C.S. Lewis, Christianity, family, Genealogy, The Teachings, travel, Writing

Hunkering Down

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[Note to self: Don’t hit the browser back button when typing a post if you haven’t hit “save draft”. Maybe the second time will be a charm.]

This is looking up the street from our house on Thursday 2/11. It is sanded (actually gritted). I believe I could get up it if I tried.

I’m looking out The Dungeon windows to a light snowfall. It’s just condensation due to the cold, 14°F. We were supposed to be in Texas this weekend, watching the grandkids while their parents were at a church event. Wednesday last was our departure day. But we woke up to a winter glaze on the roads, a freakish ice storm overnight. It had been predicted then removed from the forecast. After a quick survey of the situation, I postponed the trip a day.

If not, perhaps I could get down the hill then loop around the circle and go up the next street which, last time I checked, was free of ice.

I spent time chopping and clearing ice, spreading rock salt and sand. I was able to get the already-loaded van up to the end of the driveway. Once the City truck came by spreading grit on the road, I probably could have made it up the hill. But reports on conditions elsewhere indicated the trip would be difficult. Thursday morning was not much different. Radar showed light, frozen precipitation along our route. I delayed the trip from morning to afternoon. By noon it was clear things were no better. Reports of accidents along our route said it all. I cancelled the trip.

So were are unexpectedly home. The forecast now calls for 6-10″ of snow Sunday-Monday, with temperatures like we have now or lower. After a trip to Wal-Mart today (hopefully) for fresh items, we will hunker down. I made a large pot of soup yesterday. We have enough frozen, canned, and boxed food to get by a long time should the W-M run not be possible. I plan to write in the church anniversary book. I plan to begin the editing process in The Teachings. I will read C.S. Lewis and other things. On Sunday I will teach Life Group from home. And I will walk outside a little but get my main exercise on the elliptical. I might even get a little genealogy research done.

I realize that the last paragraph is all about me. “I plan…I will…” Obviously I will do that only by the grace of God and the strength and abilities He has given me and continues to give me.

Oh, in the last half-hour we learned that the church event have been postponed due to…weather.

book reviews

Book Review: “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”

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My little gray cells were not, alas, sufficiently cognitive to solve this murder before all was revealed.

Once again, in the interest of reducing our possessions, my wife and I read a book we will want to read but will be willing to part with afterwards. For this we chose The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. When we found the A.C. books in the basement, belonging to our son but being given by him to his sister (in his own effort of dis-accumulation), along with some other of her books in the house having come to us from various sources, I put them all in order based on what I thought was the order Christie had written them. I thought this one was the next.

It didn’t read like that, however. In this book, Hercule Poirot has retired incognito to the charming village of Kings Abbot. Alas, two deaths in the two most prominent families in the village—one an apparent suicide, one a murder—result in Poirot being called in to investigate. The result is an amazing story. I, of course, don’t want to give away who the murderer is. Suffice to say I didn’t get it right, though I had an inkling into it. A weak inkling.

This book is Christie at her best. Poirot speaks often of the “little grey cells” and his “little ideas”. He muses, ponders, engages other people to help him, and keeps his cards hidden. As the story unfolds, all suspicion is on one person. After the butler is ruled out that is. (It’s always the butler, isn’t it? Unless it’s the footman, but in this book there aren’t any footmen.) But other people also had motive and means. Opportunity was a difficulty, as the apparent time of the murder was fairly precise and as alibis abounded. Two people didn’t have them. One of those disappeared. As the stories are told, it looks like everyone could have done it.

While the writing is a bit old fashioned by today’s standards it is not archaic. On occasion I had to re-read a sentence or paragraph to make sure I understood what was being said in dialog or narrative.

In detective novels earlier than Christie, such as the Sherlock Holmes series, the author did not give sufficient clues to the reader for them to figure it out. But Christie came much closer to that. When we came to the end of the novel and all was revealed, we decided to go back to the beginning and read it again, to see if we missed such clues (or “clews” as this book has it). Yes, they were there, but very subtle. I don’t feel badly for having missed them.

So this book is 5-stars. I probably won’t bother to review it on Amazon or Goodreads. Agatha Christie’s reputation is solid with out my few words. The question I always ask in all of my reviews is: is it a keeper? Alas, no. Too many other books to read or re-read to pick this one up again. Once we get through the A.C. books, they will go to our daughter as our son wanted. Too many books, too little time to keep Christie on our shelves permanently.

