Sunset, Almost 20 Years Ago
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Building
Somehow, I didn’t publish these pictures from a couple of months ago…
Some of My Kiddos
A gaggle of girls came to the basketball game tonight to watch their friends play — all of them my students.
What a sweet bunch of girls. They’re like that in class, too.
It’s a pleasure working with kids like this.
Our Neighbors (Sort Of)
Out for a walk with Clover, and I find myself wondering if that guy up the street — a near-neighbor, I suppose, who lives about half-a-dozen houses up the street — has finally taken down his Halloween decorations. He puts on such a show that he starts putting crap in his yard sometime in mid-September. Surely, I think, surely he’s taken the last of the decorations down — huge skeletons that have remained in his yard long after everything else disappeared.
But no — no such luck.
“He can just put hearts in their hands and he’ll have Valentine’s decorations,” K laughs when we’re talking about it later in the evening. “And then an Easter egg!” she adds.
“Maybe a flag for Independence Day,” I suggest.
We come to a few simple conclusion, though:
- We’re glad this guy lives up over the hill, and we don’t see this unless we go for a walk.
- We’re glad the neighbors around us have, well, taste.
- And we finally see a positive use for a HOA…
Shed
It finally arrived.
Extra storage!
A new home for the lawnmower, bikes, and gardening nonsense.
A Walk in the Park
Sevierville Volleyball
The girls spent the day in Tennessee playing volleyball — well, one playing, one watching.
The boys woke to the promised dusting of snow,
and ended the day with a dinner of chili, corn chips, and ice cream.
“That was a pretty good day,” the Boy concluded.
Snow Days 2022 — Day 6: No-Snow Snow Day
There was no snow on the ground to speak of where we live; no snow on the roads at all. Yet we had another e-learning day today.
The Boy took all the cushions from the couch and made a little study corner for his work. The Girl remained in her hobbit-hole room.
After lunch, the girls headed to Tennessee for a volleyball tournament; the boys began the countdown to a boys’-night-out dinner: Mexican.
As I was putting the Boy to bed tonight, I realized I hadn’t checked to see if the forecast had been correct — the cause for all the worry today, I guess. Sure enough, there was a dusting of fresh snow. If tomorrow weren’t Saturday, I’m sure it’d be another e-learning day…
Snow Days 2022 — Day 5: What We Thought Was Our Last Day
The snow is disappearing. We thought today would be the last e-learning day with everyone at home, but apparently, the threat of snow tonight was enough to make tomorrow another e-learning day. A whole week spent at home. That’s a blessing in many ways, but tough on some kids, no doubt.
Not our kids, though.
Snow Days 2022 — Day 4: Instructions about the Rapture
An acquaintance posted a video on social media about the rapture — one of the most bizarre ideas in all of Evangalicism.
He begins thusly:
The rapture of the church is when Jesus comes for his church the second coming is when Jesus comes with his church. The rapture of the church happens when he appears in the clouds of heaven he does not come to earth we go up to meet him. The dead in Christ rise first we which are alive and reign shall be instantly caught up to be with the lord in the air and we go to heaven.
The first thing that happens is the judgment seat of Christ. Paul said we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of the deeds that have been done in our body whether they are good or whether they are bad. Our works are going to be tried by fire so that our lives in its essence will be given purity as we enter our eternal life. Every person is going to stand here people say well uh you’re already in heaven it’s not a matter of if you’re going to be in heaven and on it’s a matter that you are going to give an account to God for what you have done and what you fail to do. The gap that exists between what you could have been and not were not because you did not use the opportunities god blessed you. You are still going to be in heaven but you are going to receive a reward in heaven based on what you did on this earth where there are going to be five different crowns that you can receive. You’ll receive a white robe and we are going to receive the mansions. We are going to be there for a period of seven years and there will be the marriage supper of the lamb.
While we’re in heaven seven years there will appear on this earth the antichrist and he’s going to set up a government of ten — ten men who will lead groups of nations — that will be complete dictators on the face of the earth. Every commercial exchange shall be recorded. You cannot do anything without his permission. He will start out making a treaty with the state of Israel that’s for seven years. He will break that treaty in three and a half years.
In this seven-year period there will be six seals, seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven vials: 21 supernatural acts of judgment that are coming on this earth. Just one of those acts will be whenever angels are released to destroy a third of the earth’s population in a day what’s going to happen on this earth will be hell on
earth and we the bride of christ are going to be in heaven.People teaching that we are going to go through that just simply biblically misinformed.
