Sunday, June 29, 2008

Reminder #39

I've sort of been hooked on Sex and the City for a while, though I'm kind of ashamed of the fact (the movie was pretty decent, by the way).

Anyway, the other day I was watching it, and in the episode I saw, Carrie had moved in with her fiance and was having a difficult time having somebody live with her. She has a conversation with her friends in which she laments not being able to do the idiosyncratic things that single people only do when nobody else is around. They then have a conversation about the quirky things they do in their homes that they'd rather no one else ever know about.

Yeah, that started me thinking about my own quirks. One has worried me lately...

You should probably not read any further...

Anyway, I've gotten into this habit of going to bed with clothes on, but waking up with them all off. And I definitely never remember taking them off. I definitely don't go to bed planning to do this.

Yeah, this worries me a little bit. You know, what happens next time I go camping with my family? Or when I crash on a friend's couch? Etc.

Reminder #39
Buy some suspenders.

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Some Observations

It rather sucks to have your computer crash. Such happened to me last Friday. What's worse, the hard-drive is gone-gone. Fried. They could get nothing off of it. So it goes.

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My mother is funny. The other day, she was about to email a recipe to me, and for whatever reason, it wouldn't go through to my normal email account, so I told her to send it to a different account: "pierce1301@yahoo.com".

Mom's response: "Ok, p-i-e-r-c-e-1-3..."

My response: "Mother, you should know how to spell "Pierce" by now.

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I'm not bothered by Obama's flip-flop on the public funding issue. Such things are often pointed to, and rightly so, as demonstrating a lack of integrity. It's important, for integrity's sake, to also allow for honest changes of mind.

I think this instance is one of those. The original reason Obama and the other candidates agreed to take public financing was so that they would not be so beholden to the lobbyists who have traditionally funded campaigns. Instead, public funding would make them beholden to the taxpayers, the people whose votes they're seeking.

The breakthrough, it seems to me, for the Obama campaign is that under the new campaign finance system he's found a way to raise money without selling himself to special interest groups. He's beholden to exactly the same people he would have been under public financing. So, he's free to accept money from supporters without betraying the original principles he was seeking to follow. I think, considering the way he's managed to raise money, that this is a rather excusable change of mind.

I, for one, am finding myself to be fairly conservative on the issue of campaign financing. I've rather enjoyed getting to donate to the campaign and have some small imput in the election.

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Massages are wonderful. I finally put out the money and got one. It's sort of amazing how much minor pain is gone that I hadn't really noticed too much had been there until it was gone. Looking back, I realize that I'd even stopped exercising because of those latent aches.

They're gone for now though. I think it's worth setting a little money aside to have a good massage a couple of times a year.

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Oh yeah, my mother is funny. I'd mentioned recently that I'd pretty much run out of t-shirts. I've only bought shirts in the last couple of years for my jobs, and now I have no casual clothes that are in decent shape.

So, Mom decided to look for me some tshirts when she and Kalyn went shopping one day. After searching in Old Navy a while, Mom pointed a shirt she naively thought I'd like to Kalyn.

It was evidently a simple shirt, just a couple of words: "World's Biggest Hot Dog."

Kalyn started laughing and explained to Mom the sexual connotations of the slogan.

Mom's response: "Well, maybe that would help him get a girlfriend."

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I have a way of getting stuck with strange responsibilities. Somehow, I managed to have to put together the story hour today for the library. I had a day, pretty much, to come up with something and put it together.

Luckily, I got some pretty good help from some friends and survived it.

I barely survived it though. It's sort of amazing how little I know about craft stuff. I had to by Tempora Paint, but I thought it was "temporal paint." I bought the wrong glue because I didn't realize that Elmer's glue wouldn't keep a pipecleaner attached to construction paper.

We were going to cover popcorn in the powdery tempora paint and then glue the colored popcorn to the paper to make flowers (mainly bluebonnets). I, for some reason, bought yellow as the second color. I got home and realized that buying yellow was pointless. The popcorn was already exactly that color of yellow.

I actually messed up the craft myself the first time, and my final try ended up being worse than most of the three-year-old's. I'll post a picture on here once I find the cord from my camera to the computer.

I did survive though.

Anyway, that's what I've noticed the last couple of days.

Monday, June 16, 2008

The Abilene Book Sale is wonderful. I got a lot of books this weekend for cheap.

Here they are, in the order I'm excited about owning them:

1. Wesley for Armchair Theologians - William Abraham
2. Barth for Armchair Theologians - John R. Franke
3. Maxims - La Rochefoucauld
4. The Thanatos Syndrome - Walker Percy
5. Hannah Coulter - Wendell Berry
6. The Way of the Pilgrim
7. the Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita
8. Memento Mori - Muriel Spark
9. A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
10. Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko
11. Fool's Crow - James Welch
12. Cathedral - Raymond Carver
13. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
14. Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
15. Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
16. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
17. The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker
18. The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield
19. Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
20. Thomas the Rhymer - Ellen Kushner

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Reminder #38

Wash my tomatoes before eating them.

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A Mystery – Wendy Cope

People say, ‘What are you doing these days? What are
you working on?’
I think for a moment or two.

The question interests me. What am I doing these
days?
How odd that I haven’t a clue.

Right now, of course, I’m working on this poem,
With just a few more lines to go.

But tomorrow someone will ask me, ‘What are you up
to these days? What are you working on?’
And I still won’t know.