:: in.a.mirror.dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

I was checking out a web site called Web Pages That Suck and found a web site that literally made me dizzy and almost made me sick. It’s an experience. I can’t believe that human beings do this to one another. “Psychedelic” comes to mind.

Unfortunately the theme of this web site is Accept Jesus, Forever Forgiven. Fortunately this is not the only site on the internet where you can read the Bible. Try reading this site. I double dog dare you!

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I have nothing against water, but sometimes it’s nice to drink something with a little . . . flavor. I mean other than the taste of hard water.

I’ve tried Vitamin Water, Propel, and all manner of juice, but all of these options have lots of sugar and some even sneak in corn syrup, which is just about one of the grossest things you can inject into your body. Well, probably not, but it’s up there on the list.

Today I tried out O Water, made by O Beverages. It’s a simple drink that is primarily water with 85 mg of natural caffeine, 25 mg of ginseng, 25 mg of guarana, and 4 mg of yerba mate. I selected the strawberry flavor, and I think it rocks.

Shameless product endorsement over.

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I’ve been stuck in Quennsbury, NY at a Saturn dealer getting fleeced for some repairs that only Saturn can make. I arrived at 9:00 am, and found that it will take four hours as of 10:00 am.

Fortunately their exorbitant prices help fund a nice waiting area with a desk and a power outlet. The internet wasn’t working, but I still hammered out three future blog posts, three articles, and over 1,000 words of fiction. Not a bad morning. Nothing like boredom to drive production.

I grew hungry and since the pop corn machine was empty, I asked if there was a place near Home Depot that I could stop for lunch. It turned out there is a Panera right next to the home superstore.

I’ve never been so glad to see an overcrowded Panera with average food. It has been wonderful. I even pulled off a cookie sample. And the bread isn’t that bad so long as you stick to the plain stuff.

One of the tricks today has been negotiating the final details of our home deal, final as in, not happening. It’s a good thing though. We had a house under contract, found some problems with the home, and now the deal is off.

In the meantime we found another house that may prove interesting. More on that later.

For now I’m enjoying the free wifi at Panera and planning a trip to Home Depot before calling for the “courtesy shuttle” to rescue me.

Last Friday was Dr. Seuss Day. It also happened to be ice storm day, so school was canceled. My wife Julie backed five cakes last week in order to make a Dr. Seuss hat out of them, but had to freeze them for this week. Today is the “make-up” Dr. Seuss day.

Update: This cake is for the Dr. Seuss day at the elementary school she works at. It is most certainly not for our own personal observance of Dr. Seuss, important though he was. I kind of left that curcial detail out of the original post.

Last night she assembled the five cakes and cut them up to create the hat effect and then proceeded to put icing on all of them. It took about four hours. You can view Julie’s project at our flickr account.

I also had a deadline. With an exhibition opening this Saturday at a local art gallery, I wanted to have my photography on hand in the stacks. So while Julie was laboring on her cake, I was in the other room matting 18 photographs. I was done at the same exact time as her.

Here is Julie’s finished product:

I was standing in line yesterday at my favorite place in the whole wide world waiting to order my drink. A crowd of roughly six people stood before and behind, a fairly informal line for a very relaxed place.

A stressed and hurried woman walks up next to me–right next to me, invasion of personal space next to me–and barks out in a French accent, “There are two lines here? I see two registers. There are two lines.”

“Sometimes there are two, but there’s only one right now,” I said, noting that only one register was occupied by a staff member. She was still way too close to my left arm.

“No, there are two lines,” she said, shoving herself basically in front of me, apparently assuming that I would go to the the register on the right that did not have a staff member attending it.

In the midst of this power struggle some old dude in a strange hat shot in front of me from the right! I was all well and good with letting one pushy, obnoxious person go because, hey, she’s obviously stressed and in a hurry. Anyone who gets that worked up over the number of lines should either have some allowances given or be institutionalized. But this new wrinkle began to test the patience.

