Still, I managed to shovel the entire driveway, get some cleaning done, attend a church choir rehearsal, and get prepared for tomorrow's children's choir. We also finished watching the movie The Darkest Hour--whose purpose, I am convinced, was to finally give that cameleon, Gary Oldman, the Oscar that he so richly deserves. However, the accomplishments of the day which made me the happiest was getting see Chloé finish her final official race of the season and then later go sledding with Rowen.
It felt like most of my day was spent in the car either driving someone to or picking someone up from one event or another. On several occasions, I arrived at the time requested, only to have to wait a considerable amount of time (nearly half an hour in one case). Meanwhile, my time at home seemed to fly between the times that I had to open my garage door.
Still, I managed to shovel the entire driveway, get some cleaning done, attend a church choir rehearsal, and get prepared for tomorrow's children's choir. We also finished watching the movie The Darkest Hour--whose purpose, I am convinced, was to finally give that cameleon, Gary Oldman, the Oscar that he so richly deserves. However, the accomplishments of the day which made me the happiest was getting see Chloé finish her final official race of the season and then later go sledding with Rowen.
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Normally, we use the hill on the far side of the cabin for sledding purposes. It is a long, cleared area with a nice starting slope. Unfortunately, the slope faces partly towards the woods and the incline isn't all that steep. Still, it's fairly serviceable.
Connor, however, wanted more. He decided that he would try the hill that is behind our house as it is considerably steeper. It also has a great deal more undergrowth to deal with. Despite a couple of false starts, he beat out a path on the north side of the house that is considerably faster, bumpier, and curvier than our traditional runs. It's so much faster, bumpier, and curvier that I was tossed from the sled twice while I was trying to ride down it on my knees. Riding down on my chest led to my breath getting knocked out of me on a couple of bumps. Going down while just sitting did not provide the momentum needed due to yesterday's dump of fresh snow. I don't know if this will become our main sled run as the other one has some advantages in staging area and distance that we can travel, but it certainly has Connor's attention now. Today brought some pleasant surprises that certainly made my day better than I had any reason to expect. For one, I was shocked this morning to find that the one to three inches of predicted snow was substantially greater. In Michigan, this amount would have easily cancelled school, yet we did not even have a delay. Now, many people do not enjoy driving in the snow, but I take immense pleasure in the experience. I will admit that I was a little concerned that I would make it up my unplowed road, especially as Mera scooped up the snow and tossed it over the windshield. Still, we made it safely and had fun doing it.
Later, as the snow continued to fall during the day, I was concerned that I would have a repeat of my experience the last time I drove home after a snowfall and get (temporarily) stuck in the driveway. I was thus tremendously surprised to see the driveway cleared. Although I saw that Trevor was out with the shovel, the markings clearly indicated that a plow had done almost all of the work. It turns out that a neighbor (which one, I don't know as Trevor doesn't remember his name), seeing Trevor working on the driveway entrance, asked if he could help and then plowed out the whole thing. Even better, he instinctively pushed the snow in the directions that I prefer. Another surprise came at lunch. One of my lunch friends said she had a gift for me and then provided me with a metal apple slicer. I often bring an apple slicer to core and slice an apple that I dip into peanut butter for lunch. Yesterday, while trying to get through a particularly stubborn honey crisp, I snapped off one of the plastic handles of my slicer. Having seen my loss, my friend decided to ease my pain by replacing the broken slicer with a better one. As much as the above gifts meant to me, my favorite was getting to hold another friend's infant girl for a while. She was rather fussy, and her cries drew me like lodestone. I, as well as liberal use of a pacifier, was able to calm her a bit, but she still exercised her lungs to let me know that she was not pleased with the current state of things. With my granddaughter accessible to me through digital means only, it was amazingly soothing to me to physically hold and comfort a--slightly older--adorable baby girl. I am not worthy of such gifts. Well, we finally took down the Christmas tree this past weekend. We traditionally keep it up until at least Epiphany on January 6th, but our pastor suggested waiting even longer--until January 12th. At that point things got a little busy, so we decided to wait until Candlemas, which was February 2nd. However, Janelle was not here, and she has particular places to put the ornaments (she placed herself in charge of ornaments ever since I decorated a tree in Star Wars Micromachine spaceships). Thus we waited for the weekend after her return.
