I have been very sick since Saturday. I thought it was one illness, which is difficult enough, but yesterday we found out that something else is wrong as well, possibly some kind of viral infection. I won’t blog for awhile.
I was glad to note via Slashdot today that I am not the only one sick of the Web 2.0 term. I am equally disenchanted with the corollary Library 2.0 term. It may look slick and “with it” especially in proposals for conferences and the like, but as a way of describing recent developments, it leaves me cold. Let’s focus on user needs, on bringing the library to the user’s space (not just the other way around), on building a two way dialogue with users, of making library data work harder and in multiple ways. But please, don’t categorize all of this under the Library 2.0 meme any more.
This has been a stressful week. I have not felt up to writing blog entries for a while. On Wednesday when temperatures plummeted and we had some snow, we discovered that our furnace was broken. We were without heat until Thursday afternoon, when the repair man was able to replace the heat exchanger that had a crack in it. We made it through ok, but this incident helped us to remember to be thankful for things we often take for granted.
Cohen, Brinley, and Tristan have been struggling with chest colds for a couple of weeks now. ‘Course the cold temps didn’t help but they seem to be getting over it. After about 10 days of taking muscle relaxant and an anti-inflammatory (naproxen) to cope with the severe headaches I’ve been having, I was glad to report to my doctor that the medication had helped. This vindicated his diagnosis, that the headaches are caused by muscle tension. He said that many people who think they have migraines actually have headaches caused by muscle tension. The pain profile from muscle tension headaches is apparently indistinguishable from that of migraines. Anyway, my doctor prescribed physical therapy for 4-6 weeks and I had two sessions already. In addition to the therapy sessions I am supposed to do exercises three times a day. I think this treatment is helping.
On Tuesday a.m., Michele discovered that our dog, Maddie, had gotten ahold of an avocado pit and appeared to have eaten half of it. She noticed that Maddie had thrown up and decided to look up information about the situation on the Internet. She discovered that avocado pits are toxic to dogs, so we called a vet and asked for advice. The vet urged us to get her to the clinic as soon as possible. $160 later we thankfully found out that she was ok. It was a pretty stressful day for Michele since she had to go by herself with all three little kids, who were quite sick and crabby to boot.
Last night as I was going to the bus to start my commute home from work, I felt in my coat pocket and realized that I had lost my monthly train and bus pass (an expensive loss). I had to run back to my office to get enough money for the train and bus fares and in the meantime, missed the connecting bus. Unfortunately by the time I got to the Metra station, all trains outbound from Chicago were running up to 45 minutes late due to signal problems. I left work shortly after 5p and didn’t get home ’til after 7p.
Well, we’ve had quite a time of late. First of all, Michele and the kids were gone all last week, staying with her parents in the Chicago area. I drove up there Good Friday to stay the weekend and then drive them back home. Michele had another seizure or trembling episode the night before, this time, pretty severe.
Saturday evening, I started feeling sick. I began throwing up a lot, and spent the rest of the weekend mostly in bed with nausea, a severe headache, and general weakness. I’m feeling better now but only about 50% of normal. Thankfully, we made it home ok today. Michele had another episode on the way home, and I was still not well the whole trip. When we got home around 3p local time, I lay down for a while and woke up feeling a bit better.
I’m thankful that I have this week off of work, for Spring Break. Hopefully we’ll do better this week than we did on Easter weekend!
Remember me? Yeah, I’ve not been blogging here for a long, long time. Life has been quite difficult of late. Michele and the kids have been sick for much of the past three weeks. Michele’s health in particular is concerning because in addition to getting through the cold/flu situation, she has been having inexplicable seizures. The most severe episode lasted more than two hours and left her pretty much incapacitated for a long time. I have not been at work for most of this time — thank goodness I have that flexibility.
