Flight across

I went through my first puffing security scanner today. It let out small 'poofs' when I stood inside the machine that was shaped like a photo booth with 2 entry points. I asked one of the security guys what the deal was. He said it was blowing particles to be tested for explosives. He also said it measured my body fat. We laughed.

The first flight was uneventful. I'm in my second flight now, from Minneapolis. Got shuffled around on the plane because my row of 3 seats contained myself and 2 women with 2 babies.

The flight attendant was going to move one woman with her baby because there are only 4 oxygen masks per row. I volunteered to move instead; not that I have anything against being wedged in a window seat, confined by 2 babies.

I am now in another window seat with a very quiet, smaller baby. Me and the babies, man.

"Excellent ..."

Just so you know, I am not making fun of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). I seriously went to this page to find out how I could do EFT privately in public. Here's the method:

A Useful Method for "Private Tapping": "The technique works well on its own or if you use the Karate chop to do the setup followed by this technique.

Place your hands together as though praying (palms and extended fingers together) then arch your fingers so that just the finger tips of each hand are touching (your hands should look like two crabs). Keep the fingers quite strong so that they don't bend or wobble about and gently start to tap the finger tips together while doing your setup or reminder phrases.

This technique stimulates all the hand meridians at once and I find it is also useful as a general calming and energising method. It is pretty good as an initial first aid for shock and also if you are stuck (even though I'm stuck and don't know what to do next.....) I have used it on myself when I need inspiration with where to go next in an EFT session (You can also get away with using it in any situation without being embarrassed about looking weird, people just think it's a natural mannerism)." - Denis Jevon

Here's what it looks like:



But here's what it also looks like:



I read the description aloud to Rob and then showed him the hand position. We laughed pretty hard. Good way to start the day, I say.

Now, to do my reading for class this morning.

Eating right for your blood type

TYPEbase4: Blood Type Diet Food Values - This is a good place to browse, if you don't particularly feel like reading the whole book right now. Just click on a food and it tells you which blood type a food is beneficial or detrimental for.

I'm compiling a shopping list for Jerusalem Diet "fruit/veggie/nuts day" food. I figured that if we were going to eat only these things for one day a week we might as well make sure that we're getting the right ones for our blood type.

Day of rest

We're resting today. Roughly, that means that I'm still in my PJs. Rob is not but he just changed out of them about 1/2 hour ago. We've been play-testing a Neverwinter Nights module/world based on the Firefly universe this morning. The costumes and toolset are great. I can't get the heads and portraits for some reason but the quirks of this place override that. It really has an authentic Firefly feel to it! I threw together a character and Rob DM'ed me around. This image is a screenshot from one of the cities, Beaumonde. I like the gritty, Asian-influenced, fringe-society vibe. Tons of custom content.

Tonight, we're going to a dramatization of the Gospel of John, at a local Presbyterian church. This guy, Brad Sherrill, does this all over North America. This should be a stunning example of vernacular media.

The week in review

Not that it's been a mad week or anything but it certainly felt, well, full. Here's kind of what it looked like, after Monday:

• Tuesday - Class in the morning, homework and other Bible research in the afternoon. I had my Greek readings translation due in the morning. I was also getting together some concordance materials for my mother, for a Bible study she's going to be going to soon. There was a healing service in the evening that I went to as well.
• Wednesday - Found out that Amy hasn't been feeling optimal for a few weeks so we got our groceries in the afternoon and I whipped up my famous chicken soup, boiling the bones while I worked on homework for Thursday. I had choir practice at 4:15, putting the finishing touches on our Bach piece for Thursday night.
• Thursday - Turned into an unexpectedly hectic day. No class until 4:15 but it took almost all day to finish up my hand-in homework, due at class-time. My outline took me until about 1PM and then I was still 2 hours writing a summary of key context points. I was really pleased with my results ... until I got to class and heard the official answer. Turns out that I came to an entirely different conslusion from everyone else in the class, including (most critically) the prof. Yikes. Well, we see how he responds to my workings. I was pretty clear about how I came to the conclusions that I did. The class was even more jarring in light of the fact that I waited until 1.5 hours before class to get ready for the day and kind of accidentally crashed for about 45 minutes, only waking up 5 minutes before I absolutely had to leave for class. That meant being a little groggy and jittery when I got there, from running so soon after waking up. Class ended around 5:30, supper happened at 6:00 and I had to leave for chapel at 6:45 at the latest. That left me about 30 minutes to wash/dry my hair and make myself look nice for the special service. It was an appointment service for a new assistant-in-ministry for Region 9. I don't really understand all that but there were 5 (I think) bishops there and almost everyone was wearing a suit so it must have been a big deal. After chapel, we played Bible Scattergories at Amy and Beth's place. We had way too much fun.
• Friday - I spent the bulk of the day assessing our progress in the area of partnership development. I compiled statistics related to income and specific efforts made to develop partners and came up with a preliminary look at how those two intersect. I then tried to see how past experience might shape our efforts in the future, particularly our local efforts here. I also looked at what it might mean for a location of a fall tour, pre-Namibia. I then sent that off to LBT for assessment and input. I made creamed corn in the crockpot during all this, my sidedish for the BBQ. The BBQ was sparsely attended last night, not sure why. I know there was a party going on across the way from our apartment but we checked that out afterwards; it was sparsely attended as well. I don't know where everyone was. Perhaps they went away for the weekend.

