words, words, words

1:35AM - Coming up for air

I said: I will take heed to my ways lest I sin with my tongue. I set a guard for my mouth, when the sinner stood up against me.
I was dumb and was humbled, and held my peace, even from good, and my sorrow was stirred anew.
My heart grew hot within me, and in my meditation a fire was kindled. I spake with my tongue:
O Lord, make me to know mine end, and the number of my days, what it is, that I may know what I lack.
Behold, Thou hast made my days as the spans of a hand, and my being is as nothing before Thee. Nay, all things are vanity, every man living.
Surely man walketh about like a phantom, nay, in vain doth he disquiet himself. He layeth up treasure, and knoweth not for whom he shall gather it.
And now, what is my patient endurance? Is it not the Lord? Yea, my hope is from Thee.
From all mine iniquities deliver me; Thou hast made me a reproach to the foolish.
I was dumb and opened not my mouth, for Thou hast made me.
Take away from me Thy scourges; for from the strength of Thy hand I have fainted.
With reprovings for iniquity hast Thou chastened man, and hast made his life to melt away like a spider’s web; nay, in vain doth every man disquiet himself.
Hearken unto my prayer, O Lord, and unto my supplication; give ear unto my tears. Be not silent, for I am a sojourner with Thee, and a stranger, as were all my fathers.
Spare me, that I may be refreshed before I go hence, and be no more.

O God, with our ears have we heard, for our fathers have told us the work which Thou hadst wrought in their days, in the days of old.
Thy hand utterly destroyed the heathen, and in their stead Thou didst plant them; Thou didst bring evils upon those peoples, and didst cast them out.
For not by their own sword did they inherit the land, nor did their own arm save them, But Thy right hand, and Thine arm, and the light of Thy countenance, because Thou wast well-pleased in them.
Thou Thyself art my King, and my God, Thou that commandest the salvation of Jacob.
Through Thee shall the horn of our strength push down our enemies, and through Thy name shall we bring to nought them that rise up against us.
For not in my bow will I hope, and my sword shall not save me.
For Thou hast saved us from them that afflict us, and them that hate us hast Thou put to shame.
In God we will boast all the day long, and in Thy name will we give praise in the age to come.
But now Thou hast cast us off and put us to shame, and wilt not go forth, O God, with our hosts.
Thou hast made us to turn back before our enemies, and they that hate us took spoils for themselves.
Thou hast given us up as sheep to be eaten, and among the nations hast Thou scattered us.
Thou hast sold Thy people without a price, and there was no gain in the selling of us.
Thou hast made us a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us.
Thou hast made us a byword among the nations, a shaking of head among the peoples.
All the day long my disgrace is before me, and the shame of my face hath covered me,
Because of the voice of him that reproacheth and revileth, because of the face of the enemy and pursuer.
All this hath come upon us, and we have not forgotten Thee, nor have we dealt unrighteously in Thy covenant.
Though our heart hath not turned back, yet Thou hast turned aside our paths from Thy ways.
For Thou hast humbled us in a place of affliction, and the shadow of death hath covered us.
If we have forgotten the name of our God, and if we have stretched out our hands to a strange god,
Shall not God search out these things? For He knoweth the secrets of the heart.
For Thy sake we are slain all the day long, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.
Rise up, why sleepest Thou, O Lord? Arise, and cast us not off at the end.
Wherefore turnest Thou Thy face away? Dost Thou forget our poverty and our affliction?
For our soul hath been humbled down to the dust, our belly hath cleaved to the earth.
Arise, O Lord, help us, and redeem us for Thy name’s sake.

O Lord God of my salvation, by day have I cried and by night before Thee.
Let my prayer come before Thee, bow down Thine ear unto my supplication,
For filled with evils is my soul, and my life unto hades hath drawn nigh.
I am counted with them that go down into the pit; I am become as a man without help, free among the dead,
Like the bodies of the slain that sleep in the grave, whom Thou rememberest no more, and they are cut off from Thy hand.
They laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness and in the shadow of death.
Against me is Thine anger made strong, and all Thy billows hast Thou brought upon me.
Thou hast removed my friends afar from me; they have made me an abomination unto themselves.
I have been delivered up, and have not come forth; mine eyes are grown weak from poverty.
I have cried unto Thee, O Lord, the whole day long; I have stretched out my hands unto Thee.
Nay, for the dead wilt Thou work wonders? Or shall physicians raise them up that they may give thanks unto Thee?
Nay, shall any in the grave tell of Thy mercy, and of Thy truth in that destruction?
Nay, shall Thy wonders be known in that darkness, and Thy righteousness in that land that is forgotten?
But as for me, unto Thee, O Lord, have I cried; and in the morning shall my prayer come before Thee.
Wherefore, O Lord, dost Thou cast off my soul and turnest Thy face away from me?
A poor man am I, and in troubles from my youth; yea, having been exalted, I was humbled and brought to distress.
Thy furies have passed upon me, and Thy terrors have sorely troubled me.
They came round about me like water, all the day long they compassed me about together.
Thou hast removed afar from me friend and neighbour, and mine acquaintances because of my misery.

Unto the Lord in mine affliction have I cried, and He heard me.
O Lord, deliver my soul from unrighteous lips and from a crafty tongue.
What shall be given unto thee and what shall be added unto thee for thy crafty tongue?
The arrows of the mighty one, sharpened with coals of the desert.
Woe is me, for my sojourning is prolonged; I have tented with the tentings of Kedar, my soul hath long been a sojourner.
With them that hate peace I was peaceable; when I spake unto them, they warred against me without a cause.

Originally published at Alex's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

2:31AM - Why I am not a monk (yet)

It's been quite awhile since I had any real inspiration to write in here, and now that I have my own computer (and can type in Dvorak all the time now - yay!) I suppose it's much more likely that I'll be able to take advantage of my moments of inspiration by writing in here. Such is now the case, and it's because I've been re-reading some old emails. I should remember this in the future when I have time to write but no motivation or inspiration; all I have to do is read old emails. Being tired, stressed and tipsy helps a lot also, but I am none of those things at the moment.

Since early 2004, almost 2 years ago, I haven't felt anything very strongly; I haven't been very emotionally stressed because the very few things I'm emotionally attached to have been pretty stable. In the last several months of 2003, things were very rough for me emotionally and spiritually, and although I can point to a few reasons for that, I know there was much more to it than I knew then or know now, so I haven't been able to analyze it, and by now I'm content with not knowing really what was going on. The only thing I really know is that God was allowing me to be severely tried, using many things that I held dear and introducing me to a lot I didn't know about myself, giving me a glimpse of the depths of my rebellion and selfish pridefulness. Reading emails that I wrote during that time, I remember well what it was like, the intensity and gravity of what was going on and how I was responding to it. During all of 2004, the quality of what I'd been experiencing didn't change, but the intensity slowly lessened, and I described it as becoming somewhat numb, and the feelings and trials becoming more hidden, less obvious. That never seemed like an adequate description, but it's still the best I have, so it'll have to suffice.

This entry is titled "Why I am not a monk (yet)", but it could well be titled "Why I'm not married (yet)" or "Why I don't have a patron saint (yet)", because those are all things that I'm waiting for the kind of inspiration born of emotional and spiritual upheaval to decide upon.

I've visited a few monasteries, and my latest visit (2 weeks ago at St Herman of Alaska in Platina, CA) was by far the most significant in the way I experienced it; it was the first time I really had a strong sense that "these guys really have all the spiritual richness that I've been seeking, I need to just live here and somehow soak it up." That's much the same sense that I had on coming into the Orthodox Church, but it was much more sudden and a little less extreme at the monastery than on my introduction to Orthodoxy. As I was first finding the Orthodox Church, it was very much the finding of the pearl of great price; although it took several months, I became certain that I had found the fullness of God's revelation and his spiritual riches, and that I would not find it anywhere else. That led to the inexorable conclusion that I knew that the choice of life (Orthodoxy, the true worship of God) and death (rebellion and selfish pride) lay before me, and I found I was practically powerless to choose death. I guess those last 2 sentences give the shortest answer to "why I am Orthodox". At the monastery, it was as though I was suddenly being presented with a clear, amplified or magnified version of the great spiritual riches I had already found in Orthodoxy, and the choice of continuing my struggle in my current situation (neither married nor monastic) seemed very dull by comparison. Still, it was not a choice of life and death, rather a choice of a clear and simple single-minded pursuit of God (monasticism), or continuing with my present struggles and waiting for God to reveal Himself to me in a way I couldn't refuse, as He'd done already with Orthodoxy.

There have been many times in my life when I've been in love, and several of those were times I was in love with someone I was quite sure would make an excellent wife. Each time, despite fierce emotions, I did not "go and sell all I had and buy it" as I did with the Church, but instead waited, and the seeming opportunity slipped away. It's been over 2 years since I've really been in love, and I think the best answer or consolation I can give myself when I hope and wish for a wife is that I haven't yet found one who is truly the "pearl of great price" which I would sell all to obtain.

With the blessing of Fr Isaac, I have not sought a patron saint, instead hoping and waiting for one to choose me, expecting that one will reveal himself to me and I will be certain. I have thought of many, but none have really seemed like "the one", and whether this is because of my inability to listen and recieve, or because of something else, I don't know. I have a feeling that if I sought with all my heart, I would find (or make myself ready to recieve) the patron saint I lack. I imagine that I haven't yet really sought because I haven't felt the need, which is probably because I've been relatively stable emotionally and spiritually since well before I was baptized and chrismated.

So, as I look back on my life, I can't remember a time since being a kid that I've been this relatively stable for so long, and I think that has a lot to do with me just continuing in the regular life I have now, instead of seeking monasticism, marriage, or the adventurous life of a bicycle tourist/missionary. I keep thinking that in a year or so, I'll have the finances and whatever else is required to make a serious change in my life, but I've been thinking that for like 10 years now so it seems unlikely that it's actually true now. If history is any guide, I'm likely to stay right here with the same old life until some emotional or spiritual drama forces a change.

Tomorrow is the opening day of the ski season on Mt Ashland, and I have a season pass, all my gear, a 4WD car with tire chains and emergency stuff, tons of time because of not having a job, and just enough money for gas, so I expect I'll be up there a whole lot this year, like I was 2 years ago when I had my season pass and a car. It's 2:30am, and I'm not at all tired since I've been staying up late and sleeping in all week, but I'm going to try to leave before 8:30 tomorrow morning so I can be among the first to be on the slopes. It's early season so the snow isn't too deep and they've only gotten a few inches in the past several days, but I'm sure the first day will be great regardless of the conditions. Tomorrow evening I'm going with Father to Roseburg, and Saturday I'll be snowboarding again with Jake and Tristan. Starting next weekend the weather looks like it'll be dumping feet of snow on the mountain for several days, so after that the conditions will be great. I'm looking forward to Ken and Jessy and Yarah and Jane coming just after Christmas, and trying to finish working on Glenn and Burt's Mazda before then. Besides the aforementioned inspiration, that's about all that seems noteworthy at the moment.