One of the things that has been very challenging for Michele and me is finding a new church home, a place where we feel connected and part of a community. We tried a local church for much of the past two and a half years and it simply wasn’t working. Although many people there showed kindness to us, which we really appreciated, we never felt integrated or part of the place. Instead, we tended to feel like outsiders. We also did not feel “connected” during worship time, mainly because we were too distracted by the music (well, not so much the music itself, but the way in which it was played and/or sung). Instead of helping us focus attention on God, worship time tended to invoke frustration. We have tried many other churches in the area with little sense of success (if that’s the right word to use). As a result, we have not been very motivated to make the effort to go out on Sunday morning to attend church. Compounding the problem has been the natural course of events that tends to prevent us from getting out: one or more children are sick, one of us is sick, we had little sleep the night before, or we are away from home visiting one side of the family or the other. Then, too, we are not a typical family. When we look for or try to fit in with a church community, it seems that we don’t fit with the newly married set, we don’t fit with the very young children set, etc. etc. We have a 12 year old plus three children, ages three and under.
This is a serious problem and we have felt quite isolated for a long time. More recently we have been greatly encouraged by attending a church in a nearby city that’s about a half hour away. Unlike other places we’ve been, we don’t feel out of place there. The worship time is well done and truly points us Godward. The content of the sermons is thought-provoking and timely. Doctrinally, we are in agreement with the church’s positions. We have only been there about four times, but each time I go, I come away with several impressions of scripture and a sense of being spiritually refreshed. We struggle a bit with the kids in the sense of getting them used to going on their own to designated rooms. Brinley usually cries a lot and Tristan sometimes just refuses to join his class. Yesterday, though, everything worked out well. Even Cohen behaved! He slept through most of the service. Talk about an answer to many fervent prayers from Michele and me! Now we just hope (and pray) for personal connections and the ability to make friends with others there.
The sermon yesterday was on Daniel chapter 3 and the main focus was on integrity. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are some of the strongest examples of integrity in the face of great, life-threatening danger that are to be found anywhere in the Bible. Are we ready to truly stand for what we believe? It made me think. We live in a highly pluralistic society where there is very real and increasing hostility to the Christian faith, even in a supposedly “Christian” (I use the quotes on purpose) country like the USA. Those who put Christ first are viewed as intolerant, bigoted, even sometimes racist. I would like to say that I am unaffected by this climate, but I’m not. It is a source of great concern to me, particularly in my interactions professionally as a librarian. The issue of open hostility to Christianity is even more obvious in this election year. I don’t know if George Bush truly is a Christ-follower–only God knows for sure–but he professes to be one. If he is, I am very thankful for that, even if there are many elements of his administration and policies with which I am in disagreement. My point is that his openness about his faith is a huge source of suspicion, fear, and downright hatred in today’s world. I think this is a “sign of the times” and that this atmosphere will only get worse. I am not big on Biblical prophecy but it seems pretty clear to me that what I see happening around me is what is predicted in scripture. I think of part of Romans 1:21-32 that says “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened…since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.”
Today is a gorgeous day, a little on the hot side for my liking, but still, gorgeous. I had to run down to Muncie for a doctor appointment and also was able to get a haircut, at last. I feel like a new man 
Last night I had a good talk with my brother. One of the things we commiserated over was the incredibly ugly stuff that’s been happening in Iraq with regard to the abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops. So many people in evangelical Christendom have this twisted belief, and it’s especially strong in the South where my brother lives, that the U.S. is some kind of promised land, morally righteous, a Christian nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. This country is morally bankrupt and nothing could have demonstrated that more blatantly than the inexcusable actions in that prison in Baghdad. This is the direct result of the extremely self-focused, there-is-no-truth society that is our country. We as a society have decided that everything is relative, what’s right for you is fine but may not be right for me. The sick thing is, and this is not an exaggeration, the Church is no different than the world in this regard. You look at Christians today and there is hardly any perceptible difference in the way they live their lives than those who reject God. It makes me sick, especially as I see this holds true too often for myself. It’s no wonder that many adherents of Islam despise the West in general and the U.S. in particular. I am totally against their doctrine and theology but at least they have a measure of piety and faithfulness to their beliefs.
There is no hope in military might, in ANY man-made government, in “good feelings,” and especially in the greatest disease of our time, the word “tolerance,” which sounds great but really means there is no right and wrong and that we have no right to discern the difference. What we see around us in the U.S., supposedly the “light of the world,” at least in many people’s eyes, is the best that we as humankind can achieve. Obviously, it’s a failure. The answer to our failure lies only in Jesus Christ. I can’t wait for the day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. That will happen, it’s a promise.
