Hey everyone, I’m migrating my original Tertium Squid blog, which was designed in Drupal, to WordPress. I’ll be moving the old posts over as soon as I can. Until then, you can see the original site here.
Gordon
Einstein, a biography by Walter Isaacson. I loved this book so much that I decided to read it again in a year. That will be sometime in 2012. There is much about Einstein’s life that is charming. He was apparently a delightful man in many ways. Not a good husband. A somewhat absent father. But for a man who had such a mind and who lived so committed to his work, he was apparently a person that you and I would have enjoyed knowing.
Late in life he was working at Princeton. He was very old and became forgetful about everyday things. His mind remained sharp, though most of his stunning and seemingly intuitive breakthroughs occured in his 20s. But he would forget little things. One day while walking home from Princeton he became lost. He knocked on a door and asked a woman to call his wife. She was shocked to find Einstein on her porch. He was a world famous figure by then. She went to the phone and came back to find him at her kitchen table helping her daughter with her math homework.
Kind of a cute story. Continue reading
I’m at Laity Lodge this weekend. I write for this retreat center in a secret way, which I greatly enjoy. I rode up with Paul Soupiset, who has become such a close friend over the last couple of years. Somewhere between Boerne and Kerville, a funny sound started coming from the right front wheel well of Paul’s car. We stopped so that Paul could take a look at it. While he was under the car doing manly repair stuff, I wandered over to the place where grass met pavement and became intrigued with a cute little scene I found there.
At my feet was a tiny rock, embedded in some soil that settled into a small clearing at the last rainfall. Miniscule weeds looked like bushes to me. And the only sign of human existence in the tableau was a bit of shiny metal, perhaps a link from a small chain, discarded by someone and looking as mysterious and out of place as the Monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Continue reading
Okay, technically it wasn’t Welfare, but it was government assistance so let’s not split hairs.
In November of 2007 Jeanene quit her job because Shelby was in a crisis and we needed an adult at home. Like many Americans we had health insurance through her job, but we thought we’d just call up some insurance company and get different insurance. I was working three jobs at the time to make the money we needed. Pastor, writer for the High Calling, and I was working for the Christian Century setting up their blog network. I’m not counting Real Live Preacher as a job, but I was doing that too.
So I don’t want to hear anyone say that this stuff only happens to lazy people. I’m a hard working guy. Always have been.
But then a series of bad things happened. Continue reading
