This morning I feel so full up of things to say that it’s hard for me to focus on one, but I’ll try. What with the looming crisis with North Korea, the Charlottesville tragedy, and my own media intake via audiobook and film, there’s just a lot of ground to cover. All, really, have to do with how we humans get along with each other–or don’t. Those pesky relationships!
I’ll start with the audiobook, because it focuses on the “Jerusalem” of human experience: those who are closest to us. (If you’re not familiar with the reference, it comes from the book of Acts in the Christian New Testament, in which the disciples are told to be witnesses of the Gospel “in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth.” So it’s a set of concentric circles, starting with where they are and moving out. I’ve heard many a sermon emphasizing that we need to build relationships and witness with our nearest and dearest first. If we haven’t done that, we have no business saying that we’re going out to the “uttermost parts.”)
We continue to make our way through the chaos at our new home. Last night Jim started putting up the beautiful new sliding panel blinds on the patio door. I couldn’t begin to tell you how much time we spent agonizing over how we wanted to have those done.
How I love Wednesdays, because that’s the day when the “
I ran out of books to read while we were on vacation, and since I didn’t have a phone or a laptop I had to make do with, like, actual printed books. We visited a great bookstore in Durham, NC, on our final weekend of the trip and this book was available at a reduced price. I’d seen references to it before and thought it would be an informative read, so I went ahead and grabbed it.
I’m always hearing snatches on the radio that intrigue me; sometimes I even follow up on them. One of my favorite sources for these snatches is “The TED Radio Hour” on NPR. As you may know, and as I’ve written before, TED Talks are a great source of short talks on a wide range of subjects. “TED” stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” but you can shoehorn almost any topic into those three areas. 
I almost always worry that we won’t have enough to do on our trips, a worry that Jim reminds me of when we arrive home after having crammed each day to the fullest. This trip was no different.
I didn’t get much writing done during the two weeks we were gone on our big drive-to-the-east coast/eat-barbecue/hike-in-the-Blue-Ridge-Mountains/attend-the-Charleston-family-reunion/deliver-Gideon-and-his-car-to-grad-school trip. One big lesson from the trip is, Nothing that you worry about ahead of time is too likely to happen, but something totally unexpected will inevitably crop up. So we had gotten on the road two weeks ago, with Gideon’s Subaru Outback packed to the gills. My big worry was the question of how we’d get him a mattress set for his new digs, something that ended up being supremely simple to do.
Do you ever finish a book with a feeling of regret because now you have to leave its world? That’s certainly happened to me many times, and my son said once when he was younger that he wished he wasn’t such a fast reader, since he sometimes didn’t want a book to end. Yesterday, because of a memory brought to mind of a phrase from a 1960’s detective novel, I loaded up the audiobook version of 