Last night after we got home from a shopping trip to Kokomo, we turned on the TV and there was a program on PBS called “Great Streets.” Its focus was on The Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. Emmylou Harris took viewers on a tour of this famous area in one of the most beautiful cities in the world (my opinion). The program was very well done and I was thrilled to watch it as it brought back memories of my two visits to Edinburgh, once in 1989, and again in 2001. One of the highlights was the National Library of Scotland. Michele and Keegan were sick of hearing me exclaim “Look, I was there at that shop or such and such a place…” I’d dearly love to take them all with me on a trip back to Scotland, a place that has special meaning for me. My grandfather emigrated from Scotland to the U.S. in the ’20s after serving as a cook on fishing boats in the North Sea. I’d love to show my children the home in Macduff where my grandfather, Stanley McCallum, was born and raised. There is a wild, harsh beauty to Scotland, especially in the area called the Moray Firth, where my grandfather came from.
The flu finally caught up with me and Michele yesterday. Thank goodness the worst part was over after a matter of about seven hours. We’re both still feeling weak and I am bothered by a continuous headache but otherwise, we feel much better. The children all seem to be doing well, also, although caring for them all while we were feeling that sick was a huge challenge. This period of my life reminds me of stories my mother tells of the short (18 months) time when we lived in Detroit and I was only about three or four years old. This was from 1970-71. She said that it just seemed like everything went wrong during that time and we kids were very sick a lot of the time. I don’t remember much of that except for the episode of chicken pox that went through all seven of us, down to me, the youngest. During that time, Detroit experienced race riots, my father nearly lost his eye in a welding accident, and my oldest brother, then only about 11 or 12 years old, was nearly strangled to death by a neighborhood kid while he was delivering newspapers. I can remember seeing the black plumes of smoke from the rioting from the front door of our house.
One incident I vividly recall is coming home from church one day on one of the major highways. Cars were stopped in a traffic jam due to everyone gawking at a bad accident. A car had somehow flipped onto its roof. When we got near enough to see what was going on, the car burst into flames. My dad jumped out of the car and ran over to the burning car to see if anyone was inside. The driver was still inside, unconscious or something, and my dad, with the help of another guy, managed to drag him out. He was badly burned but they saved his life. Meanwhile, I was terrified that my dad would die so as soon as he jumped out of the car, out I jumped, too, dodging cars and running up the embankment toward him. Fortunately one of my older brothers ran after me, grabbed me, and took me back to our car.
Another time, also while we lived in Detroit, I can distinctly remember my mother taking us somewhere when we got caught in a shootout between some crooks and a police squad. Bullets were flying everywhere and I remember my mother yelling, “Hit the floorboards!!!” I remember scrunching down as far as I could into the floor of our station wagon.
I think these kinds of days are like the days that Anne Shirley (of Anne of Green Gables fame) used to call “Jonah Days.” Our house is even more of a mess than usual and I feel even further behind in just about every aspect of my life. Sigh.
Now that I’m married and a father of four lovely children, it is increasingly difficult (read: impossible) to ever see a movie in the theater. Michele and I don’t get any time to ourselves, period, let alone the opportunity to go out and see a new movie. One of the movies I most wanted to see last year in the theater was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World because I’m a big fan of the books on which the movie is based (I think I’ve read them all), and I’m also a big history buff when it comes to the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars in the early part of the 19th century.
When Michele and the kids (minus Tristan, who was sick) went to Sam’s Club yesterday, she bought the DVD, which just came out last week, I think. Last night I had a chance to watch about half of the movie. Cinematically it’s great; the details and design are very good. I’m not at all a fan of Russell Crowe and think there are others who could have done a better job at portraying Captain Aubrey. An actor that comes immediately to my mind is Ciarán Hinds, for example. He’d make a great Captain Aubrey. Anyway, I’ve read some of the criticisms of the plot in movie reviews and I can see why some people are rather critical of it. But I still have enjoyed it and look forward to finishing the rest of the movie soon.
I also am a huge fan of Ioan Gruffudd and the Horatio Hornblower series on A&E. I now have the complete collection on DVD but haven’t had a chance to watch them all yet. It’s kinda hard to do that when you’ve got little kids!