Church History Novels, Documenting America, self-publishing, The Teachings, Writing

February 2021 Writing Plans

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Dateline: 4 February 2021

As I said in my last post, which re-capped the writing I did in January, my next post would be about writing goals for February. On Monday I thought I might write that post the next day and have an extra post this week. Alas, that didn’t happen. But I’m here now.

What are my writing goals for February? I haven’t written them anywhere (something I sometimes do), so today I’m making this up as I go along.

  1. Continue to work on The Teachings. At the rate I’m writing now, I should write “the end” somewhere around Feb 15. That depends a lot on life circumstances. We will be babysitting grandchildren during part of this time, and traveling two days, so that time may slip. A lot depends on how much I manage to get done today.
  2. Continue to work on the 100th Anniversary book for my church. I’ve made a start with the book somewhat planned out and the writing started, now sitting at 1,675 word heading towards 20,000 words, maybe a little longer. Last night I did some research into one item—actually a person—that I felt needed expanding in the book. I found what I needed. I don’t have any real deadline for this book, but I would like to have it fairly well finished by July. Still much research to do, especially of photos for illustrations.
  3. Get back to research into my next Documenting America book. I call this Run-up To Revolution. It’s about the period before the outbreak of fighting in 1775, so say from 1761-1775. I read for research before, but not a whole lot. I don’t know if this will be the next book I work on or not. A lot will depend on this research.
  4. Continue to blog twice a week. Very doable.
  5. Continue to work on my bibliography. I started this some time ago, maybe three or four years, after I found joy working on a chronological bibliography for Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Every now and then I open it and add a few more things to it. I did that last week and early this week. I plan on keeping up-to-date with blog posts and other writing endeavors. This is a “don’t have to do it” task, but it is becoming a labor of love. Perhaps no one will ever really care about the vast number of items I’ve written, but I plan to leave a comprehensive bibliography behind just in case someone does.
  6. This is more publishing than writing related: Begin to improve my books to try to 1) get more reviews and 2) improve the click through and purchasing rates on my ads. I’m aware of several small-ish things I can do to make that happen. Or at least do to try to make that happen. I’ll start with the two books currently advertised, then do the others in their series, then branch out to others. For February, I will plan on doing the ones advertised.
  7. Advertise one more book. I’m thinking it will be Acts Of Faith, but we shall see.

I think that’s it. I have no plans to work on letter transcriptions, or write any essays, or political essays. It’s getting into tax season and, right after this babysitting gig, I’ll have to take some time for that. Corresponds well with completion of the first draft of The Teachings.

self-publishing, Writing

Writing Progress in January

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Since my regular blogging day, Monday, falls on the 1st, it seems good that I give an accounting of the month just passed. My writing life, that is.

Yet another box of old correspondence pulls me away from other tasks I’d like to do, the unnecessary interrupting the important.

My main work this month was on The Teachings. I continued interest in it that had developed in late December. As that month ended the book stood at 33,455 words. I had been writing for several days to get to that point. My writing diary and saved files shows work on most days of the month, taking the occasional day off. My writing diary for today was, “Did a few more words, ending at 72,699. Very tired today.” That meant that, in the month of January, I added 39,244 words to the book, an average of over 1,250 a day. What caused the increase in production? Mainly because I got past the point in the book where I felt that I needed to rigorously needed to align with the history of the Jewish War that serves as the backdrop for the whole book. I knew the blot, so was just able to write.

Since I was shooting for the book to be 80 to 90 thousands words, I’m getting close. If I can maintain that kind of average production, I’ll be done with the first draft in just two weeks. Thinking about that, I decided to contact a couple of past beta readers to see if they were interested in doing so again for this book. Both said yes. I’m also sending chapters to my critique group, Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista. I’ve sent out nine chapters so far (out of 28 completed) and received at least two critiques on each chapter. I haven’t yet gone through all the critiques.

What else writing related has occupied my time? Mainly letters. Having done a lot of letter organization in 2020, including that transcription project of the letters from our Kuwait years, my mind was on letters. Early in the month I was still finding a few letters that needed to be put with letters from those periods and collated. Also, my digital letters needed work. Yes, I consider e-mails to be letters. Last year I began some work on going through e-mails in my in-box and out-box to see what needed to be saved, what could be discarded. I had also, foolishly perhaps, moved e-mails into a number of folders. My intention was to save each important e-mail to a Word document and save them in a year-by-year folder in the cloud. Well, a few unimportant e-mails as well. My goal was to start with 2020 and work backwards. First I started with the folders. I saved all those e-mails to files. Then I tacked the inbox and outbox. After saving each email from the last two, I moved them to the appropriate folder. My inbox and outbox started to look a lot better. E-mails that didn’t need saving—receipts, links, forwarded documents and photos—are simply moved to the right folder. At the moment I’m working in 2015 inbox, almost through with it. Still have the 2015 outbox to do. Then, back to 2014.