Homework buddies

I also have people to do my homework with. For my translation for Greek Readings, I've worked with Amy a couple of times. She came over for lunch yesterday (Rob made crockpot peanut chicken) and we worked on translating Revelation 1:1-20 afterwards. We got about 13 verses in; good headway.



I'm supposed to meet with Amy and Beth later today to work on our translation for Pauline Studies. I think we don't actually have translating to do but we do have an outline and study of the immediate context due on Wednesday.

I also have about 75 pages of reading to do for tomorrow, some of it at the library. For at least part of today then I won't be visible on the couch for a very logical reason.

Church contacts

Last weekend, we met the pastor at Providence LC in Lexington. Yesterday, we met the pastor at Christus Victor LC here in Columbia. And one of my friends in the knitting group says she talked to her pastor about us and he's going to ask the board when they can have us speak. The ball is now rolling, so to speak.

Hobblies

There are a few extracurricular activities I picked up over the weekend:

• blog-modification - I had been satisfied with my pre-fab blog template until I saw the modifications that were possible, on other people's blogs. Note the changed background on this blog. It's a shot that Tscho took of me when we went to the Lavender Festival in Sequim back in 2002.
• knitting - There's a Sunday night knitting group and it's full of people that I enjoy so I thought I'd pick up knitting ... again. It's something I do for about a month once every decade. The time has come to do so again. It was fun. As people arrived, they'd ask each other what project they were working on. Responses included "prayer shawl" or "scarf for my brother" or "afghan". I took perverse pleasure in saying, "A strip". Yes, I am knitting a strip. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it when it's done but I do want the flexibility of it being something other than a scarf. I'm thinking that it may become a tube top.
• window cling design - Yes, you absolutely read that correctly. See, our front door is composed of 15 panes of glass, each 6.5 by 11 inches. That means that passers-by can see me sitting on the couch. Not that I'm paranoid but I'm afraid that people might notice that I'm always sitting on the couch. So, I've decided to make window clings that look like stained-glass for each pane, or as many as I can until the kid's window cling kit paint supply runs out. I made my first cling yesterday and, man, was it ever gratifying! The outline was a total mess (wouldn't come out of the tube evenly) but the filler paint was easy to use. Then, a mere 14 hours later, I had a fully functional window cling that I could just slap up onto the glass. Talk about quasi-instant gratification!

Confirmation Day

Went to the BBQ last night (I brought homemade creamed corn; a first for me), played a little NWN online afterwards with Rob and Ryan.

Today, LTSS is hosting a Confirmation Day and we volunteered to do music for the morning worship. It was outdoors on the porch of Beam Dorm, looked like about 200 youth/adults there. I djembed/sang, Rob played guitar. We did Here in this place, Taste and see and Steve Bell's Hear our prayer. It was cold but people still seemed pretty pumped. The music part went reasonably well. Each song had a rough spot. For Here in this place, we started with the wrong rhythm and had to restart a couple of measures in. Hear our prayer was barely audible in the great outdoors with no amplification. And it seemed as if no-one knew the tune for Taste and see. We got a few measures in and I stopped when I realized that people were looking at me in shock, like, "Where did this tune come from?" I asked if we were doing the tune in the bulletin. They said yes. I got all confused. Then I felt dumb for stopping. We tried again. Turns out that some people knew the chorus but not the verses. Ah well. Some people commented to us later that they liked the music so it mustn't have been a travesty. I felt like I was totally having some kind of a Napoleon Dynamite moment.