10:58PM - Your computer box needs words

So, this is my first post from my "new" computer. Actually, I have two computers now, up from zero just a week ago. I don't expect this trend to continue, though. Both were given to me, and neither is the computer I had been promised a year ago and have been expecting since then. Hopefully, Gayle will find the time and motivation to send it soon, as it's a much more capable machine, and I'll be able to give the computers I now have to someone else who could benefit from them. Ironically, all of my computer time this week was used in setting up one and then the other, so I haven't written much of anything. Even now, I don't have much of a typical journal entry to write, but I want to give a sincere thanks to Jacob, the 12-year old kid that Jami babysits, for putting together this computer for me, and to Emily (and her dad) for sending me their old laptop. I had to use my old hard drive in Jacob's computer, and had to get a CD drive and network card for Emily's laptop, but they're both working now, albeit slowly. Even if it's not by me, I'm sure good use will be put to both of them.

And the first person to give me the source for the quote which is the title of this post gets a cookie. Maybe the second person too. But if you use Google to find it, it doesn't count.

9:41AM - Sleeping, eating cereal, wasting time on the internet

...these are a few of my favorite things...

Actually, if I were asked, I'd list things like cycling, church, talking to or hanging out with friends, and any manner of adventure. But truthfully, those are all things I can do for awhile and then be sated, whereas it seems my thirst for sleeping, eating cereal, and wasting time on the internet is never quenched. Perhaps if I were able to just sleep until I woke up, eat cereal while wasting time on the internet until I was tired, sleep and repeat the cycle without end, I would at some point get sick and tired of it, but that's never happened. I have many times spent more than 24 hours (and a few times 3 days or so) doing only those things, and then did something else not because I wanted to but because I had to. Besides, I don't want to do an experiment to see just how much would be enough to make me sick enough to stop.

Although those things do all fill a need and aren't inherently bad, none of them are the best way to fill it. Sleeping is necessary, but if I don't have a schedule and a reason to get up, I usually sleep about 12 hours out of 24. Kristen says that sleep begets sleep, and that's often the case, but for me, the sleep begotten by sleep inevitably begets laziness. Likewise, I need to eat, and cereal (at least the kind I eat) isn't bad for me, but it's rarely the best thing, and it's certainly not balanced enough to be my only sustenance. Wasting time on the internet isn't really a necessity, but it's an essentially harmless way for my curiosity and intellect to be fed and excercised. Taken by themselves in proper doses, all these things can be helpful and beneficial, but too often they are the products of my laziness, and when life consists of nothing else, they become decidedly harmful.

Recently I've been reading the life of St Silouan the Athonite, and as with any hagiography, I can't read it for more than a few hours without the questions and thoughts in my head overpowering my ability to concentrate on the text. What's hard is that I quickly see the ascetic labor the saints give themselves to so fully and humbly, and I desire the fruits of that labor, but like a properly conditioned American consumer, I want to somehow get there the quick way, to experience the grace of God in close communion with Him without going through all the necessary ascetic self-denial and especially without having the extreme humility it requires. Of course, I do experience the grace of God without ascetic labors readying me for it, but it's not what the saints experience. Indeed, God's presence and nature is inescapable, but given in small measure now on earth it is experienced as good or bad depending on the condition of each person, and given in great measure in the world to come it will be experienced as heaven or hell. So even when I don't seek the depth and richness of God's grace in the church services and prayer, all creation is imbued with the goodness of God and ministers that to me. But because of my selfish pride, too often I experience that grace and goodness as a negative thing: as frustration with people's irritating behavior, as unfulfilled desire for material riches and goods, as impatience with the nature of creation, and as unsatisfied longing for personal intimacy with a wife.

And so my appetites and desires are temporarily satisfied in mediocre ways, by sleeping, eating cereal, and wasting time on the internet. These things are for me the cheap, quick, and lazy distraction from the humble ascetic strivings which would satisfy my larger desire for goodness. It's said that the good thing can be the worst enemy of the best thing, and that may be the case for me, but I think that if I truly knew from experience what the best thing was like, I would no longer settle for the good, and especially not for the mediocre. Soon after St Silouan arrived at the monastery where he spent his life, he was given by God's grace an unsurpassed vision of Jesus, and was filled with the wonder of God. For the rest of his life, he spent all his time and effort in asceticism, humbly seeking that best thing which had been granted to him. He knew by experience the words of the Lord spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: "Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart."

Somehow, I need to learn to seek God and find Him when I search for Him with all my heart. As long as I keep allowing myself to be momentarily satisfied with earthly things, and neither seeing their divine purpose nor seeking their Creator, I will continue unfulfilled, knowing only the shadow of a glimpse into the grace that others have received, and not finding myself able to give up my temporary pleasures for the sake of the grace and goodness which God is ready to pour out in great measure. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

10:13PM - Racing

I'm trying to decide 2 things about bike racing. The first is what to do tomorrow: go on a club ride, watch a cyclocross race, or go on a training ride with the Cycle Sport team. The weather is predicted to be pretty rainy, so there won't be many people going on the club ride, and I don't have fenders for my bike because of a snafu in exchanging them at REI, so those are the points against the bike ride. The points against watching the race are that it's in Grants Pass at 10am, so I'll probably drive there since it takes 4 hours to cycle there and sunrise isn't till almost 7am, and there will be another race at Emigrant Lake next week, which would make a much nicer cycle-to-the-race destination. The points against training with the Cycle Sport team are that I haven't decided if I want to race next year, and that I know I'll work as hard as I can and they'll still all drop me with ease until I've ridden with them for a few months. I think I'm leaning more towards doing the club ride tomorrow and either watching the 'cross race or doing the training ride with the team next week.

The other thing I'm trying to decide is whether to start training this winter in preparation for the racing season next year. I've talked to several people about it, former racers that I ride with in the club and Tom who has a great perspective on these things, and although I'm sure I'd enjoy bike racing and wouldn't be last in all the races, I'm not sure I want that lifestyle and all the baggage that comes along with it. Instead of just riding for fun, I'd have to make sure I prepare for every race by riding enough and eating properly and maintaining my bike, and I'd have to make sure I attend all the races. Instead of riding casually as I feel like it, I'd have to commit to riding seriously, consistently, whether I feel like it or not. I've proven to myself that I do have the discipline to do this sort of thing if I really want it, and I've also proven that I can think I have the discipline and then find out that I don't. I think the thing I'm most afraid of is that even though I'm sure I'll enjoy the training, the races, and the fitness, I won't enjoy all the commitment it takes.

In some sense, there's some pressure to decide pretty soon about bike racing, because I'll be 26 next year and time is slipping away; even if I start now, I won't be able to ever perform as well as if I had built race fitness since I was 16 or so, and with every year that goes by my body becomes less responsive to training and more settled on whatever rhythm I give it. And with every week that goes by without training, I lose a little of the potential racing form and fitness (and thus performance) that's possible for me next year. This pressure is a necessary and intrinsic part of bike racing, and it's only a foreshadowing of what a regular racing schedule will be like next year. I don't like pressure, but it's the only thing that makes me perform anywhere close to my best, and in that sense it's good for me.

I'm also trying to decide whether racing might be a vain pursuit; and whether I might be better served by doing something that more directly has an effect on my closeness to God. None can know the mind of God and His ways for me, but in many ways bike racing somewhat smacks of a selfish, vainglorious pursuit of my own will, and doesn't seem to offer many opportunities to learn and demonstrate Christ-like humility and love. I haven't yet talked to Fr. Isaac about this, but I'm sure he'll have something profitable to say. That may be what I need to do to decide for sure about racing.

Maybe if it rains and nobody shows up for the club ride tomorrow, I'll go watch the 'cross race. Then I won't have either of those good excuses not to do a training ride with the club next Saturday. That's how I need to feel in order to make this kind of decision; as if there's no good alternative and no good reason not to, so that I feel as though it's my only option. As with all things, we'll see.

8:11PM - A Nosty Fright

The roldengod and the soneyhuckle,
the sack eyed blusan and the wistle theed
are all tangled with the oison pivy,
the fallen nine peedles and the wumbleteed.

A mipchunk caught in a wobceb tried
to hip and skide in a dandy sune
but a stobler put up a EEP KOFF sign.
Then the unfucky lellow met a phytoon

and was sept out to swea. He difted for drays
till a hassgropper flying happened to spot
the boolish feast all debraggled and wet,
covered with snears and tot.

Loonmight shone through the winey poods
where rushmooms grew among risted twoots.
Back blats flew betreen the twees
and orned howls hounded their soots.

A kumkpin stood with a tooked crooth
on the sindow will of a house
where a icked wold itch lived all alone
except for her stoombrick, a mitten and a kouse.

"Here we part," said hassgropper.
"Pere we hart," said mipchunk, too.
They purried away on opposite scaths,
both scared of some "Bat!" or "Scoo!"

October was ending on a nosty fright
with scroans and greeches and chanking clains,
with oblins and gelfs, coaths and urses,
skinning grulls and stoodblains.

Will it ever be morning, Nofember virst,
skue bly and the sappy hun, our friend?
With light breaves of wall by the fayside?
I sope ho, so that this oem can pend.

--May Swenson

3:37AM - Another Adventure Story

For this story, I'll try to write in a stylized "storytelling" way instead of the sparse and bland narrative that I usually use for my journal, so it should be considerably longer, richer, and more inviting. If I come back to this after a while and find that the tone sounds put on and not authentic, I'll just stick to my usual dry narrative for my journal.

I spent a nice end of last week at Hobbitworld, waking up to leisurely breakfasts, spending the days nailing shingles on the roof under clear blue skies, and enjoying conversations over dinner and wine with Christina and Sergei. I came back Friday night at almost midnight to a dark house; Jami was already in bed. I tiptoed around putting away groceries, then spent the next 5 hours glued to the computer screen, letting my soul drain out of my eyeballs and fingertips into the lifeless plastic machine. Charles said that the difference between wasting time on the internet and wasting time watching TV is that with the internet you feel like you're learning or accomplishing something until you've spent 5 hours and have nothing to show for it, and I think he's right. Jami got up to use the bathroom at 5:30, and that was enough of a reminder for me to get off the computer. Just as the first grey light of early dawn was filtering through my window, I closed my eyes and sleep came immediately.

I woke up to Katie asking where Ax was, and Jami answering that he was at his parent's. I had forgotten to lock the front door the night before, and Katie walked in at 10am, expecting to find Ax there. He arrived with his parents at almost 11, by which time we had eaten breakfast and Katie had repeated about 10 times all there was to say about his parents being late. Despite having had only 4 hours of sleep after a week of work, I was itching for a bicycle exploring adventure, and hammered out a fast pace on the greenway up to Talent so I could ride up Wagner Creek road. I'd never been further than the turn for where Patrick and Gabriella used to live, which is only 2 miles up the road, and I wanted to find out what kind of road it was and where it went.

Wagner Butte looks considerably larger than its 7,255 feet as it looms large over Talent, and the view from the lower slopes of Wagner Creek road was almost intimidating. The first 5 miles of the road had an almost stair-step grade, alternating between 4% and 10%. The houses grew fewer and further between, the valley narrowed to leave just enough room for the road and the small creek between the steep, densely forested sides, and then I saw the sign that explained why that road is never part of the club rides: PAVEMENT ENDS. I kept riding onto the hard-packed gravel, and my touring tires felt solid and comfortable as they crunched the rocks underneath them. The grade became a more consistent 6-8% for a few miles, and then it inexplicably began climbing the hillside, getting further above the creek, at over 15%. Standing on the pedals in my lowest gear, I struggled up at 4-5mph, my rear tire slipping slightly on the loose gravel with every hard pedal stroke. After almost 1/4 mile, I had to stop to catch my breath. The hill was so steep that the bike wouldn't stand on the kickstand, so I had to hold it up. I was demoralized by letting a hill beat me, and considered turning around and finding some pavement, until a pickup truck passed me with 2 mountain bikes in the bed, grinding up the hill in first gear, the rear tires bouncing on the washboards. Seeing those "invalid bikes" cheating their way up motivated me to attack the hill again, and it fortunately went back to a moderate 4-6% just a few hundred yards later.

