Today has been a full day and tonight is a short night because I have to be at work at 6:30 in the morning. I have a great deal I want to talk about from church today, but I have to set it aside because my heart is heavy as I watch what Israel is doing in Gaza. I realize I’m hitting a hot button and that the issue is incredibly complex and yet what doesn’t seem complex to me at all is Israel is using extreme and excessive force to destroy people who don’t have much power at all. Yes, I understand Israel considers Hamas to be a terrorist group. I also understand our American government has given them the vocabulary to justify what they are doing with our words and actions in Iraq. I know the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinian feels like an intractable problem. I know what is already an emotionally charged conflict is exacerbated by that faction of Christian theology that sees Israel as somehow special and untouchable. And what I keep coming back to is if you are the one with most of the power, then you hold a greater share of responsibility, and even accountability, when it comes to how you use and abuse that power.

What I really want to do, rather than editorialize, is ask you to look at the following stories and see what is happening. Here are links to

• the BBC (and an analysis)
• National Public Radio
• Reuters
• Alternet
• Al-Jazeera
• and a blog written by a Palestinian woman who lives in Durham and is communicating with her family in Gaza.

As I read through the articles, I found myself pulled back to an old Steve Earle song I learned at the beginning of our invasion of Iraq:
Jerusalem

I woke up this mornin' and none of the news was good
And death machines were rumblin' 'cross the ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way
And there was nothin' anyone could do or say

And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find

That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

Well maybe I'm only dreamin' and maybe I'm just a fool
But I don't remember learnin' how to hate in Sunday school
But somewhere along the way I strayed and I never looked back again
But I still find some comfort now and then

Then the storm comes rumblin' in
And I can't lay me down
And the drums are drummin' again
And I can't stand the sound

But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb
Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem

And there'll be no barricades then
There'll be no wire or walls
And we can wash all this blood from our hands
And all this hatred from our souls

And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem



I want to believe that, too.

Peace,
Milton

YouTube - Die Hard - Music Video - NEW 4th Verse!.

I’ll post something about the vacation tomorrow night, but this catchy tune should keep you entertained until then.

Lyrics may be NSFW if your co-workers have issues with the f bomb.

I just received an amazing package in the mail. Delivered to the door in fact. It had been kindly opened for us by Australian Quarantine – I think they thought we were hiding our cocaine in it. The smell of the chili would have confused the sniffer dogs no end.

Let me back track.

A few years ago I started reading www.reallivepreacher.com. I bought his book and read that as well. noticed that he was using Drupal to run his website. Some time later I ended up talking to Gordon and he expressed his frustration with where the site was at. I glibly offered to look at it for him – for free!. A couple of years later (actually I have no idea how much later) Gordon and I are really good mates. I have been working on his site for free all this time – something I love doing for him. In response he has been touting me around  both on his site and to people he knows. Between us we put together the ccblogs.org site. I say between us because he pulled the community together, I only built the site and provide backend support. We did another site www.materialmedia.net for a friend of theirs, Elizabeth. Jeanene now manages this site. Then we rebuilt Jeanene’s website www.gracefullthings.com. I did this for a nominal fee largely because of the ubercart shopping cart implementation we put in. I had never done this before and I treated this job as an R&D job. Well one thing led to another, and I did a bunch of stuff for Gordon and Jeanene that they think took me a lot of time :)

Jeanene hinted that she wanted to send Judith a necklace as a thank you. I replied and asked her to include a game that I couldn’t buy here and offered to pay for it. Jeanene wouldnt hear of it and said she would buy it for me as thanks.

A few weeks went by but the package just didn’t come. I wondered why. Then a sneaky  little email from Gordon let me in on the secret. Jeanene was stocking the package with Texas Goodies for us. and not just going and buying the first thing she saw.

