bierkergaard

Wow, what a huge amount of rain we got walloped with in Pa. on Thursday....some words just sound like what they mean....WALLOPED! In my office in the high school Guidance Department, even my papers were taking on a dampened feel. Maybe I was projecting onto the papers wetness, my sense of touch just throwing its lot in with all my other senses that were overwhelmed with Waterworld. Rain was much needed...our home's front yard was parched. Hopefully, now the grass goes from brown to green again. Worried that the temps will start to fall too soon for the grass to recover and we will have freeze-dried dead grass adorning our property until March. My yard humbles me, chastises me, shows me that I am not worthy of suburbia. Just the latest episode in an ongoing saga of man versus grass, Suburban Sisyphus pushing his mower fruitlessly up a hill in search of redemption. A little fall of rain makes the flowers grow (song from Les Mis). Does a lot of rain make my grass grow too? Fascinat...

When I was down in D.C. on Saturday, I went to National Community Church close to Union Station for the 5:00 service. It meets in the bottom floor of a coffee shop that the church owns called Ebenezer's . It was a long walk from the hotel and I was pretty sweaty when I arrived.The lead pastor is a dude named Mark Batterson and I have probably been more influenced by his writing, preaching, and thinking, more than anyone else recently. I tend to gravitate to energetic, positive, and practical teaching. Plus, a sense of humor and a tad of self-deprecation. Self-deprecation can be healthy to a point (i.e. someone willing to be self-revealing about one's own weakness). It can go too far though (TMI), or it can also be false humility. I suppose the real test of humbleness is when others are deprecatory about us. Then we discover if pride is truly behind even our admissions of weakness, as in, "Gee, look how humble I am, I willing to admit how weak, stupid, and full of folly I...

About 1.5 months ago, Lina and I upgraded to a DVD/Blu-Ray Player with Wi-Fi access. Our old DVD no longer worked with all of the new anti-piracy technology in DVD's. I mean the DVD player played but the picture was schizo in one way or another. For example, with the film Incubus , the picture was all bright, bright green with outlines of characters. With the Wi-Fi access, we can download movies or TV series. Lina quickly latched onto LOST and went through the season episodes like a chain smoker does with the cigs. For a while, I tagged along. But, I found that the series riled me up with its lack of resolution. Plus, it started getting really weird. I found myself unable to sleep at night. Lina polished off like 40 episodes in three weeks and is now in season 5 somewhere. LOST is like a modern day Gilligan's Island with a malevolent streak. There are moments of lightness and joy yet trouble always is just a lurk away. I know that the writers, directors, and producers of LOST ...

I was down in D.C. for the National Books Festival on the Mall on Saturday and scored a cool poster of the event and a nifty fluorescent orange book bag from C Span 2. Both items were free. Comcast really ticked me off when they took C Span 2 out of our line-up. No more author interviews on Sunday. Someday, I will have the special pleasure of cancelling Comcast. In an interesting and convoluted process, I got to watch Laura Bush live give a talk about her book. I say watch because it was far too loud, with generators humming away and the din of the hoi polloi, to hear her. So, I pulled up CSpan radio on my I-Phone, called a D.C. number, and listened to her time delayed (about 30 seconds) talk. I arrived too late to get a seat in the inner tent and instead was with the outer orphans straining to hear her words. The triumph of technology. Once Laura Bush finished her talk, the tent she spoke in emptied about a third to half. And, like catching a wave, I surfed in and found a seat and the...