After several more miles of relatively consistent uphill grade over hard packed gravel, I saw the truck that had passed me parked in a turnoff, and the 2 guys were suiting up to ride their full-suspension toys. I stopped to see where they were headed, and they showed me their map of the area. They were planning to ride some singletrack trails around there, and suggested that I could continue on Wagner Creek road (which by now had turned into NFD 22) up to the Siskiyou Crest road (NFD 20), which I could take to the Mt. Ashland parking lot. From there, it would be a quick flight over pavement down the hill and back into Ashland, which I'd done before. It was 1:30, the sky was blue, the air was cool, I had plenty of water and trail mix, I had 3½ hours before I had to be back, and I figured the total loop to be only 50-60 miles, so I decided that would be my route. I thanked them for their map and suggestion, wished them a good day of riding, and headed on up the hill.

Riding along the road in solitude, with the cool wind blowing the fresh mountain air on my face, the sound of my tires crunching along the gravel, the occasional stunning view of the Applegate valley from a perspective I'd never seen it before, and the wonderful feeling of being "in the groove" with my body cranking out consistent power, was exactly the exploring adventure I'd been itching for. After about 30 minutes of this, I found a straight stretch of road with no trees on the south side, letting the warm sun and the view in, and stopped for a snack. After only 5 minutes, the sweat on my arms had dried, the taste of trail mix had gotten old in my mouth, the stiffness had become noticeable in my legs, and the picture-perfect view had become etched in my eyes, so I started pushing the pedals again. About another mile further, the road became flat, then slightly downhill, and my bicycle surprised me by feeling solid and stable at 25mph over the bumpy gravel. I was glad the downhill was short and moderate, because after about two minutes my hands and feet were cold and I knew I'd be shivering after another 10 minutes. My spandex shorts and short-sleeve cycling jersey were perfect for the mild autumn weather in the valley, but not quite enough for the thinner, colder air 4,000 feet above the valley, and I knew that I'd freeze on the descent from Mt. Ashland, but realized that would just have to be part of the adventure.

When I turned onto NFD 20, I felt like I was in familiar territory, since although I'd never been in that section, I'd been on that road before, and knew I couldn't be far from Mt. Ashland and the long paved downhill back home. The uphill grade immediately steepened to 10%, the potholes multiplied, the trees crowded in over the road, and I alternated sitting and standing in my lowest gear, hoping to soon reach the top of the ridge where I knew I'd be back in the warm sun and not have such a steep climb. I noticed small patches of snow hiding in the deepest shade, the last remnants of the several inches that had fallen there 5 days earlier. I was surprised to see it, and although I was comfortably warm as long as I was pedaling hard, my summer clothes suddenly seemed not enough.

After about a mile, the bicycle seat suddenly fell away from my butt, and I stopped immediately. The seat was hanging loose, attached only by the seat post bag. I put down the kickstand and retrieved the hardware from the road behind me, and found that the bolt that holds the seat in place had broken. The bolt had 12.9 stamped on the top, so I knew it was a high-grade bolt, but what I didn't know was that an 8mm grade 12.9 bolt of high-strength steel requires 350,275 pounds of force to break it. I thanked God that something as relatively insignificant as a seat post bolt had broken, and not something related to the brakes, wheels, or drivetrain.

Suddenly, I was in a different world, and the solitude, altitude, dense forest, cool breeze, and hard work of pedaling became my enemies instead of my friends. My imaginations of a grand enjoyable adventure were replaced by imaginations of being stranded overnight, lonely, cold, and hungry. I took a quick inventory, and found that I had no warm clothing or shelter, no flashlight or cigarette lighter, and no first aid kit. What I did have was less than 1,000 calories of trail mix and ½ bottle of water left, a knife and string among my few bike tools, and my cellphone, which had both a charged battery and good reception. It was 3:15, I felt good and had plenty of energy to keep riding for a few more hours, and knew that if nothing else unexpected happened, I could almost certainly ride back home, getting there late, tired, and cold. Suddenly my route planning turned from trying to find a great place to ride into trying to find the quickest, safest route home. My tripmeter read almost 30 miles, so I estimated I had the same distance to travel in either direction, and I knew I'd have a harder time descending the gravel road I had climbed up than descending the paved road from Mt. Ashland, so I decided to keep going. I had seen a few cars on the road during the 2 hours I'd been on gravel, and planned to try to get someone to take me and my bike back down the hill. In the worst case scenario, I knew I could call Jami or anyone from church to come bail me out.

I put the broken bolt and seat hardware in my seat post bag, and used the bungee cord I always carry to fasten the seat and seat post bag on the rear rack. Riding on a steep washboarded gravel road on a road bike with no suspension is tiring, not just tiring on your legs because there aren't gears low enough to comfortably go 5mph, but also tiring on your upper body because it takes a lot more effort to hold the bike steady and keep it going straight when the gravel keeps pushing the front wheel around. Lacking a seat to sit on, or even hold between your legs while standing, makes the job much more tiring. Turning the pedals at the low speeds necessary to keep from rocking the bike while standing is very hard on your knees over a long period of time, and requiring your arms to support some of your weight as well as hold the bike upright and pointed straight is hard on your wrists and shoulders. I rode standing up for about 30 minutes, during which time the front part of my plastic front fender broke off while I was going over some washboards. I stopped and picked it up, and it joined my seat and seat post bag on my rack.

Soon I reached the crest of the ridge, and seeing the snow-covered 14,162 feet of Mt. Shasta rising up across the Klamath valley inspired me to let out a whoop of joy. The misadventure of mechanical failure had done little to dampen my high spirits of a grand time with my bicycle in the mountains, and I was still enjoying myself, trusting in God's providence to lead me home with no danger. I decided that if I didn't meet a car with helpful occupants by 4pm or so, I'd call Jami or someone else.

About 5 minutes after I rounded a bend and first sighted the white radar dome "soccer ball" atop Mt. Ashland, a pickup truck came along the road, going the same direction as I was. I waved to them to stop, and when I saw they were Hispanics, I knew they'd agree to take me and my bike down the mountain, which they did. I had to ride with my bike in the bed as there was no room in the cab, so I asked for a jacket or blanket to keep me warm, as I knew I'd freeze in the cool mountain air if I wasn't pedaling hard. The passenger took off his own jacket and gave it to me, and that combined with me sitting in the lee of the cab kept me warm and comfortable. They suggested that I help myself to a can of pop from the cooler they had in the bed, so I did. I couldn't have imagined a nicer way to get down the mountain than the only vehicle that happened to come by in the hour since my seat had fallen off.

We wound down Old 99, and at the bottom they stopped to let me head towards Ashland, as they were heading towards Klamath Falls. I expressed my deep thanks, and they gave me a booklet titled "Worship the Only True God", saying that they hoped I'd read it, as it had helped them to become different people. I haven't given it more than a quick glance, which showed it was published by the Watchtower society. Although my kind friends are unfortunately misled, I was thirsty and they gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and they invited me in, I needed clothes and they clothed me. May God bless them and show them the divine light of His countenance for the kindness they have shown to me, an unworthy sinner.

Even on the relatively flat paved road, the 10 miles back into town was harder than I had thought it would be. The lack of a seat meant that the bike's center of gravity was noticeably lower, and that made the handling more twitchy, especially if I tried to take a hand off the bars to wipe my runny nose. On the downhills, I scooted back and put my butt on the rear rack, and although it provided some comfort relative to standing, it made the front wheel react sharply and immediately to every little undulation of the road and every little movement of my body. Riding with the setting sun to my left, I laughed at the shadow my bike and I cast, the seat post sticking up lonely and useless as my legs cranked out a rhythm without it.

I got back at almost exactly 5pm, when I had hoped to get back. I probably would have gotten back a little later if my seat hadn't fallen off, since I stopped for an extra 10-15 minutes on its account, and I rode significantly slower without it, but I gained a good deal of time by whizzing along the road in the back of the pickup truck. At any rate, I had just enough time to change clothes and eat an apple before going with Ax to Great Vespers. There is truly nothing better than being part of a beautiful church service after partaking so fully and purely of the grandness and glory of creation, experiencing God in nature, and finding Him living in me at the same time. The more of God and the church I experience, and the more of adventures in nature I have, the greater grows my appetite for both.

5:26PM - So many words, so little time

Jami recently commented how it's so much easier and less work to keep up with the cleaning every week (2 or 3 hours' worth) than to let it go and then have to catch up. I think that's just psychological, as the amount of time it takes to clean after 1 week of dirt is about the same as after 3 or 4 weeks; you just get a lot more dirt up when you leave it for a month, and overall you spend much less time cleaning if you leave it for later. It's not that way with my journal, because the stuff to write gets piled up and it takes much longer to write it all. In the end, what ends up happening is that a lot of it just doesn't get written. Well, enough meta-journaling.

Bicycles and bicycling continue to be my greatest interest at the moment. I think it's been this way since spring of last year, before I went on my long motorcycle trip, when I started finding out about bicycle touring and reading a lot about it and catching the bug. Before I left on that trip I told myself that if I were ever to do it again, I'd do it on a bicycle. When I got back, I used my bicycle for most of my transportation needs, since it was either that or my motorcycle, and it's impossible to stay warm on a motorcycle in the winter. I first rode from Medford to Ashland and back that fall, which I'm pretty sure was the first time I'd done a 30 mile round trip on a bicycle. Then when I moved to Ashland, I rode to work at Laidlaw on my bicycle for like a month, in the dark cold early February mornings. I started riding with Siskiyou Velo this spring, and got my "new" bike from Tom on May 31, and since then I've put over 1,700 miles on the bike, almost 500 a month, which means I've put almost twice as many miles on my bike as on my car during that time. I did the MS150, which was by far the furthest and fastest I'd ridden up to that point, and in the past several weeks I've been riding my bike to Medford to sell plasma, and doing over 21mph average for the 13 mile stretch of the greenway a few times. When I started riding with the club, I never saw over 16mph average for the first month, and having 17.6mph average for the 105 miles of the MS150 also seemed unimaginably fast at the time. Two weeks ago I did an 86 mile ride with 3 other guys from the club, and we were all pretty well matched, so we did a lot of good paceline work at 20mph, and had almost 18mph average for the day. Last week I did a century ride which will be a large organized ride next year; this year was for club members to try the route and give feedback. I was motivated to do it fast so I could get back in time for Vespers, and stayed with the fast group at the front the whole time, and had an 18.7mph average at the end. That means I finished 105 miles in 25 minutes less than I had on a nearly identical course just 6 weeks earlier, and what's really remarkable is that last time I felt like I was just flying the whole time, trying hard to hang onto a fast group, whereas this time I felt much more comfortable, and the pace seemed just right. So after 4 months I've gone from inexperienced and trying hard to hang on to the back of the club rides to riding at the front with the fast guys on every ride, and finishing a century as fast as the fastest guys in our club, and doing this on a bike that weighs 15 pounds more than most of theirs. So I've been thinking a lot about whether I should try racing next year, I don't think I have enough of a dedicated competitive attitude to kill myself for a win, which is what's necessary to be a great racer, but looking at the improvements I've made this summer, I think that if I continue to ride a lot and push myself, I'll be in racing form by next spring. The Mt. Ashland hillclimb race was a week ago today, and I knew that not only would I have to miss church to do it, but I also wouldn't be able to do the century on Saturday and the race on Sunday, so I chose the century ride. About 3 months ago was the only time I've done the climb, and I did it in about 2:30, which would put me at about 80th place of 93 racers, but if I can do it in 2 hours, I'd be in about 40th place, a good result for a beginner. Maybe this Tuesday I'll try to do the Mt Ashland hillclimb by myself and time it and see how my time compares to the finishers of the race. Even though I don't have a real racing mentality, it still seems like it would be fun to race, and I might do well enough to feel like it would be worth continuing with training and racing for a few years.