This saving of e-mails is probably a total waste of time. I’m too fascinated by letters to let mine go. The hope is that someday someone will care about my letters based on my literary career, and they will be published. I know that’s unlikely. As I get further along in life, if my career is still a pipedream, I may publish them in nice bound volumes for some of my progeny to read.

What else? I began work on a book I’ve been asked to write about our church’s 100th anniversary. The date is in July but the celebration won’t be till October. Thus, the book will have to be ready for publishing in September, probably early September. This month I: retrieved loads of documents from the church archives; went through about half of them and formed a timeline document for church history (though I have much more of that to go); made a plan for the book—a mental plan right now; and started the writing. Okay, I wrote two paragraphs. It’s a start. I shared those paragraphs with our pastor and the chair of the anniversary committee, and they both seemed to think it was a good approach. I tried to work on it a little yesterday, but found myself too mentally tired to do much.

One other thing I did in January was keep up with my blog and my correspondence. Okay, yes, that’s two things. I blogged twice a week, I think not missing a day. I wrote and received letters, mostly electronically, and saved them out to Word documents. I’m going to do my past to keep up with that all year, and not leave it to a concentrated effort sometime in the future.

Oh, just thought of something else. I did a little work on my own writing bibliography. It’s a big task that I need to do but have long delayed due to the size. I don’t necessarily plan on making a big effort on this, certainly not till my letters project is complete. But from time to time I’ll tackle this. It’s actually kind of fun though it does take me away from other things.

One other item I should note, not exactly writing related. While I have been consulting with my former firm, they wanted me to use one of their computers, for security reasons since I would have to access their network drives. This week my former boss e-mailed me that they felt I no longer needed it and would soon want me to turn it in to the office. So for the last three days I’ve been going through the files on it, seeing if I have any personal files and saving them out to the cloud. I made excellent progress on that. I should be done in about three more days. I think most of the files I need are saved, but I want to check all folders because sometimes a file gets mis-saved the first time and, if you haven’t used it in a couple of years you might now miss it.

So that’s the month. My next post may be an extra one, goals for February. Stay tuned.

book reviews, Carlyle

Book Review: Sartor Resartus

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I have one Carlyle book published and two more started. And essays about him on my mind. It’s probably an obsession that I ought to get treatment for.

Of the many books, essays, and articles written by 19th Century British author Thomas Carlyle, perhaps none is more iconic than Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. Written in 1830 and 1831, serialized in 1833-34, published in the USA in 1836 and in Great Britain in 1938, Carlyle’s life changed from landed poverty to the beginning of success by the time it came out in London. Throughout Carlyle’s life it grew in popularity. The year he died it sold seventy-thousand copies in an inexpensive edition. For the life of me I don’t know why.

This photo shows Carlyle perhaps close to the age when he wrote “Sartor”.

I’m slowly working my way through Carlyle’s works, in the chronological order they were written. About five weeks ago I came up to Sartor. Having read little bits of it and knowing it was a hard book to understand, I waited a little while before tackling it. Finally I did, reading an e-book version. At times I read with good concentration; at other times I read in distracted conditions. Generally when I did the latter, I went back and re-read the section again in a quieter time. Did I understand it better? Alas, no. The more I read, the more I determined to stick with it and understand it, the more I would zone out after five or ten minutes.

I have no idea what the purpose of the book is/was. The fictitious professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is said to have written a (fictitious) book on the philosophy of clothes. That much I knew before I read it. But in the book, I found precious little about clothes. D.T.’s life history is given. His lost love is described. Endless words describe…endless nonsense. Or so to me it seems like nonsense.

I purposely didn’t read commentary on Sartor before reading it, allowing me to get it for myself. But I didn’t “get it.” I found the flow of ideas almost unintelligible. I think Emerson said it well in his first letter to Carlyle in 1834: “I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus…has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction?” If Emerson had problems with it I guess I’m in good company. To give you an idea of the difficulty of reading Sartor, go back and read the second sentence in this review. I purposely made that complex. Yet, it would be one of the simpler sentences in Sartor.