This claim that dissenters of this view are “simply biblically misinformed” would carry a lot more weight if there was anything in the Bible that actually explained things like he does in the video. If we could turn to Hypothetical Book of the Bible chapter x beginning in verse y and find what is quoted above, perhaps in more flowery language, perhaps a little more poetic, I might think the guy has a point here. However, the Bible says nothing about this. Instead, we find passages describing hallucinations of multi-headed beasts rising from the sea and then these people interpret it to mean this silliness. They explain it as if they are simply describing something they see in front of them or the process by which uranium-238 gets processed into uranium-235 (i.e., observable, confirmable, testable facts in our reality), but in fact, it’s just wild conjecture.
And then there are all the competing interpretations. The Catholics, for example, have their own interpretation, strangely (for such a superstitious belief system) less based in wild conjecture:
The aim of the Apocalypse, the most difficult book of the Bible to interpret, is eminently practical. It contains a series of warnings addressed to people of all epochs, for it views from an eternal perspective the dangers, internal and external, which affect the Church in all epochs.
It’s sort of a handbook for spiritual growth, I guess. It’s not for the future, in other words; it’s for all time. That’s less crazy than suggesting that beasts coming out of the sea somehow represent contemporary events.
And there’s a meme that perfectly illustrates a central problem with this interpretation:
Snow Days 2022 — Day 3
Today was an e-learning day — the first would-be snow day that transmuted into a strange school day spent sitting in front of a computer. For an English teacher, a math teacher — for numerous subjects, it’s a fairly straightforward thing. But how do band teachers do e-learning days? What assignments do PE teachers give? “Go play in the snow until you’re out of breath!”
In the afternoon, I finally left the house — the first time since Saturday. I found shelves mostly empty in the poultry section. There’s probably some metaphor here, but I’m going to leave that for you to construct.
Snow Days 2022 — Day 2
I start to head upstairs to get the Boy to put his guitar away and get to bed when I look down and see he didn’t clean up his cars. I nudge the boxes out of the main walkway and head upstairs, thinking that there will come a time that do something like that — push his toys out of the way — for the last time, and I likely won’t even know it when it happens.
When the Boy finally gets into bed, I lie down with him to snuggle a little. He’s been putting himself to bed lately, and a couple of nights ago, it broke my heart when I realized that he’d gone to bed without even getting a goodnight from anyone. The day will come, I know, when he’ll be too big for a cuddle like that. There will be no more plaintive requests to “rub my back, please!” Those days kind of slipped by with the Girl — she was suddenly just getting herself to bed without a single minute of reading or cuddling, and now they’re long in the past.
As the Boy gets his bedtime music going — a mix of softer Beatles songs — “Let It Be” comes on.
“Hold on!” I cry, grabbing his phone to load the album itself. We’ve been watching Get Back this weekend, a little here, a little there, and like most fans, I’ve found it fascinating to watch the songs evolve from little snippets to the masterpieces we grew up listening to. It doesn’t have as much of an impact on everyone else in the family because they don’t know the songs as well as I do, so it occurred to me that they should at least listen to Let It Be a few times as we watch over the next little bit.
As I’m lying there with him, “Across the Universe” comes on.
It is, without a doubt, far and away my favorite Beatles song. Not even a close contest to any other song, in my top 5 all-time favorite songs. Period. As perfect a song as ever created.
Suddenly I’m transported back to the late eighties, sitting in my best friend’s basement listening to records, when he puts on Let It Be. The first two tracks are great because, well, it’s the Beatles — and then “Across the Universe” comes on, and I’m flattened. From the first time I hear the opening chiming guitar I know it’s going to be a favorite song for the rest of my life.
Those magical days listening to music and eventually playing music with a guy I still and will always consider my best friend are now over thirty years ago. My daughter is the age we were; his children are all older than we were.
It’s a constant theme in my thoughts and writing, I know — how quickly time passes, the transitory nature of it all — but it comes into sharper focus today, the second of our snow days here in the south. Snow is so rare and rarified here in the south that each day with snow on the ground sparkles like the snow itself does when clouds pass and the sun begins melting it all.
“Nothing’s going to change my world,” John sings in the chorus “Across the Universe,” and the key to maintaining that attitude must be the skill of living in the moment and not worrying that it’s going to pass before we really realize what it’s worth. It’s pushing that box of toys out of the way with a certain tenderness at the thought that it won’t always be in the way instead frustration that the kid left the toys out yet again. It’s treating the quirkiness of teen behavior with patience and tenderness because even those frustrating moments will haunt us once they’re gone.
And of course, it means going out to play in the snow as often as possible when you’re in the south.
Addendum
January 17 must be the magical day for snow here in the south. We had a snow day on that date in 2008
and then again ten years later!
Snow Days 2022 — Day 1
Take 1
I could hear the ice striking our windows in the early morning. “It’s not supposed to start until early tomorrow afternoon,” I thought. Still, I got up and checked.