Last week on my way to Hobbitworld, I saw an old road bike on the side of the road (in someone's driveway) with a paper on it that said "FREE" so I looked at it, and it seemed like a classic old steel road bike, a bit lighter and overall in better shape with better components than my "old junk bike" that I used to ride everywhere, so I picked it up. It's an old Fuji Monterey, probably 20-30 years old, and after cleaning and adjusting and measuring it, I found that it's a 56cm, one size smaller than my bikes, and overall in quite nice shape. It needs new tires and a new chain, and would benefit from new wheels and drivetrain and handlebars, but the tires hold air so I rode it around town some, and it has a remarkably smooth and nice ride. If it were my size, I'd fix it up and keep it as my "old junk bike" that I'd ride whenever I didn't want to put on my cycling shoes and clothes, but I think it would be better off as someone else's main bike. I told Father Isaac and Ken about it, and we'll see how interested they are. It's really neat to find and fix up an old junk bike and find out how beautiful it can be to look at and ride. Whoever was giving it away would certainly look at it now as a thing of value instead of worthless junk. I went to the used outdoor gear shop in Ashland to see if they have some good parts for it (they do) and found a flyer for the Ashland community bike program, a place that collects old junk bikes from people and turns them into nice rideable bikes and keeps a "bike library" from which people can check out a bike. It seems like a great program, and something that I'd really enjoy being a part of, and I'm sure I could be quite helpful. They have free bike clinics every Tuesday, so I might go to that to meet them and see how to get involved.

The reason I was going to Hobbitworld is because I've been helping Sergei put a new roof on the houses out there; I worked for several days last week and the week before, and I'm planning to work next week and maybe the week after also. Sergei is a Russian guy who was just kinda driving through here, looking for a place to live and be a truck driver (which he has lots of experience doing) and Christina offered him the job of putting new roofs on the buildings there (he has experience with that also) and he agreed. He's a real neat guy, has a thick accent but speaks excellent English, has lived here in the States for many years, has at least one son and daughter, both college-age, and I don't know where his family is or why he's just floating around the West Coast, but I've really been enjoying working with him and talking to him about all kinds of stuff. He's very practical, very smart, has lots of very diverse knowledge and experience and lots of well thought out opinions. He was raised atheist/communist in Russia, but became Orthodox when he was 23 (same age as when I became a catechumen) and (at least among people I know) is second only to Father Isaac in his knowledge and practice of Church stuff and spirituality. I don't know how long he's planning to stay here, maybe only as long as Christina has a job for him, but I hope he stays here a long time, or maybe I wish I could go with him wherever he's going and share his adventures.

Last week Tom called to let me know that he's got some sanding work for me soon, maybe in a week or two, lasting probably a month or two, and probably 20-30 hours/week, on a schedule that suits me. That sounds pretty darn good, it means I'll have enjoyable work maybe even until Christmas. I'd much rather have this kind of roofing and sanding work sometimes than have my computer ninja work; not only is it with more enjoyable people, but it's much easier because I don't have to do anything to get the work, people just call and ask me if I can work. Maybe once I get the computer ninja thing going, it would be like that, but at least right now I'd rather postpone that until I really need that kind of dependable income.

Today was the first day we've decided to have coffee hour at the Newman Center instead of at the park because of the weather; it's pretty cool and cloudy. Several inches of snow was predicted for Mt. Ashland this weekend, and we got all the requisite rain and cold here in the valley on Friday and Saturday, but it cleared off Saturday evening and on my way to Vespers I could see the top of Mt Ashland and it had no snow. So that canceled my plans to go up there with the kids after coffee hour and throw snowballs. Maybe next week, or the week after, we'll get the first real good snow. Probably sometime in November I'll go up there at least once to snowboard before the lifts open in early December. Overall I like warm weather better than cold weather, but I really love the snow, so I'm pretty excited about this weather. The clouds have moved back in now, and it's probably snowing up there right now. Well, maybe if I ride my bike up there on Tuesday I'll find out.

I wish I had my own computer; I always have lots of thoughts I want to write in my journal, but my computer time is usually so limited that I only have time for some emailing and reading cycling news, and when I get around to writing in my journal I always feel like I have to catch up so much that I rarely write my thoughts and feelings. It might not be that different if I had more computer time, but at least that's how it seems now. Maybe Gayle will send me her computer soon; I've been hoping for it for like 6 months now. She just had another baby, Margeurite Joie Trepanier, so now they have 4 kids, and Genna is a big sister to 3. They just moved into a house, so hopefully they'll be settled in enough soon that Gayle can send me that box. We'll see.

The longer I live in this kind of regular predictable life, where the closest I come to extreme feelings is the physical suffering and near-bliss of riding my bike, where even though I don't have a rigid work or school schedule, every day is pretty much the same, the more I'm sure that I don't really like this kind of "normal life". I've been reading The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, and the kinds of things experienced by the characters in that book and the way they talk really appeals to me in a lot of ways, that kind of extreme living where things are never really certain and you really have to be ready for anything. The only kind of life I know of where you could live like that sustainably is to either be a bum on the street or a professional adventurer. I guess many people's lives in 3rd world countries is like that, but that's in something of a different sense, perhaps. Anyway, I suppose that if I get married sometime then I'll have different ideas about how to make a good life for myself, but until then I don't think I'll ever be really loving life unless there's a fair amount of uncertainty and adventure. I think a lot of people get bored with the same old thing all the time, but I also think that few would actually choose danger and the unknown over the predictable life where you know you won't be suffering too much. I've been finding that when I have a chance, I usually choose the risk and the unknown over the thing I've been doing that I know works well. I should probably do something about that with the direction of my life, but until I have a good idea how (and the means to do it) I'll stay here where I have free rent, food, etc. Comfort and ease can get old quick, but it always seems valuable.

11:29PM - Weather! ...and other things

Thursday night, Fall blew in with a little storm. Ax and Jami and I were at Jon and Agafia's, and we went out to watch the sun reflecting in bright pinks and oranges off the storm clouds, and saw a bit of lightning. On the way home, the wind picked up just a bit and we got some rain sprinkles. I stuck my head and arms out the window as I drove to catch some of the rain, and shouted with glee. I've seen a little rain this summer in Austin and Nashville, but that didn't dampen my rejoicing at the rain finally coming to our little parched valley. Friday morning the clouds were hanging low on the mountains, the temperature was 50 degrees, and it just felt and looked like a classic winter storm that dumps snow all over the mountains. It's much too early and a little too warm for snow yet, but the unrelenting reign of the hot dry summer days is clearly over. This may just be my favorite time of year, at least around here. The way the clouds hang down low and little pockets of mist hide in the creases of the hills, the way everything turns from brown to green in a week, the way the earth and sky seem washed so clean the day after a storm moves through, and the way it all just hints so tantalizingly at the wonder of the coming snow, just really stirs my passions.

On the other hand, I wasted so much time on the Internet last night that I didn't get up in time for the bike ride today, which was out to Shady Cove and back, and I had been wanting to go back and "conquer" that ride after it kicked my butt so hard the first time I did it 4 months ago, the second club ride I did, just as I was getting into recreational cycling. It may be just as well, since my left knee is not quite totally recovered from a strain that showed up Sunday night. I'm sure it was from my cycling and mountain climbing adventure last Saturday, but it took until Monday morning before it was swollen and hurting, and it confused me because I hadn't felt especially strained or physically stressed from that adventure - my legs weren't even sore. Also, the muscles around my knees are much stronger than they've ever been, so I was a little surprised to have a kind of classic stress injury to what seems like such a strong part of my body. By Wednesday I could walk without a significant limp, and yesterday was the first day I felt no unusual pain from it, but I can tell it's not quite perfect yet. Regardless, I figured that since I missed the club ride, I'd probably ride to Medford and sell plasma, since I did that on Tuesday and I've got $40 waiting for me next time I go. I ate and got ready to cycle, but just as I opened the garage door it started raining pretty hard. I knew that showers were moving through, and that I might not see much rain, but then again I might be riding in the rain the whole time, also. I don't have my fenders mounted yet because there's not enough clearance for the rear one, and it wasn't cool enough to wear rain gear, and I just felt kinda wimpy and lazy after limping around most of the week, so I hopped in my car and drove instead. I got there a few minutes after 2pm, and found out they close at 2pm on Saturdays. So I went to the library and read cycling and car magazines, got fruit at Winco, and came back for Vespers, which I drove to also since it was raining. I feel like a wimp for not wanting to ride in the rain, since I rode my crappy bike with no fenders in all kinds of weather last winter, but I think it's partly just that we've had such perfect cycling weather for months here and I'm not used to having to prepare for the weather anymore. Hopefully I'll have motivation to mount my fenders soon, and once that's done I expect I'll have no qualms about riding in all weather.

Jami is...not exactly a neat freak, but certainly more organized and neat than the average person. Our house wasn't cluttered by any standards when she moved in, but it was obviously lived in, with things we used regularly on tables and counters and such. Well, no more. Everything is in cabinets in the kitchen, dishes don't go unwashed for more than an hour, things I didn't care about are moved into the garage, little baskets keep Jami's and Ax's stuff in the bathroom, etc. My general way of taking care of the house has been to do what's necessary in a satisfactory way, but not do any organizing or cleaning that didn't have an obvious purpose. I value organization only as a means to doing things more efficiently with less effort, thus I don't organize things that I don't use much or aren't in the way, since it's less work to leave them be until you happen to need them than it is to always work to keep everything organized. Basically, I keep things in a way that requires the least amount of effort to do my regular tasks, only organizing when it's obviously less work to organize than to leave disorganized. Jami seems to value organization very highly as an end in itself; anytime there is an opportunity to make something more organized or more aesthetically pleasing, she immediately makes it so, even if it's obvious that her organizational effort is far above the effort required to just use it as it is. Some of this may just be her moving-in "nesting instinct", wanting to start out with things the way she thinks they ought to be, but I'm pretty sure it won't change much as she lives here and gets used to how things are and has less time to focus on it. Since she's been very active in that kind of stuff, I have been also, both in just helping her and in doing those kinds of things myself, since if she's going to keep things that way, I'll need to do that also so that we share the load. When one person on a tandem bike starts pedaling harder, the other one has a duty to pedal harder also, and both people go faster, albeit with more effort. When I'm by myself, I'm content with much less organization and housework effort than Jami is, but now that she's here, I'm also content to match her cleaning/organizing effort and keep things as she wants them. My housekeeping philosophy is entirely pragmatic, choosing the path of least resistance, and when she's here than means matching her effort in housekeeping in order to avoid the greater effort of fighting with each other about how to keep house. I certainly like it better with her here, though; even though I naturally do things differently than she does, she's an excellent housekeeper and I've liked all the changes she's made and the way she does things, and I'm glad to work with her to have the house as she wants it.