My mind began to race. I thought of speaking up. I thought of saying, “Look, I can’t let everybody run in front of me!” But then magic happened.

The man who ran in front of myself and the pushy woman was indecisive. He dropped the ball at the crucial moment and fumbled his order. He occupied the register on the left, the one chosen by the woman who bumped in front of me. At just this moment an employee opened up the register on the right, made eye contact with me, and took my order.

I had my drink and was on my way before the line jumping guy could say “Large caramel latte.”  

I take a few lessons from this. 1. Keep your mouth shut in these situations. Things will work out, and if they don’t work out, see point two. 2. It’s amazing what upsets people in day to day life. Petty, petty, petty.

We’ll see if my friends will stop by the cafe today for a rematch.

Technorati Tags: cafe - spiral+press - northshire+bookstore - Manchester - Vermont

I know that entrepreneurs will try just about anything, but this latest plan to combat “E-Mail Attention Deficit Disorder” just has “Dilbert Cartoon” written all over it. Scott Adams is probably licking his chops right now.

Maybe it’s a good idea. I just don’t see how any manager or executive can pitch it to the rank and file with a straight face. Maybe it would help if they gave employees new job titles to match: serf, elf, dwarf, wizard, etc. That will at least create the right mood.

Technorati Tags: e-mail - Dilbert

Ever since upgrading to WordPress over the weekend my feed has not been working. I figured that WP had it’s own location for the feed, and I found the RSS at the bottom of this blog . . . but no dice.

I searched through directories and tried all kinds of locations. No dice. As a last gasp effort, I clicked on the RSS link in the Meta section and behold: dice. It works now. I apologize for the delay. Major learning curve as always.

I also apologize for the gratuitous use of semicolons in the blog name. I think it’s nice to use punctuation as decoration. It’s kind of funky . . . func-tuation.

Technorati Tags: rss - feed

Whispering doesn’t work with rabbits. Loud noises and force are your only tools.

When you think of rabbits, you probably think of cute little cuddly guys licking each other’s ears, giddy hopping, and and frantic munching on hay and grass. Last night we witnessed first hand the killer instinct of rabbits. I mean it. If it wasn’t for our intervention we’d have at least one, if not two dead rabbits today.

Bonding is the process in which you make two rabbits friends for life. It take one to two months and it can get ugly. Biting, clawing, and chasing are just the beginning.

I thought Julie was going overboard when she put on gloves last night for Eva and Evan’s first bonding session. She heard that two fighting rabbits can become a blur or fury in the midst of their scuffle and didn’t want to take any chances. I played along.

The bunnies were genial at first. They say and let us pet them. They hopped around our little laundry room and took little notice of one another.

And then they dropped their heads. We knew it was a time of asserting dominance. Who will lick who?

Slight nipping started. A tuft of Eva’s white hair rested on the floor. It’s normal. It has to happen. A little nibble won’t kill either of them.

They began sniffing and chasing each other. The tension heightened. More nipping.

And then it happened.

Cold fury, sprawling, biting, clawing, fur tufts all over the place. We each tugged at a rabbit, but they wouldn’t let go of each other. We panicked and eventually separated the two combatants.

We put them back in their cages for the night, not too worse for wear as far as we could see.

I had to pack boxes and keep myself busy for the next 20 minutes I was so shaken up. It grew tense so quickly and the thought of our rabbits literally wanting to kill each other kind of disturbed us.

Nevertheless, it has to happen. We’ll see what happens tonight.

Technorati Tags: rabbits - bonding - bunnies

After mourning the loss of Bailey, our calm, sweet rabbit, we traveled 2 hours to Enfield New Hampshire in order to adopt a young, brown minirex from a shelter. He was returned because of allergy problems.

