Halfway to the Edge of the Universe

A case of faith

I was listening to a "This American Life" podcast this morning and they had a story about a women who had lost her faith in God following the death of her good friend to colon cancer.  Raised Catholic, she had struggled to look for a reason for why her friend had to die.  She wondered why God would have let her friend, who was a good loving person, died while she was still alive. Many devoted christians had offered explanations and reason and one in particular that caught her attention.  For the show she taped several conversation she had with this stranger about faith, God, and alot of the things she struggles.  It was painful to listen to.  She wanted an answer to why bad things happen to good people in light of a loving, caring God only to get apologetic answers on why her logic was faulty and her reasoning was bad.  She confessed later that she really did want to believe, but her questions and doubts have not been answered or relieved.  It broke my heart and made me cringe at the same time.

I think too many times good-meaning Christians miss the point in situations like theses.  She's not a person raising a hypothetical questions, this means something to her. She's not looking for logical arguments, but someone who can reconcile her doubts with her desire to believe.  I wanted to call her and tell her,  bad things always happen to good people about as often as good things happen to bad people and vice versa.  That God never promises that nothing bad will happen to people who trust in him, that he understands that pain and that confusion, that he is there for us in those dark times.  I wanted to tell her that there are several instances in the Bible where people have to face many of these trying situations only to find that God is always present and there for us.  The good side is that her conversations with this Christian stranger have got her thinking about God again.  The bad side is that I worry that the explanations she was given presents this cold, logical, rational god that does what he does without really caring about us.  The ironic part is, the most comfort she got about God was an explanation given to her from an atheist who understood what she wanted to hear about. 

Chemical Dependence

Our new little puppy has been having a problem.  She's totally house trained and doesn't intentionally go to the bathroom in the house.  But since she was little she's been a dribbler and will occassionally leave little puddles in places after she's been sitting or lying down in a spot for a while.  She doesn't notice that she does it, but we've taken to following her around with some paper towels to wipe up her little "accidents."  We took her to the vet to have her checked out because she did have a pretty bad UTI infection a few months ago that may not have completely cleared up, but we wanted to double check.  After her lab tests came back negative for an infection the doctor decided to put her on medication, which made me feel kind of bad for her.  She'll be on medication for a year or so until she can learn to control her bladder a little bit better, but I don't know how I feel about medicating her problems all the time.  Now we're not total hippies who want to cure everything with natural herbs, prayer, and sheer will.  We've both been exposed to good medical care and what medicine can do for people.  But I have a tendency to only really want to medicate when necessary to relieve a problem because I feel like medicine has its place and it shouldn't be expected to solve all our physical issues. 

We notice this morning after we had started her on her new medication that her demeanor changed.  She (thankfully!) didn't wake up super early crying to be let out.  She waited until Josh got up to let her out.  She then pranced around the house a bit, but not quite as enthusiastically as she's done in mornings past.  It kind of freaked Josh out who had gotten used to this exuberant little puppy running around the house in the mornings.  She's still curious and wants to know everything you're doing, she's just not as pushy about it.  This morning on our walk she was well-behaved and still went crazy at the sight of another dog.  But I wonder if some people would see that as a medical cure-all for behavior problems.  I'm kind of hesitant to want to look at it that way, mostly because I think she can be good even if she weren't being drugged for an unrelated problem.  We'll see how this goes long term.  Other than that, we're still trying to teach both her and my sister's dog to chill out when someone comes to the door.

Obedience

We got the new puppy on Saturday and have started the slow work of getting her trained to listen and obey us.  It's going to take some work, but she's making some good progress.  I'm adhering to the Dog Wisperer tactics of using calm-assertiveness like a dog's pack leader to get her to listen.  I like it because it emphasizes that we need to understand how dogs actually think and behave instead of anthropomorphizing their behavior.  He talks about lots of stuff concerning being consistent and understanding that bad behavior often results because the owner being unbalance (ie frustrated, angry, pitying, ie) which dogs don't respond to well. 