I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with Jami, but ever since she got here, every morning I've been waking up spontaneously, 15 or 30 minutes before my alarm clock rings, and feeling awake and alert enough to rather get up than lay in bed. I've also probably slept on the couch as often as I have in my bed (which is also strange but not as mind-bogglingly alien to me), and that's because I often sit on the couch and read at night, then get tired and turn off the light and fall asleep almost immediately. I do that because I know that if I go to my room, take off my clothes, put some air in my Thermarest, and crawl in my sleeping bag, I'll have lost that sleepy feeling and I'll lay awake for at least 15, maybe 45 minutes, before falling asleep. So taking advantage of my sleepiness by immediately falling asleep on the couch often means I sleep there all night, and the funny thing is that I always wake up at pretty much just the right time in the morning, and don't feel like sleeping for another 3 hours. It's as though I've suddenly gone from being nocturnal, or at least an incorrigibly late riser, to being diurnal, feeling sleepy at night and waking up naturally in the morning. I suppose most people's almost uniform experience is what I've been having for the past week, but it's so strange to me that I'm sure there's something going on either with my body or my mind that is unlike anything I've experienced before. If I was used to how I've been in the past week, and suddenly changed to how I've been the whole rest of my life, I'd be certain I was seriously ill or depressed, and would consider asking a doctor what's wrong with me. As it is, it seems like a positive change, so although it's a great mystery, I'm going to hope it lasts and not try to mess with it.

I'm supposed to pick up Ax and Katie at A street marketplace in 5 minutes to take Katie home, so one more quick note: Jami's grandpa, who she's pretty close to, is in the hospital and not expected to live more than a few days, so when Jami found out yesterday morning, she got a flight and drove to Portland that night and flew back home, and she's coming back next Monday. I hope and pray that it's a profitable time for her, even in the midst of her grief.

O Lord our God, Who by word alone did heal all diseases, Who did cure the kinswoman of Peter, You Who chastise with pity and heal according to Your goodness; Who are able to put aside every malady and infirmity, do You Yourself, the same Lord, grant aid to Your servant and cure him of every sickness of which he is grieved; lift him up from his bed of pain, and send down upon him Your great mercy, and if it be Your Will, give to him health and a complete recovery; for You are the Physician of our souls and bodies, and to You do we send up Glory: to Father, and to Son, and to Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

11:18PM - My mini epic adventure

I just got back from my little imitation of Goran Kropp today. For some reason, I had a hard time falling asleep last night, so I only got about 3 hours of sleep. I got up about 5:45 while it was still dark, packed my stuff, ate breakfast, and left at 6:43am. Riding up Dead Indian, even with about 30 pounds of stuff on the rack, didn't seem quite as hard as I'd remembered it being when I did it with the club a month and a half ago, but it may have been because today I was trying hard to pace myself, whereas last time I was practically racing one of the guys in the club. I kept my effort level well below maximum the whole way to the trailhead, and other than the 2.5 miles of gravel road (often very rough and steep) between 140 and the trailhead, it was not too hard and pretty enjoyable. I had figured on a 12mph average speed on the way there, which I had when I started up the gravel road, but when I got to the trailhead it had dropped to 11.4, and I had planned to get there by 10:15 but didn't arrive till almost 11:15, partly because I stopped longer than planned (filled my bike water bottles and Platypus bag at the Fish Lake campground) and partly because it took me 3 hours and 50 minutes of time on the bike instead of the 3:30 I had planned. Jami wasn't there when I got there, and my cellphone had no reception so I couldn't call her, but as I was sorting my stuff out to get ready to hike, she pulled up. She had made a few wrong turns, and had wandered around the gravel roads for a little while trying to find the trailhead. I was famished, and made 2 tuna sandwiches while we got ready to hike, and ate them as we walked. We started hiking at about noon, made 2 quick stops on the way up, and got to the summit at about 3:30. I made and ate 2 more tuna sandwiches while Jami had her lunch and tended to her blisters - she says she gets them every time she goes hiking, and I can't imagine how hard that must make it for her, but she still loves to hike. We left the summit at 4, and got back to the parking lot at 6:30. Jami left pretty much right away since she didn't have to do anything but hop in her car, and I changed clothes and re-packed my stuff on the bike and ate some of my trail mix and left at about 7pm. The ride back was mostly downhill or flat with a few short uphills, and I fairly flew back home, making the 42 miles in just 2:27 with an average speed of 17.2mph, despite riding the last half in the dark.

Overall, it was really a great adventure, certainly my biggest craziest adventure yet, and the experience was probably the best of any adventure I've had. As I was riding back, I was practically euphoric, partly because I could hardly believe I had actually done it, and partly because everything just seemed so right - like the whole world was in my hands, or something, and I was capable of anything. Physically, I've pretty much never felt better on the bike as I did on the way back, especially the last big climb up the backside of Dead Indian, which was way easier than it had been the last time I'd done it at the MLC Coming back to a climb that was very tough last time and finding it to be almost easy compared to how you remember it is an incredibly good feeling. I went down the frontside of Dead Indian almost as fast as I would have in the daytime, which is partly due to the power of my headlight, and partly due to the several cars that followed me for a mile or more at a time, lighting up the whole road for me with their headlights, and partly due to my recklessness or nerves of steel, whichever is the case. The hike itself was pretty nice; Jami turned out to be a great hiking partner, never going slower than I wanted to go, and only mentioning, never complaining about, her blisters. She claims to be out of shape and apologized for going a bit slow when her blisters were hurting, but if that's true then I'm sure she could easily beat me up and down that mountain if she were in shape and not in pain. The way up seemed a lot faster and easier than when I did it 2 years ago, which is probably due mostly to the fact that last time we stopped a lot for a long time, and just generally went slow. For my heart and lungs, going down was much easier than going up, but much harder on my knees and feet; the long middle section of the hike is mostly stepping up (or down) big rocks, and my knees and feet just didn't like all that shock over and over and over. Especially my feet are a little sore now, and my knees and leg muscles might be a little sore tomorrow, but right now they feel fine. The weather was great; cool enough in the morning that except for the 2 big climbs, I wore my jacket while cycling there, and cool enough on the trail to not sweat much at all, in fact I had to put on my jacket near the top, and I was pretty cold by the time we headed back down from the summit. The view at the top was nice, but somewhat obscured by the high thin clouds and overall haze. The Crater Lake rim and Mt Shasta and Mt Ashland were all quite visible, but not much beyond that was; which is too bad because on a bright clear day you can see all the way to the Sisters and Mt Lassen. The setting sun turned the clouds a beautiful mix of orange and purple as I rode back over mostly deserted roads through the forest, and again it was cool enough for me to wear my jacket except for the short climb up the back of Dead Indian. The temperature rose at least 15 degrees as I went down the hill back into Ashland, which made for perfect cycling and hiking weather all day.

There's something unique about me in the way I thrive so much on adventure; especially over the past year or two I've been finding more and more that if I don't plan big crazy adventures, I just have them spontaneously when I find myself out somewhere and just keep going, and sandbag myself so even though I'm not prepared I get myself stuck where it's better to keep going than to go back, and then somehow I make it, and thoroughly enjoy it. I've been pushing my limits, mostly physical and mostly on the bike, using my bike as a tool or means to adventure, but also psychologically with what can and can't be done, or at least what will or won't be fun. I'm finding more and more that my physical limits are always further than I expect them to be, and my enjoyment of crazy adventures (especially if I'm cycling) is greater than I expect it will be, and my thirst for being outside and physically active as an enjoyable thing is greater than I consciously realize. I want to find a way that I can live my life such that I not only have an outlet for my adventurousness, but take advantage of it, using my unique ability and desire for it as a way to glorify God and become Christ-like and thus save those around me. However, God's thoughts are higher than mine, of course, and all my thinking and striving towards that will never be as productive as His revelation of how these things can be for me. In this as in all things, the important thing for me is obedience, which means repentance and submission and willingness to let go of my own prideful thoughts and desires and listen to God. Somehow it's so much easier and (at least in the moment) more enjoyable to ride 85 miles and climb a big mountain all in one day than it is to trust God with my obedience and repentance and submission.

Whether or not my adventuring is now, or will be, a unique part of my being the image and likeness of Christ and thus a part of the salvation of the world, I might try to find a way to make some money doing it. Making money has always been hard for me; I never seem to be able to hold a job for very long (having jobs I don't like is part of that) and have never had any kind of financial breakthrough, where I really "get ahead" with money. I don't like having money, which means that my motivation to get it is always need (usually desperate need) and not want, so that is certainly a factor also, but it seems like the "killer app" for me is not to find a job that I can do that pays money, as all my jobs have been so far (and my prospective computer ninja-ing would be also) but to find a thing that I really like and find a way for that to provide me with enough money to live. There are a few things that I really like, but just tonight as I was riding back, I was thinking that what I'm doing is so unique that I'm sure there's some good way to make money doing it, and that would be a really great way for me to live. Goran Kropp, Tilmann Waldthaler, Willie Weir, and others live a life of paid adventure, and they all got started because they couldn't keep from having their own adventures, and then found a way to get sponsored and make money just doing what they had been doing and loving. I don't know where to get started on that, but it seems like the first real possibility of a "career" that's actually appealed to me in many years, so it's probably worth pursuing. Right now I need to pursue some serious rest, and this week I need to pursue things, like maybe Labor Ready or selling plasma, that will pay me some cash right now, since I'm just about out, and need to spend a little on my motorcycle before I can sell it, which is my next source of reasonable income.

1:24PM - Two thumbs up!

Since Jami got here this Sunday, most of what I've been thinking about and doing has been helping her get moved in and getting her adjusted to the house and vice versa. So far, it's been great having her here; from my perspective I'm noticing that she's very patient and kind and helpful with Ax, and is pretty flexible and laid back, and she's very good at all the housework stuff, much better than I am. I cook well, but have a limited range of ingredients I use and things I cook, so it's been nice to have her shopping and cooking to significantly expand the cuisine here. She's also more organized and do-it-now than I am, so things like the dishes and clutter don't pile up as much as they did with just me. Things never got bad with just me here, but everything happens faster and better now, partly because she's helping, and partly because her help is inspiring me to do-it-now like she does. So far we've been sharing the housework pretty evenly without having to formally assign chores; something needs to be done and one of us does it, which is how I had hoped it would be.

Ax really likes her, as expected. He doesn't have a wide range of emotions or ideas, and so far as I can tell he never has negative thoughts about anyone that he knows, so I think he's just overall pleased with her, another helpful nice person in the house to help him do things and talk to. He's especially pleased that she's a 23-year old girl since he's such a ladies' man.

