Most people don’t imagine that I was ever poor.  No, I don’t have a “pulled myself up by my bootstraps” story. Instead, I have a story that is full of ups and downs–times when my community failed me and times when it saved me.  That’s why poverty will always be a social issue to me–not [...]

Happy Schereschewsky day, everyone!

It's the feast day of this blog's patron saint, Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. I intended to write something commemorating the day. You know, use a few words to honor the man of many words.

And then, instead, I sent a LOT of words. Spam happened. And it's my fault. I clicked the wrong button.

As far as I can tell, an email has been sent to every person in my address book telling them to check out my facebook page and asking them to sign up for an account. (yes, I do have a facebook page. I'm late to the whole facebook party, but finally got there. That's another story for another day.)

Then I tried to send a "sorry, please disregard earlier email" message, but my email program wouldn't let me, saying that I had exceeded the maximum number of messages in an hour. As if I was a spammer... oh, wait, I guess I am.

My whole freakin' address book. It includes three quarters of the active members of my current congregation, about a hundred core leaders from other congregations I've served in and still keep in touch with, at least three ex-girlfriends (don't ask), all of the clergy of West Texas, three judges, fifteen or twenty bishops (one of them a primate), my Senators and Congressman... Ah, crap.

Right. I'm a spammer. And I have egg on my face. (Spam and eggs, get it?)

I'm going home to hide in the closet.

Are you like me? Does it seem like this presidential campaign has been going on for two years or more? And NOW, the local politicians are running their own ads on TV. Also, living where we do, a lot of the ads we must endure during commercial b...

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freeze!
(the wisdom of a dream)

well, i had a dream a couple of weeks ago, she said, and it probably doesn't mean anything...but it really disturbed me...

she is new to the dream group...she gave a bit of background of who she is...a long journey of difficult sobriety, fighting to avoid relapses, mostly succeeding, for years at a time, recently falling back, and now re-claiming her health...she has the determined mix of many recovering folks...seasoned with the struggles of life, scared by family history, sometimes overwhelmed by how to deal with the enormous strains of changing old patterns, how to healthfully detach from generational family expectations and demands...and still do her best to love them...without losing her soul and health....she's also very humble...sometimes giving and claiming for herself grace and acceptance...

i am with my family somewhere, she begins her dream...all of my brothers and family are there, other people, too...we are at some large, beautiful home, like an estate...lots of trees and grass...it is night...i think we have had a cookout or something...i am uncomfortable with some of the people, like a brother...i am walking toward a large beautiful swimming pool behind the house...suddenly! i see my mother fall into the pool, she is drowning...i think i scream for help...one of my brothers yells at me to jump into the pool to save her...he is up on a balcony, looking down...he is far up...i can't move!! i am frozen! then my brother leaps down, dives into the pool and pulls my mother out...everybody shames me and is angry with me for not jumping in...but i couldn't...i couldn't move...i wake up feeling so guilty...

we ask questions to gently understand her dream, not analyze or interpret...she is, she explains, the one who has been the giver and caretaker of others, that she in recent months had been the one to travel over a thousand miles to give care to her aged and dying mother...and how this "threw" her into that old pattern of being expected to take over...to lose herself, her soul in caring for others...while "they", many family members just stood by...taking advantage of her...she, torn by love, loyalty and past training, giving in, at least for a while...fighting to not get lost and finally relapsing, overwhelmed...now promising herself, with anger and clarity to never give in again...

so, as we, this group of dreamers, borrowed her dream, owned it for ourselves and explored our own journeys through her journey...feeling the terror and guilt of freezing in the face of death...began to become aware of how we, too, can get lost in the needs of others...how we get trained, programed to rescue others in such a way that we will drown in their needs, losing our soul...drowning ourselves in our own version of alcoholic sorrow...   i remembered out loud about the instinctual wisdom of the beautiful, sleek african gazelle...who survives the african prairie, survives the hunt of the fastest animal alive, the cheetah, by first, of all things...freezing...forcing the cheetah to blow her quiet stalking cover, to make the first move, not able to hide and kill... the cheetah is forced to run...exposing her stalking strategy...and the gazelle, now seeing where the danger is...explodes, darts, zig-zags...running its marathon of obstacle courses, tiring the cheetea...escaping...because, first...the gazelle knows to freeze...

freeze in your tracks!

all senses hyper-alert...the old pattern says "jump!"...

but, instinctual...wisdom...learned from scars...over seasons of seasoning...says...

freeze!