While we still keep up our window lights until sometime around the Vernal Equinox, I usually swap out the multicolored lights in the kitchen for red lights in honor of St. Valentine's Day. We are cutting it a little bit close this year, but our kitchen now has a red (and slightly creepy) tint to it. After this weekend, I will swap out those lights with four strands of green in anticipation of St. Patrick's Day ... and the upcoming spring. Janelle and I just finished the final season of the HBO TV series Game of Thrones. Initially, I was not going to watch the 8th season as so many people complained about how it ended. In particular, I did not want to see one of my favorite characters go the Anakin Skywalker route of preaching justice and then murdering younglings a few minutes later. Thankfully, I feel that this particular aspect (although I still would have prefered it did not go the way it did) was handled well and believably.
In fact, I liked where most of the characters ended up by the end. Even those who did not have "good" endings, had endings that fit their characters. While I had already heard a great deal about what would happen with certain characters (and was initially outraged in some cases), I feel that the writers built a good case for how things turned out. Certainly, my hoped for scenario did not come to pass, but this was a George R. R. Martin story, and I have come to expect that he liked to do the unexpected, but still keep the tale believable. In this, I feel that the showrunners stayed true to the soul of the books, even if they differed in some areas out of necessity. I'm still amazed by this series. While it is certainly more violent and pornographic than I would like, the story is well-conceived and the dialogue is almost Shakespearean. The set-pieces and costumes are worth the price of admission alone. For me, though, it is the level of acting that makes this series a true masterpiece. I truly cared for these characters (or loathed the ones I was supposed to loathe). I'm glad I got to see their story (for who knows if the books will ever be finished). Today's homily focused largely on needing to dedicate time and attention to practice our faith. The priest delivering the homily has only been in America for a little over three years. He spoke about still struggling with the prayers, especially the creeds, in English. He has them memorized, but still uses the prayer card to make certain that he doesn't mix them up while he's leading the congregation. We have aspects of our faith that we need to work on as well.
There are many things in my life that need more of my attention if I am going to get them done. It is so easy to put certain projects or tasks off that I know will be tedious, disgusting, or troublesome (e.g. like cleaning the clog in the boys' bathroom). Yet, I feel so much better once they are accomplished. I think that this true with my faith as well. I have grown complacent with it, and thus feel a bit distant in my relationship with God at the moment. I don't believe He has withdrawn from me, but that I have not given our relationship the attention that it deserves. Too often do I take for granted the relationships around me. I need to work on that. This is especially true for my relationship with God. Over the years, we have accumulated a large collection of music. As my, Janelle's, and our children's tastes vary widely, the collection is rather haphazard. This is even truer as we have music chosen from the tastes of our siblings as well.
When I have the inclination, I go through some of that collection and choose songs to add to the playlist in my car. This was a necessity as, until fairly recently, I had more music than I could fit on my phone (and still have pictures and apps, etc. #firstworldproblems). This gave me about 300 songs that I knew I enjoyed or that I knew my children enjoyed that we could listen to on our trips. Realizing that I could actually hold all of the music I own in the palm of my hand, I dumped it all from my aged laptop onto my iPhone. This has greatly confused my car. I've happily used Bluetooth to play music from my phone through my car's speakers. In the past, Mera would connect with my phone and play whatever music I had last played. Unfortunately, a recent update has made it so that only happens some of the time, while the rest of the time it plays music from the entire selection. In short, I've been hearing songs that I hadn't heard for years. Occasionally, I've found ones that I then add to my "Car" playlist or even my more upbeat "Exercise" playlist. Sadly, it turns out that I don't care for many of the songs that are on my phone. I'm not quite willing to delete them, but I have been finding myself frequently saying, "Hey, Siri. Please shuffle car playlist." I noted as I pulled onto my road with a car full of my boys and Connor’s friends, that our road had been plowed. Not only that, we clearly got more snow than in town. I made a comment that it was a good thing I had so many strong backs to help me shovel out my driveway. They responded by informing me that shoveling and then sledding where the first two items on their to-do list.