Later, we went to an iconography workshop. Perhaps more on that later but perhaps not; we have to go buy milk and wool today.

Undertone

This is the blog of a friend of ours in the Seattle area: Eric Go. (so-called because actually know another Eric G. in Seattle ... also know an Eric F.).

We "eagledy" await the release of his first album, and and his 24th as well. Though he'll be all raspy by then.

Happy Valentine's Day

From the work of Graham Roumieu, author of "Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir":

More reading

This is the coolest thing I read last night:

“The living or spoken Word was primary; the written word was secondary and often
no more than a record of the oral. In our age of millions of books, e-mail,
Internet chat rooms and the like, it is hard for us to grasp that physical text
was not primary in antiquity. Text was largely a tool of oral culture. This is
why the study of rhetoric in and of Paul’s letters is crucial. Paul wrote his
words so that they might be heard as persuasive, not merely seen to be
persuasive.” – The Paul Quest, Ben Witherington III, p93

Not everyone can see this

If you're reading this, you're one of the chosen few. I'm not able to read my own blog right now, I'm not sure why. I deleted the Screaming Banshee card post, just in case the Hallmark link was scragging things up.

Rob can read this, as can "Missions Mobilizer" (he commented last night). So, why then, oh, why can't I?

RCPL - Film & Sound

I'm making a little list of films at the library that I'll put a hold on, once I get a card.

War of the Worlds
The First Amendment Project
Mr & Mrs Smith
Joseph Campbell and the power of myth
Hair Show
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

And, get this: they have 8 copies of the entire Firefly series on DVD ... and nobody has it on hold! Sure, all 8 are checked out. They're also all due back next week. But no holds. Can you believe it?

Library holdings

Wow! They have multiple copies of Robert Jordan's Knife of Dreams in stock and there isn't even a waiting list!



They also have Tad Williams' Shadowmarch. 2 copies, neither checked out right now. What are people reading out here?

The Richland County Public Library

We're hoping to soon put a small chunk of time in our schedule to check out the local public library.

This Website Will Change Your Life

We stopped in at a Books-a-Million on the way home from church today and flicked through a book from Benrik called "This Book Will Change Your Life". We didn't buy the book but noted the website that goes with it. It's very odd but amusing. The book was more so.

The most eclectic thing this website does is arranged marriages.

Green card!

It arrived in Chicago this morning! Woohoo!

"Weren't you just a couple of weeks ago lamenting that it had been mailed in September and you never received it?" you may ask. This is true. But it arrived at my mailing address today.

Which means I'll have it in time for my INS appointment on March 1 ... in Seattle. I just found out yesterday that I've been given a fingerprinting appointment in Seattle as part of the citizenship process. The woman at the Congressman's office who looked into my missing green card and enquired about my citizenship application told me that they would probably make the appointment in Seattle as that is my current permanent address. She advised me not to try and make it any nearer to where I actually physically am as that could confuse matters and delay the processing of my application. So, the only choice that we need to make is whether:

• I'll fly alone to Seattle on February 28 and fly back on March 5
• Rob flies with me on the 28th and we fly back together on the weekend of March 12: March 6 is the beginning of our Spring Break.

The reason for debate on this is that we had talked about taking advantage of local features on Spring Break, not of the least of which is a Silent Retreat at Snail's Pace up in NC. We should make the call on it soon, so we can get decent price on a ticket or tickets, whichever is the case.

Stress test

I just got these in a forward and thought they were fun enough to share. I have no idea where they came from before they were forwarded to me. The text of the email says:

"The pictures attached are used to test the level of stress a person can handle. The slower the pictures move, the better your ability of handling stress. Alleged criminals that were tested see them spinning around madly; however, senior citizens and kids see them standing still.

None of these images are animated - they are perfectly still."

Nature of the Gospel

The coolest thing I've read tonight:

"[The gospel is not] a system of how people get saved. The announcement of the gospel results in people being saved … But ‘the gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus … When the herald makes a royal proclamation, he says ‘Nero (or whoever) has become emperor.’ He does not say ‘If you would like to have an experience of living under an emperor, you might care to try Nero.’ The proclamation is an authoritative summons to obedience – in Paul’s case, to what he calls ‘the obedience of faith’." - N.T. Wright

That's from this book:


What Saint Paul Really Said

Misses and Mystery

Yes, we have another site hosting some of our music; SoundClick. Rob has uploaded 4 of our tracks from the Simple Words album. You can either stream or download, depending on whether you want to listen now or later. Keep checking back to the site - Rob will upload more as time permits.