She learned how to fetch this weekend and she's getting good at waiting until we tell her to come into the house instead and barging right in.  She also knows that certain rooms are off limits (like Noah's room and the bathrooms) and that there are certain things in the house that are Scout's (like her bed).  We're having to work a little harder on other things however, like the mornings.  She's been waking up earlier and earlier each day (this morning was at 4am before the sun had even risen).  We're working on getting her to wait an hour til Josh gets up and then trying to play quietly with a chew toy until I can get up and take both of them for a walk.  The walk has been good but there are still rough spots.  They're not pulling me (good), but Zoey gets all defensive when she sees other dogs (bad), and they both have a habit of trying to change positions '(mostly when they notice another dog/animal) while we're running together (bad, because it makes me trip and/or inadvertantly kick them).  She's quite silly when she eats.  It's almost as if she can't get it down her gullet fast enough. On the other hand, it's gotten Scout to be WAY less picky about her food and Scout will eat right away now instead of waiting until 10pm in hopes of something else.

But we still need to look into obedience schools to help us learn how to get her to listen a bit better.  She's a puppy in that stage where she is going to try to test her boundaries as much as she can, but she's a cutie and super smart so we'll see how the next few weeks go. 

Riddle me this . . .

Why does working in ArcGIS always make me want to pull my hair out?  I've been working for months trying to get a elevation map of the Western United States so that I can relate areas of high pollution in close proximity to places with mountains and for some reason an elevation map of the US that I can use in ArcGIS does not exists.  Or only pieces of it exists and the most important pieces either don't site correctly (with the Oregon coast sitting somewhere in the middle of Nevada) or they just don't want to show up.  So I've resigned myself to putting hundreds of little DEM maps together to form the Western US only now to struggle with the mapping program not wanting to put them together properly.  I'll place hundreds of little maps together, tell them to create a single map of them, and then only end up with pieces of the west coast.  GRRRRRRR . . . .

So tell me this, my faithful ESRI friends (who I love dearly and cherish) why is it so hard to get a map with elevation on it for a simple, VERY simple map?  I just need mountains.  That's all. There are pictures of them all over the stinking internet, but to get a decent one of the US seems like asking someone to pull your hair out, individually, with a pair of tweezers.  The process is leaving me drained and frustrated and now I just need a cookie (and maybe a milkshake too).

Great . . . . now the program just crashed. 

Puppy Love

We are in the middle of a puppy adoption. We are going through an organization known as Paw Placement who work to (1) avoid euthanizing their animals and (2) want to make sure where the pets get placed are their "forever" homes. Meet Zoey. My boss and his wife have been her foster parents for a while and we're working to adopt her. She's a heeler (Austrailian Cattle Dog)/hound/Jack Russel(?) mix. Super smart and very much a puppy. But the adoption process has been pretty intense. Besides filling out an application, they did a home visit to check out her future and a trial visit to make sure we like her personality. Since my boss likes me, they've expedited the process and we will probably be her owners in a week or so. We'll get to take her home about two weeks after that when we move out of our current apartment. Super excited to have her and looking forward to having everyone meet her!

