In your face

...boxes! So there. :)

In the office tonight unpacking and putting away. The trash people will have their hands full tomorrow.

I've got to do this now before the next load arrives!

It'll be here when I get back to the office the first week of May, so... gotta make space now.

That won't be the only thing waiting for me when I get back. The local realtor is arranging for the home improvement contractors to get in the new house and measure stuff this week and next, so.. no doubt I'll have estimates to think over and decisions to make so they can start work right after closing.

But I can think about that later. :) As of noon tomorrow I'm off on vacation! It'll be the last one in quite a while, I think. Hmm... maybe a long weekend in late October. That might be nice.

The whole family is overseas! J2 is on choir tour in Germany and Austria, the rest are all in Italy. :( Ah, well... I'll find something to do that's memorable, I'm sure. :) Mmmhmm, definitely.

Ciao, bebe!

Boxes again

Much of what I shipped last week was waiting for me when I came in this morning to my new location.

What in the world do I do with this now? I think some evenings this week will be spent in here, unpacking.

Well, it keeps me off the streets, right? :)

But today, something fun! I go to see the registrar at seminary to talk about next fall's classes. Yay!

Spring!

After all the slogging through rain of this past week, it felt sooooo good yesterday to feel the sun on my face. Much as I try to avoid that, normally. :) Just goes to show how desperate I was.

And, after all that rain, and now the 70 degrees and sun, up come the daffodils! My favorite spring flower by far... they always seem to wave hello to me. :)

Plus, I vacated my temporary office in NE, never to return I hope! I'm so eager to move to the Twin Cities. Let me at it! A new life is starting for me, and I want to settle in to it. And by the end of May, that's exactly what I should be doing, settling in.

Next week I'm there for 4 days and then on vacation for awhile, having a wonderful time just poking around and enjoying Spring, like a farmer enjoys going out to see how his fields got through the winter. :) I sure hope winter is really over, both literally and metaphorically. We'll see. I'm hopeful.

I even test-drove a new car yesterday. I have the itch. Yes, I would even trade in my pride and joy! The new Dodge Charger is awfully hot. :) Hot hot hot!

That's a wrap

The last of the boxes from the NE office goes today to the Twin Cities. No doubt an enormous pile will be showing up next week when I'm there. Where I'll put them, I have no idea. At last count I'm up to 32 bankers' boxes, and this is after an extensive cleanout! I filled two dumpsters with throwaways. Really!

Some will go to the new house, but will have to sit at the office for a while until after closing on May 15, when I'll start to haul a few to the new place each night. But a few things I'm taking with me on the airplane Sunday, like speakers and an external hard drive with my iTunes library on it! Not one more day without it...

So the next time I set foot in the NE home office, I will truly be a visitor. And... that's good. :)

You know youthful manhood has passed...

when you cut yourself shaving, and its... your earlobe.

I remember cutting myself weekly in my 20s, as I perfected the art of shaving and got to know intimately every contour of my face. So okay, I guess I have a few new contours to learn now, as hair grows where it never has before (and in my opinion has no business growing...)

Sorry, God, but this is one of the aspects of physiology that makes me question the intelligence of this particular design I live with daily. What possible purpose is there to ear/nose/back hair that should cause it to flourish starting in mid-life? And before you tell me that it's an effect of The Fall of Man from Grace, the Scripture clearly teaches that it's the *ground* that was cursed to bring forth thistles and weeds, NOT MY EARS!

Now I'm walking around with a bandaid on my ear and if anyone asks, I'll just have to tell them that the piercing got infected. It'll sound like a young man's problem. ;)

But! I have a new young assistant as of today. :) Work-wife, as I call her, agreed by email yesterday (complete with little smiley emoticons) to come work for me. Soon she'll sit across the cubicle wall from me and I'll be able to hear her talk to her work-husband across the aisle from me all day long! How fun!

I bought a fan to generate some white noise. I think I'm going to need it.

Seven Laws of the Harvest

Last Sunday, the pastor referred to this list of cause/effect principles that anyone in an agrarian society (such as first century Palestine) would understand without discussion. They might not be quite so intuitive today.

1) We reap only what has been sown. Nothing comes up by itself except - weeds.

2) We reap the same kind as we sow. You plant corn, you get corn, not beans.

