More Beautiful Sunday news.

Hopefully I'll come up with more to say than photo-chronologizing [that's not a word, sorry - your teacher will call it 'non-standard']



What the heck is wrong with my hydrangeas?



Bad soil?

Anyway, it was cold - low 50s - but very pretty. We played outside for about 3 hours. Rosie has a rock collection in her "tree-house," so we examined that quite a bit. I'm only good enough to classify rocks as igneous, metamorphic and/or sedimentary. And I can recognize quartz and calcium.

A bourgeois Sunday afternoon.

Sunday morning the youth group put on a musical in place of the service. We've got a girl in our church that needs to be on American Idol. She can belt out a jazz tune as well as I've ever heard - absolutely relaxed, smiling.

You'll see her name in public soon, but I don't feel the right to publish it.

The rest of the kids are all very good, and several may go into music and/or drama for a living. They had to memorize a lot of the gospel to do that play. The central character has a beautiful voice as well, and I was sad that we didn't hear more of it.

Well, I'd like to go into more detail, for my own benefit if nothing else, but it's Rosie's turn to play on the computer.

Since there are no pictures here, I'll do a pic-post of my beautiful Sunday.

Well, first we raced around like maniacs, getting ready for church. Laurie had to teach Sunday school, so I had the baby to myself and she's getting both rammier and more obedient. I should call her a toddler now, since she's been toddling for a while.

I call this "That's my baby...and her mess." Just try to kick back and relax after church on Sunday, and this is what you get.



Kneeling to beg my forgiveness.

I tend to just revel in watching my babies grow, and don't think of sharing that news. Rosie's a good reader and speller, too. She was rereading All Because of Winn-Dixie today.

Finally we decided she needed to get out of the house:



See the bubble? Aliina did:



The day closed with this vision:



This picture isn't mine, but I know who it belongs to, and I know the kid. But it deserves iconic status. I didn't experience this emotion today. It's called Bunny Frustrated:



Thanks to ImageShack for [URL=http://www.imageshack.us]Free Image Hosting[/URL]

Well, here we go!

A simple quiz for everyone. I am

46 years 9 months younger than Walter Cronkite, age 88
42 years 1 month younger than Nancy Reagan, age 83
39 years 2 months younger than George Herbert Bush, age 80
31 years 11 months younger than Barbara Walters, age 73
29 years 9 months younger than Larry King, age 71
23 years 6 months younger than Ted Koppel, age 65
20 years 1 month younger than Geraldo Rivera, age 61
17 years 1 month younger than George W. Bush, age 58
12 years 1 month younger than Jesse Ventura, age 53
7 years 10 months younger than Bill Gates, age 49
3 years 0 months younger than Cal Ripken Jr., age 44
2 years 11 months older than Mike Tyson, age 38
6 years 11 months older than Jennifer Lopez, age 34
12 years 5 months older than Tiger Woods, age 29
18 years 10 months older than Prince William, age 22



and that you were:
38 years old at the time of the 9-11 attack on America
36 years old on the first day of Y2K
34 years old when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash
31 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing
30 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder
29 years old at the time of the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center
27 years old when Operation Desert Storm began
26 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall
22 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded
20 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh
19 years old during Sally Ride's travel in space
17 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.
16 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began
12 years old on the U.S.'s bicentennial Fourth of July
10 years old when President Nixon left office
8 years old when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot
5 years old at the time the first man stepped on the moon
4 years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated
a 1 year old during the Watts riot
not yet 1 year old at the time President Kennedy was assassinated

I'm most disturbed to find that I'm

9 years 4 months older than Alyssa Milano, age 32
20 years 0 months older than Mila Kunis, age 21

I've been hot for both of them since I first saw them.

I might be a philistine, but I wouldn't go this far

I mean, liking the best stuff from the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries is hardly anti-bourgeois, and can in no wise be taken as avant garde.

Watch your asses, now!

An incident from Two Years Before the Mast that I had forgotten:

The night after this event, when I went to the galley to get a light, I found the cook inclined to be talkative, so I sat down on the spars, and gave him an opportunity to hold a yarn. I was the more inclined to do so, as I found that he was full of the superstitions once more common among seamen, and which the recent death had waked up in his mind. He talked about George’s having spoken of his friends, and said he believed few men died without having a warning of it, which he supported by a great many stories of dreams, and the unusual behavior of men before death. From this he went on to other superstitions, the Flying Dutchman, etc., and talked rather mysteriously, having something evidently on his mind. At length he put his head out of the galley and looked carefully about to see if any one was within hearing, and being satisfied on that point, asked me in a low tone- 8
"I say! you know what countryman 'e carpenter be?" 9
"Yes," said I, "he's a German." 10
"What kind of a German?" said the cook. 11
"He belongs to Bremen," said I. 12
"Are you sure o' dat?" said he. 13
I satisfied him on that point by saying that he could speak no language but the German and English. 14
"I'm plaguy glad o' dat," said the cook. "I was mighty 'fraid he was a Fin. I tell you what, I been plaguy civil to that man all the voyage. 15
I asked him the reason of this, and found that he was fully possessed with the notion that Fins are wizards, and especially have power over winds and storms. I tried to reason with him about it, but he had the best of all arguments, that from experience, at hand, and was not to be moved. He had been in a vessel to the Sandwich Islands, in which the sail-maker was a Fin, and could do anything he was of a mind to. This sail-maker kept a junk bottle in his berth, which was always just half full of rum, though he got drunk upon it nearly every day. He had seen him sit for hours together, talking to this bottle, which he stood up before him on the table. The same man cut his throat in his berth, and everybody said he was possessed. 16
He had heard of ships, too, beating up the gulf of Finland against a head wind and having a ship heave in sight astern, overhaul and pass them, with as fair a wind as could blow, and all studding-sails out, and find she was from Finland. 17
"Oh, no!" said he; "I’ve seen too much of them men to want to see 'board a ship. If they can't have their own way, they'll play the d--l with you." 18
As I still doubted, he said he would leave it to John, who was the oldest seaman aboard, and would know, if anybody did. John, to be sure, was the oldest, and at the same time the most ignorant, man in the ship; but I consented to have him called. The cook stated the matter to him, and John, as I anticipated, sided with the cook, and said that he himself had been in a ship where they had a head wind for a fortnight, and the captain found out at last that one of the men, whom he had had some hard words with a short time before, was a Fin, and immediately told him if he didn’t stop the head wind he would shut him down in the fore peak. The Fin would not give in, and the captain shut him down in the fore peak, and would not give him anything to eat. The Fin held out for a day and a half, when he could not stand it any longer, and did something or other which brought the wind round again, and they let him up. 19
"There," said the cook, "what you think o' dat?" 20
I told him I had no doubt it was true, and that it would have been odd if the wind had not changed in fifteen days, Fin or no Fin. 21
"Oh," says he, "go 'way! You think, 'cause you been to college, you know better than anybody. You know better than them as has seen it with their own eyes. You wait till you've been to sea as long as I have, and you'll know."

Melville's Billy Budd

Wow! That's site's an English course all by itself!

I aim to be like Billy Budd: hard working (and competent), honest, kind. And pretty much ignore the slights of those who hate me.

I don't think I'd take a beating with equanimity, though.

Oh, whoops! I'm confusing that story with Two Years Before the Mast, or part of it, which seems to have influenced Melville.

Check out the Melville website, especially this page.