite ready to post reviews on them, so I’ll set them aside for now. What to write about?
Recently I’ve written about two special projects I’m working on. One is scanning and e-filing poetry critiques I did at internet poetry boards. The other was transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia with the intention of putting them in book form for our family’s use. The scanning project still has a lot of work. I am unlikely to finish it before the end of summer.
But the Saudi letters are well along. In fact, I finished transcribing them on May 9. I then set about transcribing the travel journal from our 1983 Asia trip. I finished that on Tuesday, I think it was. That gave me a chance to breath and concentrate on the other project. In an intense three days I finished scanning the smaller of two remaining notebooks and thumbed through the other to separate the critiques from miscellaneous writing.
Letters and postcards stamped many places as our time as expatriates included travel.
But the work of the next part of the project—loading the Saudi letters into a Word document and making a book out of it—remained. While the transcription work was somewhat daunting, I knew the book organization would also be as well. But I had to get started. Saturday evening, Lynda and I were watching something on TV. I decided this was a perfect time to multi-task. I opened Word, created a document for the book, and began to copy and load the letters into it.
I discovered an easy way to do this on my laptop. During a one hour TV program, I was able to copy in all the letters from 1981, a total of 65 letters. They ranged through all twelve months, but most were from June (when I went to Saudi before the family) to December. I was pleased with the progress.
Sunday night, while watching two programs, over about an hour and a half, using this efficient copying process, I was able to copy in all the letters from 1982 and 1983. This was 159 additional letters, making for 224 for our Saudi adventure.
Unlike the letters from the Kuwait years, this collection includes a fair number of incoming letters from family and friends.
I felt good about this and sat back, feeling a weight off my shoulders. Then I remembered that I had transcribed three letters from 1984. That was after we were back in the States. But these were letters from friends from our years in the Kingdom, from people who recently left for their home or were still there. That will bring the number of letters to 227, close to the same number as the Kuwait years.
As the document now sits, it consists of 102,000 words. When I add in the travel diary and the last three letters, it will come to about 109,000. That compares to 112,000 words for the completed Kuwait book. But once I add an introduction, and bits of commentary along the way, I suspect the word count for the Saudi book will be closer to 115,000. Strange, perhaps, that the two books should be so close to the same length. Sure, we were in both places almost exactly the same amount of time, 2 1/2 years each. But in Kuwait we had a computer and tended to write longer letters. I expected the Saudi book would finish out shorter than the Kuwait book.
For the Saudi years, we had a lot more incoming letters in our collection, the bulk of them from our two maternal grandparents. When we were in Kuwait, both ladies were too old to write, and indeed both died while we were there, a week apart. But we also had a phone part of the time in Kuwait, which tended to reduce the number of letters by a little.
So what’s next? First, adding the three letters from 1984. Second, adding the travel journal from 1983, which must be spread out over the dates the entries were made. That will actually be a mere hour’s work, which I hope to accomplish today. Next will be writing an introduction. Probably another hour or two. After that, the commentary to be spread around the letters, giving a little context to what was going on in our lives. That’s going to take some time, and I’m not committing to a timeline for completing it.
After that will be proofreading the whole thing. I’m not looking forward to that. It’s tedious comparing the transcription in the book to the original letters. That will take a couple of weeks. Last will be adding photographs and putting the book into publishable formatting. I’m thinking of doing that in late July and August when I’m convalescing. Oops, I haven’t told you about that, but that story will have to wait.
If all goes well, I should have the book finished and published before Christmas. I’ll print off enough copies of it then unpublish it, but leave it uploaded to Amazon just in case the family wants more copies.
Thus, I see this second letter transcription project coming to an end. It was sort of a labor of love, with perhaps a little more emphasis on labor than on love. Will there be another transcription project in the future, maybe of the couple of hundred pre-Saudi letters Lynda and I sent to parents and other relatives? Almost certainly, but don’t hold your breath. I need to breathe a little first, and concentrate on my regular writing.
Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. Some of those I may have to write early due to schedule conflicts. Did this, including writing a few pieces ahead of time and scheduling them to post on day we were traveling.
Start writing Volume 2 of A Walk Through Holy Week. I don’t have a specific goal as to word count. Just making a start will be sufficient. I began this! And it’s good to be writing again. As of this morning, I’m approximately 30 percent done with it. I had hoped for a little more progress, but am pleased with what I got done.
Continue to scan, format, and file old documents, specifically poem critique I did from 2001 to approximately 2012. I have done well so far, but have another ±400 pages to go. I have no specific page goal—just getting some done will be sufficient. I thought I finished this, but found another two notebooks, with maybe another 300 pages that need to be scanned. I’ll write a post about it later in the month—or possibly next month.
Do a little reading for the next Documenting America book. The problem is, as reported in a previous post, I don’t know if the subject will be the Articles of Confederation or Abolition. I hope by the end of this month to be far down the road in deciding between the two. I did a fair amount of research reading for this project in May. That’s the good news. The bad news is I found it very laborious, and am not sure I’ll be able to use it. I’ll have to think about this going forward.