I arrived at my driveway to find it entirely impassible with Trevor having just arrived to start shoveling (I later learned that Janelle has asked him to shovel at least the entry several hours earlier). As he was moving very slowly, I got out of the car, told him to go get another shovel, and started digging through the berm left by the plow. He was not back by the time I cleared it, so I got back in the car and started to go up the drive. Our driveway curves in a way that keeps our house out of sight of the road and has a bit of a hill to it as well. The snow was deep enough that Mera was scraping it a bit. I knew I would need momentum to get up to the circle part of the driveway. Unfortunately, just as I started to make my way up the hill, Trevor came sauntering back with the second shovel (I left the other one at the driveway’s entrance). Rather than moving quickly out of the way, he stopped there as I was moving towards him—a deer in headlights, as it were. I rolled down the window and yelled at him, at which point he slowly moved to the side, but I had to slow down enough that Mera could not crest the hill. I told Trevor to push, but by the time he got there, Mera was fully in her anti-power skid mode and was not even trying to move her tires. I had Trevor get out of the way and tried backing down the drive, but I misjudged the curve and came off the drive slightly. At this point, I got out, had Trevor get in to drive, and started to push. Unfortunately, Trevor is still a bit panicky behind the wheel, and even though we got the rear out of where I had trapped us, he got the front stuck. This, I took the wheel again, had the boys get out of the car, and tried to back up to a point that I could charge the hill again. I made it almost back the road, but again misjudged the curve a bit and the rear passenger tire got slightly stuck. This time, I had Connor take the wheel and everyone else was pushing. We managed to get Mera back on the main drive and I relieved Connor of his time at the helm. This time, with the boys giving a needed initial push, I got Mera up the drive and into the her cozy garage. The picture shows the battlefield from the perspective of looking down the the drive. It had been pristinely smooth before I first started to make my way up, but our experience left the scars that can be seen. That evidence is largely gone now, as we quickly went to work shoveling so that Janelle could get in without a problem, but the memory of our adventure still remains. It's warmed up to near freezing the past couple of days. In celebration, we've brought out the ice cream. After all, it's nice to cool down when the weather starts to turn warm.
In truth, the boys and I had a craving for ice cream even during the sub zero weather trend that just came to an end. I just couldn't bring myself to actually buy that dairy-based goodness until this past weekend. Even without toppings, it has really hit the spot. The impeachment ended exactly as everyone thought it would (which is a sad commentary on our nation) with the exception of it being the first time in history that a member of a President's own party would vote to remove him from office. The State of the Union was even more of a reality TV show than normal. Basically, politics has been a continual source of frustration and anger. As of this moment, I'm taking a step back from commenting on or creating my own political posts for a while. I've been on a negative spiral for the past few days, and I think that I need to just cut it off.
Although Lent isn't for a three more weeks, I am going to take an early start on it, and limit my social media presence to generally positive contributions. For that matter, I am going to start my Lenten practice of limiting my Facebook time to a total of ten minutes a day (5 minutes in the morning and 5 at night). I will still keep up on news sites, but I will limit that a bit more as well by avoiding the comments altogether. As my daily posts are from my website, I will continue to copy and paste them on Facebook; however, I think I might shorten them a bit too. I need to take the time to realign and especially get farther with my doctoral study. We caved. We've been leaning towards picking up the Disney+ service since the Mandalorian first came out, but discovering that we could not continue watching Dr. Who on Amazon Prime (it's become an HBO Max exclusive), we thought that we would Disney+ for the Mandalorian and the plethora of Disney content available. Unfortunately, we discovered a hitch in that our PS3--which is the device we use for our dining room television--does not have an app for Disney+. Thus, we picked up a Roku Streaming Stick+ (lots of +s) and connected it to our older TV.