Here is a list of all the amazing things that arrived today:

• 2 necklaces - beautiful hand crafted necklaces from www.gracefullthings.com
• 2 bags of Mexican chewing gum
• A large bag of Arbol Chili Pods
• A small bag of  Whole Piquin Chili
• 2 bags of seasoning
• A jar of Tomato Garlic Salsa
• 2 goats milk candy wafers
• Pecan candy
• Mexican drinking chocolate
• Fritos original corn chips
• A recipe for cooking Texan Chili
• Sid Meiers Civilization IV – Colonisation

Wow!

Thanks very much Gordon and Jeanene.

So I learned in Sunday School today that I am a Christian Hedonist.

Feels kinda liberating

Here is some more on why God wants you to be a hedonist too: 

When God created us to glorify Him, this was not the needy desire of a celestial egomaniac hungry for compliments.  Rather, when God created us to glorify Him, He was really creating us to enjoy Him.  And where else can you find greater satisfaction and happiness than in the One who created happiness.

God’s purpose in creating us for His glory not only keeps Him at the center of the universe where He belongs, but it commands us to be maximally happy!  If you seek your pleasure in someone or something other than God, you not only belittle God’s worth, but you also starve your soul of the only One who can satisfy your deepest hunger and thirst.  

I like Sunday mornings. I mean, I’ve always liked them. I was raised to see Sunday as the pinnacle of the week, as the time toward which everything else reaches. If I’m not at a church on a Sunday morning I feel terribly out of place, like a part of my soul decided to ignore my [...]

tonight when things slowed down a little, i set up an m-audio usb preamp/audio interface with the macbook pro and recorded me playing my new guitar. it's not perfect, but if you want a little paul soupiset recording for your... Paul Soupiset

I managed to make it through most all of the holiday season with only one or two trips to the mall. Online shopping allowed me the luxury of avoiding the experience of standing in front of the large lighted mall map, trying to figure out how to find a particular purveyor, which also means looking for the little star that says, “You are here.” For all its shortcomings, the mall is one of the few places that gives you that kind of geographical certainty: here’s the context and here’s where you are in it.

Though I’m still happy to not be at the mall, I thought about the map as I began reading Transformational Architecture by Ron Martoia, one of the books kindly sent to me by the folks at The Ooze, and one that falls into the expanding body of literature focused on how our world is changing and how those of us who are followers of Christ must also change if we want our faith to be a transformational part of the conversation. I’m only about fifty pages in, which means Martoia is still setting up his argument, but he’s already got me thinking, particularly, about how we contextualize ourselves when we look at what is going on around us when there is no map to say, “You are here.” I should say the thoughts that follow are less a critique of the book – since I’m not far along at all – and more of the rabbits my mind went chasing as I read, which also means I’m not sure about the coherency of what follows.

I am challenged and intrigued by the conversations swirling around the shift in our world from modernism to postmodernism, and the corresponding claims that we are living in a profoundly transitional and transformational time and (not but – and) I wonder how well we can tell where we are on the map of history. Nobody who lived during what we now call the Middle Ages saw themselves there. How could they have been in the middle of anything when they when nothing had yet come after them? As profoundly as Galileo and Copernicus changed how we think a bout our place in the universe, when we start talking about what it means to be living in these days in more existential terms it becomes difficult to do so in a way that doesn’t make us the center of the universe once more: we are alive at the most critical time in history, or we’re going to usher in the next Reformation, or we are living in the next Enlightenment. Some years ago, as globalization and the Internet were exploding alongside of civil wars around the globe, Umberto Eco said the signs pointed to our being in another Middle Ages rather than a Renaissance and he pointed to the increased tribalism that has continued across our world.

Who knows where we are.

