Monday Music - Happy Birthday, Valerie (2013) edition!

Here's a Chicago song my Valerie likes, one of Chicago's unknown should-have-been hits. Sung by Peter Cetera, it's "A Song for You":

Since MM usually features live performances, and since I could find none, here's a pretty-decent-effort (i.e. better than I could do) instrumental version:

Happy birthday, my honey!

How to NOT drive an author crazy

Getting a decent book published is really hard work for most people. The concept, the hours of labor, the shopping around, the contract, the process — it's really a tremendous undertaking. And then comes the emotional roller-coaster of seeing what comes of your baby, out there in the cruel world.

So if you've got someone who's written a book you think is a decent, worthwhile book, and you have a particular line of questions. You've never been an author, so of course you don't know who authors think. But hey...I do! And, as

always, I'm here to help!

So, I suggest you proceed thus:

You: Congratulations on getting your baby published!
Author: Thanks very much, I appreciate that.
You: What editions are out?
Author: Just the hard copy.
You: Terrific. I'll buy that and read it.
Author: Thanks, I appreciate that, too!
You: Any plans for other editions?
Author: None that I know of.
You: Okay. Well, I know that if enough hard copies sell, they'll be likelier to look into other markets. So after I buy mine, who can I write to encourage them to look into Kindle/Logos/whatever?
Author: That's kind of you to ask. Let me get that for you...

There y'go. You're welcome!

How flu is better and worse than a cold

So how was your long weekend, American readers? Pleasant, I hope. Mine? Thanks for asking:

Flu.

Yep, perfectly-timed to gut the weekend. I started having symptoms mildly Saturday night and Sunday morning, reluctantly decided I couldn't make the 27-mile drive to church — and boy, that was the right decision. I got headachey, sick, and dizzy. So to spare you the details, I just got sicker and sicker, and spent the rest of Sunday and first 2/3 of Monday pretty miserable.

(Mercifully, Dear Wife — who'd just had a dose, herself — took Cadillac-level care of me.)

So here's why I (kinda) like getting the flu more than I like getting a cold.

The flu, as a rule, barges up, kicks in your front door, makes your life Heck for 12-36 hours... and then leaves. It grabs you by the collar, beats the stuffing out of you, throws you to the ground, and then it's done with you.

You feel dramatically worse, awful, and then dramatically better. It's like the world's second-worst guest: crashes in, trashes the place, storms off. You're left to do an hour or two cleaning up cigarette butts and beer cans, but basically the worst is over. (The worst guest would never leave.)

A cold, by contrast, isn't as dramatic but takes much, much longer. My body in particular always seems to put up a protracted and doomed fight. As a result, it may take me a week just to come down with a cold. And then I have the cold for a week. And then I take the next week or two to get over it.

It snivels its way in, miserables its way around, then snivels off — all very, very gradually. It's a protracted process.

I guess you could say that flu is like a mugging, and a cold is like protracted low-grade torture.

Of course, the rude bottom-line difference is: colds don't kill you, but the flu can. Jim Henson, QED. So, there's that. Kinda major, that.

Of course, what they both have in common is that they're both baleful consequences on Great-Great-Great Grandpa Adam's experiment in autonomy. Another common factor is that both are first-creation realities, and will not be part of our new creation life (Romans 8:18-25).

Meanwhile... ugh. Patience and hope.

Where I was last night ("Evening in December")

A large local church has, for 18  years, put on a bit of an extravaganza called "An Evening in December." It combines a play, songs, and dancing.

For several years my DAOD has danced in it. This year, two danced for the "price" of one. The little one's starting to show a bit from the outside, and move furniture around on the inside.

Happy personal news

To start the day right and joyous: my dear, beautiful, amazing (in many senses of the word) and only daughter, Rachael Christine Phillips, is engaged to be married! Valerie and I are very happy for them. We look forward to joining in the celebration and witness of their public exchange of vows in early January.

Random New England observations

The whirlwind tour is over, and I'm more or less coming back up to my normal, West Coast speed. Such as that is.

Last Thursday, I worked a full shift, came home, helped pack and regulate, loaded up the car, dropped the boys off at their grandparents', went to the airport and flew all night. Landing in Connecticut, we rented a car, drove all day, showered and changed, and went to my daughter's graduation ceremony at Middlebury, Vermont. We dined there, and went to bed maybe 10-ish (ET), after having been up since 3:30 the previous day. I'd had maybe 45-60 minutes' sleeep.

I don't know how Jack Bauer does it without psychotic episodes. Well, more psychotic episodes.

So then we took off touring a bunch of those postage-stamp little states back there, thanks to my wife's usual brilliant planning. We saw Plimouth Plantation, the Mayflower 2, the USS Constitution, and Old Sturbridge Village. We walked the Freedom Trail.

Then we got up 3:45am on Wednesday and flew home. Then I went back to work yesterday.

So, it was a full, whirlwind tour. I'll probably put up some pictures, eventually, somewhere. But for now, here are some Random Observations:

