Lorena has bugging me about cutting off my beard for quite awhile. I finally broke down and did it. As a reward she let me get an Indio mini-beer (6.42 fl. oz.). This is me sitting at my desk in the apartment living the high life and feeling like a Xoloitzcuintle (Mexican hairless dog).
Kelly and Christian took Lorena to eat at Pastis in New York City. I am so grateful for them. They have been confronted with some difficult obstacles with which I have been almost no help to them. We are all confused about the time and place or our existence, but here we are and the kids truly make their own decisions. I have every confidence they are on the path where God has taken them and they are still listening to Him. They are kind to their mother and they are kind to me, even though Lorena and I are at a different place and struggling with some of the same battles–we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. The very best we can do is pray and depend on God to lead them where He want them to be.
I am sorry that I am not with Lorena and the kids in New York City right now. This is Lorena’s first time there and she is ecstatic, mostly because of the kids, but also because New York City, for all its foibles and failures, is a magnificent place. The did a lot of things today, but the highlight was almost certainly the visit to MOMA and the spectacular Starry Night painting by Vincent Van Gogh which she has no seen, in person, and I have not. I cannot wait to go there myself. Tomorrow, Keith McNally’s equally spectacular Pastis Restaurant is on the schedule and it is killing me that I cannot be there.
This is the view from the top of Christian’s apartment building in Brooklyn, New York. Lorena flew in this afternoon to spend the week with him. Kelly is taking the train up from Washington, D.C. for the weekend. I am so sad that I cannot be there, too, but I have a business trip to Boston–that actually should be a phenomenal time with the Thrive Bioscience team. Honestly, it is very exciting to me that the kids have taken their own paths and are living in places that, while I might not have chosen to live, are spectacular, storied places. It is a chaotic time, not only in terms of the lives of our children, but in the world writ large. The kids are doing the best they know to do and, I believe, loving Christ and trying to do what God gives them to do.
This view is from the same location as the first image. My Finnish great grandparents arrived in America and were receive on Ellis Island (the island in the image) in the late 1800’s. This is a powerful image and one that evokes a sense of gratitude in me. God put me at the time and place that was in accord with His plan. And now Christian lives within view of where they arrive. I am humbled before God.
Dark, dark clouds are on the horizon. I hope they are actual and not metaphorical, too. Things just seem to be getting crazier and crazier. Politics, culture, and just life. It is a very interesting time to be alive. I need to keep reminding myself we were all put in this time and place by a higher power and to just go where I am taken and do what I can to be a help. God is in control and it all comes out OK in the end.
There was an assassination attempt yesterday on Donald Trump. I am writing this post, not so much to comment about it, but to provide a marker in the blog for when it happened. The first time something like this happened in my lifetime was in 1963 when I was eight years old at recess in the third grade at Harrison Elementary School in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Cottage Grove High School was up the hill from Harrison and we saw some high school kids running down the hill to talk to the teacher on recess duty. They told her that John F. Kennedy had been killed. The second was, of course, when the Twin Trade Towers in New York City were hit in 2001. We lived in Sherwood, Oregon at the time and I had just dropped my in-laws off at the airport to return to Monterrey, Mexico and was on my way to work. When I got to work, everyone was glued to a television watching the it all. I got there just in time to see the second tower get hit, live. This attempt might fit into a second category in terms of my awareness–not the gravity of the event, the assassin killed an innocent bystander in the audience. I remember where I was and what I was doing when Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981 (riding on a train from Boise to Denver with Curt Nichols) and when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986 (sitting in a dentist chair). Yesterday, Christian sent a note to Lorena that the President Trump had been shot. I was sitting at my desk working (on a Saturday) so I immediately pulled up X (Twitter) and spent the rest of the day following the events.
We are trying to sell our current house. We have been here over three years now and I was thinking there were fewer memories and events of note that we lived in this house than previous ones. Now that we will need to move in a short amount of time, we are feeling some nostalgia. We have had Thanksgivings with the kids, Lorena has learned to grow flowers in Texas (see the spectacular one in the image on the left), we have enjoyed watching rabbits, huge hares and Golden Eagles, and birds learning to fly (see the image at the top of baby birds sitting and flying on and off a porch beam, long horns, burrows, many, many cows, fantastically beautiful fields of Indian Paintbrush and Bluebonnets, and much more. We will very much miss this place if we ever sell it.