One of the statistics I heard about the time Eco was saying his piece that has stuck with me, though I’m sure it’s now outdated, is the amount of information in the world doubles every five years. We live in an age of informational overpopulation. Not only can we not know everything there is to know, we can’t even categorize or process it fast enough to keep up. When I go to check email, the headlines on AOL read like some sort of bizarre found poem, and it changes every few minutes. As I’m writing, here are the headlines:

• Israel Flattens Hamas Homes
• Disabled Man Left Overnight on Bus in Freezing Weather
• Superintendent Chosen to Fill Colorado Senate Seat
• Obama Family Moving to Washington Hotel
• Longtime Senator, Creator of Pell College Grants Dies
• Caroline Kennedy Critic Changes His Mind

Those stories are more connected than most. Beyond the news, Facebook means I have more information just about people I know than I can keep up with. Most anywhere I turn, I being given something else to add to the pile of stuff to know and, often, to set aside. If I’m taking a stab at where we are on the map, or at least how the world has changed while I’ve been walking around on it, the information overflow is at the heart of it: we are at the corner of We Have Too Much Information and What Am I Supposed To Do With It.

No, let me change that. Perhaps it’s more like the intersection of All There Is To Know and Based on What I Know, Here’s What I’m Going To Do. At least those coordinates give us somewhere to go.

Here’s what I know: the more global the discussion becomes, the smaller I tend to think. When we start talking about changing the world, I find myself thinking about the people in my kitchen, my church, my neighborhood, my family. Luther drove the nail into the door at Wittenberg, it seems to me, not so much because he was intent on altering the course of global Christianity as it was because he “could do no other.” People like Gandhi, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela, and Mother Teresa were meeting the needs in front of their faces first; the universal movements that followed grew out of the particulars.

And they all took years to come about.

Last Saturday, Ginger and I went to see The Tale of Despereaux with our friend Jay. The movie has stayed with me because it is such a wonderful story of forgiveness; perhaps that’s why it comes to mind again now. As I try to contemplate my place in the universe and what I can do to live transformationally, one sentence keeps coming to mind: I want to be more forgiving.

It was St. Francis, who lived smack-dab in the middle of the Middle Ages who prayed
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.As a middle-aged man working out his faith in the middle of a world larger than I can comprehend those are words that give me some sense of where I am and what it means to be here.

Peace,
Milton

Paul Soupiset

From the great movie "Grace of My Heart" starring the incomparable Illeana Douglas. Supposedly this film was based on the story of Carole King. Bette Midler also did an amazing cover of this song, perhaps even more poignant. This is the aural version but there are no moving graphics:



Breath-taking.

Everyone seems to be reflective at this time of the year, and writing out their New Year goals. Got me thinking it did...

In 2009 I will:

• Find relief from the ongoing health drain of Atrial Fibrillation. Hopefully I will undergo an ablation early this year, and hopefully it will work properly
  
• Get back to losing weight again - and be able to undergo some regular, ongoing exercise
  
• Continue to enjoy being with my family - in particular my two wonderful grandsons
  
• See the establishment of my dream "Gentle Footprint" - Chick's Studio

Simple goals... but lots to do to acheive them

Janet

Hello to our GGB readers, hope you had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Years!
Our first Geek Girl Blogger for 2009 is Nicole Jensen from Australia.
Hope you enjoy reading her survey/profile! Toodles.

Name: Nicole Jensen, Nikki J
Screen Name’s: a_lil_spaz (or varieties of), willow22, nikkij, even drummachik for a bit. Hey, I had a great imagination at 14!
Personal Blog’s & Social Network’s: www.claimid.com/nikkij is my lifesaver. I’d never keep track of anything online otherwise.
(claimid has links to all Nikki’s blogs & social networks etc).
Current Employment: Seeking full-time work in the events industry, considering freelance events management. Casual blogger and editor for www.TechWiredAu.com.
Location/country: Brisbane, Australia.

What is your reason/motivation for blogging?

Fun, discussion, record-keeping (in the old days of pure journal writing). Learning too is a good motivation. I’m no code guru at all, so I like to mess around with web design on occasion, teach myself a few more HTML and CSS tid-bits.

What is it that you find yourself blogging about, mostly the same stuff or does it vary?