One other major thing accomplished, thought not an official goal for the month, was transcribe the writing diary for our trips in 1983. Most of it had to do with the big Asian trip, but I also documented some other snippets. That’s now done. Will next have to format it and work it in to the book of letters for the Saudi years.
I still have one more day in this month, so perhaps I’ll get a little more done on the book and scanning.
As far as June goes, it’s difficult to set goals since we have a trip in the works and then a grandchild with us for a week. But I’ll take a stab at it. I can always edit the goals at some point in the month.
Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. That’s starting to sound monotonous.
Make good progress on A Walk Through Holy Weeks, Vol 2: Temple Teaching. I’ll have to see if time will materialize for writing. If I had to set a goal, I’d like to be at least 70 percent done.
Continue with my scanning/formatting/e-filing of old poetry critiques project. This task is bigger than I thought, and will take a lot of perseverance to get it done. I think it will take three more months to finish.
Begin to put together my book of our letters from Saudi Arabia. The letters are transcribed and saved, the travel diary is only a day or two away from full transcription. I’d like to have the book mostly done by mid-July (for reasons that will be revealed in a future post). That means I need to be 2/3 done by the end of June.
As with last month, I want to spend some time reading for the next Documenting America book, but it will have to be different material than I read in May. I have a book picked out to take with me and read on our next trip. May also get some in before that.
That’s it for goals, subject, as always, to amendment.
It was good to see our son, and attend a Woo-Sox baseball game.
From May 11 until just the wee hours of May 23, Lynda and I were on a road trip back to New England. The posts you saw during this time were written ahead and scheduled to go live at my normal posting days when I knew it would be difficult to post.
Lots of good memories on this trip.
The reason for the timing of the trip was my 50 year reunion of graduating from URI, which was held May 17-18. Of course, other reasons exist to go back there. Our son now works at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. While we have seen him regularly at our place, we hadn’t to where he lived for close to three years. Also, I have family in the area, friends in the area, who I hadn’t seen since 2015.
Too many good meals. We both gained weight on the trip.
The trip took much planning. Number of days to drive outbound. Where to stay. Which reunion events to attend. When to hold a family gathering. What kind of buddies gathering we could have. Who to meet up with outside of the main gatherings. Where to stay in New England. When to head home. Many pieces to fit together. I tried to arrange for several other meet-ups, but people were unavailable.
The full gathering save two: one who left early for a birthday party, and Mario, who took the photo.
Surprisingly, all turned out well. I booked hotels for the 3-day outbound trip. Always before we’ve taken two days for this drive. When we neared our hotel the first night, Lynda thought it was ridiculous to stop so soon. But stop we did. A traffic tie-up the last half hour made the early stop seem closer to normal. The next day, the early stop seemed more normal. And getting to Worcester the third day seemed totally normal.
We had several days of meals with our son, who had to work every day. We saw the house they’re staying in, lots of the Holy Cross campus, and his office. I wouldn’t say we learned a lot about Worcester, but what we did see we like.
Many changes at URI campus. I toured the new engineering center.
On Friday it was to Rhode Island for the reunion. Part of the day included a stop at the library special collections, which I’ll tell about in a future post. It was good to be on campus. I took time to go to the Memorial Union and visit old haunts, including the student senate chambers, where I spent so much time junior and senior years. My main complaint about the reunion was it wasn’t very well attended.
The Student Senate chambers. I wonder if that’s the same carpet from 50 years ago.
Saturday was our family gathering, partially catered and partially potluck. We had twenty attend overall, including a surprise visit by my half-sister, who flew up from Florida for the occasion. She got to meet family members she didn’t know before. This was a good time for all.
Lynda and I then rushed back to R.I. for the last reunion event. Sunday was a visit to the cemetery where my family is buried and a tour of places in Providence and Cranston, Then off to Cape Cod for two days, then reverse course with a stop in Worcester on the way out. The drive home we did the old-fashioned way: freestyle, with no plan and no reservations.
The first day heading home, I routed us over the new Cuomo Bridge north of NYC, just because I wanted to see it. Big mistake. That cost us close to an hour lost to heavy traffic. We stopped for the night in central Pennsylvania. The next day we ditched the stopped we had sort of planned at the Columbus zoo and just kept driving. We made it home around 1:15 a.m. Thursday morning after 18 hours of driving.
The trip was good. Maybe this was our last long driving trip. It sure took a lot out of us. Had we flown it would have been 9 days instead of 12. But it was a good trip. Good to see the old house and schools, friends from long ago, and family.
Trip 2 is coming soon. Not near as long a drive, but maybe the same number of days.
Is this an appropriate meme to be sharing? Somehow I think not. It certainly doesn’t comply with the law of love that Jesus spoke about on several occasions.
Here’s one more in my series of social media posts. This one is a little longer than the other ones. I’ve seen it worded two or three ways. It’s based on the premise that people act stupidly. Now, I know that the word “stupid” is out of favor at present. You ought not call anyone stupid, which is usually meant to demean their intelligence.