3) We reap in a different season than we sow. Results of our decisions, good or bad, are seldom immediate.

4) We always reap more than we sow. A little, planted, usually yields a lot.

5) We reap in proportion to what we sow. The more the activity, the more the result.

6) We will harvest the full harvest of the good only if we perservere. (through drought, weeds, pests, etc...)

7) We can't do anything about last year's harvest, but we can do something about this year's harvest. (But even then, some things remain outside our control.)

So... what am I harvesting in my life right now? And what will I harvest later on?

"Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary."

----- Galatians 6:7-9

Packing and repacking

I am getting reaaaaallly tired of boxes.

Yesterday I needed to vacate my office in New England, to make room for a new hire. At least it wasn'tfor my replacement.. the two candidates they had for that internally were rejected, so they have to go outside and recruit now. Good luck with that!

So they move my workstation, phone, etc., to a new space in another building. But it's only for a few days. Friday is my last day in this location. And it was such a pretty office, too. :(

But I have a few days in peace now to go through my 30-some bankers' boxes that I packed on Saturday, sort, toss, tape shut, and ship them to the Twin Cities and my new office there. Not that there's room - there's not. Some will go to the basement of the new house once we take occupancy. My new space is smaller and not enclosed. But the people are nice, and the downtown is too. :)












Ha - there are boxes that were under my desk full of stuff from... 3 moves ago? Ridiculous. I didn't take the time to look through them then, and may not now, either. Leave it to my heirs! They will just shake their heads and say "just who was this man, again?" ;)

Wonder and reality

"...there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don't make any sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty. Jesus as God.

"It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable.

"When we worship God we worship a Being our life experience does not give us the tools with which to understand. We may be able to wrap our heads around living forever (and we can do this only because none of us [still able to discuss it] has experienced death), but can we understand what it means to have never been born? I only say this to illustrate that we, as Christians, believe things we cannot explain. And so does everybody else.

"I have a friend who is a seminary student who criticizes certain Christian writers for embracing what he calls 'mysticism.' I asked him if his statement meant that he was not a mystic. Of course not, he told me. I asked him if he believed in the Trinity. He said he did. I asked him if he believed that the Trinity represented three separate persons who are also one. He said he did. I asked him if that would be considered a mystical idea. He just stood there thinking.

"You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.

"One night I watched the sunset till the stars faded in and, while looking up, my mind, or my heart, I do not know which, realized how endless it all was. I laid myself down on some grass and reached my hand directly out toward where? I don't know. There is no up or down. There has never been an up and down. Things like up and down were invented so as not to scare children, so as to reduce mystery to math. The truth is we do not know there is an end to material existence. It may go on forever, which is something the mind cannot understand.

"I think we have two choices in the face of such big beauty: terror or awe. And this is precisely why we attempt to chart God, because we want to be able to predict Him, to dissect him, to carry Him around in our dog and pony show. We are too proud to feel awe and too fearful to feel terror. We reduce Him to math so we don't have to fear Him, and yet the Bible tells us fear is the appropriate response, that it is the beginning of wisdom. Does this mean God is trying to hurt us? No. But I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon once, behind a railing, and though I was never going to fall off the edge, I feared the thought of it. It is that big of a place, that wonderful of a landscape."

----- Don Miller in "Blue Like Jazz"

Is the devil in the details, or...

is God in the math? The math of the universe, that is.

Today marks the 300th anniversary of Leonhard Euler's birth. Who was he? Only one of the top four mathematicians of all time.

NPR had a story on him yesterday:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9585232

He was the one who originally derived what I've always thought of as "the signature of God on the universe."

Here's how WIkipedia describes his "identity formula":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity

When I was going through the deep math needed to get my professional certification, I actually derived his same identity myself, without realizing that it had been done, oh, about 250 years before me! :) It was actually the first time I ever derived anything mathematical from scratch before, and it was instinctive. I thought about it like this: God wrote his initials on the universe somewhere, and two of the fundamental constants in the universe, pi and e, must be involved somewhere.

So I started playing with them and then stumbled on the idea of involving something paradoxical and mysterious, like God is, and what better concept than the idea of imaginary numbers? Imaginary numbers are something you can't grasp in reality. The idea of taking the square root of a negative number is... impossible. Inconcievable! It's a paradox. Unreal. It has to be imaginary. And yet... it's what ties everything together and makes a lot of the higher math that describes the universe possible.

