Enjoying the Ride

     We had a pretty nice Mother's Day celebration at our house this week. The kids helped me cook and clean up the meal for Beth and my Mom. Beth received money towards the purchase of a bicycle, as she'd really like to get back into biking (which means I guess I'll end up getting back into biking).
     Monday was an historic night at our house. First Beth taught me how to mix up hamburger patties (her famous secret recipe - well, everyone I know who's tried them really likes them) and fry up leftover potatoes. Then I showed her how to navigate around Facebook and Hotmail, setting up accounts for her. She's checked in every night and is up to 35 Facebook friends. Beth received her first forwarded email but it was excellent (and she of course forwarded to a few people herself). It included this great line:

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather we should skid in sideways, Chardonnay in one hand, chocolate in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO! What a ride!"

     Wednesday evening was my first time leading a practice at church as I'm kinda in charge of the music this Sunday. I was pretty nervous about how things might go as I'm finding there are a lot of things to adjust to and to know, but it seemed to go really well and I felt much better by the time we were finished. 

     Beth is away at a ladies' retreat this weekend so Friday night I invited all the guys from our house church/small group to come over to our place for some games and snacks. There ended up being 10 of us altogether and we had a great time playing Wizard (an expanded version of 'Up and Down the River'). In our second game, in a group of 5 (the first game was all 10 of us playing together) I pretty much smoked my competition, always getting the number of tricks I predicted, and scoring 450 points by the end of the game (mmm, maybe I should have been a more gracious host).

     This week I continued listening to some T-Bone Burnett.  His 'The Strange Case of Frank Cash' on "The Animal Years" is so awesomely clever. Also gave a couple of listens to the first Fleet Foxes release (they have a new album out this week but I decided a while ago that I can't buy a new release by anybody unless I've given appropriate time to their last one). They've got some pretty amazing harmonies - I've gotta check out their lyrics more closely. I gave a first listen to Ashley Cleveland's "God Don't Never Change", which is her take on some classic gospel songs - they're okay, but they just made me want to dig out my Kaiser/Mansfield acoustic blues stuff. So I did and was impressed all over again - this is fantastic musicianship. Glenn Kaiser can really play the blues guitar, he and Darrell Mansfield have great voices, as well as some great blues harp/harmonica. I was surprised how many of the songs mixed in with the oldies were written by Glenn - some of them should be classics as well. Waking up in the middle of the night with his 'Cornerstone' tune running in my head.

     Just finished reading 'The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales' by Peter Rollins. He writes modern parables that have surprising twists on many traditional biblical stories Christ told. They're quite short, then include a commentary, and many of them are very thought-provoking. I purchased it on my iPad for only 99¢. It's for the Kindle app - I'm certainly finding better deals at Amazon than at Apple's iBooks store. And now the Kindle reader seems to be able to track the number of pages in books as well, which is a nice feature.