The meme I see fairly regularly on Facebook, and I suspect it would also be on other social media platforms, is something like this.
I have got to stop saying “How stupid can you be?” I’m beginning to think people are taking it as a challenge.
In other words, people in general are really, really stupid. And just when you think they can’t be any stupider than they have been so far, they go and do something even more stupid.
This grates on me. Behind this meme is the thought by the one posting it that everyone he/she knows is stupider than he/she. The person has an expectation that everyone he encounters in life is below him on the intelligence scale. Or on the behavioral scale.
I look at Jesus’s command to love one another, love your neighbor, and love God. Somehow this meme doesn’t fit that command. You might say, “I’m just telling it like it is.” You might think so. You might even be way high on the behavioral and intelligence scales. But saying this meme is not loving others.
It’s your choice. Post the meme if you want to appear arrogant. I’m going to do my best to live out the law of love.
I find truth in this saying, but when do you get to the place where you give rather than get?
Continuing with my mini-series of mini-posts about advice found on Facebook, here is the third one. On Facebook, you have heard it said:
If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.
Said another way:
Surround yourself with people who are better than you are.
Admirable sentiments, don’t you think? How can anybody object to that? In order to improve yourself, choose your friends wisely; make sure they are smarter than you, better than you. Let their wisdom, experience, and common sense rub off on you. You will soon find yourself a better person.
But…but…if you really, rigorously do that, you might help yourself, but can you ever help someone else to be better? You can’t. You will always be taking, never giving.
So it seems like this is the height of selfishness. Yes, sometimes surround yourself with good, smart, better people, and grow from your association with them. But at other times, be the smartest, most experienced person in the room and help others to grow.
I remember back to college. I think it was fall semester sophomore year. Several of us in the engineering program were in the same calculus class. This was level three calculus. We’d already been through calculus both semesters freshman year. Third level was what was supposed to weed out those who would make it or not as an engineer. I was working a lot of hours at the Burger Chef that semester, riding my 5-speed bicycle the 5 miles each way, along with 18 credit hours, leaving little time for study. Leading up to a critical test, I thought I knew the material fairly well but still wanted to study more.
But two other guys in the same class with me were struggling big time. They asked me for help. So between classes and work, rather than study on my own to improve my knowledge, I met with them and went over the material. The test came without me doing my normal intensive study for a math test. I felt fairly good, but thought I could have done better if I had found the time to study.
The day the grades were supposed to be posted, I went to the professor’s office. He walked in about the time I got there. He said the tests were graded but not yet entered in his book. Would I help him do that? I took the pile of tests and read off the names and grades while he entered them in his book. Yes, this was a primitive time, long before computer databases and grading systems. Page by page I read, over 60 students in his three classes of this course. Finally I came to my test. I got a 100. My best grade of the year. It paid to help my friends study what they needed to know, perhaps more than studying on my own.
I want to be careful here. Making sure others in the room are smarter than you may be a form of selfishness, but making sure you’re the smartest in the room could easily lead to arrogance. Some balance is required.
But I think it’s easy to reject this Facebook advice. Be in the position with others that makes sense for you. Look for smart people when you need help and needy people when you need to minister.
I’ve seen this several places. Somehow it grates on me.
This second post in the series about advice found on Facebook somewhat stunned me. It came in a post titled “A Prayer for Removal of the Wicked”. Here’s the text of it.
Father, we ask in the name of Jesus that all WILLFUL WORKERS OF WICKEDNESS be removed from position of power, prominence and prestige. Open the eyes of those being deceived and place people who stand for your righteous cause in the high places of government and influence.
I have to tell you, I have mixed feelings about this. At least until I think about it. Do I want our government to function efficiently, honestly, and ethically? For sure. Would I like to see every government employee be an ethical person and do only good, never wickedness? Of course. Am I so naive that I think everyone in government has good as their only attention? No, I know that in any large group of humans there are plenty of people who meet the definition of “willful workers of wickedness”.
Should we pray for as stated in that posted prayer? You would think so, but I wonder. As Christians, where is our hope? Is it in government? Or in God? If in government, where is there room for God? If in God, why would we pray a prayer so all-encompassing as to ask God to remove all those from government whose conduct does not meet with our definition of goodness? Because, before you declare some people wicked, you have to define wickedness.
Well, that’s easy, you say. Sin is the definition of wickedness. But no two people can agree on the definition of sin; hence, no consensus definition of wickedness is to be had. But surely there is a degree of wickedness so bad that we can agree on that? Let the prayer be limited to the wickedness we all can agree on, and ask God to run all of them out of government. So to pray that prayer means we are setting ourselves up as the ones who define what wickedness is.
I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t seem to be following the law of love. How could we rephrase that prayer—assuming the presence of wicked people in government at any or all levels is a true problem—so that it complies with the law of love? How about:
Father, we ask that you help our government to be a force for good, not evil. We pray that government workers and leaders at all levels work only for the good of their constituents.
That would be a prayer I could pray. As for that prayer suggested on Facebook, I think it better to leave it un-prayed.
