No Grasp of Your Reality

I’m sick. It’s horrible. Major head congestion, sore throat, inflamed sinuses and a fever.

First, Thomas got sick - fever and a cough. Thomas also gets crazy night terrors when he’s sick.

Then, Tabitha got sick - coughing so hard she was throwing up. (She is one tough kid. As she was throwing up, I told her to “be strong, Tabitha!” and she would give me a high five each time she threw up and said, “Grrr! I did it!”)

So, between T&T and nursing Micah, I haven’t been sleeping… which has led to this illness. On Saturday night,I could actually feel the cold forming in my body, and I knew it was just a matter of time.
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Just got back from the information meeting with the Heritage Presbytery Judicial Committee Commission over our recent complaints.

The summary is that they denied our first complaint and upheld our second complaint against our Session. Sarah and I are very pleased at the outcome, and based on what the Presbytery commissioners said, the first complaint really wasn’t valid since the Session hadn’t been following proper procedure anyway. In other words, had the first meeting been properly ordered, then they should have been able to exclude Simon and Mike.

I’ll be updating this post with scans from the document, so you can see the exact wording. More importantly, the commission acknowledged their responsiblity as brothers in Christ, and have offered themselves to help reconcile differences between our family, the Session, and anyone else still involved.

UPDATE: Here’s the document of the affirmed complaint from the Presbytery Commission (page 1, 2).

misc/stabbykniferackI guess you wouldn’t get your spouse this knifeholder for a present. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it myself, but this kitchen accessory looks like a human form being stabbed by multiple knives. Perhaps there’s some art angle that I’m missing, but I can’t see how anyone would want this in their kitchen.

Update: I forgot to link the original story. You can get the knife rack itself here. My apologies to you and to BoingBoing.

I’ve created a new category to organize my thoughts on intellectual property, copyrights, and their relationship to Biblical ethics. As I said in a previous post, I’ve been working occasionally on a book on what scripture says about the subject. I think Christians have bought the party line, and we need to do some serious and honest rethinking.

There is even a separate rss feed for those who want to follow just this subject.

Saw this quote originally written in Christianity Today by Lewis Smedes:

Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard. Reality is always deucedly complicated; any human situation has far more to it than first meets anybody’s eye. No one has twenty-twenty discernment. This is why we need other people to tell us what they see in the same chunk of reality that we are looking at. This is why people of the church need to share their visions of reality with each other before they shout their judgments at each other.

(via “Gideon Strauss“)

Young Tilly Merrell, a seven-year-old girl from England, had never eaten solid food, since she was diagnosed as a child baby with Bulbar Palsy, a condition the necessitates being fed via a tube into her stomach.

Friends of hers raised a collection to send her to America for treatment of her condition, but upon arrival, she was tested and found to simply have swollen tonsils. The doctors removed her tonsils, and she’s been eating normally for 10 days.

Thank you, socialized medicine!

(via Fark)

Sarah and I had been going back and forth on the status of our computers. She’s been spending more time writing in the past few months, and we’ve started to have issues with the kids playing downstairs and the computers in the office upstairs.

For a while, Sarah had been wondering about a computer downstairs, so I started checking Dell and SlickDeals for deals on PCs. As many of you know, my job has me travelling round the world quite a bit, so I’ve also been looking to get a laptop to keep in touch while I’m gone. So, tonight I decided to combine those two “needs” into one computer purchase.

I get a discount through Lockheed Martin at HP/Compaq, so after looking at the different reviews, I decided to purchase a Compaq Presario R3000Z notebook computer. The reviews were good, so I took the plunge and bought one.

Sadly, it won’t be here in time for my trip, but I think it will make our lives a lot easier. Until we start fighting over it, of course.