Carlyle’s early works I understood well. The further into his career, he found his “diction” and “style” and became less understandable. His pivotal work as to style was his essay “Novalis”. I had to read and reread that to understand what Carlyle was saying. I read it all thrice and parts of it four times and felt that I came to a basic understanding of it. The essays between that and Sartor were a mix of difficulty and clear writing. But Sartor made “Novalis” seem like a Little Golden Book.

I can’t give Sartor any more than 2-stars. Perhaps, if I read it again as planned, and come to a better understanding, I’ll come back and edit this review. If I had a paper copy of Sartor, I would keep it as part of my larger Carlyle collection, but not because I think it’s good. I’ll re-read it again someday, probably in the near future. Perhaps I’ll even understand it.

home improvements, self-publishing, The Teachings, Writing

Staying Busy

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Here it is Monday morning, about 8:45 a.m. I have set myself a schedule to have my blogs posts up by 7:30 a.m., so I missed it. Sometimes I write my posts ahead and schedule them to post at that time on Monday or Friday. Last night, however, I got busy doing other things and, well, here it is late Monday morning and no blog post.

I’m not quite ready with a couple of different posts, one a book review, another part 2 of a prior post. So I’ll just say I’m staying busy. Writing and marketing of my books are taking a lot of time. I’ve been trying to write 1,500 words a day on The Teachings, and, except for weekend, I’ve been successful at that. I’ve also been involved with an on-line “school” for doing Amazon ads. I blew off a lot of the classes since this is the third time I’ve taken the school, but I’m looking at some of them, including this morning. I won’t do a lot with it this time, but I’ll do some new ads on a different book.

Well, while I was typing my rheumatologist’s office called. My appointment last week was cancelled for the doc’s convenience and couldn’t schedule me until April, which was okay with me. They called now to say they had two different times today, one this morning, one this afternoon. I was about to take the afternoon one when I checked my calendar and saw I have out pest control service scheduled for today. I totally forgot about that. So, I’ll have to spend time getting ready for that.

My listings at FB Marketplace are continuing to generate interest. I had people come by to look at books several times this week, including yesterday. That doesn’t mean our clutter is greatly reduced, but it is some. In the storeroom I have cleared off one full shelf unit and almost a second. These we will give to our daughter next time we go there (possibly in February) to replace some sagging plastic ones. The small amount of de-cluttering feels really, really good. The work ahead is massive, but progress feels good.

So here I am with a post for today. It’s breakfast time. I made two stock trades, which is all I’ll do today. Small trades: low risk, not much money involved, which are the type I like. It’s time for breakfast, then to finish that class I interrupted, then get on with my writing for the day, then get ready for the bug man. All in a day’s work.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: The Jesus I Never Knew

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We thought this would be a discard, an author we didn’t know but happened to have his book. But it is a keeper. Someday I hope to re-read this.

For our evening reading aloud, Lynda and I are looking at books on our shelves that look like good reads but which probably aren’t “keepers”, which, after reading, can be sold, donated, or discarded. Lynda found one such on our shelves, The Jesus I Never Knew y Philip Yancy. I said sure, let’s read it.

We did this over about two weeks. Our hardback copy has 275 pages not including notes. Yancy is not a writer I was familiar with, but the book sounded good and so we dove in.

Wow, what a good book! Yancy covered aspects of Jesus’ life, teaching, and ministry that I had never thought of. Makes sense, given the title. With chapters such as “The Jesus I Thought I Knew”, “Beatitudes: Lucky Are the Unlucky”, “Kingdom: Wheat Among the Weeds”, Yancy looks as the raw words of the gospel and, without an historical or political filter, tells us about the biblical Jesus.

I’m not going to quote from the book or give specific reasons why I liked it so. Instead, I urge everyone to read it [Amazon]. Published in 1995, it is still fresh and relevant in the third decade of the 21st Century.

One interesting anecdote about our reading it right now: I had never heard of Yancy. A new literary agent posted what she was looking for and said she was looking for the next Philip Yancy. Clearly, he has a degree of notoriety that escaped me for years. Not any more.

We intended to read a book that we would discard, but we are agreed that we should keep it and read it again sometime. Consequently, back on the shelf it goes. I give this an enthusiastic 5 stars.

America, Politics

Agree With Me On This or I Will Unfriend You

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How many times have I seen something like that on Facebook? That’s my only social media platform. I assume it happens on other platforms also. I saw statements like that about ten times on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. Let me set my scene for you.

