Tomorrow Is Martha's Birthday ...

… but due to a most hectic schedule that day (actually, after she gets off work comes Jeffrey's Cub Scout meeting and after being done with that it's close to bedtime), the kids and I took her out to Applebee's for lunch Saturday and it was great. Though our son we learned is not a fan of their pizza … both the girls finished their meals and I got halfway through a seven ounce sirloin. I've been getting that way with a lot of restaurant meals lately, they're often TWO meals for me! All that Shaklee 180 meal bars and smoothees I've had – and even when I don't have them every day – have re-calibrated my appetite to the point where it takes less to (or I'm doing more that keeps my mind off of) fill me up. Gone down from 232 to 188 in a little over a year and lost inches as well, and I'm excited about that!

Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.

Yesterday at church besides the worship service where Sarah wasn't feeling too well after she ate a “breakfast pizza” of toasted bagel, cream cheese, summer sausage, and shredded cheese, we got our blood pressure tested – we have a church member who's a nurse who does that the first Sunday of every month – and I heard I was “ornery” for the first time since my dad last said he was “fit as a fiddle and twice as ornery” … eight years ago now? Freaks me out, that I am becoming my dad. (Or sometimes I think that Jeffrey acts more like my dad, but that is another story. Also performed the first Parable Playhouse play in Sunday school based on Daniel and the Lions' Den with twelve first graders. I remarked out loud that Jesus started this way too, with twelve!

When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists.





“A thirty-eight minute war, the top hat that caused a panic, the man who walked around the world -- took him five years, the man suffocated by praise, that and much more is all here!” That's how I worded my comment on Facebook's page “I <3 BOOKS” on the book I read this weekend, Michael Powell's Curious Events In History (ISBN 9780760790977) And I DID know some of what's in here, such as how President Garfield would have most likely lived had his doctors not been free with their germ-laden hands and tools. I had to be reminded of some, such as Draco the Athenian lawyer from whom we get the term “draconian” who was suffocated by those who favored him throwing their garments at him in a meeting … early law groupies?

But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round.




Then there's the blow-your-mind things like the consuming powdered mummy craze for every ailment until 1908, and Abraham Lincoln buying small amounts of cocaine. In the pre-FDA days, all the drugs on the legal no-no list now were consumed to get a high and also prescribed for what ails you, by quacks and professionals alike. In fact, Coca-Cola gets its name from the COCAINE that was originally a major ingredient in it. And today it is still there, but in a very tiny amount, so tiny that you would have to drink a swimming pool's worth of “the real thing” to get the buzz one sniff of that powdered stuff would give you. And perhaps, from what I've heard of Coca-Cola's Super Bowl commercial yesterday, that's what some of their ad people were on …

The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity. (G. K. Chesterton)



This weekend Martha and the kids and I got to stay in for most of it, and acquainted ourselves with several good games of Skip-Bo, the card game where you have to clear your thirty-card stockpile (but this takes a while, so for all games but one we used twenty-card stockpiles) by building up discard decks from one to twelve with Skip-Bo cards as wild. All but Sarah this weekend won at least a game. AND all of us but Martha took in the new location of Main Street Books, which moved a block south to a space three times its previous location (and close to its original location, so it's coming full circle) and opened for business Saturday. Sunday the kids were with me while Martha was at Chorale practice – that afternoon so's not to miss the Super Bowl – and they had fun and quiet too!

Now I need some, David