Fall Leaves

I promised you I would show you a couple of pictures of trees around town, turning colors. These three pictures are on one street. I took them the other morning when it was a little foggy.

And this is the tree outside my bedroom/office window. It’s just beginning to turn color, so it’s kind of pink and green, rather than the full-blown red it will be in a week or two.

Have I said recently how much I love this place? All that beauty, and somebody else mows the lawn, and trims the bushes, and rakes the leaves! And to make sure I can enjoy it, the window washer was here today. (He scared me half to death because the first I knew of it was when I heard what sounded like a large mouse in the kitchen. It was the guy washing the windows, but my heart went pitter-pat!)

Update

After the dreadful weather the last weekend of September and the beginning of the first week of October, we’ve had several days of bright blue sky and warmer temperatures. The weekend was simply mahvelous! Last evening, after dark, a nice rain moved in, and, although today is bright, with scattered clouds, it’s colder and very windy (no reading on the porch for me). WeatherBug says it’s 54 degrees with a wind chill of 52. The rest of the week looks like it will be changeable, with scattered showers and sunbreaks. Typical fall weather!

The trees around town have started changing colors, and there are some spectacular sights. Maybe I’ll remember to take my iPad and get some decent pictures of the really beautiful ones later this week, if only the wind doesn’t blow all the leaves off of them. We lost one of the big trees that line the drive onto campus last week in the storm last week, but, so far, the trees in the forest over the fence from my backyard seem to be holding their own.

Kudos to the Ducks for maintaining their place as #2 college football team in the nation with their game against Colorado. Unfortunately, the Cowboys were didn’t fare so well, although they were in it until the last play of the game. I was very impressed with U-Dub (that’s the University of Washington) against Stanford on Saturday night. They seem to be a real team this year, and the Ducks had better buckle down and try hard next week when they play them in Seattle. It’s the featured game of the week on ESPN next Saturday. ESPN will be bringing Game Day to town, and the excitement is running high.

About the only excitement for us last week was a Lunch Bunch trip to Silk Thai. I wrote a guest post for the Franke Tobey Jones blog about it, but so far it hasn’t been published. I’ll let you know when it finally pops up.

We talked about DESPAIR in Sunday School yesterday, and we’ll be talking about it for the next several weeks. We’ll be looking at Biblical references to despair (think Job), and we’ll be using Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me to explore further. We’ll be looking at acedia as containing depression but being different. In one episode of West Wing, Josiah Bartlett says “There’s a Korean word, Han. I looked it up. There is no literal English translation, it’s a state of mind, of soul really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come, and yet still, there’s hope.” I think that’s what we’re looking at. What is the Christian response to that existential angst?

I’m trying not to bore y’all with my thoughts on the idiots in Washington, DC., but it’s never far from my mind. Lord in your mercy…

Book Review – Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

I’m guest-posting at the Franke Tobey Jones blog, today. Why don’t you pop over there and see what’s up.

This week the Book Club met in the Bascom Library to discuss our September book, Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver. It was well received by the members drawing ratings of 3.5-5 on a 5-point scale. Several people said they would read it again and recommend it to others.

Read more…

Breathing Deeply

I’m trying to avoid the news and the brouhaha about the government shutdown. As a military wife and the wife of a civilian employee, we lived through this nonsense in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I’m attempting to give it up to prayer, right now,

I only wonder whether the folks in Washington (not the state – DC) have decided to cut the relevant passages of Matthew and Luke out of their Bibles. (Isaiah and the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, and the Koran also have a few choice words to say about the least, last, and the lost as well.)

Lord, in your mercy, forgive us.