Greg Cello: Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection.
Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.
I made a walking stick and posted a short video about it.
The gap between who do I want to be and who will I be is rooted in who I am now.
CNBC:
Chiefs of the world’s leading AI companies are descending on the G7 conference in France Wednesday, in a sign of their growing geopolitical influence as artificial intelligence rises to the top of the global agenda.
Gordon White’s comment about the tech bros presence at the last inauguration applies here as well: the new archons are making themselves known. May their rule be brief.
Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell. We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not.
Thinking back on my phone call with mom last night, how she was cried, worried she would go to Hell. Remembering a line from an old David Bazan song: “I discovered Hell to be the poison in the well.”
From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.
You may have noticed how much I’ve been quoting Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality lately. It’s been so engaging that about a third of the way through I knew I needed to return the library copy and buy my own.
Which I received today. Flipping through it tonight I came across the publisher on the copyright page:
Guys, that’s like right over there. I’m not sure you can appreciate how utterly bizarre it is that this book I love so much was published by a company not five minutes from my house—in this obscure town. I am restraining myself from going on and on here. Suffice it to say I might actually call this publishing company tomorrow just to say “what the hell?”
Based on Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground: Traditional Songs and Recipes 2 tbsp flour 1 tbsp cornstarch ½ cup white sugar ½ cup brown sugar ¼ cup sorghum ½ cup cider vinegar 4 eggs 1 tbsp melted butter pinch salt ¼ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp vanilla Cinnamon for sprinkling Heat oven to 350 and grease a casserole dish. 9x13 makes a thin custard but it bakes uniformly and quickly; a smaller dish would give you a thicker custard but the baking might be trickier.