The Electric

It is interesting to see what memories are starting to take hold in John.

For example, last year when we went to Disney, we took John to the “It’s tough to be a bug” show under the Tree of Life at Animal Kingdom. Now if you’ve gone to the trouble to shoot in 3d, you want to show your audience that it’s working by doing a ‘pop’ effect in which someone or something comes at you from out of the screen.

We had forgotten about this and while John didn’t get upset, he didn’t want anything to do with the glasses. Not for that show or when we saw the new 3d show inside the Magic Kingdom.

Fast forward to Monday night. We decided to take in Chicken Little in 3d. I knew that John might not like the glasses. After all, while at Wildlights Sunday, we took John’s cousin on the merry go round. The last time we took him, he didn’t like it. 8 months later, he still doesn’t like it.

Yet I had to try and sure enough, he wanted no part of them. The irony is that if the sun is out and bright, John is the first to let you know that the sun is in his eyes and he needs his sun glasses.

Wednesday: - Sold bass and amp to Sam Ash. As Mike Doughty posted to his blog, instruments are meant to be played and loved. My bass was just gathering dust.

• Drove to Cleveland which took close to 5 hours thanks to traffic

• Brined the turkey

Thursday - Yanked the turkey out of the brine

• Looked over sale ads

• Cooked herb rubbed turkey along with helping Jean with the other items

• Dinner at the Shull’s

Friday - Ran up with Terry to Best Buy to get Studio 10 for the computer.

• Met Kathy and Mike for lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s

• Got a spindle of DVDs from CompUSA which then needed to be returned since they were not the ones on sale

• Returned Studio 10 to Best Buy since I didn’t qualify for the competitive rebate and got a spindle of DVDs which this time were on sale

• Had leftovers at the Shull’s

Saturday - Drove home with the Shull in time for the Gahanna Holiday Lights parade

Sunday - Went to Wildlights at the Columbus Zoo with the Shull’s

Monday - Shull’s head home after some shopping at Meijers

• Jean and I take John to see Chicken Little in 3D at the new Rave Motion Pictures @ Polaris.

Too many things in the hopper the last few weeks but here is a sampling of the fun stuff I was able to sneak in:

Books: We3: Interesting angle. Reminded me of the rat-thing segments from Snow Crash.

Batman War Games Vols 1-2: I’ve never liked the character of Robin. So a few of the subplots ring hollow but its got some interesting twists.

Games: Call of Duty 2: Messed with the pre-release demo on a Xbox 360 and on my new rig. Very hard for the untrained eye to tell the demos apart (both demos are from the El Daba mission). I’m already jonesing for the new 360 controller since it will work on both the 360 and my PC (thanks to the 360’s use of USB and the new XNA game developer toolkit)

TV: I got my AMD X2 to play nice with Windows Media Center Edition thanks to a patch from AMD that keeps both CPU cores from trying to handle the MCE video calls at the same time. I also got WinTv2000 working with my VCR so I’ve started the process of going thru my tons of video tapes, dubbing what I want to keep over to the PC for future burning to DVD and then chucking the tape. For the really valuable stuff, the master tape will be kept but 80% of them are hitting the curb.

Biggest Loser: Don’t know why I’m so hooked on this show since it makes me feel bad about finding the time to workout.

Cooking: In time for Thanksgiving, I’ve been messing with an herb paste turkey rub that I got from the good folks at Cook’s Illustrated. I used it at our church Thanksgiving and came out so well that Jean has me cooking it again for Thanksgiving itself. It’s a fun recipe plus it does make the turkey so yummy.

Was talking about the events in NOLA with my in-laws over dinner after my mother-in-law’s surprise birthday party.

My brother-in-law talked about Michael Savage’s ‘idea’ of moving the refugees to the military bases on the closure list. Savage. that’s a voice of reason for the masses.

My father-in-law talked about people still in NOLA just want a handout. He also said that he would have shot to kill rioters during the LA riots to put a stop to them.

My sister-in-law said the reason people stayed was so that they could get their welfare checks on Wed.

My mother-in-law praised the folks who self dispatched themselves saying they fed people. Maybe in the other parishes but not Orleans.

All questioned the idea of rebuilding NOLA. I snapped at this point asking if we should have rebuilt Northridge or LA after an earthquake…

Needless to say all of them are Christian, Republicans & Bush backers.

When my brother-in-law joked that he wished Katrina had taken out the Clinton Library, I responded by saying I then have to wish for an earthquake to swallow the Reagan library.

I put John to sleep and watched college football with my brother-in-law until bed. Now, I’m going to head to bed or maybe watch Riding Giants.

Busy weekend at and around the Leslie homestead:

• Friday Work then had Doc D check my leg and arm from my fall last week then over to Patty and Jay’s to get ready for Jean’s party plus have supper on the new deck.