I haven't yet found anything about Jami that seems like it might be a problem or a negative thing, she seems to fit in very well with both Ax and I. She and I have a lot of the same ideas about how to run a house, and the differences have been good ideas we've been learning from each other. She seems very open with her life, doesn't mind the things that Ax does that many feel as an invasion of privacy or whatever; she's fine with Ax sitting in her room talking to her about her life and her friends and such, and doesn't seem to be tired by his never-ending chatter and (sometimes personal) questions.

She's surprisingly un-Texas-like, other than a few vocal inflections and grammatical constructions (y'all and might could, etc), she doesn't have a Texas or southern accent, she rarely eats meat and has a lot of the same organic-food ideas that Agafia does, although not to Agafia's extreme. She's pretty active and likes doing outdoor things a lot; she has the same exact kind of hiking boots that I have (also well-worn), has a fair amount of rock climbing gear, telemark skis and boots and winter snow gear, 3 packs of different sizes, sleeping bag and Thermarest, etc. Her bike is a made-in-Taiwan but still nice Italian designed Bianchi mountain bike (no suspension) and she's not bad at riding it. On Monday she wanted to go to the Walmart in Talent to exchange her blinds for a different size, so I suggested riding bikes there after supper. I rode Tatiana's tandem with Ax and she rode Vonna's bike that I was borrowing while she and Father were gone (Jami's brakes were stuck and I hadn't fixed them yet) so that's what we did. I was a bit surprised that she'd go for it so easily without me having to convince her, especially since we rode back in the falling dark. We didn't go very fast, but I didn't have to go slower than usual just for her. On Wednesday I told her my plans to follow the example of Goran Kropp by riding my bike to Mt. McLoughlin, climbing it, and riding back home this Saturday, and asked if she wanted to drive up and meet me at the trailhead and do the climb with me, and she enthusiastically agreed. I was planning to do a big bike climb on Thursday morning to get my legs ready for it, and Jami came along with me to do the climb. We drove to old 99 so that she wouldn't be tired when we started the climb, and each went at our own pace. I climbed up to the beginning of the Mt. Ashland access road, 6.5 miles in just over 30 minutes, the fastest I've climbed that kind of grade, and would have gone on to the ski area parking lot, but I figured Jami would be worn out after 45 minutes of climbing, so I headed back down. I was mildly surprised to find her just below the second bridge over the railroad, 3.5 miles from where we started, further than I'd expected. She said it was really hard and she stopped 4 or 5 times for water (she had her Nalgene in her backpack) and a rest, but she felt fine. Hopefully that climb will do for her legs what I'm hoping it'll do for mine, so that we're ready for the big climb tomorrow.

It'll be interesting to see how well Jami and I become friends, since Ax is the reason we're here and usually dominates any conversations we have. It's like a job and a housemate thing all in one, and sometimes you become friends with your co-workers or housemates to the extent that you do things with them just for fun because you like them and you purposefully do things with them in contexts other than the one you met in, and you keep in touch with them after the job or housemate thing is over, and sometimes you just don't, even if you really get along with the person in that context. She seems like someone I could be pretty good friends with totally apart from our current context, but I'm not sure if we'll develop a real friendship like that or if we'll just be happy here for awhile and then move on and not think about each other much later. I'm not sure what to hope for, either; I definitely love having friends, but I already have lots of good friends who live far away, and since that's probably the most our friendship would ever turn out to be, it seems like it won't make much difference in the long run whether we're good friends or not. Those are all secondary thoughts, though; the most important thing by far is how we get along and how the house runs while she's here, and so far that's been great.

Today I worked on my motorcycle some, finally got the points attached properly due to Tom's generous tool help, took off the carbs and cleaned them, realized there was basically no gas in the tank (which means less old gas to use as weed killer), called several places about pod filters and nobody has them in stock, Cycle Quest is the only one that offers the cheap ones I want but it'll take a week or 2 to arrive. I was interrupted by Father calling, he wanted the long-overdue list of all the stuff that's sitting in our garage that was donated to the church for the e-Bay yard sale, so at his suggestion I dictated it all to him, which is probably the only way it would have gotten done before the next parish council meeting, so that was a good step to start that big mess going. I don't know if I'm just inspired by Jami's more organized and motivated attitude about things or if it's something else, but I'm glad to have gotten good starts on both those projects which have been waiting for me to find some motivation or discipline to do them. I have to decide what to do about the air filters for my motorcycle, but that and replacing the fork oil and charging the battery and cleaning it is all that needs to be done before I sell it, so if I'm motivated (and my lack of money is providing some of that) then I can put it up for sale next week. I'll end this entry the same way I do just about every other entry: We'll see.

2:11PM - Jami

Jami is expected to be here soon, any minute now really, and I wanted to quickly write down some of my expectations that I'm sure I'll soon forget once I meet her.

Neither of us has any idea what the other one looks like, but for some reason, right as I first started talking to her on the phone a month or so ago, I pictured her having curly red or brown hair, about shoulder length. On the phone, she seems pretty happy, almost bubbly, kinda like Maureen, so I'm imagining that she'll be smiling a lot. Other than that, I don't really know what to think about what she'll look like, just that she said she likes doing outdoorsy things; hiking, camping, biking, whatever, so she's probably not overweight or out of shape. It would be interesting to know what she imagines Ax and I look like; we haven't given her any clues. I don't know if this is true or not, but I think my voice and the way I talk sounds more clean-cut than I look, so I always expect people to think I look like a scraggly hippy when they meet me.

She didn't sound like she was particularly well-off in our conversations, but her dad bought her a brand-new Subaru Outback a few years ago, so her family obviously isn't poor, and I'm assuming she's used to a middle class American income and lifestyle. She doesn't like to watch TV or listen to loud music, but she does have a computer (a desktop, not a laptop, I think) and might like to waste time on the Internet like I do. She said she has a sleeping bag and (I think) a camping mattress like a Thermarest, so she might have a decent amount of camping or other outdoor gear. Everything she's bringing fits in her car (except maybe her bike is on a rack outside the car) and she's said she's not bringing a TV or any furniture or kitchen stuff, so I'm guessing she only has her personal stuff with her. I have no idea what kind of bike she has or how much she's used to riding it. She'll probably find out pretty soon that biking is a better way to get around Ashland than driving, so if she's not used to riding her bike a lot, she might get used to it.

She's said that she's pretty domestic; in other places where she's lived with college kids people have called her "mama Jami" because she did a lot of the housework, so I hope she's not a neat freak, because if she is then she'll end up doing all the cleaning or asking me to clean things that I think don't need it. I'm hoping she can broaden our palette of things to cook; I cook well but I have a pretty limited menu, and don't use a lot of food items that most people keep in their kitchens, so hopefully she'll help with that.

That's all I can think of right now. She left a message at 10am saying she was in Redding and expected to get here around 4 or 5pm, and it's less than 2.5 hours drive between there and here, so I'm not sure what she's planning to do on the way, but I'm expecting her to arrive anytime. Ax and Jake and I are going on a bike ride this afternoon at 4pm, so I hope she gets here before then and not while we're out. We'll see.

10:21PM - Nashville on an iMac

So, I've been in Nashville for 5 days now, and it's been nice. I've been staying at Debbie and Jake's with Lydia and Joe, so I've been seeing a lot of them and not much of Jon and Naomi (and their kids) and Momma and Daddy. Debbie's son David Cosby was born at 6:35pm on August 1, so he's been home and they were somewhat adjusted to him by the time we got here, but Naomi's son Micah Nathaniel wasn't born until 6:45am on August 12, which was the day after Joe and Lydia and I got here. I only saw Micah yesterday afternoon for a while when we were all over at Jon and Naomi's. Debbie and Jake live so far away from Jon and Naomi that it makes it a big deal to try to be there much, but I might spend the night there tomorrow since I have to be at the airport the following morning. Noah and Anya are huge and delightful; Anya's pretty shy with all the people around but she is the cutest little girl ever, and Noah's just lots of fun. David and Micah are too young to know much about them, but neither of them cry too often, which is a good sign.

The other evening I worked on a little 200cc 2-stroke Yamaha Blaster ATV that someone gave Jake awhile ago, and got it running pretty good. I owed him $200 for my airplane ticket, but he wanted to "pay me" for fixing his ATV that had been previously worthless to him by just calling it even on the plane ticket, and that sounded like a good idea to me, so I basically have $200 more than I thought I would, which makes life easier for the next few weeks. And it's a great fun little toy to ride around the yard, basically just a 4-wheel dirt bike, very fast and fun. I used it today to haul clippings from the bushes in the front to a pile in the back, so it can be useful also.

I went to church on Sunday with Debbie and Jake and Joe and Lydia, and although I knew it was a Protestant church, I had no idea what flavor of Protestant it was, and knew that the way Joe thinks about things that if it was different from what he thought was right then he'd either say nothing or try to convince Debbie and Jake of their error. That's the benefit of being a Protestant; if your religion is based on your own secular scientific worldview then you can be 100% certain you're right about whatever it is you believe and you can personally condemn heresies from 100 yards off. Satire aside, I was glad to find that, just like at Joe and Lydia's "Presbyterian" church, Jake and Debbie's "Bible" church had the 5 Sola's as the only decoration on the inside walls of their meeting space, and I knew that there wouldn't be much discussion of anything afterwards because everyone except me would agree with and enjoy whatever was said and done, and I was resolved to just hold my tongue, even if asked what I thought, because Joe and Lydia almost seem anxious to get in a debate with me about religious things, and they're better at preaching than listening, and I don't have the humility to go through that and learn, so I knew the only profitable thing would be to not say anything, which is what I did, and I guess it worked. A wise man can learn even from a fool, but a fool learns from no one because he's too full of himself to listen, and I don't think any of us have the humility to be wise instead of foolish. I was expecting to somewhat cringe and be very saddened that so many well-meaning people that I loved were so close and yet so far away from the truth, and that was certainly part of my reaction to it, but I was surprised to find so much arrogant pride of self-righteousness, mostly in the sermon. It was quite hard to sit and listen to, not so much because it misrepresented the God of love, but mostly because the tone was such that it really seemed like he was so convinced of his correctness and righteousness that he wasn't able to listen to anyone, even God, and that he would just rest self-satisfied forever in what he's doing for God. If I weren't so full of my own arrogant pride, I wouldn't have this reaction to their pride, and if I were truly humble, I might not even notice their pride, being instead ready only to learn and repent from my sinfulness and seek God. Well, I still have enough of my own prideful ideas that I'm not ready to learn from the small bits of truth remaining in their stripped-down and secularized understanding of God and religion. Theirs is definitely a religion of self-worth based on their own efforts, and there's no room for the wonderful mystery of God to inform or infuse their life with grace. Well, they're good people, as much as people can be good by their own definition and will.