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I’m by instinct a journal-writer, so my main problem at the moment is coming up with content other than that. I like to discuss topics like event management, marketing, sociology and psychology, mental health, technology, and current affairs. Some celebrity stuff too if it’s absurd. I often find myself peeking at PerezHilton.com on a rainy day!

What style of blogging do you do, short and regular, or not so regular but long, other? And is your blogging just text or do you also use audio or video?

I prefer short and regular, but it really depends on the topic and when I last posted. I’ve been told my blogs are pretty interesting and I think this is because I blog straight from my thoughts, no matter how disconnected they are from the previous paragraph. I like to use a lot of imagery in my writing too.

As for audio and video; love it! Unfortunately due to costs of buying equipment and what-not, I’ve not done video blogging for a while, and did so under an alias earlier this year. It was fun and gave me a break from typing. I guess talking is more of a natural communication form and I’m able to just spit out what I’m trying to say more freely in audio or video. I’ve never podcasted but would love to get into that in the future.

How Nicole became a Geek Girl Blogger:

I was a big reader and writer as a kid. I’ve been keeping diaries from a young age and after discovering the Internet around 14-15 I decided it was a good time to change from pen and paper.

If anything, it was something to get my thoughts out during a difficult time in high school. I moved from a country town public high school to a larger city private girls’ boarding school and I’ll say that neither was easier than the other. I had a private online journal which I updated under an alias and this was helpful later on in analysing my thoughts during these years. The diary went from 2002 to 2007 when I gave it up in my second year of uni and wanted to focus more on connecting with people via LiveJournal.

Social networks rock. I’m seriously addicted. Twitter is my natural habitat and I’ve made some seriously cool friends this year through BTUB, the Brisbane Twitter Underground Brigade. Facebook is of course keeping in contact with people I’ve known over the years, but Twitter is full of interesting people I cannot wait to meet [again!].

It really makes me sad that so many people do not utilize social networks who could benefit so much from social media, though in the same I get angry about so-called “social media experts” and businesses mistreating the medium. It’s a telephone, not a megaphone!

Nikki J

 

Thanks for reading our latest GGB survey… If you are a Geek Girl Blogger, or know that you probably are one even if you don’t consider yourself to be one, and you’d like to be featured in our series, then please contact us and we’ll get back to you. We’re always on the lookout for some new GGB’s so don’t hesitate if you’re interested. We’d love to feature you! aManda

I got home and took off my shoes and jacket, and put on my slippers and the sweater I wear in the house in the winter. And then it hit me: I’ve turned into Mr. Rogers.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but middle age happeneth to us all.

A visit to my mother is usually a vivid reminder of why forgiveness is so necessary.  In her mid-80s, she has treasured her hurts and wrongs and grudges until they are the stuff of her life and conversation.   The bitterness this has infused in her life spills out daily in predictable and unpredictable ways.

So I come home determined to do better, and I always hit the same wall:  what does better look like?  How does one go about forgiving, anyway?  There are wrongs I’ve forgotten, wrongs I’ve made a policy decision not to pursue further, and then — much the biggest category — wrongs I’ve collected and treasured every bit as much as my mother does hers.  Given time, I’m sure the poison these spots contain could contaminate my life in the same way.

But an intellectual decision that forgiveness, broadly defined, is necessary is not forgiving.  Contemplating individual hurts and acknowledging that yes, this ought to be forgiven is not forgiving.  Praying in a general way to learn to forgive is not forgiving.   Even saying airily that something is forgiven is not forgiving.

It doesn’t help that I’m coming at this issue from a position of weakness and discouragement.  This job, like so many others, seems impossibly huge and complex.   My recent personal growth efforts seem to be taking the form of a repetitive tour through the Gallery of Known but Seemingly Unsolvable Problems:  Yep, that’s a big ‘un.  That’s a tough one.  There’s an ugly one for ya!  Oh yeah, that one.  Haven’t made much progress there.  Yup, still stinky.  Damn, that one’s gotten worse since the last time I saw it.  Yuck.  Shit,  here comes that one again!

