We’re engulfed in a pile of stressful last minute stuff as we finalize our preparations to leave for England this Saturday. Most interesting bits:

• We still don’t have Abigail’s passport. The Passport Agency said that Kathy hadn’t signed one of the documents, but didn’t bother to tell us until several days after everybody else’s passports had been delivered. Kathy signed and FedExed the document back as soon as she got it, and the Passport Agency signed for it on Monday, where it has evidently sat in their mail room since. Today they finally decided to process it, but only after extorting another $60 for expedited service, even though we’re now outside of the six week window we were supposed to allow for their regular service. (We submitted Abigail’s application on May 27.) We should have it tomorrow if all goes well, at which point we’ll rest secure in the knowledge that the State Department is protecting the world from virulent eight-year-old-girl terror cells.
• Saskatchewan, our injured dove, seems fairly happy munching birdseed in the cage we’ve set aside for him. Unfortunately, his wing doesn’t seem to be improving. There’s an animal rescue organization in Austin that one of our friends tipped us off to, but there’s no way we’re going to have a chance to deliver the critter up there before we leave. Anybody want to act as a bird chauffer?
• Our front door was falling off the house, and several other outside doors had cracks that went all the way through — not the most energy efficient portal in 100 degree Texas summers. Kathy put her amazing bargain-shopping skills to use, and found some lovely doors with nice big glass elements, priced amazingly cheaply, at the Habitat for Humanity store in Austin. Our friend RJ came up from San Antonio yesterday to give us a hand installing them, and was amazed to see once he pulled off all the trim that the front door frame had only been secured with a single nail. “All I can figure is that somebody had put it in place temporarily, stabilized it with the nail, and forgot about it.” Thanks to Kathy and RJ’s efforts, the new doors are now in place, secured with many more nails than their predecessors, and look great. (The back door has such a big pane of glass in it that I keep walking into the living room and thinking someone’s left the door standing open.)

After all this, I’m rather looking forward to being on the plane, and not being able to do a dang thing about my to-do list for eight hours straight. We’ll be dragging an iBook along on the journey, so I’ll be updating the weblog whenever we have connectivity and can squeeze in the time.

Many thanks to Christina, Lori, and the other folks who have been extremely helpful as we’re getting these last things squared away!

Ok, Windows users, I’ve reencoded Laser Boy & Dog Girl vs. The Tooth Fairy for your viewing pleasure. While I was at it, I fixed the aspect ratio so that our children are no longer squished into oddly emaciated versions of themselves.

So, if you missed it the first time, you can grab the kids Magnum Opus right here.

The kids and I decided on Sunday night that we were going to make a movie. It started out as an Indiana Jones thing, but for lack of props morphed into something else entirely. After about 3 hours of filming and 5 hours of post-production work, we have more-or-less finished our premiere production:

Enjoy, and be sure to send fan mail to the actors.

Update: It would appear that the Windows version of Quicktime doesn’t yet support the codec I used to encode this. Sorry, Windows guys. I’ll see if I can’t get an updated file online before we split town this weekend.

Update 2: This should now work for Windows users as well.

Christina wrote up a very nice post on a little mini-adventure our family had last night. (Lions and lightning and fire, oh my!) Thanks for the look at the experience through another set of eyes, Christina!

Also, when I got home from work on Tuesday, I found a mourning dove with a broken wing hopping around our backyard. It was apparently fairly traumatized, as it wasn’t making particularly enthusiastic attempts to get away from me, only hopping slowly in the other direction when I’d get within 5 feet or so.

I grabbed a laundry basket and, after chasing it under an overturned canoe, was able to catch it, bring it inside, and give it some food and water. Later than evening, we cleaned out a cage we had around and moved it from the laundry basket into the more suitable home. The kids were very excited, and decided to christen it “Saskatchewan”, though none of them actually knew what the word meant.

Saskatchewan has gradually been getting stronger, and is considerably more fiesty now than when he arrived. We tried to devise a sling for the wing, but it kept slipping off, and we finally gave up. We hope to be able to let him go again in a week or two. (I am reluctant to bring him to the vet and spend money on an animal that has good odds of becoming kitty chow in our neighborhood anyway.)

My cousin Mary is very involved with student exchange programs up in Massachusetts where she lives. The organization she works with is trying hard to find some suitable host families for a passel of soviet honors students who are coming over to the states. With seven people already under our roof, we’re not ready to add more people here, but perhaps some of you folks might be.

Here’s Mary’s message:

I have just been told we are getting more scholarship students from the former Soviet Republics – know any other families who might be good candidates for hosting? Pacific Intercultural Exchange has people all over the country, so that’s why I ask for advice…We are desperate to place a bunch of kids within the next 3 weeks.

If you’re interested, you can reply to this message or email Mary directly at armstrong [dot] mary [at] comcast [dot] net.

I’m posting this message to act as a clearinghouse for info on the bombing in London. I’ll be updating it as I find out anything new.

• Chris and Becky were in Rugby at the time of the bombing, having left London the previous day. I don’t believe any of Becky’s extended family was affected.
• I’ve got an email in to the family with whom we’re supposed to be exchanging houses to verify that they’re all right. Update: they’re fine too, aside from traffic hassles
• Some helpful links: The Guardian’s Weblog; A Flickr Photo Pool; a Wikipedia article.