On Saturday our family went shopping. It all started with Lotta getting the sniffles and me getting a cold in addition to which Lotta still continues to wake up several times a night. We wanted to go see if we could find an affordable crib which would have the option of pushing one side down to make it easier to get the baby in and out of the crib during the night. Didn't get that.We did, however

You are most like:

Black

You are bold with a dark side. You make clear lines wherever you go, though you color outside of the lines. Many people may just see the surface of you and think you are merely plain, but you have a lot of depth to you as well.

 

Take this quiz: Which Crayola Box of 8 Color Are You?

Visit Toys For Your Blog.com for more blog quizzes

For Africa 2008 updates go HEREIt's too much of a challenge to post here and on Table and Fire so I'm sending all my posts back to Dennis at IBC and he's putting them on Table & Fire.Navigate there, bookmark... BillB

That's right, I have been so lax in my blog reading that there were around 740 unread posts on my f-list/blogroll late this afternoon. I'm *not feeling well enough to pick up my knitting (unbelievable, I know!), so I am trying to make some progress on the backlog. I have just 600 left and that includes the posts made since I started reading. Don't be too surprised if you get a comment on a 2 week old post...

*Yesterday evening, while helping a friend with her computer, I started feeling unwell, warm and dizzy and like I was going to pass out. It was less intense today and I did go to work, but not to water aerobics. I had the beginnings of an earache when I got home from wrk, but that seems to have disappeared.

It seems that among UU bloggers, there has been significant negative reaction to the President of the UUA, Rev. William Sinkford, meeting with the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Interestingly, when the topic was brought up on the Ministers’ chat list, the only responses were positive.  I’ve been mulling that over and trying to figure [...]

Sometimes, it really sucks being trained as an engineer.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Two weeks ago Tuesday afternoon, I was packing to go to a conference in Corpus Christi, Texas. Then we got the word that the conference was postponed because of in impending hurricane. By Wednesday evening, the projections said that Ike would be directly overhead of us here in San Antonio on Sunday morning, as a category 1 or 2 hurricane.


I sent an email to my congregation, warning them of the possibility of a hurricane (just in case someone wasn't listening to the news), and telling them to use their common sense on whether or not they should try to get here for worship on Sunday. I planned out a couple of alternate routes for myself for Sunday morning (the two most obvious ways to get from my house to the church campus have streets that flood).


We weren't alone--events got cancelled all over San Antonio. Kids' activities, high school football... and the Texas Longhorns rescheduled a football game in Austin. Now there's a sign that the world just might be coming to an end.


On Sunday morning, Ike was... over five hundred miles away. In Missouri, for crying out loud.

The very best minds we have, using the most sophisticated computer modeling we have, missed their guess by five hundred miles. Some things we still don't know how to predict, or else are inherently unpredictable.

And then there are other things, whose behavior we know very well how to predict. And that's why it sucks sometimes to be an engineer.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Engineers, you see, are trained to understand the way the world works, and to make it a better place. I studied with Phil Bedient, and I know that hydrology is a fascinating and complicated discipline, but if you over-over-simplify, this is true:


V=R*I*T*A


where
V=Volume of water
and
R=rate of rainfall
I is a coefficient for the percentage of the impervious surface of the land, from 0 to 100%
T=time of rainfall
A=area on which the rain falls


Just for fun, I've used this basic formula (yes, I'm a nerd) to calculate the rate of rainfall, based on the amount of time it takes to fill up a trash can with the runoff from the roof of my house.


Applying to the impending hurricane:

Houston, my friends, is a great big place. It's flat as a pancake, with a huge portion of it paved over or developed. By late Thursday evening, our best guess had changed, and a storm five hundred miles wide was heading for the city, where it was about to rain very, very hard.


And the engineer part of my brain said: It's going to flood, and at least a few people are going to die. The only question is where, and how much.



