Caleb finally sleeps in the truck

Shhhhh! Caleb is sleeping in his toddler bed for the first time! Don't wake him. L. found him curled up with blankets around his little people airport. She would have taken his photograph, flash and everything, if the batteries hadn't run out. As it was, I took some night-vision Hi8 video of the sleeping lad--who knows if that will ever be converted into something available to the twenty-first century.

But wait . . . did you know about the recent addition of the toddler bed? Have I mentioned it in all of its amazingly adorable fire-engine sweetness? Did I say something about the real working light on top of the plastic cab?

I'm on day three of a neck cramp. I got these a few times in Junior High, and then again when I was writing my thesis, and then suddenly Friday morning I woke up with it. Not a thing you can do, really, just find a place to put your head and wait it out. I have taken a zillion milligrams of Ibuprofen in the last 52 hours, applied that marvelous chemical substance Icy Hot quite liberally to my neck and shoulders, and alternated cold and hot presses. Nothing really works. See, it is exciting things like this that keep you coming back to this blog.

Several large organizational projects have been put into the past tense in recent weeks. We got rid of a lot of stuff. The Pampered Chef stuff has been weeded like tares at the last judgment. Caleb's clothes were picked through, and my bookshelves migrated into the living room. (It is not commonly known, but bookshelves do slowly move around a house in the manner of subject-specific ents.) Besides completing household projects, L is also between writing assignments, though she has picked up a travel-writing gig. We'll blog more on that later. The resulting hiatus means that L is scrapbooking again.

I always like it when she does this. People really love the scrapbooks she has made over the years--we have a whole shelf of them. People love flipping through them, and their thematic quality provides a lot more narrative shape to what they are looking at than if we'd just thrust a pack of four-by-sixes at them. Plus it is always interesting to see the crafty stuff that she adds to it. Like just now she is scrapping our visit to the aquarium in Gatlinburg last summer. Funky scissors and multicolored paper come together and next thing you know she's made all this interesting coral with fish swimming around it as a frame for the lower portion of each page.

Finally, I've been reading the final draft of a new book coming out by Bible Answer Man Hank Hanegraaff (my neck was stuck in a downward position, may as well put that to good use.) It is amazing to me that dispensationalism even exists. Once you expose the silliness that God has a separate soteriological track for Jews and Gentiles--an error patently obvious for anyone even casually reading the New Testament without reference to eisegetical "here's how to think" notes--the whole of its nineteenth century architecture crumbles.

stuff we got for cheap and some Greek

Some of you may remember that I have often mentioned doing this. Well, it is done. I was just going to by the wireless card ($40), but the router was there, and you know that bit about how it is better to ask forgiveness than permission? I haven’t installed the router yet, and for those of you who don’t know what a router is: a router takes the internet connection that is in a cable and broadcasts it like a radio station. You password encrypt your station broadcast, your router, and then you tune your wireless receivers—in this case the wireless card plugged into the laptop—to your personal router’s signal. The rush of internet- available freedom was palpable. Even L had to admit the real benefits. See, our computer is in Kara’s room, so unless Kara is at school it is off limits. If you are on the computer while Kara is at home, give it up, because she’ll want to play solitaire or go to the Barbie website or something, and will bug you the whole time until you give in. Now, however, L can research her essays from the comfort of the living room couch. She was able to get a jump on her essay-crunch right away after the kids were in bed. And I was able to work on my Greek without the annoyance of the TV being on. I’m hoping now that we have Internet access from the living room that we will see a lot less mindless TV and a lot more other things like reading, flipping vocab cards, and even, who knows, talking. Maybe we will even blog (gasp!)

Yeah, I worked on Greek for about two hours last night and discovered, much to my surprise, that I may only be one hundred to one hundred fifty words away from Basics of Biblical Greek vocabulary wholeness. From years of just splashing around in it, making sorties here and there, I know a great deal more Greek than I thought. Where I lose it is in the ability to quickly parse verbal forms and in truly understanding how participles are operating in the syntax of a given pericope. Anyway, here’s to a new horizon for intellectual pursuits.

In other news,

This weekend, L discovered that we had a slow leak coming from the dining room wall that was beginning to soak the carpet padding—that was Saturday night. An hour later, the maintenance guy had carved a six-by-six inch hole in the drywall. You could feel droplets of water spit-raining down from the floor above inside the wall. Turned out to be a busted washing machine valve upstairs. Thank God L caught it early, because it could have been worse than it was. As it is, we have this gigantic blower drying out the carpet next to the dining room wall. This thing is loud, but not annoying with a smooth, rushing sound. You could sleep to it, but it drowns out other noises like phone calls and such. And why not make it louder?

Sunday afternoon, for example, we were trying to watch the football game, and Kara and Caleb were in full-on scream mode, playing hard together in Caleb’s room. I couldn’t hear what L was saying to me from one couch to the other. L called this afternoon and told me they had taken away the blower, but the hole is going to remain another day or so.

Because of potential flooding, we transported my bookshelves into the living room, and, you know, they actually look better there. We re-sorted so that (as L says) “pretty books” are on the outside and paperbacks and cheap dented stuff is on the inside. It really looks good, and adds a great deal of comfort to the space. I feel better just lounging next to my bookshelves—there’s something about it that just jazzes the mind. Who cares where the remote is when you can pick up Aquinas, Moltmann, Pannenberg, or Barth simply by extending your arm!

Finally, we were selling some things at a consignment shop this weekend and discovered Caleb’s toddler bed. I connected the minute I saw it: there it is! Sure, he’s a little young, but this thing is perfect. It is a big, plastic, red fire engine with a real fire engine light on the top. I pretty much wanted to throw it in the truck the minute I saw it, but we restrained ourselves until L could take her mom to the shop this morning. Now all three of us just want to throw it in the truck—and, here’s the best part, thanks to our selling stuff to the shop, the bed is pretty much free. You know, maybe Caleb would like our bed and I, um, we can have the fire engine. Kara’s going to stick to that thing like a six-year-old, gangly barnacle. “Kara, it is time to go to bed. L, hon, can you get the pry-bar?”