I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Nine years ago …

Isaiah 7:1-9 October 23

1000 Days of Sharing Christ 10410.23

And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established. 9

Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.

I hope that's what has been done by the time I give next week's devotion at Breakfast with the Boys – the last one on seeking God's will in our voting was a little rambling. (On my part, not God's.) As we're on the downhill stretch in our country's upcoming elections [remember, as I wrote this Bush was at the end of his first term, so it was a choice between George W. Bush and John Kerry, the latter of whom was introduced to speak by then-little known Barack Obama – ed.], please let our own testimony remain one, Jesus, without compromise or shame in the eyes of the world. Amen.

[Also included with this day's entry is USA Today honoring Scott Jordan, a science teacher in Cuba, New York – odd, I wasn't aware the island had moved, lol – as an outstanding teacher and my own review of a book I'd just read, Martha Albrand's Nightmare In Copenhagen.]

And in other news …

Today's title is the opening line of Marianne's Moore poem … “Poetry”. One of a hundred in Dover Thrift Editions' 100 Best-Loved Poems edited by Philip Smith (ISBN 0486285537), ranging from the early sixteenth century to the nineteen fifties – I love chronological order anthologies, because you see that human thought never completely stands still, no matter what fundamentalists would have you believe – and also including two ballads dating probably from the late Middle Ages.

It's exclusively American and English poetry in this edition to maintain “aesthetic continuity”, whatever that is. Don't worry, other anthologies get into other ethnicities, locations, time periods … and it was fun for me to reread several of these poems that I had to recite, mostly from Honors English my senior year of high school! (Exception: Mrs. Durant's sixth grade class, where everybody had to memorize and recite Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening”.)

In case you want to know – I'm told I get very tight-lipped about my growing years, and I want to do better with that – among the senior year poems Mrs. Hooten's class had to memorize were Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias”, John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which I almost screwed up at the beginning by making the title “Ode to”, Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess”. We also had Hamlet's soliloquy beginning “To be or not to be” and the opening paragraph of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. It's not that hard.

Got home last night after a meeting I was supposed to be at post-work got canceled (but that's ok, the person I was supposed to meet called me first and explained why, and I set up another meeting tomorrow night too) and I'm glad I did because the four of us – Martha doesn't work at McDonald's Tuesday nights anymore so she can get Jeffrey to his Cub Scout meetings – sat down and had sloppy joes and chips for dinner, it was great! The kids on their own were picking out a movie to watch (A Simple Wish) and started picking out videos they did not want or watch anymore, ones that they have outgrown – I am so impressed with that.

This morning after the kids got their reading done (for Reading At Home, Sarah in second grade has to read twenty minutes a day and Jeffrey in first grade has to read ten) I quizzed Jeffrey on some of what he needs to know for his Bobcat badge. And he's doing it – the Pledge particularly was giving him some trouble – from memory; I am so impressed with how he and Sarah are doing. When I asked Sarah did she think she read with no help, with some help, or with a lot of help, she took a minute and then said “with some help” for I did indeed help her. The honesty is just great when it comes out.

Breaking this into print, David