Debbie and Jake have an iMac and 2 Windows laptops, but most of the time I use the iMac, which is more frustrating the more I try to do with it. I've never tried to use a Mac very much, but the lack of sensible options, the lack of the ability to do the normal things I want to do with files and such, is pretty frustrating. I could get used to the single mouse button (which won't be the standard for much longer) or the strange setup with menus and windows, or the odd placement of programs and files, but I can't get around the lack of a real text editor, a good working web browser (They don't have Firefox), the home and end buttons not working, and many little details that just aren't available. Last night I was trying to steal the pictures of me riding in the MS150 from the website that has them (I've found 8) and the more I got away from just a simple "checking my email, surfing the web" thing, the worse it got. Useful applications, Steve Jobs? No, we'll go for cool and fuzzy and wow factor instead. I got fed up and got on Jake's Windows laptop, and it was comparatively a breeze. Call me biased or uninformed, but I just don't think that Macs are as useful as Windows boxen; every step took more mouse clicks and there were fewer keyboard shortcuts, and I couldn't find any good apps for anything. My small experiences with Linux have been in the other direction; it seemed that there was so much utility packed in so densely that it almost made me feel stupid to not know how to use it, and Linux people often give the same rants about Windows as I just gave about the Mac, so I think I'm just a propeller-head stuck in a Windows world. Anyway, I did finally do what I wanted to with the pictures, and put them in a webpage on my server, and updated my earlier post to link to the larger pictures by themselves on my server. Maybe Ken can take the watermark out of them like he did for my pics from the MLC.

I guess that's all for now. Jake and Lydia and Joe should be home soon, and I'll probably want to not be on the computer while they're here. I've been trying to use some of my computer time to catch up on reading Ars (I'm over 3 months behind), partly so that I can give John some good computer advice, and partly so that I can actually be the computer ninja instead of being out of date, but I've only gotten caught up by about 2 weeks. Marc and Gayle should be moved into a house that they're buying by now, so it looks likely that they'll ship me that computer soon, and having my own computer will help immensely with me being a computer ninja. Hopefully that'll fall into place before too long, since I can sell my motorcycle, work on Glenn and Burt's car and sell it, and maybe work on Ax's go-kart and sell it, and then my prospective sources of income will have dried up. Maybe by then something besides being a computer ninja will come along, but I think the computer ninja thing still seems like the best idea for a relatively steady source of income. Fixing mechanical things for money has worked well for me so far (it paid for my plane ticket here and back) but I think I need something more consistent that I'm better at.

3:38PM - 10 hours, 6 minutes

That's how long it took me to ride the 177 miles of the MS150; 5:58 for the first day's 105 mile course and 4:08 for the second day's 72 mile course. That makes for an average speed of 17.6 the first day and 17.4 the second day, way above my optomistic expectations. The first day, I rode with a lady who had just finished the USA Ironman Triathlon in Lake Placid 2 weeks earlier until the second rest stop, where George Hincapie was signing autographs. He was using a ball-point pen and signing jerseys, and after 2 washings, the autograph has faded from my jersey. Oh well. Everyone left the rest stop when he did, and several of us rode out front with him. He's 6-3 and almost 180lbs; he's about as big around as me in every respect but taller, and looks thin as a rail. I rode beside and behind him for a bit, and he gave a real nice draft when I was on his wheel. He had just flown in from Spain (where he lives all summer) so he was only doing the 86-mile ride, so a group of us split off from the larger group that went with him and rode the shorter course. A fast train formed with 5 of us riding at over 20mph the whole way, and by the 3rd rest stop my computer had a 19.3mph average for the first 40 or so miles. We didn't stop for long, and by the time we got to the hills just before the lunch stop at Newberg, I couldn't hang with the group anymore and they got to the lunch stop almost 5 minutes ahead of me. My rear derailleur pulleys were squeaking so I got the mechanic to put a little oil on them, and had lunch with the fast group I'd been riding with. I could only hang with the fast train for about 10 miles after lunch, and when it got pretty hilly I had to let them go on without me. At the next rest stop, I found another guy to ride with, who was riding a little more on my pace, 18-20mph. At the last rest stop, we caught up to the fast group I'd been riding with earlier; they'd been there for almost 15 minutes. We all left together and did the fast 22mph pace the remaining 20 or so miles to the finish line. Including stops, the first day took me 7 hours and 45 minutes, which means I was stopped for an hour and 45 minutes, although it felt more like an hour total stopping time.

The next day I rode by myself until the first rest stop, where I started riding with another rider who was riding my pace, and at the second rest stop we caught up with Erick, who I had ridden with for the last part of the day Saturday and chatted with at supper afterwards. He and another rider formed a train of 4 of us, and we made good time until the big climb of the day, where Erick and I left the others way behind - apparently he and I are much better climbers. After lunch, Erick and I rode together, and after going over the medium hill, it was all straight flat smooth roads with a 10-15mph tailwind, so he and I rode at 22-25mph pretty much all the way back to the finish. My legs would get a little stiff every time I stopped, and felt sore all day if I wasn't riding, but even at the end of the day Sunday I felt great as long as I was pedaling, and finished the day at the fast pace of the day before, helped by the tailwind.

Overall, it was a great ride and great package. I was continually noticing things I liked that I thought they had done well; the course, the schedule, the food (they even had the blue Powerade I use at every rest stop) were all great, and didn't find anything I thought was dumb or could have been better. I raised $435 so far, which is below my goal of $500 but an amount that I'm content with. A few people said they'd support me but haven't yet, and the deadline's not till September 9, so maybe I'll get my goal by then. My riding form was way above what I had expected it to be; even on the second day when I was riding without my fast train, Erick and I managed 17.4mph overall. Up to this point, the fastest longest ride I'd done was 2 weeks before the MS150 with the club, riding to Applegate lake and back, 86 miles with an average of 17.3mph, being pulled along by a fast train pretty much the whole way. Most of my fast club rides have been 40 - 50 miles at 16.something mph, so riding at those fast paces for the whole long course of the MS150 is just way beyond my expectations. If I keep improving at this rate, I should enter some amateur races next year to see how I do against real racers, not just fast guys in the club. Maybe I'll do Seattle to Portland (206 miles) in one day (over 17mph average) next year; now that would be a real accomplishment.

I'm in Nashville now and have lots more I could write about, but I should go, and besides it might be a good idea to restrict my entries to one subject at a time instead of just writing everything all at once. Hopefully I'll have enough more time while I'm here to keep writing more. If not, then it'll just be life as usual.

1:17PM - Oh Muse, where art thou?

This is my third entry in a row that I'm just writing so that I have a way of remembering later what was going on at this time in my life, and I guess partly so that others can find out what is going on with me right now. I would despair of losing my muse, but I don't think I've lost inspiration, just that I haven't been able to take advantage of it with writing, and thus it's perhaps fading a bit. I never seem to have both inspiration and opportunity to make journal entries at the same time, although I do have plenty of both at different times.

So, for the obligatory news: Tomorrow I'm driving up to Forest Grove for the MS150, which is this Saturday and Sunday. My legs are probably ready, I'm sure they would be better if I had worked harder to prepare but I think they'll be fine. I'm hoping to do the 100 mile course on Saturday in under 6 hours and the 70 mile course on Sunday in under 4:15, which will mean average speeds of 16.7mph and 16.5mph respectively. Given that there will be 800 other riders (although I don't know how many will be riding the long course with me) and that the course is mostly flat with some small rolling hills, and the weather looks about perfect with highs in the mid 80s and light winds, those goals seem well within my reach. I would also like to say hi to George Hincapie and maybe get him to autograph my MS150 t-shirt. There should be time for that on Saturday night.

After the MS150 I'll be in Portland for 3 days with Ken and Jessy and Jane, trying to find worthwhile stuff to do, and then I'll fly to Nashville for a week for a little family reunion thing to celebrate the addition of 2 new little family members. Debbie had her little boy David Cosby Hutchison on Monday evening, he's a fat and happy baby. Naomi is due any time now, maybe I should call her today and see how she's doing. Me going to Nashville was made possible by Jon and Agafia, who graciously offered to take care of Ax for the week that I'll be gone, and me flying there instead of riding the bus was made possible by Jake and Debbie, who graciously offered to pay the difference between a bus and plane ticket so that I could be in Nashville for 6 days instead of 3. So, this trip is made possible by the generous donations of time and money by Ax's parents and Jake and Debbie. May God have mercy on them and remember them in His Kingdom for their acts of love given to me, His servant.

My car has been giving me fits; the starter has worked consistently since I cleaned the battery terminals real good a week ago, but it's been losing coolant and overheating a lot more lately. I replaced a heater hose that I found leaking, and in the process accidentally broke a metal pipe off the heater core, so for now the hose just bypasses the heater core and later I'll take the dash apart to get the heater core out and probably JB-Weld the metal hose back on to fix it so that I have heat for this winter. Then yesterday I went to Dan's to put cheap Wal-Mart synthetic oil in the car, and when I got there I found the upper radiator hose leaking, so if NAPA has that in stock today then I'll replace it as soon as I get done writing this. Hopefully using synthetic oil will get me another mpg or 2, even though it's cheap Wal-Mart stuff. I'm planning to loan my car to Ken and Jessy for the week I'll be gone, and I hope it doesn't blow up or grind the gears off the transmission like the 2 times I loaned cars to Joshua years ago. I'd really be in a pickle then, since I'd be stuck in Portland with no good way to get back here before my parents get here.

Speaking of which, they'll be visiting for 3 or 4 days on their way back to the Philippines, the weekend after I get back from Nashville. This will be the first time they've actually visited me in the place where I live to see what my life is like. I've been living on my own for like 4 years now and somehow it seems like I'm validated or something by my parents deciding that I'm worth a visit; like I'm enough of my own person with my own life now that they need to come visit me to see what it's like. Anyway, they'll either be staying here in our spare room or at Ax's parent's house up the hill, and I'll try to give them the tour of the area and they'll be here over a weekend so they'll get to meet everyone at church, which is just about everyone I know here. It should be interesting, to say the least.

That weekend is also when our potential new housemate will be arriving here in Ashland; she's a 23-year old college graduate from San Angelo TX who is moving here to go to ISTM, a midwifery school here in Ashland. She seems like she has the temperament, skills, and experience needed to be a good fit with Ax and I, and we'll all meet her when she gets here and decide for sure. I'd probably be fine with deciding "for sure" before we meet her, but Ax's parents are a little more cautious than I am. At any rate, she's the only one out of 6 or 7 that responded to the ad that we are seriously considering, so I hope it works out well, or we'll be out playing the housemate lottery game again. We'll find out soon enough.

I could write more but since I'm not particularly inspired, I'm just writing what I think needs to be said so that I remember it later, and besides I have a bunch of stuff to do today and tomorrow morning before I leave for Forest Grove so I need to start doing that. The lazy has been hounding me, but it hasn't been debilitating, at least not so far.

4:32PM - The lazy strikes again

I'm trying to strike back at the lazy which is threatening to take over my life by typing this entry in DSK, which I haven't used for months. It's not much of an effort, but the defeat of the lazy is brought about by a change in mentality, not the difficulty of my current efforts. Hopefully using DSK will begin the required change, and even if not, it's fun to try it again and find out I'm not as bad in DSK as I'd feared. Just writing an entry in this journal without being prodded by some outside force is a step in the right direction.

So, I'm making a short list of things I need to do soon, and that's another way to start defeating the lazy. Making my responsibilities present in my mind is the only way to actually start accomplishing them.

