Given The Right Conditions, The Impossible Is Always Possible.

Eighteen years ago [again, of voting age] ...

Lamentations 3:19-27                                                                         July 31
to stop lying - around, to others, and to myself                                  9607.31

Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.
My soul hath them in remembrance, and is humbled in me.
This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.
It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.
They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.
The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.
It is good that a man should both hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.

Atlanta [Olympics] - day 12; God's Treasures - [a Vacation Bible School?] -19 days

Good news, Kitty! I will be in another car -- a 1986 Dodge Lancer -- tomorrow. I would like it a mite better, though, if I weren't driving Dad and Susan to the brink of insanity. I need them to forgive me for when I haven't been as communicative as I ought to be. There is so much I want to share, so much I need you to know I remember.

I reread Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People and finished Schoenfeld's biography of Winston Churchill today. Two things stick out in my mind: to get what you want from others, get them talking about their favorite subject -- themselves; also, do not let age or the face that you are alone in your thinking stop you. Teamwork (Together Everyone Achieves More by WORK) brings together all of these differences despite ourselves, and we all come out with more than we started with.

Listen to me.

[PRAYER AND PRAISE AND MARGIN NOTES: my dream - how does it come true if I don't know what it is; It pays -- I'm just not able to see it now; 40 days Noah in the ark [and] Jesus in the wilderness; where we're going today, please let us find (and afford!) what we need; when you're working, your belief in building this business goes way up; Martha Powell is back home; Burundi; Pravda 1912-1996; a society where children attack their parents - I read three accounts today!; Perhaps I have aged enough now not to make these mistakes in my "old age"]

Right here and now in our time-space membrane ...

Where the heck did July go? It's the last day of the month, the State Fair has been survived (even by the Christians, but I digress), and tonight the lawn is supposed to get mowed. It's known to grow quickly ... and we had another "God moment" yesterday! I stopped by church on my way in to work and I brought up our son Jeffrey's bright red and blue Spider-Man wallet that he'd lost Sunday and after worship was the last place he'd remembered he had it. Donna who's one of our youth coordinators happened to be walking by and told me one of her kids found it! Didn't have ID in it but it did have money, which was all still there to the relief of both Jeffrey and Sarah, for he owed her money! Just got to get a little less afraid to ask adults questions ...

"... and the nature of your emergency ... fire, ambulance, police ... or physics?" I MUST read this again, DC Vertigo's offering FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics - The Paradigm Shift collects Simon Oliver's written and Robbi Rodriguez's illustrated account (ISBN 9781401245108) of the public agency that exists to deal with those localized gravity failures and wormhole generators ... it sounds like a headache, but it really isn't. Think Star Trek: Voyager meets THE ORIGINAL CSI. Even with FBP agent Adam Hardy's personal reasons for staying on (his dad got swept up by a quantum tornado) and the impending fear of privatized physics protection with its own agendas, it's hard to not follow this even when you think you can't follow it. Trust me, no advanced physics degree required, just remember the Federal Bureau of Physics' motto which doubles as today's title!

According to my blogroll on - appropriately enough - Blogger, this is my 1871st post. Something so Franco-Prussian about that ... anyway, on the same library stop where I picked up FBP, I came across a bound edition of The Star Wars. No, not Star Wars, The Star Wars. It seems that George Lucas had a rough draft together that incorporated a great many of the characters he'd later use (in both trilogies, no less) in the early 70s, and reading this ... I wanted to like it. And I did. A lot! Turns a lot of what we know now from the big screen inside out (here Luke Skywalker is a Aquilean general and Jedi-Bendu leading the efforts against the Empire and its Space Fortress while grooming his apprentice Annikin Starkiller, the stormtroopers have lightsabers, and Artwo is quite conversant). Written by J. W. Rinzler and art by Mike Mayhew, one imagines how modern science fiction would have gone had The Star Wars (ISBN 9781616554255) had been green-lit.

See you next month! David