No offers yet, but today we had the third showing in the first three days the house has been on the market. We have been trying to figure out what we should do to be out of the way while waiting for people to view the house and we think we might have found it. There is a place in Godley named Row 171 that serves drinks, but no food. The hook is that people come there for the music and ambiance AND the scheduled food trucks. Tonight, there was some stellar quesadillas and a glass of wine. The music was a little loud for an old guy like me, but it was not bad music. The feeling was that kind of feeling you can only get in a small town in America of a high school ambiance, but with beer, wine, and well drinks. You kind of expect to see Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite to walk by in his high school letter jacket.
Lorena did a no-look cell-phone capture of the total eclipse and this is what she got! Notice the star (or planet–might be Venus) down and to the right from the sun in the image. If that is not enough she has gotten Wordle right in three tries for the last two days.
She is definitely putting that hard earned Associate of Arts degree to work. Honestly, for an English speaker of a language she uses frequently, but only for a very limited percentage of all of her communication (we speak Spanish at home), she has an amazing command of the language. She is easily as good at English as I am at Spanish. My Spanish is so good that when I order something at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, the workers might think I am from Mexico, but they always ask me where I am from because they know my accent is not theirs, but they don’t mistake me for a gringo. How impressive is that!?!!
We found out today that the grandfather of Omar, one of our most dear friends in Mexico fought in the Mexican revolution as a Carrancista. If you do not know what that is, it is okay. You can read a little about it here. He enlisted in the forces of Pancho Villa (not a nice man) when he was very young–maybe just a boy. That war was brutal. My thesis adviser for my Masters degree at University of Texas at El Paso told me that one out of every five people in Mexico lost their life during the war. I am not sure that is true and there is not a consensus on how many actually did, but there is a consensus on the fact that a LOT of people died. The sad part is that is that the influenza epidemic of 1918 took even more people. We are looking forward to the next time we can get together with Omar to ask him about all this.
This is the stream/drainage ditch that runs beside our house. It only fills up when we have a big rain storm. Those storms are semi-frequent events during parts of year in our part of Texas. We were excited about it because everything turns green and the bluebonnets start to bloom when there is rain in the spring. In thinking about this, I realize I have turned into my parents and grandparents. We watch weather, birds, the price of gas and steaks and, more than just about anything else, we cherish the times when we get to meet with people.
Lorena and I got to do that at lunch today. The elder of the church we used to attend came into our favorite restaurant in Granbury with his wife and a couple of other friends. We had a wonderful lunch and enjoyed just being together. I am not sure if I want life to get more exciting than that, but I DO want to spend more time with people of good will… And be one of those people of good will myself.
Lorena ran down to the Spring Market in our town to buy a few things and fill the tank up with gas. She came home all a flutter with the really big news that the gas kiosks where we get gas had been replaced with new and completely amazing digital electronics. They even added a supply of plastic gloves so you no longer have to touch anything that the previous people have touched. Thrilling beyond belief!!!
On the other hand, we have to admit that our little town has been upping its game fairly dramatically, even in the face of all the complaints of the local citizenry that the town government is just nuts. In one sense, we agree with them–they make every attempt to fund the local government schools much more than they deserve and/or can reasonably use to provide an education to the local, young minds full of mush. All the leftover, which is a lot goes to sports and stupid stuff like marching bands. What a waste. At least, the voting public had the good sense to turn down the latest bond issue to make the already, college quality sports facility up to an NFL/NBA/MLB quality level.
Lorena and I have been living according to an ad hoc schedule since when I finished my degree back in December. We have been at loose ends trying to figure out what to do next. We have finished almost all we set out to accomplish since we arrived in Texas almost three years ago. The only thing left is the thing that is, mostly, keeping us in Texas–that is the finishing of the house on the hill to the point where we can live in it well. We are still six or so months away from that. By that time, we will be close to the end of the year and time to receive family for the holidays, so we are thinking it does not make sense to do something else until early 2025. The election will have occurred by then and either Trump will be president or it will have been stolen again. Either way, that will be at least a little bit of an indicator about what we might want to do and where we might want to live.