1. The weather wasn't nearly as unpleasant as I'd anticipated. We had some beautiful clouds and a bit of rain. The temperatures got up into the eighties. What made the difference (as anticipated) was the humidity, but it was far from miserable.
2. The most exhausting day was the Freedom Trail walk. On that same day, we walked (it seemed) every square inch of Boston, I climbed that 294-step obelisk at Bunker Hill, we toured two ships, and ended up with a delectable meal at Legal Sea Foods.
3. How to say it delicately? With all that heat and humidity, you end up quaffing gallons and gallons and... er... not processing much. It all gets used up and sweat out.
4. My image of New England was population and houses and pavement from border to border. Boy, was I wrong. There are miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of beautiful, thick forests, on rolling hills, with very trouty-looking, fly-fishable streams and rivers, and lots of rocks and cliffs and outcroppings. Gorgeous. I would love to see it in the Fall.
5. The people we dealt with were all very nice.
6. There seemed to be a higher-than-usual percentage of grim, very masculine-looking women. Often in pairs. I said "Hm" to myself, and prayed for them, a lot.
7. Cracker Barrels are great restaurants. But they're better in the South.
8. Dunkin' Donuts everywhere. Wish we had them here. But the best cup I had was after we landed and got the car, and I'd been up for... hm... (doing math) about 29 hours with about 45-60 minutes' scattered sleep. Had a big, fresh cup, and my, it was wonderful.
9. We did get a Garmin Nuvi 670, and the ladies cristened our navigator "Claire." We were really glad for the purchase, again and again. Cool thing about having a GPS system is you can go off exploring freely, knowing that all you have to do when you're done is flick the GPS back on, and it'll get you where you need to go. However....
10. My least-favorite word for the whole trip came to be "Recalculating."
    

So another trip logged, tremendous credit to my amazing wife's amazing ability to put together the fullest, richest trips.

Excellent, once again, Valerie!

Oh, and I took just <800 pix. I'll put a few more up sometime, p'raps.

Where I Am Right Now® (mostly-personal blah-blah-blah)

Posting has been light, here, recently. Some things have been going on keeping me busy and middle. Here are the ones I'll tell you about:

New laptop. I just upgraded my old Toshiba Portege 3505 for a Gateway CX210S. Both are convertibles, which is to say that you can use it either as a laptop or a tablet. The monitor twists around, and you can write on it with a stylus. It's really cool: I've used it for classes, it comes with me on retreats or trips, and I take notes on it during sermons. I can have half a screen with BibleWorks 7, and half with Windows Journal. The older Toshiba had no internal optical driver. I had to plug in an external CD drive. But it was light and cool. The Gateway has a faster, dual-core CPU, twice the HD size, 1GB of memory, an internal DVD-RW drive, and a larger, very clear screen. I also got a 12-cell battery, so it could go a lot longer between charges. It is a lot heavier, though, but that's not a real problem.

What was a problem was that the cursor displayed as a big, black box instead of a dot. It took Gateway almost 2 weeks to hook me up with a driver upgrade that resolved the issue. Otherwise, getting a new pc is like moving into a new home. You have to install all your programs, copy all your files; and you have to uninstall the unwanted garbage that comes with the pc. (Gateway is not nearly as bad as Dell in that regard.)

Here's a funny thing: I got this great laptop for just over one-third of what the Toshiba cost some 5 years ago.

New Operating System. The laptop came loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium. This is my first experience with Vista, and danged if they didn't move everything around! So that's taken some getting used to. Thus far, I like it. It's definitely pretty! But I had to retrain myself on how to do some common tasks.

Microsoft OneNote. I gather that Windows Journal (which I'm used to) is to OneNote as Wordpad is to Microsoft Word. But OneNote is really taking some getting used to, and I'm still not comfortable with it. OneNote doesn't actually save discrete files; it auto saves whatever you're working on. I've watched a number of training videos and read some documents, but still really don't get how to organize what I'm creating. All those tabs... I just don't get it. I bet someone has a good page or post on it, but I've Googled in vain so far.

Scholar's Library: Silver - Logos Bible Software 3. I'm reviewing a new Bible Study(and more) program, and it's really taking some getting used to. It's massively powerful and very impressive, but even starting to use all its assets is (to me) not intuitive. There's just a lot to learn, but it's clearly worth it. Logos helpfully provides a lot of tutorial videos, and I've been working my way through them.

Hot times at Pyro. You can read all about it in this post, if you haven't already. Some brave anonymous professor writes about hearing God's voice and writing a book under divine inspiration. I had a few warm words to share. I thought I was probably going to be under heavy fire, but the comment thread seemed to be tapering off at 30-40 comments. Then boom! it took off, before coming to rest (so far) at 169. It never makes me happy when people get mad at me. However, some of the angry people were really kind of funny, if you look at it from the right angle.

It's what happens when you do write pointedly, and don't write anonymously.

Preaching. Some of the happiest times in my life are when I get to preach, and I just did. Read about it here, if you like.

Ouch. About two weeks ago in karate, we had one of those exercises I really enjoy. One student was surrounded by four others, each of whom was to attack with one strike, followed by the others in rapid succession. The person in the middle had to block that strike and respond quickly with at least three strikes of his own. It's a great workout; one of the students is a really excellent (and aggressive) black belt. Every encounter with him is educational. Often painful (and bruising!), but always educational.

Well, I was very winded, but doing all right for an old fossil — blocking, striking, pivoting, shoving my opponents into the others. But I have a kind of tricky right knee. A few times, I've done something and it has yelped at me to stop. So far, I've always stopped short of really injuring it.

But not that night. I probably pivoted clumsily, but all of a sudden my knee was out of it; and it was kind of hard to carry on without that knee. Sort of attached to it.

So I limped like Walter Brennan for quite some time, with a very sore knee. It still hurts. Unfortunately, I didn't injure my appetite. So I've been unable to do my hour-long lunchtime "power walks"... but I've been able to eat just fine. Clothes tighten, muscle tone declines....

Ah well, life of an old man taking karate with a bunch of younguns. Not likely to get much better.

Reading. I've also finished reading Tremper Longman (The Third, if you please)'s new commentary on Proverbs. I plan to do a review over at Pyro. Stay tuned.

Greeking — in public! Plus I've had a pretty steady output over at my Greekblog. I have really appreciated the folks who come regularly and interact betimes. I do hope the readership builds, and particularly among pastors. If your pastor isn't going there regularly, tell him about it!