if life gives you fire hydrants...

I am eating lunch. After that, I will go outside and make a 7 by 10 foot lawn around the oh-so- inconveniently-placed fire hydrant in my driveway. What can one do? When the fire hydrant cuts into the middle of your double driveway...you make a lovely patch of grass around it as if highlighting a priceless statue you imported from Italy especially for that prominent spot in your front yard.

I just hauled 525 litres of dirt home in my little Echo (that's 756 pounds) and I don't think the car was quite built for that kind of weight. The nice guy who loaded the bags of topsoil into my car expressed some concern as the wheel wells sagged down on top of my tires each time he tossed another bag in. I agreed that it was not optimum, but told him I would be careful on the way home and it should be okay. Well, not only did I drive circumspectly for the 7 or so kilometers to my house, I decided not to stop at the Dairy Queen on the way home to buy the box of buster bars I wanted as I figured those few pounds might just have proved to be the last straw for little Echo-car.

Well, this writing is turning into procrastination, so I raise my Perrier to getting a fine piece of lawn seeded this afternoon. I will post a picture when I am done.

NOTE: I am done and it looks great -yes, I know it's just black dirt, but there are seeds in there, believe me! Here is a picture of the newly framed hydrant, my trusty Echo, and if you look closely, you can see a little red bird on the ground between the car and the house. Oh, and after I finished I went and got those buster bars from Dairy Queen - YAY!

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comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

soul refrigerator

I went grocery shopping yesterday and came home with three bags of food. After I unpacked them all, this is what my fridge looked like: really empty. How does that happen? How can I feel so full and ready for any food emergency one moment, and after one quick glance, realise that I have nothing, really? Today is one of those days in my soul as well. I woke up with gratitude and fullness in my heart, ready to take on this day and all the wonderful opportunities that it presented. Then I caught a brief glance of some emptiness in my life and bam - my buoyancy was compromised. For the past few hours I have been treading water, trying to keep my head in a positive space, bobbing in and out of disappointment, and catching myself whining with pathetic indignity at the cement blocks of other people's stupidity that are tangled around my ankles. When I am staring at the empty refrigerator of my soul, these are my thoughts. Where do I go from here? Perhaps I should slam that refrigerator

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

outWORD by Matte Downey

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