If the Pentateuch had originally been put together as a blogroll ...

I highly doubt the collected books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) would look like this, but if you think about it -- since there are no serious contenders besides Moses to have written them, the "Documentary Hypothesis" notwithstanding -- from Exodus through Deuteronomy 34 it's practically the earliest autobiography, beating out Augustine's Confessions by nearly two millennia.

And far from me to be sacrilegious any more than I already am due to my continued sin. Oh, I know I'm forgiven, I know I ask for forgiveness, even if I don't always live a life that bears fruit in keeping with repentance. I wonder if that's why the TGIF T-shirt I wear often when I'm not working strikes a chord and get so many compliments from people we meet. (It says beneath the big TGIF that it stands for "Thank God I'm Forgiven".) I need to ask for forgiveness, and I need to be forgiving.

Since time marches forward, so will I regarding the last five days. Friday after work I got home and I don't remember what we had for dinner, but we settled in to watch The Day After, a 1983 film detailing the before and after of a nuclear war as seen by the people of Lawrence, Kansas. I'd bought the film for a great price, and I remembered watching it when it first debuted on NBC (I was 11) and Sarah said she wanted to see it too. Martha had watched parts with me last year; I warned the kids.

But despite that, they really liked it even though Jeffrey too said The Day After was "a weird, tense movie". But silence prevailed in our house through the night and into Saturday day, mostly because everyone was sleeping. Well, except Martha who had the paper route Saturday morning, and me who a few hours later went into Marketplace Foods for my day in dairy and frozen foods. Jeff the store manager and Darla were a BIG help getting everything in with me!

While I was gone Saturday, Martha and the kids cleaned and vacuumed our living room and Sunday we spent after church mowing the lawn and cleaning the dining room so we can have a meal on the dining room table as opposed to sitting on our couch! And we did last night; we had sloppy joes with chips that I picked up after I got out of work. Also, Sarah got her new glasses adjusted to fit her face -- we've never found the other ones, darn it! And they're SOMEWHERE upstairs, they must be!

After dinner last night we went to McKinley Elementary School's playground -- the street we live on in Minot is on the school district dividing line between McKinley and Longfellow. No disrespect, but I'm thankful we chose for the kids to go to Longfellow! There's some revolving monkey bars (what Sarah called them) there and Jeffrey and I climbed up on one playset and "captained" the ship with the wheel and play ended with the kids shooting off fireworks by throwing tiny pebbles in the air.

I also learned what underdog means to a kid on a school playground (besides the dog Shoeshine -- or Shoeshine Boy, depending on whether we're going with the live action movie or the cartoon -- that's a superhero); apparently the first time you pull them back on the swing you run through the path they will take before they begin their downward arc. Martha did it once with Sarah, but I was hesitant to ... and on our way home we found Miguel's broken cell phone on the street.

It wasn't that broken as we were able to put it together last night before bed, and this morning Sarah turned it on and then I looked for its owner, figuring he'd be somewhere around town. I googled his name and found one person by Miguel's full name ... in Colorado. But still not impossible, for we've been getting a lot of people here from out of state here in Minot with the oil fields and nearly everywhere hiring from services to ships and shoes and sealing wax.

It was a bit of a fight to get the kids out and get them to Grandma's this morning, mainly because Sarah and Jeffrey tend to fight each other -- I REALLY can't wait for school to start! But on our way out I drove slower than usual and at the intersection before Broadway a car with Colorado license plates (like North Dakota they have front and back) drove up, and I asked the gentleman driving the car if he knew a Miguel (his last name).

I tried to ask that without sounding too racialist (unlike the current Trayvon claim in Ferguson, Missouri, but I digress) and understandably the driver was reluctant to admit whether he knew, but then I showed him the phone and the driver's wife said it's probably hers and then a young man in the back piped up "it's mine" and I handed the phone over. The driver shook my hand ("Thanks so much, man!") and when I related this story at Grandma's, both she and Margaret asked was there a reward.

I said "no", but really that didn't deserve a response. If we are seriously so wrapped up in ourselves that we can't do a simple act of kindness without expecting a reward, then we need to fail. I hope that Sarah and Jeffrey, on this 75th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz premiering in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (but apparently no one knows why), are learning more from that act of kindness of doing for others as we'd have do for us but expecting nothing in return. More from what I do than I say.

Great things are happening, David