I said all that to say that we have decided to try to start living a more ordered life again. To that end, we went out today after our worship meeting and bought fixing for a fine Sunday dinner of pork loin and vegetables. That is one of the little things we hope to continue to do through this period of uncertainty. We want to add other regularities like that to our lives.
We have been in our current neighborhood for just about three years now. Our next door neighbor, Darrell was a good friend during our time here, helping us out with one thing or another and reminding us it was time to do some seasonal maintenance or adjustments, always ready to stop and chat about local and national politics-we had similar ideas about most stuff. We were shocked when our neighbor across the street knocked on our door after church this morning to tell us that Darrell had passed away. It was a sudden and totally unexpected event for everyone. Lorena and I talked about the relative unimportance of whole swaths of our lives. Darrell will be missed. He was a good friend and a good neighbor.
It always stinks to not have Lorena here with me, but if she is not with me, it is all OK if she can be with one of the kids. Christian and Lorena were going to take another shot at going to a Trump rally in New Hampshire today, but when they went out to take the train to a restaurant, then had more rational thoughts, so the turned around and went home. And they decided that if they could not even get to a restaurant because of the cold, why would it make any sense to go to New Hampshire to stand in line out in the cold for hours to get into the Trump rally. Instead, they bought a soup bone, some beef stew meat, vegetables, and little corn-on-the-cobs, went home and made some Mexican caldo. That was the best idea they had all day. The photo above is of Boston across the solidly frozen Charles River.
Christian and Lorena got tickets for the Trump rally today in Manchester, NH, drove up there from Cambridge (only about an hour drive), saw the massive lines to get in, checked the temperature (14° F), and decided to try again tomorrow at the Concord, NH rally. Lorena has been a huge Trump fan since the very beginning. They were pretty sad, but there was a good chance that the would have stood in line for several hours and still not been able to get in. I have gotten a lot less political with age. More and more, I am buying into the “not my circus, not my monkeys” motif and I think it seems to serve me well. It is very much in the spirit of “render unto Caesar” and the whole concept behind Mere Christianity. Still, I do like the Donald and would love to see him poke the establishment in the eye.
Our insanely talented (and creative) friend Stacey knitted these two gnomes for our fireplace. They are PERFECT! We had no idea they would be so good. They had to be a ton of work and that they were hand-knitted by one of our favorite people in the world made them even better. They just showed up in the mail. Incredibly thoughtful.
Today is a travel day for Lorena and I. I am headed for a very short start in Portland to meet with my research team for my day job, spend a long overdue evening with my siblings and to take my friend Bryan to dinner to catch up. I am scheduled to be home before the end of the weekend. Lorena, for her part is doing something way cooler, both in terms of temperature and coolness. She is flying to Boston to accompany Christian to a Donald Trump rally in New Hampshire leading up to the primary. Will report on this as soon as I have news.
We woke up to snow on the ground with a temperature of 10° Fahrenheit and a wind-chill factor taking it down to -5°. The temperature was in the forecast, but the snow was not. Even this small amount of snow makes driving crazy in this part of the world so we are planning to stay in the house for the next couple of days and hope for warm enough weather that the roads are clear for us to go to the airport for an upcoming trip. Since today is a day off from work (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), it will be really nice to sit around with a fire in the fireplace, drink coffee, read books, and work on hobby projects with no compulsory work requirements. I think we even have some ribeye left in the fridge! We just hope the electricity stays on.
Lorena and I drove into Granbury yesterday for lunch. It was a spectacularly beautiful day. After lunch, we drove over to the public library and visited the bookstore there. I bought a couple of audio books on CD for $6 each and, on a whim, bought a couple of Louis L’Amour books because I had not read one for decades and thought it might be fun. Lorena wanted to do some antiquing, so she dropped me off at the Oz Coffee Bar right off the historic town square. I sat there for a couple of hours, read my book, drank my coffee, and enjoyed the day. It truly was relaxing. After I had been there for awhile, an old guy (maybe my age) showed up, just another customer, and proceeded play the piano right beside me and sing. He was there for maybe half an hour, was very talented, and everyone in the place applauded and was sad when he stopped.
Month 2 WEIGHT: 203.7 lbs. BMI: 31.9
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