We had about three inches on the ground already, and it was still snowing.
The Boy had only one thing on his mind: “Daddy, when can we go out? When can we go out?” Since it hasn’t really snowed since about 2018, this is the first snow he’s experienced since being in kindergarten.
He certainly made the most of it during our morning session.
Take 2
In the afternoon, the girls finally joined us.
And the dog had a chance to play.
Take 3
Evening — one must take a walk in snow in the evening.
Snow Approaching?
Heavy snowfall is nothing new to K — she grew up with sights like this:
Snowfall after snowfall all packed up, settled, and repacked to show just how much snow has fallen in the last few days.
We never get snow like that here, but rumor has it, we could get significant snow beginning tomorrow afternoon:
A winter storm warning and an ice storm warning for parts of our area is in effect until Monday morning.
- A winter storm warning indicates that heavy snow of at least 6 inches in 12 hours, or at least 8 inches in 24 hours, is expected. It can also be issued if sleet accumulation will be at least half an inch.
- An ice storm warning indicates that ice accumulation of at least 1/4 inch is expected. (Source)
It’s been years since we had any significant snow here. Last year’s snow didn’t even last a day:
Snowfall 2021
In 2020, we had a dusting of snow after the major flooding of our basement, but it was gone by the end of the day, I think:
And then snow
Earlier in 2020, we had a snowfall that lasted all morning and amounted to nothing — not even an early dismissal.
Snow and a Change
We have to go all the way back to 2018 to find significant snowfall:
Snow
So we’re all hopeful, but cautiously so.
“I flushed some ice cubes down the toilet,” L informed us?
“Huh?”
“Yeah, and I’m going to sleep with a spoon under my pillow — superstitions for snow!”
We all do what we can.
Trees
We finally finished our last bit of Christmas un-decorating today. The lights came down from gutters and the Christmas tree got some Sawz-all attention.
Afterward, instead of destroying trees, the Boy decided he wanted to try climbing one — a magnolia in the backyard that was just a little sapling when we bought the house.
And what better way to end this day off of school than with a little bonfire, burning the tree that was just in our living room.
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Nana as a Girl
Sometimes, I just get to thinking about Nana…
Lost Photos
I never published these photos, to my knowledge — I don’t know how that happened. They’re so old that it’s almost funny: L and her friend E are now in high school, as tall or taller than their parents, learning to drive, alternatively annoying and charming adults.
Little I no longer is little. He’s in middle school now.
And our little man E and E’s and I’s little sister E? Not even a thought in their head.
Speaking in Tongues, Slain in the Spirit
“Language-like activity in the absence of meaning” — a good definition of glossolalia, the act of speaking in tongues. The Bible promotes it, and I’d always understood it to be the miraculous act of speaking a language one doesn’t have any foreknowledge of. For example, breaking into Farsi having never studied it.
“Surely,” I thought, “No one really believes that happens?! It’s so easy to debunk: record it and have a computer try to recognize and translate the language.” But it turns out, real speaking in tongues is not the miraculous speaking of an otherwise-unknown language: it’s speaking in the language of angels. It is, in simple terms, gibberish.
If you listen to these segments of people speaking in tongues, you’ll notice a few things:
- A lot of them repeat the same vowel sound over and over.
- They like to trill their r’s.
- At times it seems as if they’re mimicking — consciously or otherwise — actual languages.
- Some consonant sounds seem more common than others: b, k, r, and s seem very popular.
- They seem to be so clearly putting on a show that it’s almost hard to watch.
I’m on the fence about the video, though, because they’re clearly mocking these people, and while it does seem silly, I find myself thinking that they must get something out of it. It likely gives a natural high of endorphins.
I once attended a church where there was a lot of calling down of the Holy Spirit, a lot of prayers for God to send the Holy Spirit to enter the building and enter them, with repetitive music playing, the congregants with their hands raised and their eyes closed, swaying to the music. It struck me how similar they appeared to people I’d see just a week or so earlier at a party who’d passed around a gigantic bong and gotten stoned out of their gourd. They all had the lost-in-the-moment look about them, and even in some churches that speak in tongues, one way they see the manifestation of the Holy Spirit is through uncontrolled laugher, the tell-tale sign that someone has smoked marijuana.
There’s also the element of crowd pressure — some of those people are clearly forcing their laughter. And perhaps some of them are closeted non-believers and they’re finally able to let out the laughter that they keep pent up every Sunday.
The king of all this nonsense is huckster Benny Hinn.
I just can’t understand how people can fall for this stuff. I’d love to get up on stage with someone like this and let him wave his arms at me, fling his coat at me, and just stand there looking at him. Wonder what would happen — I’d likely be hustled off the stage in a hurry…
Shooting