I've also studied roadway design and traffic flow, and even if there's not such an overly simple equation to show you, I know that if you made every highway single-direction flow out of town, and somehow got the residents of the city to move with military precision, with no breakdowns or accidents, you still couldn't evacuate four million people in less than two days, even if you wanted to.


Which meant that when the mayor of Houston (or the disaster response people) said that they were "taking a calculated risk" when they only ordered the evacuation of certain portions of the city, that's true, but it's only partially true. The other side of it is that they know that they can't evacuate the city that fast, and people with pretty good models for runoff and floods (like the aforementioned professor) know where it's going to flood first, so they move those people first.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Seven years ago this September, I remember having a similar moment about an impending disaster. I didn't see the first plane hit the world trade center, and I was hoping it was a particularly horrible accident. But when the second plane hit, I was sitting on my friend Brian's couch watching it on TV, and it was clear that this was deliberate.

I was stunned for a few minutes, wondering how on earth, and who... and then I started thinking about what was going on. Suddenly, the part of my brain that studied high-rise building design jumped over and overlaid itself on the part of my brain that had been an airport consultant for a few years, and I knew--I knew--that the towers were coming down.

I stared at the wall, and saw in my imagination the curves from the steel construction handbook that describe the strength of steel as a function of temperature. I saw, dancing before my eyes, the homework I had done in high-rise design and in structural stability class. And I turned to Brian and said, "Oh, God, they're gonna collapse."

It's just the mathematics of inevitability.

(by the way, it's not that I'm a particularly good or smart engineer. I'm certain that every one of my classmates came to the same conclusion, wherever they were scattered around the country, only they got there faster than I did)

I got up to call my only friend who worked in the World Trade Center, and got as far as picking up the phone, before realizing that he's pretty smart guy, and was (if he was even in the office that day) already on his way out of the building. I put the phone back down, and went and sat back down on the couch, and waited for the horrible scene I knew was coming.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When a city floods, whose fault is it?

You can't blame the hurricane. It didn't decide to turn North, it just happened.

You can't really blame the city engineers, either. They designed a bayou system for Houston that will handle some tremendous storms. If I remember right, Braes Bayou is designed for the five-hundred year storm. (That means a storm of such intensity that it occurs, on average, once every five hundred years) But it was designed for a five-hundred-year storm in the city in which it was built... and Houston kept growing. Several years later, the runoff from all that extra pavement still flows downhill (such as that is in Houston), and it gets to the creeks and ditches and bayous as intended, but there's more of it than there used to be.

So who's to blame now? Should we tell Mrs. Martinez on the west side of the city that she is not allowed, after all, to realize her dream of owning a house in America? Should we forbid St. Martin's from constructing their enormous new worship space? Make the members of Second Baptist Church park on the grass rather than paving over a parking lot the size of Massachusetts?

Even if maybe we should say some of those kinds of things, we probably won't..because this is basically a free country, and people are going to do what they're going to do. There are laws in place in many inhabited areas that require new construction to be offset by the creation of retention ponds, which makes me feel a little better. But there are plenty of good people who find ways around those laws, or who ignore them because constructing the water retention areas are sometimes expensive.

It's old news by now, but I guess we have to keep saying it. We must recognize that our lives are interconnected. What I do matters.

We breathe the same air, we share the same water supply. When I cut down a tree, we all have a tiny bit less oxygen to breathe. And when I pave over the land, there are people (literally) downstream who are affected.

My apologies for messing up your f-list/blogroll yesterday. I had changed the photo size of L's grandbaby, but somehow it didn't make it in the final posting. I think I fixed it now.

Again, My apologies.

Gosh, looks like it's been 2½ weeks or so since I have posted. Bad blogger! A lot has been happening, though. Since I was here last, we've had visitors. One of hubby's daughters contacted me saying that she and her sister want to come and surprise hubby for his birthday. I tried to do some housecleaning without arising too much suspicion, as I haven't done much at all since my knees really started bothering me. In any case, they arrived on Thursday, September 25th and spent the weekend with us. That evening, hubby went off to a meeting about 30 minutes before their train arrived. I was getting impatient for him to get home, so I called him in the middle of the meeting and told him that I was starving and he needed to hurry home and pick up pizza on the way. He was so surprised when he walked though the door. Had to go into the other room and compose himself for a few minutes. He had, apparently, been wondering what was up, though, as he had noticed me doing more cleaning than usual and he knew that my knees were not very good right then. Hehehe!