My morning was as normal. Up around 6:45, down to The Dungeon with coffee. Devotions and prayer. Then I go through the whatever is new on the few blogs I read, mainly writing blogs. I checked e-mail and read an article on Yahoo Finance. I went through my Facebook news feed to see if the world had blown up while I had been sleeping. By then it was time to start my trading day. I didn’t have much planned; I think I made one trade. Wrote maybe 1,000 words on my novel. I did a little decluttering. I think I found a couple more items from our Kuwait years, transcribed them then put them in the collated file. At that point I went upstairs, got my third mug of coffee, and went out to the sunroom earlier than normal. At this point I checked Facebook again, then started my reading. I think that was 11:30 a.m. or 12 Noon CST. When I came upstairs my wife didn’t have TV on, or if she did it wasn’t on daytime news.

I alternately read and checked my cell phone as it dinged and vibrated. Several friends had posted that a mob had attacked and occupied the Capitol in Washington DC. But I elected not to go watch the news since early reports are so often erroneous or exaggerated. I read what was going on. Soon I began to see statements similar to the title of the post. The statement is usually made this way:

If you think this is ok, let me know right now so I can unfriend you.

If you think this is ok, unfriend me right now.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? A heinous thing is in progress. How can anyone support it? If YOU support it I can’t possibly be friends with you. Some things are just bad enough that’s the only way to respond to them, right?

Well, I want to suggest another path forward.

I responded to one of those on Wednesday, sometime in the early afternoon. One of my friends posted something to the effect, “If you think this is ok, go ahead and tell me so that I can unfriend you.” I assumed by “this” he meant the attack on the Capitol. Some others responded. I responded something like this: “By this I assume you mean the attack on the Capitol? I haven’t seen any news coverage yet, so all I know is what I’m seeing on Facebook. But from that it sounds bad. I condemn this violence based on what I’ve heard so far. But tell me, why the passive aggressive approach to this?”

As I wrote that, I envisioned a dialog between him and me where I laid out this alternative approach. Depending on his response, I planned to lead into this series of questions:

“Do you want the world and our nation to be a better place?” I would assume his answer would be yes. I mean, who wants the world to be a worse place. That’s almost an insulting question.

“Do you feel that you have any responsibility, any role to play, any work to do toward the end of making the world and our nation a better place?” Again, the answer would be an obvious yes. No one would say “I want the world to be a better place but others must do the work, not me.”

“What do you feel is your role in making the world and our nation a better place?” This answer would vary, of course, but would no doubt have a number of tasks: be a good husband and father, pay my taxes, live peacefully with all men, work to fight injustice,” etc. The list could go on with both general and specific tasks that a person might feel are their responsibility toward building a better world and nation.

At that point I would shift to a statement. “I assume you believe that those who attacked the Capitol are making the world and the U.S. worse, and that those who believe their actions are a good thing are also making the world worse. But tell me, if you unfriend such a person, cut off all dialog with them, are you not reducing your potential to reason with them and perhaps change them? I abhor their views and the actions of those they seem to be supporting, but I will not cut off dialog with them. Who knows but that, by a few well-placed and carefully reasoned statements, I could help them see another way of thinking and maybe change them.”

Now, I’m not naïve enough to believe that I can change the heart of an individual so calloused that they would turn in an instant from being in favor of violence to be a peacemaker. But I can nudge them. By several such nudges, by me and others over time, the world could be made a better place. Slowly, one obstinate and misguided person at a time. Yes, I will remain friends with such a person. I will dialog with him or her. Because I believe that makes my task of making the world and our nation a better place.

I never got there with this friend. As I renounced the violence at the Capitol I also renounced the violence of the summer protests. That brought in another person to call me a coward and make many other disparaging remarks. I thought, ah, I’m now dialoging with two people. But, my friend unfriended and blocked me and the dialog ended before it got started. Such is life. I pray the breach may someday be healed.

I had more to say about this, but my post is already too long. I anticipate another post on this, maybe on Friday.

self-publishing

4th Quarter 2020 and Full-Year 2020 Book Sales

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One of my usual blog posts to start a year is to post my book sales  for the previous year—and for the last quarter of the year. Let’s start with the quarter, which was my best of the year. Sales were:

Oct – 6 sales of two different books

Nov – 19 sales of three different books

Dec – 24 sales of two different books

Quarter: 49 sales of five different books

Those of you who follow my blog know this was a huge quarter for me. Those of you new to the blog will no doubt say What? With 32 books for sale you sold less than 2 copies per book for a quarter? Yes, that’s true. It shows that increasing sales haven’t made a dent in my cellar-dwelling status.