I keep hoping that I’ll find the key log, the one that’s holding all the others back, the removal of which would restore the proper flow. If such a thing even exists, I wonder how I would know it if I saw it.

That’s right: I’m going to start the new year talking about toilet paper.

When we moved into our house, we put in this double roll holder (with magazine rack) because it meant there was less chance of running out. It also holds the big double rolls of Quilted Northern (our preferred brand), which we load so the paper comes over the top, not from underneath. The folks at Northern must spend a lot of time thinking about toilet paper (it is their job, after all) because they keep softening and expanding the rolls and, of course, there’s the quilting. For all of their efforts, however, I’ve noticed that one or two of the rolls that come in the giant twenty-four pack we buy from Target is just plain. No quilted design.

Just a roll of plain white toilet paper.

It happens enough that I wonder why it happens. I know it’s all done by machine, which I suppose there’s some sort of glitch in the process that allows a roll to escape decoration every so often, even though every other step is accomplished. And the folks at Northern have chosen not to fix it, or at least to let us all live with it.

At the restaurant we get fresh sourdough bread everyday from a local bakery that is the bread supplier to most of the restaurants in town. They make awesome bread of most any kind and, if you go by the bakery on the weekends, they use the foccacia dough to make beignets. About three months ago, we began to notice that eight slices into each loaf is a slice that is double-thick, meaning one of the slicing blades is missing and has been for some time now. Like the folks at Northern, they have chosen not to fix it, or at least to let us all live with it.

As I sit at the table on this first afternoon of a new year, I can look around the room and spot five or six familiarly unfinished things I have learned to live with rather than repair, much like my suppliers of bread and toilet paper. Some are bigger deals than others – unquilted paper works better than double-thick sandwich bread – yet they all serve as reminders that life is not what it could be were we choosing to live more intentionally.

It’s been many years since I made a resolution to break in a new calendar, mostly because they, too, were left unfinished. I hesitate to resolve to fix the lampshade (three minutes with a hot glue gun), or hang the last of the pictures (probably twenty minutes with hammer and hangers), or finally organize the kitchen (a good afternoon, anyway) because I don’t feel like inflicting myself with the pressure of promises and yet I find myself bumping into the question I would like to ask the bakers and quilters: would it take that much to get things right?

A second companion question quickly follows: what do we get out of not fixing the little things, out of getting used to things being broken?

Though a small part would fix it, I choose not to repair the air conditioner on my again Jeep Cherokee, as much as I love the car, because they have to take the whole dashboard off to replace the small plastic piece and the labor costs would be more than the car is actually worth. Most of the little disrepairs in my life are not so costly. So what’s the pay off? Why do I chose to live among the ruins rather than repair?

The first day of this year isn’t even over and I’m already dealing with big questions.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- I inadvertently changed the template for the blog and I'm still trying to understand what I did and how to undo (or redo) it. You'll notice I figured it out when the changes happen.

"When your view of Scripture causes you to become a miserable, argumentative, ungraceful, uncharitable, unloving, and selfish person, you have missed the purpose of Scripture." (>>)

Christmas holiday for us has been of the quiet kind in our household - apart from periodical coughing and sneezing. Husband spent Christmas Eve and Day semiconcious with a cold he'd been fighting off for a week. I spent a part of Christmas Eve watching Mamma Mia dvd which I got from Husband and thoroughly enjoying myself while both the little and bigger Pusa slept. We got the

Let’s drink a cup of kindness and send our wishes and intentions into the new year: Peace everywhere on earth and in every heart. Care for our planet. Justice flowing down like waters. Unfolding wisdom. Forgiveness. Humility. An awakening to what is really of value. Hearts softening and opening to compassion. Each of us working on the side of Love. Healing. Open expressions of appreciation, gratitude, [...]

Paul Soupiset

it has not been an easy year. certainly there were many good things about it, and much to be grateful for, but especially due to the events of the last month (in which i lost three people who were extremely...