Psa. 118.12

They surrounded me like bees;
they blazed like a fire of thorns;
in the name of the LORD I cut them off!

(Proving anyone can ignore context.)

This Labor Day I have been doing a bit of the L word myself, helping to clean the house, run errands, and trim the hedges. And that is when I found the bees nest. Actually, I only found them after I had mostly finished the boxwood hedge. I had just begun leveling off the top when I thought I had been hit by a bit of flying flora. A moment (and 4 stings) later I realized I had hit a bees nest. Fortunately I am not allergic, but I do believe that many stings is starting to have a soporific effect on me.

Good night.

 

But not being able to consume anything meant an enforced fast. So upon emerging from this desert I decided to take the opportunity to step back from the beans of the devil. (And for the record, that dreck that Chris Tilling orders at Starbucks is not coffee. Chris, when the caramel, cream, foam, and sugar out weighs the coffee by 14 oz. then it is no longer “coffee.”)

So I am down to a mere 1/4 cup of coffee in the morning and no more throughout the day! I spend most of the day asleep, but I am almost free!

 

Am I the only child of the 70′s who was dressed up to look like a Hummel figurine?UPDATE: Since it appears I was not alone in this indignity, given the comments below, I thought I would share this image. I remember specifically depicting this scene on my grandmother’s fence. (The frog was a thing that held the sponge next to her sink.)  I believe this was all for some sort of contest which, so far as I know, we never won. 

 

I always have such mixed feelings about SBL. I have a great sense of inadequacy, see the recent Chronicle article, but I love the interaction. Still, it is always very humbling (a good thing of course) to be with so many people who are so much smarter and more knowledgeable than I.

Speaking of smarts and knowledge. Have you ever thought about the difference between these two concepts? I am probably a fairly clever person, but it feels like it takes a million repetitions to get something stuck in my brain. This is why I maintain that I would have benefitted greatly from the old and rejected teaching methods that emphasized drills and rote memorization. Knowledge is harder to come by, you have to go and seek it out and then you have to retain it. The next step is the hard bit, take that knowledge and do something useful with it. Once you have done that, being both knowledgeable and smart, you have broken through into genius.

Right now they are showing Transformers on the plane. I had such high hopes for that movie. I saw it on the way out to Phoenix two weeks ago. It was good, but not great. Have I mentioned that US Airways is a joke? I have to pay for my meal (skip that, gummy bears will do) and for the headset for the movie? C’mon. You screwed up my flights, have lost my luggage in my last two trips with you (leading to my now brining one carryon with a suit, etc. in it in addition to my bigger bag) and you want me to pay for my chicken salad sandwich?

Some other things I have learned today:

 

I happened upon this gorgeous church during my walkabout. They were rehearsing for a boys/mens choir recital that night. Wonderful acoustics in this church. It was burned down in 1905 (the church, not the choir) so the vast majority of it is rebuilt.

It was interesting to see the people who came in. One woman came, knelt in the pew in front of me, crossed herself, a presumably prayed for a few minutes then left. There were the requisite tourists, mostly Scandihovian as near as I could tell, but there was also the young businessman, in his late 20s, no coat just shirt and tie, who stopped in for a few minutes and then left. Was it devotion? TIme of prayer? A need for a cool stop on this rare 87 degree October day? Whatever it was, it made me feel better about humankind.

It was odd for me too, sitting there in suit and tie, having just been ordained a priest 70 hours earlier, yet there by happenstance, on a business trip for the uni. I was going to do afternoon prayer, but they had the old 1928 Book of Common Prayer in the pews and the words did not come fluently to me. The rabbis say that is a sure sign something is amiss. So I just enjoyed the music, took a few photos, and ambled down to the Apple Store.

(The image is best viewed at a larger size.)