Fire

The short comings of the external combustion become evident.

Hello

Goodbye

Tacoma Glass

I guess my last post was too obscure for those I didn't have a 15 min phone conversation with, so here is a summer shot of some building I found in Tacoma.

Would it be so bad

If he was right? Bonus!

Remembering the desert

And institutional mythology.

Late autum

Long shadows and leaves

51 degrees and rain

I feel my shoulder blades are closing in on each other. The wind is pushing the weeds sideways and the engines of McChord are throwing 5o yard rooster-tails off the runway before they get in the air. Sunset is closing in on 4:30, and it is dark by 5. We have entered the long dark tunnel.

GEEEEK!

Geek + Music = Here.

Beyond the Horizon

Vision
Skill

My Cat's Breath Smells Like Cat Food

Some days it feels like the dragons are winning.

October

Golden light and crisp air
A train of leaves at our feet
My Autumn joy.

Crash Helmet

The cement moves faster than they think.

In the meme time

Hey, Kev here is my list. But instead of books, I am listing authors. Why? Just because.

• David
• Willard
• Lewis
• Piper
  
• Benedict
• Chesterton
• Peterson
• Rich Mullins
  
• Manning
• Unknown
  

Waiting at the doors.

I was able to amble through some of Seattle today and found this little guy. I wonder how long he has had to wait.

A Toast to Brave Tomfoolery

All the way my Savior leads me
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt His faithful mercies?
Who through life has been my guide
Heavenly peace, divinest comfort
Ere by faith in Him to dwell
For I know whate'er fall me
Jesus doeth all things well

All of the way my Savior leads me
And He cheers each winding path I tread
Gives me strength for every trial
And He feeds me with the living bread
And though my weary steps may falter
And my soul a-thirst may be
Gushing from a rock before me
Though a spirit joy I see

And all the way my Savior leads me
Oh, the fullness of His love
Perfect rest in me is promised
In my Father's house above
When my spirit clothed immortal
Wings it's flight through the realms of the day
This my song through endless ages
Jesus led me all the way

Solitaire

Our first kid that came to drop-in with a new set of marks on his board. It is great to have a new canvas to paint on with the simple application of grip tape.

In the Name of Love?

What a cruel way to tell someone how to play.

Wireless time

Means taking time to slow down to think.

Walking with haste

Getting to the foreign and exotic coffee shop in Sparks, NV I found a fellow walker.

She is not a coffee date.

She was the local coffee queen set to chalk on cement.

Old School Thought Processer

The boot time can not be beat, however, pre-caffeine up-load time can be a killer.

The empty chair.

Finding a new home is difficult.

Board Detail

Some of our Senior members have spent time refinishing their decks. Here is one example.

The Board Room

Our weekly board meeting finishes with a dinner. The members kill the food.

Slug bud.

I really thought that these guys had disappeared. It is a good thing they have not, many childhood memories are built around messing with these.

Best fire werks show

I can dig it.

My Inspiration

Fra Mauro, arm-chair geographer.

Treasure hunting

On the cheap. Take you friends and family on a little adventure without having to break the bank to do it.

Staub

Here is the latest nightstand addition. It is a good read, but not really what I thought it would be. The artist part doesn't come up till chapter 9.

Check this,

cool.

New place to play

If you are looking for a place to connect with kids and see what we do at YFC. Check this site out. You will find it on the link menu to the right as well.

Return of the Mug

Centralia was great. If you go to the Olympic Club, don't stay in any of the back rooms though. There are tracks of an active rail line that goes by regularly through the night. And the beds are smaller. Stay on the Tower Ave side of the building. That is the side with the king beds and closer proximity to the baths. Coffee is good.

Suggestible Behaviour

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth full sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

"I mean, I was just me."

19 minutes. Jodi Picoult

Centralia, the New Babymoon Destination

Back south to the Oly club for some uninterrupted time with my wife before #3 hits the street. I am looking forward to a cup at Santa Lucia Coffee Co. served with a hot date. It used to be that I would go to a hotel to get a nights sleep on a bed that was newer than 1975, but thanks to the recent purchase of a 2006 bed, I can strike that from the list.

A morning with foam

I got to spend time in Seattle last week. Here is a picture of my company for the morning.

This is not a life

Magritte had something.

A pretty flower out-side of the new place

I can't do much with my phone/camera but software can.

To Quote

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G. K. Chesterton
English author & mystery novelist (1874 - 1936)

Day 17

I never got to try Martin Henry coffee. They flipped to Forza. And I bet that you didn't know that lent is the time to pick up a new vice, like pipe smoking. See Dead Man's Pipes or Alt Smokers Pipes.

Day 1, 2007

Spending my afternoon in a new place, closer to the homestead. The steamer is 15 cents more than at Forza! I don't know about the coffee because I have 40+ days until I am going back on the bean. No caffeine or soda pop for now.

