Made it through a thing today that had been giving me anticipatory stress. Also, two days from substantially complete financial statements and nine days from official issuance. Fresh start coming soon!

Following on from the “husbands in cars” memory: Rachel made a good point that our services were very demanding. If the “unsaved” husband actually went inside the building he could very easily have been targeted by the preacher. Maybe even named and called out. (It happened many times.) Ours was also a very emotional religion: men of that generation were commonly uncomfortable with such outward emotion, even if they inwardly believed.

We had a point midway in the service (I don’t know how commonly this was done in other churches) where the pastor, or someone called up by the pastor, would open the floor for prayer requests. They could be spoken out by anyone in the congregation and then we would kneel (by which I mean knees on the floor, elbows on the pews—not any of those fancy kneelers the “formal” churches had) and pray for a few minutes. Many of those women would—every service, and for years on end—request prayer for their “lost husbands” or, even more commonly, “lost children.”

A phenomenon I associate with country churches in my childhood: an irreligious husband waiting in the car while the devout wife is in church—either because she didn’t drive (this was fairly common in rural areas) or because the husband didn’t want her driving in the dark. Anyone else remember this?

Aesop Rock has announced a new album and it looks like he’ll be doing some tech critique. The first release “Mindful Solutionism” indicates that we’re looking at another great album.

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes
Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness
We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with
The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons

Nine days from the final draft of audited financial statements. Almost there! The bad thing about the busiest time of the year falling in summer means that summer goes by way too quickly.

Folks, Rachel found the bullfrog that lives in our pond eating a bird as big as the frog itself. I’ll spare you the picture. I had no idea they’d eat anything that big. We have now named her Nessie.

Last night Rachel and I watched “The Unbinding”, the new documentary from the Newkirks. If you’re interested in haunted objects, I highly recommend this one. Available on Prime.

I saw that today’s photo challenge word was “cycle” just as I settled in here at Taste of Belgium in Cincinnati for a Kwaremont, a beer designed for pro cycling fans. Named after one of cycling’s most famous hills, it has the same ABV as the hill’s average gradient.

Cory Doctorow calls tools like ChatGPT “plausible sentence generators.”