Weird Week

The week has flown by and I can't help but feel a little odd by the events that have taken place.  In some sense they have been good and sort of orchestrated and in others they have been trying and frustrating, but I guess that's just life.  Josh's mom was hospitalized this week after a fall.  While it's been good for her to get extra care, it's also been rough since she's pretty strong-willed and isn't happy about the idea in general.  Josh went out for the week to help his dad and to visit her, which was good for him, but made for a really exhausting week of hard labor but some good catching up with our friends there.  I've been in Flagstaff, trying to stay focused on school work and work only to find myself really frustrated with a co-worker and realizing that once I graduate I'm really going to need to focus on getting a job.  If I stay where I am now, I'll be pretty much in the same job I had before I left, only in a chemistry lab, which doesn't speak well of my degree.  But the good side has been church for me.  I've felt like it's been my one "quiet" place to focus on the bigger picture and to remember that God cares for us.  Earlier in the week I had volunteered to make treats for our graduate coffee sales, only to find that by Thursday I was swamped between Sedar dinners, homework, and work.  But the guy who runs the sales gave me a pass since they had extra stuff from Tuesday.  I've found myself excited about Easter, about spending time with friends, and about getting Josh home again.  It's been a strange week, but on the bright side, the nephew has been a bundle of energy who is learning new words and phrases quickly.  It's nice to have that kind of attention given to you, even if it's from a small person who on the next turn will order you to get him strawberries and ice cream.  But that's life, the good and the bad, the relaxing and the frustrating, the sublime and the infuriating. 

Culture

Been thinking alot about culture lately and how we perceive it and interact with each other in the midst of it.  I had a talk with a friend of mine who was getting frustrated by feeling like others were only interested in her culture (she's Mexican) when they needed logistical information but wanted to ignore it during social settings where they were interacting with other Mexican people as part of a project.  Another instance we were watching a native American duo who wanted to help contextualize Christianity for other native Americans, mostly because Europeans had gotten it so wrong the first time around.  It's just made me think that as we seek to be more multi-cultural in our society, we still have a lot to learn.  In my friend's case, only learning about a place when it's convenient for us seems to miss the point that engaging with others on multiple levels is important.  In the case of the duo, we have to let people be who they are as themselves without dictating or telling them how they should act or behave.  This weekend I was talking with another woman I know from Germany and she was telling me how she's having to confront that people really don't understand how her culture deals with matters of respect and trust and that they don't always translate into how we think they are supposed to act.  I can't help but feel like we get it wrong on so many levels.  One because we think we know how people or places are supposed to behave and two, because we like to pigdeon-hole people into ways we think they should behave.  In a sense, there is almost this tendency to tell people what is valuable about where they come from and how they should act without really letting them do it for themselves or without really understanding what's important or valuable for them.  In essence, culture is always complicated when we want it to be generalized and it's usually best to let a person be the one who let's us in to their culture not so that we can know what it is but so that we can share and experience a little of what has influenced them the most.  I feel there is a difference, it's subtle but it makes a world of difference. 

A New Church

So about eight months ago we started a search for a new church.  The one we'd been attending in Flagstaff had decided to close since money was tight and there was no long-term leadership.  It was a sad day and left many people wondering about where they would go.  The Vineyard was a motley crew of people from very different backgrounds, experiences, and histories who learned how to come together as a community; sadly, not something that is easily realized in Christian communities.  So we started looking, trying this church and then that one.  Most of the ones we went to were okay, but there was always something that didn't quite feel right.  At one place someone actually told me how stupid my degree program was and asked why I would ever want a degree in that.  Other places just never quite fit what we wanted.  We're fairly progressive and feel that everyone should have a place at the table so places that adamantly deny that are hard for us to see ourselves in long term. 

The church we've ended up at we were kind of hesitant to try.  It was an American Baptist church but during the split a few years ago they decided to go into a joint membership with ABC churches and with the new Transformations ministries that we really don't agree with.  After seeing how it affected our church in Redlands, joining a Transformations church seemed like treason at some levels.  But we had heard that quite a few people from the Vineyard had ended up there.  One weekend after my sister went there and talked about how great it was, we decided we'd give it a try.  We met the pastor and without mincing words asked why they had decided to go with Transformations.  He explained that for them, it was more a matter of maintaining relationships with other churches in the area that were all switching.  They decided to maintain their ABC membership while also staying with those in the area.  He also iterated that he doesn't agree with the new Transformation ministries theology (for good personal reasons), relieving some of our hestitancy.  It was also good to see familiar faces in the congregation of people we'd known from the Vineyard and could share in the experience with.