Just like God to infuse reality with mystery, and to keep defining Himself just out of our reach.

I love Euler's identity. Not because I came up with it independently, but because..

It's God's signature on the original art that is the universe.

A 10!

The house inspector came through Tuesday - he said the new house is "a 10"! :) So, nothing of import to fix before occupancy. Yay!

The only things to really do now are to:

extend the hardwoods up and down the two half-flights of stairs and up into the living room,

take up the carpet in the family room (which will become "the lounge"!),

use the carpet from living and family rooms to replace older carpets in a couple of other bedrooms,

paint a couple of rooms (the lounge being one, of course), and some ceiling beams in the kitchen,

and replace old wrought iron railing and lighting fixtures in the dining/living room areas with something much more modern. :)

And all this... I get to do in the 10 days between closing and when the moving van arrives. Oh boy!

And in the meantime, on the work front, my first hire? isn't yet. :( She's being coy. The hiring process always reminds me so much of dating. And grrr... coyness drives me nuts! Always has. Directness is so much better. :)

I've never liked waiting and wondering.. I mean, if you already know what you're thinking.. what's wrong with being straightforward??

Two houses - again

They accepted the offer. As is.

A fair price, fast closing, room in the cost to make a few (hopefully stunning) decorating improvements.

In by the end of May!

No movement on the house in NE, though. The clock is ticking...

Pretty good week

all the way around.

From a nice reception at the office, to contributing right away, to making a good hire, to getting all the equipment and connections to be productive, to thoroughly searching the housing market, to finishing the week with an offer on a home...

a pretty good week.

:)

Okay, this is creepy.

I learned a new expression this week: "work wife."

It's my first day here, and I'm having lunch with D, my peer and assigned tour guide for the day, who henceforth will be known as "work-husband." After the entree, as we linger over our sodas, he pops out with this expression, and says "have you ever heard of it?"

-- news to me, says I. What's it mean?

It's like your wife, he says, but just at the office. You share gossip about office politics that your real wife doesn't get, know all the inside jokes that would take hours to explain at home, get aspirin from her when you run out, have lunch together when your wife is a 40 minute commute away, and tell each other when you look tired or your hair is messed up or your tie is crooked or your strap is showing.

-- oh, says I. Really.

Yeah, and you met mine this morning, he says.

It turns out to be R, the "pretty capable girl" from the prior post who I just hired, and who henceforth will be known as work-wife. Not mine - his.

Since then I have observed them several times a day talking in each other's cubicles in hushed tones, and work-wife coming over to find out if work-husband is feeling better now after the aspirin he took from her, and going down to the caf for lunch together. At least they don't car pool!

Now, I thought to myself, am I just out of touch here? How long has this been a common expression? So, as I've been instructed to do by more than one 20something I know, I just "Googled it." (hmm.. should that be capitalized??) Very interesting results - to wit:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109876/

http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_403

Hm.

I have to say that this seems creepy to me. But that may well be because I have a harder time than most people seeing relations between men and women as being strictly platonic. There is always a sexual tension between men and women, which makes those relationships interesting and fun.

Now I suppose there are certain personalities that can handle the sexual tension, and keep it in check, better than others can. Me, though... um... that would be no. Sexuality is waaaaay too much in the forefront of my makeup (yesss, even at my age. Give it a rest already.) to do platonic male/female relationships with any degree of closeness except under very clear circumstances. Like - with your relatives! :)

So, it makes me nervous to have this going on across the aisle between a peer and one of my staff. Especially when I know that if she and I have any disagreements as worker and boss, that she will go straight to him with it.

Hm.

Maybe I'm making way too much of it, but.. I still think it's creepy.

Two days into it

and so far, so good. Actually, better than good. :)

I was apprehensive, of course. How will I be welcomed, perceived, treated? The answers are: with open arms, as some much needed talent, like it's their privilege to have me here! So... it's been very nice, and definitely better than I expected. :)

Granted, the creature comforts are less than before, but the people sure are nice, and I've already landed my first hire, a pretty capable girl just a few years out of college, with some talent and a boatload of enthusiasm. That, plus getting all my computer connections to work, and a few positive remarks on my fashion sense, and.. things are shaping up pretty well for the first two days. ;)

Now if the housing market would just cooperate..