Thoughts in red from three inches

Taken at the Kickstand cafe in Tacoma WA

This just makes sense

"Mother Night" by Jim Harrison from Saving Daylight.

When you wake at three AM you don't think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said,
"If you want to understand mortality look at birds."
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

Ribbon for Type

I have been keeping a low profile as we are moving to the outskirts of LKWD. I don't think PKLD (Parkland) will be the new address for the photo site, but more thoughts from east county will happen.

Open Up and Say...Ahh!

Don't need nothin' but a good time
How can I resist
Ain't lookin' for nothin' but a good time
And it don't get better than this

I am sick. I have just finished a conversation with a former student. He was sharing his life with me since we last saw each other. During the conversation I learned that while I was trying to recruit him to be a camp counselor, he was sleeping with his girlfriend. Driving away I started to chew on this piece of information flipping through the radio dial and my ear stopped on the above song. I sang along at the top of my lungs. Then it hit me. I really don't have much room to judge.

Dark and shadowed corners

Lighting the first candle is scary and exciting. So little light leads to so many questions and so many bad conclusions.

My Den

I am not afraid of declaring goals, desires, or aims for the New Year. Here are a few that I might like to get done.

I would like to add to my collection some more PKD books. Last night I got a taste of square dancing, and I liked it. This next year I would like to try it some more. Learning to play chess, read music and get some basics of cooking down are also on the "list".

In all I have a few things that I would like to occupy some of my less structured moments.

I have missed the it, just like the Romans.

Safeway is open Christmas day. Standing in line the, it occurred to me that 20 yrs ago, December 25th was a dead day for shopping. Today had more of a "light Tuesday morning" feel. When "new atheist" don't worry about Christmas as a threat to their movement because it is just a secular holiday, and I am standing in line to get Coke for the party, I think maybe I have moved beyond the holy days and into a Roman empire like attitude. I have missed the Event of Time for a grab at the gimmes.

Generosity

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man

Down the throat

It is a special kind of trust that causes a person to take the word of someone else who is encouraging you to sign papers that will cause a dept that takes decades to pay off. With that, there is a special terror as well. It is a short trip from mortgage owner to homeless. And the following gives me cause to pause, death vow, really!


Word History: The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, "dead," and gage, "pledge." It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt. If the mortgagor does not, then the land pledged to the mortgagee as security for the debt "is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the [mortgagee]." This etymology, as understood by 17th-century attorneys, of the Old French term morgage, which we adopted, may well be correct. The term has been in English much longer than the 17th century, being first recorded in Middle English with the form morgage and the figurative sense "pledge" in a work written before 1393. (from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mortgage)

To the five of you who read this...

I present a reading list. Some I have read, others, I have not. That doesn't stop me from asking for it as a gift (those will be starred) and talking about them in sudden conversations in the toy section of Target.

1. *How (Not) to Speak to God- Marks of the Emerging Church, Peter Rollins*
2. *First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty Day Journey through the Ancient Great Canon, Fredrica Mathews-Green*
3. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
4. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
5. Naming the Elephant: World View as a Concept, James Sire
6. The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard
7. Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture, Michael Frost

Service

Service to others in the spirit of Jesus allows us the freedom of a humility that carries no burdens of "appearance." It lets us be what we are-simply a particularly lively piece of clay who,as servant of God, happens to be here now with the ability to do this good and needful thing for that other bit of clay there. The experience of active love freed up and flowing by faith through us on such occasions will safe guard us from innumerable pitfalls of the spiritual life.

Dallas Willard

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, says the Teacher.

4 a.m.

All my problems seem much worse.

Long silence

Joyeux Noel is a worthy Christmas movie.

The Idea , an extended quote:

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.' My remark was strictly pious and proper; confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comment the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

Leathal Faith

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
E.Bronte

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.

More thoughts in red

There is a little community several minutes south of LKWD tucked between Ft Lewis and Steilacoom named after the industrialist of the 19th century, DuPont. There is a little coffee place that is fighting the good fight against Mdme S. Taking it's cue from mythology as well, it has a flying horse as it's seal. I found myself here to get away from the deep wagon rutts I have so carefully made for myself. So here I sit.

One more time

Late May?

Firehouse

It is a beautiful October morning and I got to enjoy my Tuesday morning cappuccino. Mmmmm, habit.

To Quote

"Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God? We're encouraged somehow today to remove the essence of faith from the particulars of daily human life and relocate it in special times, places, and states of mind."




The Spirit of Disciplines, Dallas Willard

book and cup

Another cup o' mocha. I was reading in "the devil's cup" that the original name for coffee came from a town in what in now the nation of Yemen. I will take his word for it. I am hoping that for my birthday, I will be able to arrange a coffee tasting up in Seattle. I hear that there are one or two places to try the stuff.