• Saturday Ran out to work to grab the scripts that I need to test the load balancer changes with my brother-in-law Bob. I gave Bob the quick tour since as a heating and cooling engineer and our building at one time was heated by the old mainframes. We then hit Westerville to pick up the backup cake that I had ordered from Syniders in case Jean’s Mom wasn’t up for baking but she was. I didn’t call in time to cancel the order and didn’t want to just stiff them so I went ahead and grab it. I figured anything left over we could take to church. We also stopped at Marc’s to pick up a few last minute things and then to Bed, Bath and Beyond to grab Jean’s gift from Bob and Virgina, a Cuisinart DIP-8 Waffle iron with dipping cups.

Party was quite fun and typical of central Ohio weather, changing about every 15 minutes

• Sunday Called at 7:00 to test the load balancer changes which flew threw with flying colors. Ran the video for church then headed home for lunch. After lunch, Bob and I worked on bundling some brush (he was a major help) then the Shull’s hit the road. We ran up to Meijers then to Patty’s and Jay’s for leftovers with Amber and Bryan who had driven up from Atlanta to visit Jay.

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Originally uploaded by slubber.

Here is a work in progress photo of the fence going up. Major thanks to the crew from Lee’s Fencing for hooking us up with the 8ft Delgard panels plus saving Jean and I the joy of trying to install this thing ourselves.

Come to find out it has been on the floor of the closet the whole time. Jean called to tell me that I owe her big time. Terms of this debit to my wife have not been disclosed.

So I’m helping my brother and sister-in-law build a deck on the back of their house. We’re under a bit of a time crunch since they are hosting Jean’s birthday party this weekend and have just started to lay the Trexs down for the floor.

Just after dinner, I take a step back to get ready to move the board that I’m using to drive the Tiger Claws into the boards only to miss the board while holding a 16 lb sledge hammer.

I drop between the joisting one left leg taking the force of the blow from the joist on the way down. My left leg is numb which is a good sign. It means for me that while I took a good whack, everything is still good. Had I felt nothing, it would have been call the quad time. Plus my dinner of Popeye’s fired chicken with Red beans and Rice is wanting to come back up. Add to this I’m spooked since there is nothing like falling backwards unexpectedly.

The good news is that while I’m sore, its isn’t close to how bad it first felt it was going to be.

Well this is the week that Jean hit one of those milestone birthday’s that cause some to freak.

But in Jean’s case she took it pretty much with a so what.

As this is a milestone birthday, I wanted to do something big. I kicked around a trip to Mohican State Park but it’s August. Not the best time to camp and canoe.

Next I thought about a romantic French dinner followed by catching Cirque du Soleil Varekai but Jean said for that, she’d rather have a reverse osmosis water filter. This I should have guessed since my wife is on the Acts of Service side Chapman’s 5 Love Languages..

So while the budge won’t let us get the filter system this month, we did have some coin to get a sweet phone system from Panasonic that will allow us to intercom each other while in the house and has speakerphones built into each handset.

Just before we headed to church this morning I got a few photos of Jill, Marta and Meghan with Jean and John which I’ve posted over on Yahoo.

The performance was different. First was the enacted prayer which started with one of the members of the troupe asking for a prayer request or praise. Once the request was made, members of the troupe would then take on a role in that prayer and then act it out.

For example, the first prayer was for a healing. A daughter of one of the ladies is undergoing a treatment trail to deal with her cervical cancer. So Megan took the roll of the daughter, Marta was the mother (who requested the prayer) and Jill was the medical staff. Three others took the rolls of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost interacting with each of the mortals. Once it was clear who was who, the prayer would start with motion but not words. The daughter going for a test, the mother at home staying busy, the medical staff working all the while the trinity is with each in a different way until the end when the results confirm the healing… yet this is all communicated without a sound.

A prayer for the eyes that was quite moving.

Jean and I talked later about why neither of us raised our hands for a request. Jean thought of the Woods and just couldn’t put Sasha’s loss into context for them. I thought of asking for a blessing for our family as we deal with trying to have another child while dealing with the grind of life. Yet I was reminded of how many blessings I have with John and Jean and felt a bit selfish for asking for more. London has also been on my mind but again, I’ve seen too much from the BBC to want to see more. I must confess that looking back, enacted prayer has some very deep roots into the world of improv but without the jokes.

The play was in the form of three stories from II Kings. This is not a book that gets its due and the selections from it were interesting in the message that they bring. I really enjoyed the vocal and percussion that was used for a background (I do love the different sounds from a djembe) and the performances were top notch.

My one suggestion would be that of framing the stories into a context. How does this event apply to you some 2000 years later? For it is very much in the Jewish tradition (I’ve been reading a ton of books on the roots of the modern Jewish faith from my pal J over in New York) to talk about these events and to decided as a community their context. Plus it would be a great way for the actors and the worshipers to talk with each other.

Also it would be interesting to see how would these stories look in the modern world. Once I tinkered with the idea of taking the story of David and Bathsheba and placing it into a mixture of 1930’s Europe with Middle Earth. Like Julie Taymor’s Titus but much darker and tell it from Uriah’s point of view.

Oh and why did I say event rather than story? The historian in me looks at the bible in terms of events rather than stories and people rather than characters. Because events happen were a story might be made up and people existed while characters don’t. Yes I know there are things in their that are stories but this is my hang up.