Message from Chris:

Seanno,

Thanks for the APB and concern. All OK. We were in London yesterday and on the Tube less than 12 hrs before this… Sobering…

It make my stomach tighten a little bit to think of my family being there soon. Sickness within to think of anything happening in a place where people wouldn’t be were it not for me… Kinda fighting back tears several times today…

Love,
Chris

and one from the family in England with whom we’ll be swapping houses:

Everything is fine, terrible traffic hassle but we get over it. I have been working in Southampton for the last 3 days (about 80 miles south) and J telephoned me to tell me everyone is ok. What do you do? you cannot let it change your life, as to do so is to give in…We are used to it with teh IRA in teh 80s and we get over it quickly, we are a chilled out people.

Thanks for the email

Barry writes an interesting piece on why vocalists are oft maligned, specifically among Jazz players, but also among the music community at large. While you’re there, he’s got a good bit on Independence Day: “…wherever you are on this globe, raise a toast to those remarkable people who daringly called some things self-evident that are not self-evident at all. We all owe them.” (Also bug him to get an XML feed set up!)

A happy Independence Day to you, my fellow Americans!

We enjoyed splashing around the Taylor’s (Lana’s folks) pool and eating to excess this afternoon, followed by an ascent to the top floor of the University library, where we reveled in an unparalleled view of the San Marcos fireworks (as well as whatever ordnance others were shooting off for many miles around). An interesting curiosity of the acoustics up there was that every explosion was transformed, instead of the indeterminate pitch of most fireworks, into a low Eb, as if the sound were that of a well-tuned drum. It was a great show this year — we really enjoyed it.

As if that weren’t enough, I also got to give Emily her first guitar lesson. She learned 3 chords — A, D, and E — and is thus 70% of the way to playing rock and roll.

Yesterday we had church at a campground along the San Marcos River rather than our usual place on the University campus. After the service was concluded, we all ate lunch, had watermelon, and went to play down in the nearby rapids for a couple of hours. We all had fun splashing around, skipping stones, and tossing a frisbee, though Maggie’s enjoyment was tempered a bit by fear when the current started taking her downstream against her will. (The fast moving water was only 20 feet long, and she’s a strong swimmer, so she was in no danger, but the loss of control unnerved her.)

There was a family also enjoying the rapids as well who played with our kids for a while. They had an ocean kayak, which the older woman who appeared to be heading the group was using to give the younger folks in the group a bit of boating instruction. I have been eager for quite a while to try out kayaking, so when she offered to let me have a go at it, I accepted instantly and quickly fell in love. The double-bladed paddle was much easier to adapt to than I’d anticipated, and I was able to make much better speed than I’d expected with the flat bottomed boat. I only got about five minutes on the water, but am eager to repeat the experience and to take some time to learn more boating skills.

That afternoon, the Grant Mazak Band played at Cheatham Street Warehouse. In spite of the fact that we didn’t have a sound man until about 30 minutes after we were supposed to start, we enjoyed a great crowd, including a number of people who hadn’t been to a show before. (Liam came early with me, and had managed to bilk various customers and staff at the bar out of $2.34 before I’d finished setting up my amp.)

Wow! A great response from Dad McMains, who has clearly thought through these issues more deeply and thoroughly than I have:

OK, I’ll jump in-

I had an interesting discusssion with my room mate on the India trip in March. He was a scientist from England who had worked on some intellectually challenging stuff like figuring out the DNA helix. His observation was that the more intellectual, scientific folk in England tended to be believers while US scientists semed to be more atheistic. We considered several possible reasons for this phenomenon including: the pragmatic, materialistic, and relativistic rationism that are unquestions assumptions of our intellectualism; the narcicssistic, ego-oriented psychology that is basic to our country’s character (better known as radical individualism); and the fact that the US has not experienced the limits of our own power the same way that Europe has, so we have not ever really believed that we needed others or anything outside ourselves (how about that war in Iraq?).

 

Dallas Willard argues in the Divine Conspiracy that our materialism has divorced God and the spiritual from our intellectual communities to the point that there are no professional training/education that seriously tries to integrate the spiritual reality/competence into their program. This is a reflection of our philosophical and political assumptions. We seperate church and state and we assume that the spiritual is not real. Materialistic assumptions about purposeless and meaninglessness are interesting but in and of themselves are just that, assumptions. There is no way to prove them. However, they do have consequences for our political, economic, education and political systems as well as our spiritual life.and in our society they lead to atheism.

 

I have a friend who is a minister who was asked when she was new in the ministry if she had lived long enough to suffer enough to know what grace was. At the time she did not know. When I talked with her, she had just lost her thirty-eight year-old husband to cancer and had two young children to raise by herself. She was ccertainly understanding the finiteness of the human condition and the need for grace, then.

 

In the Transforming Moment, James Loder argues that each of us have life defiining/changing moments in which we look into the pit ( when we are facing death for one reason or another) and have to decide if we can do it on our own or if we need something beyond ourselves to live for. Otherwise, Camus is right when he says that the only real philosophical question is why not commit suicide. Intellectually competent people, in my experience, often face their transforming moment later than others and they tend to live in their heads where the illusion of  self sufficiency and control is easier to maintain than in the real world. 

The reason that there are no atheists in foxholes is the same as the reason that ground zero is Holy Ground. War and 911 force us to look directly into the pit and to struggle with the meaning and purpose of life. The ultimate question opens us to the possibility that our self sufficiency is not enough and that the eternal/God might be needed to live at all, never mind to live well.

 

 A few thoughts from : Dad M