Peculiar Aristrocratic Title

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Keeping In Touch

Boy do I suck!

My colleague from the neighbouring Lutheran parish, just a 20 minute drive down the highway, said farewell to her congregation yesterday and is moving to a new call. Now she’ll be 5 hours away!

We were, are, good friends. We went through seminary together and then as luck would have it received our first calls just down the road from each other. I was looking forward to being so close, able to see each other often, maybe even to work together sometimes. But it didn’t happen.

Why? Because I suck!

It’s been over 4½ years that we’ve been in these calls and I’ve known for a long time that I wasn’t keeping in touch. We’d phone each other every couple of months. The clergy in this conference just don’t seem to want to get together. I’m the dean and was scheduling monthly gatherings for the clergy (there are around 25 on our roster including retired clergy) and sometimes only 4 would show up. Those were occasions when I’d see her but I stopped scheduling those meetings because so few clergy bothered to show up.

It really drove home how bad we’ve been at keeping in touch when we ran into each other at the mall before Christmas and she almost didn’t recognize me because of my beard. THE BEARD I’VE HAD SINCE AUGUST!

It’s one of my deepest regrets of the past few years. We were (are?) good friends and lived so close and so rarely saw each other. I had lunch with her today to say goodbye. Now it’s too late. I said now that she’ll be a lot farther away we might end up keeping in touch a lot more by email. That’s what I’ve got to do. That would be so easy. I send one or two emails a week to my brother, not always long. I’ll have to do that with other friends.

Actually, after I post this I’m going to send a couple of emails to friends I haven’t communicated with in quite a while. Maybe that’s a belated New Year’s Resolution I’ll try to keep. Getting back in touch.

What Accent?

I knew I didn't have an accent! I know I'm not American but I thought I'd give this a try. And lo and behold I don't have an accent. I found this quiz through LutheranChik.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West   Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

4 Calling Birds

Maybe you read my lament below about Christmas being over. Well, I went home after I wrote that and informed the family that we can stretch Christmas if we pretend we're Orthodox. That way it was only Christmas on Sunday and we've still got a couple of weeks.

Nice in theory but the tree was losing too many needles to keep in the house so we pitched it. The other decorations are slowly coming down, and I unplugged the outdoor Christmas lights from the timer because we were looking kind of stupid being the only ones around with them still on at night.

But we still listened to Nat King Cole on the way to the movies and home last night. "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."

Night at the Museum

The whole family went to the movies last night. Tuesdays are half-price nights around here. I don't know if that's the case everywhere. But if there's something we can't wait to rent when it's out on DVD then we usually try to go on a Tuesday to save money.

Anyway, all 6 of us went to see Night at the Museum. It was a fun movie. I'm not giving anything away that you wouldn't see in the trailer. The movie is about a new night security guard at the Museum of Natural History in NYC. What he doesn't know when he takes the job is that everything in the place comes to life at night. The movie stars Ben Stiller and has Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Robin Williams, and Owen Wilson.

Like I said, it was fun. It was a G rating and there was absolutely nothing in it the kids shouldn't have seen. No innuendo, no language, nothing inappropriate. And all 6 of us liked it, from the 13 year old down to the 4 year old, even the 30-something mom and the 40 year old dad.

I wonder if it will get more people going to museums too. When we lived closer to Toronto we'd go for an annual visit to either the Royal Ontario Museum or the Ontario Science Centre, sometimes both, but we haven't for a while.

Anyway, fun movie, check it out.

How Lutheran?

Thanks to Andy who is apparently a lot more Lutheran than me.

You are 87% Lutheran! This is most certainly true.

Nicely done! Martin would be proud of you! You may or may not have room for growth in understanding Lutheran terminology and culture. Good thing Salvation is by Grace and not by merit. We can add nothing to what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. But it never hurts to learn a little more about the church on earth. Thanks for taking the quiz!

How Lutheran Are You?
Create a Quiz

P.S. (Jan. 10)
My brother said he tried the quiz and scored very low. It's not quite a fair test if you're not an American Lutheran and a real polity geek. I mean, if you read the questions just think how a Swedish, Finnish, German, Latvian or Tanzanian Lutheran would score.

Back to School

Well, the kids are back to school today. They had two weeks off but they only really enjoyed the first week-and-a-half because they got kind of depressed the last few days with back-to-school looming. My wife doesn't like it either. She's happy having the kids at home and she hates packing their lunches for school. On top of it, she's starting to un-decorate the house today. The 12 Days of Christmas ended on Friday, we include the Epiphany of Our Lord into the season and since yesterday was Sunday we didn't start taking down decorations yet.

I've still got Nat King Cole singing Christmas carols on the CD player in the van. It's hard to let Christmas go. I had to wake up to the alarm this morning for the first time in weeks. I'm not as down as the rest of the family. I like the movement through the different seasons of the church year and the natural year. But I love Christmas and hate that it's over. I miss the carols on the radio and in the stores. I even miss the Christmas commercials on TV. I know, you have to leave it behind so that it can be enjoyable and exciting again next year.

Maybe the weather has something to do with our moods. The sun has barely shone in weeks. We've had rain off and on for weeks. We didn't have a white Christmas and apparently El Niño is going to mess up our whole winter. Who knows if we'll have any snow at all. It all makes for a pretty blah feeling.

What can you do?

9 Ladies Dancing

Well, Christmas is almost over. It's the 9th day of Christmas, I'm back to work although the kids aren't back at school and I'd rather be off with them. But I've got to come up with 2 sermons this week, one for Saturday night (Epiphany of Our Lord) and one for Sunday morning (Baptism of Our Lord). We've also got our monthly congregational council meeting tomorrow evening to which I'll have to report, and I have to write my report for the Annual Report which the secretary is assembling next week.

But here's what I got for Christmas, in no particular order and I might be forgetting something.

A Toby Keith Christmas CD
Chronicles of Narnia audio drama on 19 CDs
A wallet and key chain
An Adirondack Pack Basket Kit
A Flashlight
A book, "Grapevine: The Spirituality of Gossip"
A leather and copper cross from Kenya
Tickets to "We Will Rock You" a musical with music by Queen
A Point Zero sweat shirt
A Canada/Olympic Sweatshirt
A "Bathroom Reader" book
A Stuart McLean CD
Golf Socks
Another sweatshirt
An Electronic Sudoku game
Piano books (Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Musorgski)
MS Streets and Trips programme
Jeopardy board game
A Vinyl Cafe book
A Sudoku book
A book of the Canadian stamps from 2006
A framed picture of dad, brother, uncle, and me golfing in Myrtle Beach
My brother's old computer (he always gives me his old ‘puters when he upgrades)