Oh, I almost forgot, they brought along a stow-away.


L's granddaughter, baby V. She's almost 10 months old now. It was a good visit!

Health-wise, knees are good, today, anyway. Water aerobics is three times a week and I am really enjoying it. Today, another lady and I did 30 minutes in the gym before the 45 minutes in the water. I don't enjoy the gym, but figure that I can do that once or twice a week before the water aerobics, since I'm going to be there anyway. It did wipe me out, though. Looking forward to when it starts making me more alert instead of being drained, like I am feeling now. Plus, I am down 5 kilograms (11 pounds).

I was surprised when I received a call from idahoswede yesterday. Apparently, I haven't been reading any of your blog posts, either. She was in Sweden for the weekend and wanted just to catch up a little since we'd not been able to see each other when I was in London staying at her place. She has now joined tysolna, olivia23 and I on the time suck wonderful website for knitting and crocheting enthusiasts, Ravelry, although, I still haven't convinced her to take up the wonderful pastime of knitting socks. It was good to hear from you, dear!

On the knitting front, finished a pair of SFS (Socks For Soldiers) yesterday out of Knit Picks Risata in the Grass colorway. The legs were knit on a machine by Michele in WI, so I started at the heel and knit the feet. Considering the legs are 13" long and the feet are 12", I was glad to have the legs finished before I even started! This pair is for the husband of a friend, who has been in the desert with his Nat'l Guard unit and is now home. He didn't get any socks while he was there, so I'm making sure that he gets some now. The next pair will be black for my nephew who joined the Marine Corps last year.

I am also still alive in Hat Attack! 2 and finished my second hat tonight (which I ended up ripping out and reknitting from scratch, as it was too small when I received it). It will be mailed off to the UK tomorrow.

Please note that no teddy bears were harmed in the photographing of these death hats.

Hat #1, mailed to The Netherlands, where it is being fought over by the daughter's of it's intended target.


Hat #2, soon on it's way to the UK. Be afraid, be very afraid!

CNN linked to a Time article called FINDING GOD ON YOUTUBE, so I figured maybe I should put CREDO up there.

So now it's up there.

If you're on facebook and want to watch the new cut of I LOVE YOU, I'M SORRY, AND I'LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN, friend me.

I don't friend people I don't know, and this is just for friends to see. If you tell your friends and they friend me, I'll say I can't friend you because I don't friend non-friends, friend.

Yes, I know it's been two months and you were expecting more. I promise I've been scintillating in my absence.

blogging the Veep debate. 1. “Nice to meet you.”  Wow. She really hasn’t been to Washington. “Can I call you Joe?” No, you can call me Senator Biden and I’ll call you Governor Palin. 2. He has a nice smile, and manages not to look condescending. (so far.) 3. She’s wearing all black. Very frumpish and an interesting [...]

I heard someone state recently: “If food means anything to you other than nourishment; you are already in trouble.” Food has been many things to me throughout my life but I can honestly say I’ve never thought of it as nourishment. Food is ...

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Can't believe it but Lotta is today 6 months old! The poor baby celebrated her half a year birthday by getting her very first cold last night. She's got a very runny nose and she spent a lot of the day sleeping. It didn't stop her from being in a very sociable and good mood, though :).Now she is in her crib but she keeps waking up to check that I come in to make soothing noises if she

During the month of Ramadan, Muslims observe a strict fast and participate in pious activities such as charitable giving and peace-making. It is a time of intense spiritual renewal for those who observe it. At the end of Ramadan, Muslims throughout the world observe a joyous three-day celebration called Eid al-Fitr (the Festival of Fast-Breaking). [...]

In the seventh month, on the first of the month, there shall be a sabbath for you, a remembrance with shofar blasts, a holy convocation. -Leviticus 16:24 My wish to you and yours - “L’shanah tovah tikateiv v’taichateim” “May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.” Today is also the day to cast away our sins and [...]

I took the photos on my way to and on my way back from the parent baby group of our congregation. It's been absolutely fabulous lately :).