He’s actually a tan/gray minirex with fairly large, perky ears. This is what we wrote to Julie’s folks last night about him:

“We picked up our new bunny today. We named him Evan. He’s insane. We let him go this evening during bunny prime time hours and he ran ALL OVER THE HOUSE!!! He didn’t stop. Just a bunny blur. He has the attention span of an insect. He has rabbit A.D.D. He is definitely a teenager bunny with poor litter habits (i.e. none).

It was war with Eva who worked very hard to chomp his nose off through the cage. She got two tufts of hair from Evan’s side and hung on to them like a little victory flag. Much grunting, scratching, biting, pooping, scenting, and running back and forth. We took a video that we’ll have to post tomorrow. Evan doesn’t sit still yet.” 

You can watch what happened when we let Eva lose. She went right up to his cage . . . and tried to kill him.

Of course things got even more lively when we locked up Eva and turned Evan loose. He was awfully curious about this rabbit who kept rattling her cage and trying to bite him on the nose! He’ll learn.

For now we will keep them separate and then gradually bring them together, let them fight a little, and help them get used to one another. They’ll be best of friends in a month or two . . . we hope.

Technorati Tags: rabbits - minirex - bunny

I would have blogged sooner but I was too busy replacing the pump in our basement. Let me explain.

Mondays are my “writing” days. Blogging is a part of it, but I try to put off blogging since I can start puttering around and waste too much of my day.

So first thing I did was drive off to the South Street Cafe in Bennington. It’s a great place, but there are never enough seats. I had to sit on a low stool at a high counter for an hour until a seat opened up.

For most of the morning I played with sub-par ideas for non-fiction writing, read articles in my 2007 Writer’s Guide, and played around with the plot for a little fiction project called Chiselville.

After running a bunch of errands, I came home for lunch. The first thing I noticed upon entering the home was a strange smell. I couldn’t place and still can’t describe it.

I put away the groceries, made lunch, and then prepared to get the kitchen in order before blogging and exercising a little. Since I can never remember how much bread we have, I bought two loaves too many today (we do eat a lot of bread though) and decided to put it in the basement.

Splish, splash.

Shoot, the pump burned out. That explained the smell.

With varying depths, I’d say the basement had about 3 inches of water in it. Stuff was floating all over the place, but fortunately we have most everything up and out of harms way. Not too much damage done so far as I can see.

I spent the next hour yanking out the old pump, disassembling the old hose, and then assembling the new pump. Some of the fittings were really old and took a bit of effort to tear apart.

Against all odds the pump hummed to work right away and began shooting out the water. Within about 20-30 minutes the water level had receded significantly.

And now I’ve had a chance to blog about it rather than the other idea I had. That can wait until tomorrow. Now I have a date with some a recipe for Tilapia from Moosewood’s Simple Suppers cook book. We’ll see how that goes.

I was sitting in a Cafe yesterday during my lunch break with a brilliant little latte at my side. My mood was soured by news that the state of Vermont is once again taxing non-profit organizations. I read it in the Manchester Journal, but it’s not online yet.

The latest fiasco is a $37,000 tax of Riley Rink. Riley Rink, a non-profit organization, provides crucial activities for local school children, children with disabilities, and just about every one else in Manchester. Knowing some of the people in the organization, I can say confidently that it’s a great little place that isn’t out to make a buck . . . unlike our local government. Though the rink only has to pick up $7,000 or the tax bill, it’s still an immense burden for a place that operates at a deficit and is dependent on contributions from the community.

This isn’t the first time our state government has tried to hit up non-profits, very important non-profits for the community, for some cash. Hildene and the Southern Vermont Arts Center were forced to plead their case against some major taxes dropped at their doorsteps.

While pondering the idiocy of our government, I overheard a conversation. With school children bustling around the cafe the volume level can be quite high, but no one could drown out this boy, probably in 9th grade I think, while he attempted to impress two girls at a nearby table.

The words that caught my attention were, “We couldn’t go snow boarding so we went back to his house and set the lawn on fire.”