While we have not yet watched anything on them as we spent the evening setting these services up, my initial observations are extremely positive. The Roku has a much better interface than the PS3 that we've been using with more options (especially Disney+) available. It also has a voice recognition function that searches all available services for specific shows or movies. I'm also happy that the Roku uses significantly less power than the PS3, making me less self-conscious about the energy use of our TV viewing. That the remote works for the TV as well is another welcome bonus. Meanwhile, Disney+ blew me away with the number of shows and movies available. It certainly fills any gaps that I have in my movie collection when it comes to Disney, Lucasfilm, or Fox. I was particularly happy to see Willow and Three Men and a Baby on the list (don't judge me). The boys were thrilled to see that they could watch Phineas and Ferb again, while Janelle was commenting on the classical Disney films that she saw pop up on the intuitive menu system. Now I just need time to finally see if Baby Yoda is worth all of the hype. Twenty-five years ago, I was taking a class called Japanese Cultural Studies as a humanities elective. Like several of my classes, I was only allowed into this class because I was a part of the honors program at UAF. Otherwise, classes like this were dedicated to only people of a specific major or minor--in this case: Japanese. I only had rudimentary Japanese reading and speaking skills, but I did have a passion for Japanese history and culture, so I was excited about the class.
One downside about taking a class as an honors student is that I was required to do at least one additional assignment beyond the normal requirements. In most cases, the professor would choose a related book and have the honors student(s) write a paper on it. For this class, the book was The Makioka Sisters. It is a densely written 500+ page, small print book about four sisters from Osaka who are looking for a husband for the traditional third sister just before Japan's entry into World War II. In short, I didn't read it. It was not a book that was of any interest to 21 year old me, and with working 30+ hours a week, taking 18 credits of classes, and expecting a second child, I did not want to waste time reading a book whose last line talked about diarrhea. Instead, I skimmed it. There were no Cliff Notes on this book and the Internet was still in its infant stages, so I had to figure it out on my own. As a literature major, I deduced some themes and possible symbols and wrote a paper that tied the sisters into the wider fabric of the world on the brink of war and Japan's struggle with maintaining its identity while trying to modernize. A friend of mine was working as an aide for the professor of this class. During one of the times that we got together, he pulled me aside and told me how much the professor loved my paper. He told me that she had never had a student pull such dynamic themes and diverse threads together in such a way before, and that my paper made her look at the book in a completely different light. Here, I made a mistake. I laughed ... and laughed ... and laughed. When asked what was so funny, I told him that I had never read the book, but just pulled the paper out of thin air (I believed I used different terminology). ... I did not realize how tenuous our friendship was, nor just how devoted he was to the professor. My grade in the class mysteriously went from an A to a C (which would end up being my final grade). Now, I'm not positive that my friend turned on me, but he did not look me in the eye again ... ever. On Sunday, a little over twenty-five years after it was assigned, but with a few months still to the anniversary of the paper's deadline, I finally finished reading The Makioka Sisters. It is a dense book, but I understand now why it is called a modern classic of Japanese literature. It certainly shows a great deal about Japanese culture in the first third of the twentieth century. As I read it, I noted the themes and symbols used throughout and remembered more of what I wrote (I never got that paper back and the floppy disk that held it disappeared long ago). I don't think that I would have changed much if I were to revise it now that I've read the novel. That C was one of only two that I have earned my entire college career. Honestly, I learned a great deal from that class. Not all that I learned was about Japanese culture. What a day! Not only was today's date a palindrome (with the zero added to the front), and the Super Bowl (Fifty-Fourth), and the Chiefs first win of a Super Bowl, and Groundhog Day (Punxsutawney Pete did not see his shadow), and the day that Janelle returns home, but today is Candlemass, the celebration of Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to the temple when He was 40 days old. This is where the two turtle doves from the song come into play, as they (or two pigeons) were the traditional sacrifice given to the temple for this sort of presentation.
In this, the baby Jesus formally enters into the religion that He later so radically changes. Throughout His life, He will follow the forms and traditions that the Jewish faith requires. Although He brings change to some of the practices of that faith, He is the ultimate fulfillment of the promise given from God to His people. Jesus is the Redeemer. I think about Jesus being human, and fully human, not just some god in a human costume. He experienced our emotions, our pains, our fears, and our temptations. He felt the impotence of human rage and the crushing weight of human disappointment. He likely felt the urges towards feelings of both arrogance and worthlessness. I believe that in truly experiencing what it was like to be us, He understood us even better and loved us even more. |
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