Fun graphic, eh?

Superbowl Sunday

We started Sunday out rather oddly. We were planning on going to a Lutheran church in Lexington, SC that I had been to last summer, Providence. However, we took a wrong turn somewhere (I didn't have the GPS out; it looked like a straight shot ...) and ended up miles away from the service, about 15 minutes into the service. Well, in our off-routing, we passed a sign for St Matthew's Lutheran Church and thought, hey, if we were going to be monstrously late anyway, might as well be somewhere we can actually get to soon. Of course we arrived at 11:15 to discover that they had a 10:30 service but I thought, "Ah ... let's go anyway."

So we did and got in right for the end of the sermon. People were very friendly and we met several folks after the service. I asked the pastor if he was related to one of my fellow seminarians (same last name and denomination) and it turns out that, yes: my fellow seminarian is the pastor's grandfather's double cousin's great-grandson. How's that for connections!

Went to watch the Superbowl with fellow seminarians last night. Seattle lost, even thought Rob and I were expressing interest in their progress vocally on occasion (cheering, I think that's the word). I wasn't sure what was going on at first so I developed sort of an inscrutable noise, one that could not be pegged as conveying either positive or negative emotion in relation to the event being "noised" at. Amy said I was getting really good at it, though she still had to prompt me as to when to use it on occasion.

This was my second Superbowl.

Dr. Mercola on Raw Milk

I'm just doing an online peek at what health folks have to say about raw milk. Dr. Mercola is a fan of it and I'm pretty much in line with most of what he says on health things.

Rise seen in sale of raw milk

I'm actually drinking raw milk right now. We went to a new grocery store yesterday that had some and I remembered that my naturopath friend in Chicago recommended it. So, we bought some. We got a smaller container of plain organic too, just in case raw milk didn't "agree" with us.

Paul, oh, Paul

[click on the flowchart to view the monstrous thing fullsize]

So, I get to the end of Philippians 3:2-14 where Paul is saying "Therefore, as many as (are) finished (ones), let us reckon this (way) and if y’all think anything different, even God will reveal this to you." And I'm thinking, "What way? You've just said a gazillion things; what way in particular are you wanting us to reckon? In a convoluted, rabbit trailing, ever expounding way?"

I whipped out the Inspiration program and began to chart. Lo and behold, there it was. Paul wants us to remember that we don't need the circumcision because we are the circumcision. The body of the text contains Paul's musings on why circumcision is not profitable in itself, on a "being in Christ: of Spirit and not of flesh" level, elaborating on what being the circumcision means.

After working on this text for 2 days, I had forgotten how it all strung together, how the passage began.

Happy Birthday, Dennis

Dennis and June on Perry's Memorial, originally uploaded by eshinee.

... and many more!

Time until our anniversary ticker

LaFemmeBonita.com

Isn't this a fun ticker? I wish I had one of these when my sisters were pregnant.

The Space Mice on SoundClick

Rob has music by The Space Mice , his imaginary electronic jazz band, available for free download at this site. I'm trying to get him to put all the stuff he's produced for the two of us on this site as well. I'll blog that when it happens.

Paul & Ali Federwitz ...Welcome!

Paul and Ali are official LBT missionaries now ... yay! Rob and I met Ali when we went with LBT to Guatemala back in August 2003. She was also exploring LBT and thinking about missions. Paul is from an LBT missionary family and so didn't need to come with us for the "overseas LBT experience".

We both got to meet with Ali and Paul again in February 2004 when we flew to Chicago for our service center visit to get to know the head office staff and have physical and psychological evaluations done. We went to dinner with them, talked about future plans. They're a fun couple, and like mirror images of ourselves. I'm a translation track introvert; Ali is more of a literacy-like extrovert. Rob's a Mac-user (read "not a computer guy"); Paul is an actual Windows-using computer guy. They're pregnant; we aren't. But Ali and I are shortish petite brunettes with shoulder-length hair and glasses. Paul and Rob are tall, bearded blondes.


Paul & Ali


Eshinee & Rob

See what I mean? I think it's uncanny.

Be sure to check out Paul & Ali 's website.

Learn Ancient Greek Grammar

link of the day: Learn Ancient Greek Grammar

I'm online ... at home! Yay! Thanks, Gene (the guy who manages the LTSS server)!

And now, for something completely different: lunch.