Taking Time for Thought

Mark Twain's War Prayer from a blog called The Glyphians.

I realize that 14 minutes is a bit of a sit for the average American, accustomed to having thier attention span programmed to seven minutes by the commercial break on television of our past; but this short film is amazingly produced and worth the time to listen to this little homily with two sound tracks.

Genesis and Dark Skies

14: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16: And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Instead of walking out of doors at night for a sky check, today we have to rely on the Hubble, or artists, to show us what we are missing. How long has it been since you were able to actually count on seeing anything up there other than contrails, aeroplanes approaching the landing strips at your local terminal, or a planet or two trying valiently to beam its light to our good earth?

I am not the environmentalist that my mother was, but I do recycle and plant trees; however, there is one group that I admire and they don't get enough attention in our culture that is too busy at night with thier own pleasures to even think about the Milky Way. This is the International Dark Sky Association.
Their number one goal is to "Stop the adverse effects of light pollution on dark skies."

One of the last times I literally saw stars was on the steps of a rural church (Lat: 45.7729645 Lon: -103.5583496). He Who Must Be Obeyed, a son named after him, and I sat in the warm night facing west for a couple of hours and watched the Milky Way approach over the McKinsey Butte and sail west while a shooting star or two enchanted us. It is rated a 7 on a dark sky chart I found. One of the darkest spots in the midwest. If people knew what a show we had on those wooden steps, we wouldn't have had room to sit.

Memorial Weekend

"Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people of Helsinki and composed a choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundstrom. This is from the expatraveler, another blogspot blogger.

We really love our country, even so much that we can complain about it to the point one would think we actually disliked it. The Helsinki choir could have been singing about America, except about turning our forests to toilet paper.

They even sigh (while singing) about outsourcing. I am surprised our own major thinkers haven't outsourced the elderly to be cared for in a foreign land. It might be worth the trip for everyone concerned.

Not Alone in the Dog House

He Who Must Be Obeyed came home two days before he told me he would. I had left some things undone downstairs; while I cleaned the garret bedroom and removed the water marks from the carpet up there from the roof leaks during our seven inch rain a while back. I love to clean house.

It is nice to have him back in the dog house with me, even if he was growling and snapping when he left. I worked off all the stress upstairs and his soft snoring will be a pleasant lullaby again.

I read a lot of Henri Nouwen and a couple of other spiritual thinkers, too. It is nice to have those guys to fall back on when I can't think straight myself. Is change all that good, if you think you are on the right track in spite of being growled at by bigger and noisier dogs?

In the Dog House Again

It would be good to get things right once in a while. Apparently, I am so mean and selfish that neither He Who Must Be Obeyed, nor this daughter/granddaughter can stand anymore of it. They are both taking a break from me.

It is my 'Christianly love'(sic) that irks them and is the reason that she won't go to church and probably the reason that he does. " You can be a very mean woman sometimes." "Sometimes you just amaze me with your Christianly love. Another reason not to go to church." It was put so pointedly within the two page diatribe.

You know the lemons thing; while they are taking a break from me; I will use the opportunity to clean the garret, take care of some correspondence, and start a long put off project. I have wanted to enlarge and develop some of my dad's black and white negatives from the 1930's and '40's and maybe this will be the opportunity to spend some time on it. When an artist takes photographs they don't need much cropping.

Sharptail Grouse

Today I discovered a fascinating description of photographing and audio taping the mating ritual of the sharptail grouse in its lek, a new word for me. "The lek is generally circular with a diameter of about 30 feet in which each bird claims a certain space for his display and confronts any other bird that enters into that space. (Dick Kettlewell/Journal staff)" By clicking on "Kettlewell" you can shut your eyes and be there yourself! By clicking on the words "sharptail grouse" you will go to the article and see a Kettlewell photo of one with his 'arms' akimbo.

Speak Finnish in Three Minutes

A person could read this list in Finnish in less than three minutes; but "Speak Finnish in Three Minutes!" is another of the Finns elaborate jokes, in the Helsingin Sanomat International. I would love to learn Finnish in three years, if I could.

I have seen this before, but this morning I got it from Dave in Soumi, a research meteorologist in Finland. He writes an interesting blog about his adventures in Finland. I am going to check out all of his links in time.

So we swim. It is good for the soul and probably good for everything that ails me. I am no athlete, I can't even walk a straight line, ever. "Look where you are going," He Who Must Be Obeyed tells me.

Mother's Day

I used to think Mother's Day felt like a lot of work. He Who Must Be Obeyed did a lot of helping or maybe it was me helping and him doing it. Anyway for several years we set the table for four generations of women, and the men in our lives. Today I can see the blessing that it was and I cherish the memory of all of us seated after church, white table cloth, best silverware.."Be present at our table Lord, be here and everywhere adored. These mercies bless and grant that we may feast in Paradise with Thee."

On this Mother's Day I think of the women that mothered me over the years, starting in January, 1935, on the kitchen table in a small homestead ranch house. The doctor got there from Buffalo, 12 miles away. I love looking at the photographs of me as a baby in my great grandmother's arms, in my grandmother's arms, in my aunties arms, and in the arms of my mother and father. How blessed is the child who is loved.

My own mother, grandmother, my aunties, and my great aunties were all women I greatly admire and love; women of great depth, large hearts, room for everyone, ever ready to take me howm with them for a stay; always willing to help one another, they loved the extended family, and held huge picnics get togethers.

I remember one time at my Aunt Lillie's when the entire clan gathered. It seemed there were hundreds of us, and maybe there were. Old aunts and uncles, little cousins, and babies in arms, two of them my own. Those dear, dear mothers in my family with the wonderful men in their lives. Men who smelled of homemade soap and pipe tobacco.

I thank God for them, every one. But most especially, I thank God for my own mother, outspoken, demanding when I was small; she saw to it that I knew how to pray, to clean house and iron clothes, and in her age softened to the point that I almost didn't recognize her. It is a happy feeling to be a mother.

Quasars and Gideon Bibles

image credit: NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al. (STECF)

The image above was the Nasa: 2007-04-19 Image of the day. It is an artist's impression showing a primordial quasar surrounded by sheets of gas, dust, stars and early star clusters. Stars are born, creating emmissions of very specific colors of the element iron and die within the first few hundred million years of the universe. So what did the first quasars look like? The nearest are now known to be supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies.

This beautiful universe, our beautiful galaxie, our beautiful blue marble; we are blessed by beauty in every direction we look. Just because we appreciate the earth do you think we need Gore's global warming book in the night stand instead of the Gideon Bible? It was one of Drudge's headlines today. Would that tempt a thief?