Other than teaching and preaching, most of my jobs have been little more than labor exchanged for living expenses. Here at the EPA things have been better than that. I love nature and it makes me feel good to be involved in practical activities directed at saving our environment. It was a wee bit on the [...]
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I’m slowly coming around. I don’t miss the west coast so much that I feel like crying when I think about our move anymore. This Saturday Joy and I will pick up our "new" 17-year-old boat. She is a 32′ Carver Mariner out of New York. Joy is itching to get her cleaning supplies aboard and [...] We are in the coldest part of winter. Any trip to the shore entails subjecting oneself to cold wind penetrating to one’s body’s core. It is really quite foolish to subject oneself to such weather. It is also foolish to even consider buying a boat. Boats are not necessarily that expensive to buy, but to keep [...] [...] When my little dog, Moku, decided it was time to go out this morning, sleet had just begun to fall. By the time I left for work, the snow was piling up (by North Carolina standards). The main driving lanes on the freeway remained clear and people drove with caution. When I came to my exit [...] As I prepared for work this morning, I thought about something that has brought me great comfort in life. Every culture has their rituals. As a free church guy I always heard a lot of grumbling about the "empty rituals" of the high church. The implication was that we were too spiritual for rituals. But try sitting in the pew where some elderly baptist lady has enjoyed her ritual-free worship for eighty years and see what happens. If you are the pastor, try changing the order of service or leaving out The Lord’s Prayer (or putting it in if it is normally left out). One quickly learns that every church has their rituals. In our designed-to-be-informal services, the pastor begins every service by reciting the three commitments of the church and showing the same slide. Families have their rituals, also. Interestingly, Tony Campolo has suggested that the more ritualized family life, the closer the family unit. Ritual and habit are close allies. When I was young I primarily used competition to motivate myself. I can run faster than you. I can score higher on this test than you. Now, I find myself leaning ever harder on ritual and habit. Continue reading Don’t Kick the Habit              Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq learned the same lesson older US politicians learned in the last congressional election, the broad use of cell phone videos by the hoi polloi means that if you have your pants down you will be caught (on video). Praise be to the internet and the people’s video! There is, however, a dark force at work to limit the power of the cell phone and that force is the commercial service providers. For example, the only documented means of getting a ringer for my LG VX8100 cell phone is to buy the ringer and then pay Verizon a $9.99 charge per month to use it! Do they know that if we could load our own ringers they would not be able to charge such outrageous fees? Do they know that this might result in non-conformist expressions of individuality from which they would not profit? Continue reading Power to the (cell phone using) People My daughter bought me the set of cd’s "Birding by Ear." I took a field ornithology class about 30 years ago at the Terra Alta Biological Station of West Virginia University. A group of students walked (or waded) behind an older, charismatic wildlife professor. When he heard a song that he was going to teach us [...] No it wasn’t the Sugar Bowl, but West Virginia did manage to come back to beat Georgia Tech in the highest scoring Gator Bowl ever. To top it off Penn State beat Tennessee and USC trounced Michigan. I got a nice family picture for my office, spoke to my close friends and family by phone on [...] |
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