From the Consular Information Sheet on Japan:

Concerns Regarding Roppongi, Tokyo: We note that an American Citizen was murdered in early December 2004 in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. The murder occurred in an office building within walking distance of the local police station. A second foreigner (not an American) was stabbed to death in Roppongi in January 2005. We previously advised Americans of six reports of western foreigners (including Americans) allegedly overdosing on heroin, resulting in three deaths. The heroin was allegedly purchased in Roppongi. We note that several Americans reported the theft of their purses and wallets, stolen from them while in bars and clubs in Roppongi. A number of Americans have also been arrested over the past year in Roppongi for various offenses. Americans are strongly advised to exercise caution should they choose to visit the Roppongi area.

Guess where we spend most of our time in Toyko? Yes, it’s seedy. Yes, the beer is overpriced. But, it’s about the only place in Tokyo where you can get a good hamburger.

UPDATE: I got some more information from the newsletter of the U.S. Embassy in Toyko:

According to information assembled through a variety of sources, including the media, US military reporting and the Azabu Police Station in Tokyo, around 0400 on January 3, 2005, a foreigner was stabbed to death at a club called “Wall Street House,” also known as “Wall Street II,” at Roppongi 5-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo. The victim’s passport showed he is 26 years old, and from Uruguay. However, there is a possibility that the passport was fake.

No Americans were involved, though Americans have been known to frequent the club. At least one American has reported that his passport was stolen from him in this same club in the past. There appears to have been no relationship between this murder and the December 2, 2004 murder of an American Citizen nearby at Roppongi 7-chome.

I’ve been to the Wall Street, and on most nights, it gets packed. In a space no larger than my living room, they can have 100 people in there.

Also, for those of you unfamiliar with Tokyo society, murders are extremely rare, even in such a large city. A single murder is noteworthy, and worth an embassy warning.

A week ago Sunday, we had a couple guys in our church stand before the congregation and answer the “membership questions” that our pastor asks all new church members.
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misc/3mmoneyglassHere’s putting your money where your mouth is. 3M has created an ad in a bus stop advertising their security glass. It’s not all cash, but the top and bottom of each stack are $20 bills, so there is still a significant amount of change.

Regardless, I think it’s just a great ad.

(via 37 Signals and BoingBoing)

misc/crimeDownloadable from Microsoft Templates is “Crime scenes with shapes” for Visio, complete with dead bodies, pools of blood and murder weapons. It requires Visio 2003 to open, but the sample picture is enough to make anyone scratch their head and go “hmmm…”.

I couldn’t link to the template directly, but it is filed under “Legal->For Legal Professionals”.

We got about an inch or two of snow last night. Nothing major, with just a little accumulation. Compare that to India’s portion of Kashmir, which this past weekend received 15 feet of snow!

Avalanches in Kashmir have killed at least 42 people after six more bodies were recovered on Monday, officials said, as the heaviest snows in a decade swept the Himalayan region.

The state was snowed under for the fourth day and was largely cut off from the rest of India with flights cancelled, roads blocked and power and phones disrupted.

Dozens of people were missing after the latest avalanches and weather officials said more snow was on the way.

misc/639lsAh, the old “abuse masquerading as homeschooling” argument has reared it’s proverbial ugly head again, this time in the form of a political cartoon. Jon Swerens, my new hero, has written up an appropriate response.

It is hard to believe that today is the beginning of a new week. So much happened last week, it seems as though much more time has elapsed.

Last Saturday, at Kate’s shower, a friend of Kate’s remarked that the last time there was a pregnant lady at the wedding shower she had attended “she went into labor the following Monday.” Now, she can say that it has happened again.

Last Sunday, my friends Luke and Liz informed me that I might be pregnant. Maybe I should see a doctor to confirm it. And, does my husband know about this?
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Grace Fellowship Church is now posting and editing a repository of documents dealing with the Federal Vision and the New Perspective on Paul, and it’s “encroachment… in the Presbyterian Church in America“. Some of the editorial comments on the site are less than charitable, but it’s nice to have all the documents handy.

(via the bbwarfield list.)