The Local News

Just for you, mon amie...

Life here has been busy-ish of late: the past four days featured both a retreat and a business trip. The retreat was with a church group and quite refreshing. Elise, my friend from many years ago, carpooled with me and it was nice to have someone there that I knew. It was at a YMCA camp, which had beautiful surroundings, a nice common building, and the hardest, crackliest mattress/pallets on the planet. So we spent a lot of time not sleeping. There was a little hike (yay outdoors!), a bonfire with s'mores, and a dance party (featuring music from the 70s to present). There was, of course, teaching as well, which all centered on Matthew 11:1-19 - a very interesting passage for the discussion of the problem of evil, among other things. The teacher was a really excellent old missionary who reminded me a bit of Dr. Hake.

As soon as I got home from the retreat, I took my things out of my bag, put a pre-positioned pile of work clothes in, and headed to the airport. The travel was uneventful and the trip was a good one. I was traveling with my boss, a quintessential ENTP - creative and high-energy - so it was an action-packed trip. (One day featured ten hours of work - mostly meetings - followed by some local sightseeing and dinner.) Lodging did step up a notch from the camp to "ritzy hotel with king-sized feather bed." So the sleep I did get was sound :). It was a highly productive trip that'll be useful for a project I'm currently working on and a brief change of pace and place is always nice.

I started into The Consolation of Philosophy on the business trip, because it was near the top of my to-be-read pile and would fit in my purse for the flight. It's interesting, though I'm not sure I like it so much - there seem to be some biggish gaps in its logic. But I'll suspend judgment until I've come to the end; perhaps things are not as they seem. I'm also technically reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, but I've been moving through it very slowly. The writing style and thoughts expressed are such that it deserves more attention than I can give in the evening when I'm tired, and the plot is so incredibly slow it's not as though I feel the need to race through it. But I like it, so I'll finish one of these days :).

LOST is back, be it ever so temporarily!!! !!! My life is happy. Need I say more? :) The writers' strike has been a pain. Good TV is a form of literature, in my opinion, and the strike has killed the literature and forced the production of the equivalent of the worst sorts of paperbacks. So the return of LOST, even for just eight episodes, is like a spring in the desert of my literary landscape.

This concludes our evening broadcast. You may now consider yourselves "up to date" on my life, the universe, and everything :).

Cheers!