We started attending and each time have been very motivated by what we've experienced there.  Communion is really a community event where everyone gets together and shares a real meal during the service, someone talks about some of the work they are doing in the community or with the church, and we have communion (with real wine nonetheless).  A few weeks ago we went to a bible study, where we talked about different theological interpretations of what happens when a person dies.  It was great to have a discussion where different views are presented, discussed, and it's okay for people to disagree about it.  The more we've learned about the pastor the more I really respect what he's doing.  He's kind of dorky, but he's so interested in people, and what makes them tick and how to really care for them. He's one of the few people we've found who gets things right when he talks about other cultures, religions, and groups.  He's also willing to wear a kilt just for fun and has been joining Josh on a weekly basis for flintknapping. 

So I think we've found a new church where we feel comfortable and less on guard about what it is we believe.  I've at least been feeling more motivated to participate and do stuff in the congregation.  This Sunday I will be dusting off the djembe and playing again (after more than a year hiatus).  We feel like we can finally have open frank discussions again about how people of God should treat others in light of calls for love and grace.  And we feel like we can learn something and get some perspective.  Amen to that.

Sniffles

I suppose it was only a matter of time. . .

After watching a sick little 2 year old many times over the past week, we were bound to catch a bug.  Doesn't help that the little guy coughs all over everything, wipes his nose vigorously, and then wants to cuddle.  Right now I'm hoping I can stave off the worst of it with lots of Vitamin C, echineacea, Zicam, zinc, and hot tea.  But I'm also very thankful for REAL Sudafed, Nyquil, and Robitussin.  Josh had been taking "healthy" doses of each to quell his symptoms, and is finally starting to feel better even if he does sound like Barry White. Just hoping that I don't bear the worst of it in the coming week. . .

I like it better when it snows

With the arrival of our true winter seasons comes these fluctuations in temperature and moisture.  Right now I like it better when it snows.  It's something I didn't think would happen until now.

I'm not a morning person.  I don't really get my engines started until around 9:30am or 10am which means getting up early is not something that I can functionally do for long periods of time.  Needless to say, my schedule this semester requires I be up for 8am classes and work every day.  Now while some of you groan and dispense the fake pity in an attempt to display that you have no pity, I'm not expecting any.  I'm only iterating that getting up early takes me longer  than getting up later.  So while I'm on this slightly earlier schedule, I have a new variable to contend with, namely, the formation of ice on my windshield. 

On "normal" mornings I can usually swing getting to school/work on time without any problems, but recently, this ice layer has become a major source of frustration.  On icy mornings, I have to plan to be outside an extra 10-15minutes before I actually need to leave so I can scrape it off well enough for me to actually see out my windows without causing accidents. Lately it's been taking longer.  The mornings have been colder and in the single digits which means thicker ice sheens which are a lot harder to chip off.  I can't really just go out and turn the car on and the defrosters since we live in an apartment complex and I don't trust my neighbors enough not to run off with my car.  So I have to scramble every morning to get ready while battling early morning fatigue and just loopiness that comes with my not being able to think clearly at that time of day. So I can run outside in the cold and get the ice scraped off in time so I can make the drive to school without any major hitches. 

So why do I like it when it snows?  The first snow that comes through is usually late at night, so the stuff hasn't melted yet.  Which means it rests on the windshield and windows in a powder that you can easily brush off without any of it sticking too badly.  It comes off much nicer than the sheen of ice.  When it does melt, it refreezes in little droplets, that are also easier to scrape off.  Plus the clouds help keep it a bit warmer at night so the stupid ice doesn't form either.  Ultimately, it takes less time, energy, and effort and doesn't make me late.  Ice on the other hand, is usually in a thin even layer and the plastic ice scrapers take forever to get it off.  I just don't like the ice.  Not that anyone can do anything about it, but I also just felt like venting.

PS Before the suggestions come in, I've already treated the windows with Rain-X and that doesn't work too well.  Neither do the larger scrapers, which they make flat even though windshields are round.  Someone explain that to me?