Bishop Mark Lawrence's address to Clergy regarding the latest General Convention

I'm so relieved that someone stepped up and spoke up for Truth for the Episcopal Church. Now I'm just praying that the fire is lit under each member of every congregation... so many regular attenders have no idea anything's going on, or at least they don't care or don't think it's important.

This letter is long, but well-written and worth reading in its entirety.

Bishop Lawrence's letter on Kendall Harmon's blog

Read more...

End of July news

There's really not much; I'm in Applied Math right now, and finding how much I really enjoy it even when it's hard. I was one of those obnoxious students who found school easy, even in High School, in everything except math. Of course, as one of those people, if it's hard it means you hate it... and I've always thought I hated math. But when I was teaching elementary math it started to be fun, and I found ways to do it differently. So now that I'm back in a college math course, I'm usually able to work for a while, take a break, get frustrated... and then really relish the victory when I figure it out. It's a good thing. I never liked challenges, school being easy made me lazy and proud of it. Now I'm kind of liking the challenge.

We're refinancing the house, finally, with the government help to banks for folks upsidedown on the mortgage (lost equity in the economy thing). That should close Tuesday.

We had new friends from church come over for lunch last week and we had a fabulous time. It's so good to find kindred spirit friends. They stayed a few hours, we had good food and lots of conversation and the kids were really good.

Spent a great time visiting my cousins last night. Good times. My one cousin lives here, but we don't see them very often because they're so busy. Her sister and her kids came to visit this week, so we had dinner over there. They'll be coming sometime this week for lunch too.

Otherwise, my bean plants finally have blooms, one pepper rotted but we picked the other one (haven't eaten it yet) and there's three new blooms, the onions are still kind of tall seedlings, I don't know if those will work out. We've eaten three tomatoes and there's four more green ones growing. I'm praying desperately that we avoid the rampant tomato blight that's killing the crops; one source said that it started with seedlings sold from Home Depot, Lowes, KMart and Target, and we got ours at Home Depot before the recall. Some leaves look strange, but the tomatoes look okay so far.

I woke up with a light headache today that I thought was tension in my neck, so I took an ibuprofen. Half hour later I got migraine symptoms, but can't take my migraine meds because I took the ibuprofen and they interact. I have to wait until the ibuprofen's worn off. So I'm missing church with only vague feeling in my hand and a small bit of pain starting to creep in my head. I love my mother's family enormously, but I really wish they'd refrained from passing along this little bit of genetics.

Read more...

You know it's August when...

...the school dreams start up again. Night before last mom took me back to Wheaton to settle me into the dorm. Apparently I had left four tall bookcases of books in the lobby as a library since I didn't want to move them the end of the previous year, and they were all still there but with evidence of having been read. Of course, the dorm didn't look at all like any dorms at Wheaton. My room was number 176, on the third floor, first door on the right after you got off the elevator. Everything was very bright with sunshine and the walls or carpet or something was pale blue. My roommate had already arrived, settled in, and was trying to go to sleep (it was suddenly night). Every dorm room came with a pet raccoon, which ran to the middle of the room and stared at me as I stood in the door talking to my nondescript roommate. After that it was all were-floormates and love magic and clones and weird computer stuff. And gaming friends from Reaper were there too.

Then last night I was a teacher on a field trip returning to Calvin, my Elementary and Middle school in Minnesota. For whatever reason I didn't know which room was mine, so I wandered down the Middle School wing and found my name above two different doors... apparently I was a part time in three different positions. I also wondered if my locker combination still worked. The classrooms looked pretty cool. Then we were preparing for parent night, and I was changing clothes in public, and a youngish male teacher ran into the room I was in and piled a bunch of stuff in the middle of the room and lit it on fire... and a bunch of us were throwing cupfuls of water on it, but it would die and spring back like trick birthday candles. My cats were there too, and I was trying to do all my prep for parent night and not let my boy cats find the other teacher's cats and start a fight.

I have to write a paper today, so we'll see if in tonight's episode I end up as the student or the teacher. It's early yet, odds are still pretty even.

Read more...