The reason for increasing sales is the ads I’m running on Amazon. Most of those 49 sales were of the two books I have ads for, 10 ads total, 5 for each. It would be nice if I could report profitability, but, alas, my ad costs so far have run more than my royalties. The will be the subject of a blog post in the near future.

Then, for the year 2020, I sold 96 books. That’s my third best year, lower than last year. But last year I sold books at author events. The pandemic prevented author events this year. Of these sales, 15 were sold in person, the rest through Amazon or Smashwords (only 1 there).  I had sales of 14 different books.

So not a stellar year, but much better than some. I still have money in my ad budget. Hopefully they will run a profit before long.

C.S. Lewis, Church History Novels, home improvements, miscellaneous, Politics, reading, The Teachings, Writing

A Whacky Week to Start 2021

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That sounds too flippant, to call last week a “whacky” week. It was an awful week as far as our nation goes. For me in my personal life, “whacky” is an apt description.

Not that anything went wrong, at least not terribly wrong. The worst that happened to me was a dead battery. I drove to a haircut appointment on Friday, the first haircut I had since May. I took the Green Monster, our old minivan. It’s been a little hard to start and I thought it might be that the battery was old. But it started and I drove it the 3/4 miles to the beauty shop. Got my haircut, came out, and it wouldn’t start. So I walked home and let it sit overnight.

I considered having my neighbor drive me up there and jump start me then drive it to the Dodge dealership 4 miles north, but on Saturday? I decided instead to call AAA. They now have a battery service. I requested that, and they came so fast I barely had time to walk up there to meet them. Fifteen minutes and some money later and I was up and running. That battery was six or seven years old, so I was on borrowed time with it. And, that service didn’t cost a whole lot more than going to Wal-Mart, buying a battery, and putting it in myself.

During the week I actually got back to significant work on my novel, The Teachings. Over Tuesday through Friday I added over 5,000 words to it. I haven’t had that kind of writing production in a long time. I left it on Friday with the next scene clearly in my mind, hoping to add another two to three thousand words over the weekend. But instead I added…nothing. Other tasks consumed my time.

On Saturday, in addition to taking care of the van, I did maintenance around the house. The shower door handle needed attention, and was easily fixed. I tried to glue down some old wallpaper that is coming loose but it wouldn’t stick, even with gorilla glue. A window handle needed put back in place, and I was able to find screws that reasonably matched and got that done. While at it I went around the house and checked the other window handles, tightening a few. I also did some more straightening/arranging of my miscellaneous hardware, and identified some more I can sell.

We continue with decluttering, going through old Christmas cards and letters received over a 28 year period. Few are worth saving. Why we saved them I don’t know. But that is slowly being cleared out. I keep getting some inquiries about items I have listed for sale on FB Marketplace. Sold some books on Thursday, but a freak snowstorm that day kept two other scheduled buyers away or I might have sold more.

My reading was progressing well early in the week. I read ten or more pages a day in C.S. Lewis’s letters, with great enjoyment. But I read less over the weekend, my concentration waning. Our evening reading is in a Philip Yancey book, and we make good progress in that. We lost reading time two days as I had evening Zoom meetings on church-related tasks.

One of those tasks is our church’s 100th anniversary committee. I was asked if I would write a book to be distributed as part of the celebration, which is in October. That may seem like a lot of time, but it’s not. Thursday evening I went up to the church to retrieve the archives. Saturday I went through about 5 to 10% of them. It’s going to be a huge task. I have a timeline already started, though with much more needed. I probably need to spend some time every day on this, and will do some today.

My weight and blood sugars were a little whacky last week. My eating was fairly good and I lost some weight and had good blood sugars, but the blood sugars didn’t track as well to my eating and exercise as I thought they would; not sure why.

I could go on. Prepared on Saturday for and taught adult Life Group yesterday. Did a little genealogy research. And, as you would expect, made a few Facebook posts or comments on Wednesday, now estranged from a family member over it. This too shall pass. I will post about that, maybe in my next post of possibly not until next week. While I’m hoping the madness (yes, I consider it madness) has stopped, I’m hearing things that concern me that it hasn’t. More on that later.

So, here it is another week, the 2nd of 2021. Normal tasks are before me. God is on the throne. I will continue to serve Him, regardless of what of what swirls around me.

Author | Engineer