I tuned in immediately. Sometimes there’s nothing better than eavesdropping on some stupid kids.

While I didn’t catch everything, I furiously jotted down a list of details from his story. You can create a sense of the story based on my list.

- Soaking wet towel on hand.

- Bucket nearby.

- Pool to jump into if it gets out of control.

- I always have a gallon of kerosene in my car . . . just in case.

- We poured kerosene into big plastic jugs.

- We dripped it out and set it on fire.

- We ran out of matches.

- They card you for buying lighters now.

- We had a stick of magnesium, shaved it into a pile, and then used some flint.

- Ended up using car lighter.

And there you have it, a week night with stupid kids. Maybe they have a future waiting for them in the government where they can tax non-profit organizations.

I decided a few days ago that it’s time to learn how to use Wordpress, and better than that, to design web sites. It’s going to be an uphill battle.

I should clarify that I’m not fighting against Verizon, Wordpress, or any other entity for that matter. Perhaps my chief enemy is my own ignorance.

Do I need an MySQL Database? What’s FTP all about? Which notepad program is the best? And so on.

I’m gradually figuring these things out. But before I could start I had to set up a web site with Verizon. It’s free and I thought it would be easy. It hasn’t.

First of all, it wasn’t all that simple to set up the site. The Verizon web page builder or whatever it was kept freezing and I was damned to the fate of going to a page with chirpy little kid giving me the thumbs up over and over and over.

Somehow I finally set up a little web page and then the real confusion began. After a very trying experience with Filezilla, I settled on SmartFTP as my FTP server.

I loaded up wordpress after watching a handy little installation video. The files had a rough go, with many of them failing to load. Eventually I prevailed and all of the wordpress files made the arduous journey to my ftp account.

Then it was simply a matter of opening a page, entering a username of some sort, and I would be in wordpress heaven. Note my usage of “would.”

I didn’t happen. I found a garble of code on the fancy wordpress page and a cryptic message saying that I had already loaded wordpress somehow.

I gave up at 10 pm last night. I am about to give up again tonight. I may have overlooked whether Verizon supports php. That would be a bummer.

I just want a free way to practice using wordpress. Any ideas?

We drove down to Gloucester, MA yesterday. 3.5 hours down and 3.5 hours back. In the snow by the way.

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law are up from Arkansas and they wanted to return to their old stomping grounds in the north shore area. My wife went to college at Gordon and my other brother-in-law lived in that area for a few months, so they all had some ties to the area.

Of all days it snowed. It snowed quite a bit actually. We took a great walk on the beach in Gloucester, but became completely soaked after a short while. My jeans were really, really wet. And don’t even mention my feet.

After chilling and soaking ourselves, we drove on over to a Thai restaurant in Beverly, MA. I drank Thai tea by the gallon and munched on spring rolls. Good times.

It was kind of a crazy trip, but we had a great time catching up and enjoying the beach. Now that I’m warm and dry, it seems like a splendid idea. Here are a few pictures by the way:

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Some random facts to bring in the new year:

200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

More than one in eight adults in the US show signs of being addicted to the internet, a study has shown.

Iceland is most web-savvy country, with a study showing it has the highest concentration of broadband users.

Physically, mentally, and spiritually there is a need for space. Creating time for this space is quite difficult, when I run from one activity to another.

If only for a few days, I have been able to settle down a little bit. I find that I can think more clearly and simply relax.

I knew I needed this time because I only wanted to read my Edward Rutherford books: Princes of Ireland, Rebels of Ireland, and now London. It’s recreational reading, light historical fiction that helps me unwind. At least I think it may. It’s better than TV for sure.

Now I’m crawling back to NT Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God and The Shaping of Things to Come. Also my moleskine journal is starting to fill up with more writing lately. All of these are good signs.

Sometimes “staying busy” becomes an end in itself. It feels right, but then I stop and realize how empty I am, how little I have prayed, and how neglected my mind has become. And that’s why vacations are so important.