And if you have not read the book "The Spirit of the Disciplines" by Dallas Willard, you should. If Dallas isn't your thing then Foster's book, "Celebration of Discipline" is the other "quick" read. And if you have a taste for a dead author, William Law's "A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life" is a rich challenge to live a life of repentance and joy.

Movies in Liquid

I am not a big fan of the wet. When I was a small child and easy to chill with a mist, I decided that water was not my friend for recreation. So when I tell people that surfing looks like a great idea, they look at me like I have forgotten that it involves a great deal of the wet (and salty). It is a kind of "are you forgetting something or are you just stupid" look. But I think what I really mean is I like the movies about surfing. So far my favorites have been The Endless Summer and Big Wednesday, which might be the obvious choices but, if you are going to be introduced to a topic, the basics are the best place to start.

Last night I saw "Step into Liquid" directed by Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown of Endless Summer. Wow, what is possible today with photography! Some of the most enchanting shots were inside the wave. It reminded me of lead crystal, cut into scalloped shapes. The blue of the water and sky as the fore and back ground and makes the surfer appear to be flying. It is a dazzling thing to watch.

The long silence

Over the last week, I have tried several times to log on and post. But the server/wi-fi/ether fairies have been against me. Hope I am back.

A better way to experience the game

Several posts back I was complaining that modern stadiums don't respect the game. Well, here is a place where you can watch in peace. Yes, I do enjoy watching the game.

Another one gone

I found this at the local park last weekend, and it caused me to pause. Scoot was a sometimes visitor in a youth group that I volunteered with. About a month ago he was shot in a sports bar just before closing time. He was the local pharmacist for the middle school set and I am sure he made enemies (he was shot accidentally by a friend) but he was always polite and quick with a smile. I am sorry that I never got to see him as a regular at the church (any of the four churches)that he walked passed everyday.

Late Night Mocha with Wi-Fi

What a great place. It is open 24hrs with smoking kids, angry G.I.s, angry women with loser boy-friends, on a warm August night. Thank you cafe culture.

A salute for you

In LKWD we have two major military installations, with lots of retired military as well. Outside City Hall we have a group of statues, including this one, to remember WWII.

NPR geek

YEA! If I am going to lose KEXP, then this is a great replacement. I like radio.

My Very Energetic Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune...Pluto?

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

Jerks.

These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth

Here is the last of the chalk art. I found this picture outside the Tacoma Art Museum. It's subject matter is dear to my heart.

As a jr. high student, I spent much of my time as a teacher's aide (suck-up). One of my favorite teachers was Mr. S. He would let me avoid all school assemblies and if I needed to school lunches. The one weak spot in this was my duty to clean the ferret cage, daily. This is when I discovered that ferrets are nasty little creatures that stink to un-godly hights. I am not a fan of the rodent family in general, but the idea of these little beasts as pets turns my stomach to this day. So I am not really sure why someone would pose long enough to hold a glorified rat. Enjoy the picture...

Bear sidewalk

 

Another picture from the sidewalk. I couldn't fit the whole think into the frame. Too bad there was a lot to it. 

My chalk Butterfly

I found this on a walking date with my wife at the University of Washington, Tacoma. The walk didn't have the effect I was looking for however: energy and conversation. We were drifty and distant. But I got some cool photos.

Freedom!

Thank you Utilikilts. My biggest frustration is waiting till I can afford another of these beauties.

Black Water Fawcett

I found a new coffee place in Tacoma. Tasty mocha with attractive foam art (I wish I got a picture of that), Cute art on the walls(lots of pink with cartoon characters), but bad wi-fi connection. This is a problem as they advertise as a wi-fi shop. I guess that is Tethered Swimming for me. However there are two other shops within one block of Black Water Cafe, so them's next.

Section 341 row 20 seat 6

The baseball stadium is not about the game. It is really just an amusment park with baseball as one attraction. I don't know why but this supprised me. I took my daughter and she sat there for the entire game. I had to make her go to the bathroom. She liked the game.

White for harvest

In the day, I would get all high and mighty self-righteous about this "cliche". Now it seems to be the clearest call I have heard in a while.

Not much coffee in Ol' Miss, but...

Sweet sweet mocha.

Going to pascagoula

hi-wireless

I will be taking some pix with my camera but I don't know if I want to post while I am there. Notes will be taken on this, my favorite wireless device. I am returning home on the 22nd of July.

Let's call it Perspective

I came into the shop today listening to Bowie. Life on Mars was on riding along with me in the back seat. He jumped into front shot-gun when I caught the chorus. It caught me in the thinking seat along with some of the books I have been reading. It is hip to talk about the poor and those in unjust lives. I hope that we take it beyond "hip" and make it a life.



Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

Back into the routine

And it feels really nice. I didn't know that some day I would find so much value and comfort in doing things regularly.

Steilacoom provides a quaint fireworks display year after year. Last night was enjoyable if not weak in the finale. It is a chance to meet with some friends and watch my youngest fall and stay asleep 5 minutes before the show.