Snow!

The campus library in all its quarter-inch-of-snow-covered glory.

Last night was our first snow of the season. We've had occasional flurries since October, but this was the first time you could walk out and see enough white fluffy stuff floating around you and piling up on the ground to be quite sure that This Is Snow. We didn't get much accumulation (see picture), but then that's the story of snowfalls in this area. Just having snow in November was an unexpected pleasure: normally we don't even look for snow until next month. Most of it had melted by the time we got out of classes, but at least I got to throw a snowball today!

Christian Prayer Group Assaulted Over Prop 8

A mob of homosexuals . . . assaulted a group of Christians praying together in the city's Castro District last week, in apparent retaliation for the recent defeat of homosexual marriage in California.

The Christians, a group of Evangelical Protestants who regularly go to the predominantly homosexual Castro District to sing songs and pray with passers-by, say they were holding hands and singing "Amazing Grace" when a angry mob began to shove and kick them, steal their belongings, pour hot coffee on their faces, and . . . assault them.

"We'd been there for a couple of nights just singing worship songs, people would come up and stand with us and join us, we got to pray for some people," said one participant in an account filmed at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (YouTube interview), "but on Friday night it just was different."

The rest of the article can be read here. Parental discretion is advised with both the article and, presumably, the YouTube video of the incident, which I haven't watched.

The incident is eerily reminiscent of Genesis 9.

Trim

I've been getting frustrated with my hair lately - too many tangles. So I decided to give myself a trim. Looking in the bathroom mirror, I cut off about six inches. I actually didn't too badly, although a friend helped even it up a little later.

Not content with that, I did Miss M's. She loves it!
I think it gives her a Dakota Fanning kind of look.

I told her I wanted to see the back,
and she turned around and struck a pose!
Those are leaves in the hood of her jacket;
she was using the hood as a pocket.

Five Years Old!

Miss M had her fifth birthday while we were out of town. So we took her to the park, bought a cake and a local grocery store, and had hot chocolate at Dunkin Donuts.



There are a few more pictures here.

November

The last flames of fall

It's fitting that the first road sign I saw, on my way to church this morning, bore the name Winter Street. Today was one of the bleakest days we've had all season: cold grey sky with wintry clouds, and a nipping wind. Yet there was a beauty even in the bleakness. The trees, which just a week ago were thick with red and yellow, have dropped the end-of-season finery, and their branches are beginning to show. It's lovely and a little strange to see their shapes again. Walking along, wrapped in coat and scarf, I could almost have said, "I have looked on beauty bare," despite all Millay says to the contrary. This is the time of year when the days begins to grow dark, and home starts looking a little brighter and warmer because of it. And as the weather turns colder and more grey, the holidays begin to glow like candles in the distance, brightening the whole calendar. I've been having stray thoughts of potatoes and turkey and apple pie, Lantern Waste and beavers' dams and hot marmalade roll; and more than once I've caught myself humming carols. The time isn't far off, folks. There's a new season just around the corner. Let's begin it with thanksgiving.

Abortion Article

This was posted on a message board; I want to save it for future reference. I'm just including a quote from near the beginning, but the whole article is enlightening.

Obama's Abortion Extremism

"... According to the standard argument for the distinction between these labels, nobody is pro-abortion. Everybody would prefer a world without abortions. After all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an abortion? But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby would present significant problems for them. So even if abortion is not medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers' money.
The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people - Thomas Jefferson was one - reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn't think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.
Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as 'pro-choice'? Of course we would not."

I'll Let Snopes.com Sort This One Out

Update:

Snopes.com has posted about this; not quite as helpful as I had hoped. They say, yes, it's true, but coincidences with lottery numbers aren't unheard of. I actually expected them to say it was a hoax.

----------------------------------------

I saw this on a message board and looked it up on the link; the site takes you to the Illinois Lottery site; you have to click on archived numbers for Nov 5 to see the numbers.

I'll be waiting for Snopes.com before I believe it.

_________________________

WEDNESDAY, November 5th-- the day that the official announcmemt went out as to who had won the Presidency, the winning lotto numbers for the evening draw IN THE STATE OF ILLINOIS were:

666

Look it up yourself.

http://www.illinoislottery.com/numbers.asp

The meaning of grace

(From The Time Garden by Edward Eager. The setting: Jack, Eliza, Roger, and Ann travel back in time to the days of the Revolution with the help of the magical Natterjack. Having mustered the minutemen, caused an Indian massacre, and nearly gotten themselves killed, they return to the Natterjack with guilty consciences for all the mayhem they've caused. Oh, and the Natterjack is a Cockney Natterjack, you should know, so 'e 'as trouble with 'is haitches.)

     "We've been thinking now," said Ann. "And I've been wondering. About those people."
     And she told the Natterjack her worries about the Indian massacre.
     The Natterjack was silent in thought. Then it spoke. "I 'ave 'eard," it said, "that the h'evil that men do lives after them..."
     " 'The good is oft interred with their bones,' " Ann finished the quotation. Then a look of horror came over her face. "Do you mean the bad things we do last, and the good ones don't?"
     "That wouldn't be fair," said Roger.
     "It would be just like magic, though," said Eliza, "always thwarting us!"
     "I was thinking," said the Natterjack, "more the other way round."
     "You mean...?" Roger puzzled it out. "You mean the mistakes we make come out of the adventure with us, and don't do any harm, but the good things we do stay buried in the past, and turn real?"
     "That," said the Natterjack, "is the general h'idea."

The architecture of the world brought to your computer screen

I was searching for pictures of Byzantine buildings (for my humanities class) when I stumbled across this site. Stunning 360-degree virtual-reality panoramas of historic buildings around the world, from the Parthenon to Santa Croce to Mont Saint Michel. It's going to be difficult to finish my homework now...

Flowers of Hawai'i

I only know what three of these are; some day I'll look up the others.

Hybiscus

Red Ginger; this was in a garden at the Hanalei shopping area.

These star flowers grow on bushes that were planted all over around at a hotel we stayed at in Kaua'i.

Taken along the sidewalk by the public restroom at the Diamondhead gravesite.

In the garden by Queen Emma's summer palace.

Airport parking lot.

Plumeria - these grow on trees all over; they must be native.