• Register for the Oregon MS 150 and write a page of text to send in email and maybe snail mail and give to people around here to try to get all my friends to pledge money for me to ride. Maybe make a little page for my website with more information for people who are curious like me. Registering requires going to Father Isaac's house to give him cash and use his credit card online. I'm not sure if I should call him about that when I get done writing, or just write my page of text so that's ready to send to people as soon as I register. Maybe I should see if Kristen would be willing to write for me as a way to donate to my MS ride. Her writing might be better than mine, but more than that, it would be a way to sidestep the possibility of my laziness keeping me from moving forward with this. Indecision about what to do next is one of the main catalysts for my laziness, so in this case any decision is probably better than no decision.


• Work on my car. I need to clean the battery terminals on my car battery and tighten them properly, try to find the source of the coolant leak that threatens to make my car overheat every 100 miles or so, and check my exhaust system for leaks besides the muffler. For the past 2 months I've had intermittent problems starting my car, which I assumed was because of the starter solenoid getting stuck, because I could usually just bang on the starter and then it would work. Then for the last week the starter hasn't been working at all, and I've been careful not to turn off the car unless it's parked on a hill where I can roll-start it. Last night I forgot and parked facing downhill with a building immediately in front of the car, so I got a rock (I'd left my tools in the garage from last time I worked on my bicycle) and hit the battery terminal to try to make better contact, and the starter worked immediately, and several times thereafter. So before I mess with the starter, I need to see if the problem is just in the battery terminals. Then I need to try to find where my coolant has been leaking from, which will probably be harder since everything's kinda dirty and wet and oily under there. Hopefully it's a hose that will be cheap and easy to replace. Then I need to inspect my exhaust system for leaks, since my registration is due last month, which means I'll need to take it to be inspected, and I already know that the muffler has lots of big holes so it needs to be replaced before inspection, but if I need more than just a muffler then I want to know that before I order stuff from NAPA and expect to get that fixed and inspected. Maybe I should make a separate list of all the things that my car needs done to it and their priority, but I usually prefer to just drive it until something breaks that keeps me from driving it, which is not a good idea if I want to keep my car running for a long time. The oil needs changed soon, the rear brakes need new shoes and possibly new drums, the valve cover gasket needs replaced and the valves adjusted (I have the gasket so that just needs some time), the front seats need at least new seat covers and preferably replacements, I could keep going but that's enough for a long time and lots of money.


• Make a list of things I need to do to my motorcycle before putting it up for sale. This is primarily doing something to attach the points properly, which probably means cutting bigger threads in the baseplate and using one size larger bolts since the current threads are mostly stripped. Then I need to buy new air filters, maybe take the carbs apart and clean them, check and lube and adjust the chain and control cables, change the oil and filter, replace the fork oil, and drive it around the neighborhood several times over a few days to make sure everything's working right. I'll need to clean and polish everything so it's real nice looking, but I'm pretty sure that trying to find and buy the right side covers with emblems and replacing the rear tire would not increase the value of the bike enough to offset the cost, so I think I'll leave those things for the next owner. All of that shouldn't take more than $60 and a day or 2 of work, so I should just decide on a day and get started so that it'll be sold by the time I do the MS 150 and maybe go to Nashville. Similar ones have sold on eBay recently for around $1000 so I shouldn't have trouble getting $800 for mine.


• Work at Margie's house. I could probably be doing this right now, except that I don't really feel like I need the money badly enough to work outside in this 105 degree heat. I don't mind riding my bike in this heat, but that's partly because there's a nice cooling breeze when I'm riding and partly because I just like riding my bike. I don't like doing goofy yard work type stuff to begin with, and when it's this hot I'd rather sit inside and read about the Tour de France or talk to my friends on the phone or go ride my bike with the club, all of which I've been doing a lot lately. Margie needs the work to be done and it's a good job for me for this short time, but if I don't do it then it'll still get done by her ex-husband who is managing the work, so I don't feel like I really NEED to be working there, and it's not any fun, so lately I've been lazy more than I've been working. Tomorrow there's another good club ride which I'll probably go on, and I need to set a goal for myself for the afternoon. I wonder if working at Margie's would be a better goal than working on MS 150 stuff or my car or motorcycle. Again, indecision is the mother of laziness, or at least its sponsor.


• Make posters and business cards and a phone book ad for me to be the Ashland computer ninja. This is at the bottom of the list because if we find another house manager in the next 3 weeks (and we're working on that, expecting/hoping for it to happen) then I'll be gone for about 2 weeks in August, doing the MS 150 and visiting my family in Nashville, and I don't want to start advertising if I'm going to have to tell everyone that responds to the ads that I'll be gone for the next few weeks. Better to have the stuff all ready and start advertising as soon as I know I'll be here for awhile than to have to postpone, disappoint, and probably lose my first customers.

Hmmm. It's 4:23 and I haven't made any progress on any of my bigger responsibilities that I listed, unless you count writing this to try to motivate myself to do it. I think that first I should call Father Isaac about registering for the MS 150, and then I should work on my car. That's what I'll do.

4:35AM - News from me

I don't like to write this way, but my dad wrote me an email asking for news from me, and it served as a good reminder that I haven't written anything for a while, and although I just write this for me (me in the future, I guess), I know from reading over what I've written in the past that any writing is better than no writing, so although I seem to be pretty rarely inspired to write well the things I really think I should be saying, I suppose it's good enough for "the future me" to just write whatever comes to mind at the moment I have time to write. Maybe "whatever comes to mind" should be the title of this post.

I'm in Austin at Steve and Kristen's house for the week, and although the weather isn't unusually hot or humid for this time of year here, and although I've lived most of my life in places where the summers are about this hot and humid, it still feels incredibly hot after living in Oregon for 2 years. To be fair, much of the sensation of it feeling incredibly hot is because I'm usually in an air-conditioned place, so every time I step outside, the heat and humidity is a shock, and once I'm outside for more than 5 or 10 minutes, even if I'm running around in the sun or something, I don't think about it feeling hot, I just sweat and feel fine. So I'm sure I could quickly get used to it again if I lived in a place with this weather for awhile, especially if I spent most of my time not in air-conditioning, but it's still a surprise to find that what I used to live in and be accustomed to now feels so strange.

It's been great so far being here with Steve and Kristen and Jane. Isaac was baptized and chrismated this morning between Orthros and Liturgy, and it went well. This is the first baptism and chrismation I've witnessed since my own about 2 months ago, and for mine, I did everything for myself since I'm an adult, but since I'm Isaac's godfather and he's an infant, I did everything for him: holding the candle, renouncing Satan and spitting upon him, reciting the Creed, etc. Of course he received the sacraments and not me, but it still felt a bit strange to be doing those same things again for someone else. And the service was like...eating a different flavor of ice cream than you're used to, or something like that. It was all familiar enough that I knew what was coming next and could even sing with some of it, but it was different enough that the little twists were sometimes a bit surprising. Like a new flavor of ice cream, though, you know beforehand that it'll be great because of what it is, and the experience of it is great, in expected and unexpected ways. Several times I was overcome by the beauty and deep personal meaning of the service, which is something that rarely happens by itself at St. Gabriel's anymore, now that I'm so used to it and often so involved in making it happen. It was also nice to be at a church with slightly more appropriate architecture, lots more people, a larger choir (though I think no better than ours, thanks to Maureen), 2 deacons, a reader, and several altar boys. They have daily Orthros and Vespers, and more occasional services for feast days and such than we do, all of which seems like it would make it a church you could get more from since there's more there. But on the other hand, it's large enough that you can't really get to know everyone well, and that would be something of a loss, since I know everyone at St. Gabriel's very well and that forms a very special close community which I really appreciate. Another thing about having fewer services at St. Gabriel's is that I can and do attend almost every time church is happening, and there's something nice about knowing that you're going as often as possible. Not that I wouldn't be able to go to every service if we had daily services, but it just makes it feel a lot less important to go every time if it's every day; you can always just go tomorrow, whereas if services are only 3 times a week or so, every time feels more special and necessary.

I think I'm finally feeling all better. I was sick with a cold 2 weekends ago, and all that week I helped Margie pack all her stuff from her house in Ashland (just around the corner from my house) into a U-haul truck and trailer, then on Friday I drove the truck and trailer 3 hours to her new house in Brookings on the coast right next to the border with California, unpacked it all into her house, and rode with her ex-husband back to Ashland on his brand-new Yamaha FJR1300 sport-touring bike; that was a fun ride, and reminded me of how fun motorcycles can be. It was a long week of a lot of work and not a lot of rest, and by Friday night when I got back at 11:30, I had only the last remnants of sinus congestion from the cold I'd had, and my bicycle was in pieces hanging from ropes in the garage. The whole week I had been trying to find time to replace the cables and bar tape; one shifter cable was starting to break and I didn't like the bar tape I had so I decided it was time to replace all the cables and housings and put on new bar tape. Well, Thursday night I had everything apart and found I couldn't cut the cable housing with any of my tools, so Friday morning I left a message for Tom asking him if I could borrow his tools when I got back that night. He'd left 2 messages for me when I got in that night, saying that he could leave the shop open and I could take my bike there that night to finish it. I got over there before midnight, and he had all his cool special bicycle tools laid out, and had his nice bike stand and even a snack out for me. I took my time to do everything right, lubing the cables and routing them properly and adjusting the brakes and derailleurs properly. The brakes were harder to adjust than the shifters since both shifters are friction, just put in the cable and it works right, infinitely adjustable with your thumb. I'm sure I'll never get indexed shifters if I can help it. By 3am I had everything together properly and had done a quick test ride around the block to make sure nothing fell off, and went back home. I ate as much as I could find that was quick and easy, got my stuff ready for the next day, set my alarm for 6:30, and took a nap on the couch for about 3 hours. I didn't actually get up till 7am, and after eating a big breakfast and making sure everything was ready, I drove instead of rode over to Walker school where the ride was meeting since I knew I was late. The official start time was 7:30, and I got there just after 8, by which time almost everyone had left. I knew that there were going to be 300 or more people doing the ride and was counting on that to mean that the actual start time would be well after 7:30, but I didn't know that they had actually opened registration at 6am and most people who were riding the century left between then and 7, and by 7:30 everyone was leaving. The only person still there when I got there was Tom Burnham, a retired guy with whom I've ridden and talked more than with any other Velo member. He was a volunteer to sign everyone up, and because he knew he'd be leaving late he signed up for the metric century instead of the full century, so we were both very happy to see each other and have someone to ride with that we knew and liked. We left at 8:15, Tom said the last person before us to leave had left almost 30 minutes earlier. Still, we passed 6 people on the way up the first big climb, and left 5 more at the first rest stop at the top of the hill, and by the time we got to the second rest stop we had lost count at about 25 people we had passed by that point. We took the Greensprings climb at about 8 or 9mph the whole way, and at the first rest stop I was still feeling pretty good, but as soon as I got off my bike and stopped breathing in a deep rythm, I started coughing a lot and felt the sinus nasty of my lingering cold. They had a lot of great snacks and Gatorade there, but we ate and drank quickly and kept going. By the second rest stop at about 10am, exactly half way through our 58-mile route, I was starting to feel hunger and was lagging a bit behind Tom on the rolling hills around the lake, feeling my blood sugar dropping. At the rest stop they had Oreos and chocolate chip cookies and watermelon and a few other things I can't remember. Seeing all that energy food felt like heaven; I grabbed as much as I could and ate as fast as I could for about 5 minutes straight, eating some of the trail mix I had brought with me. I put about 10 Oreos in my jersey pockets and we took off again. On the 6-mile stretch to the third rest stop, I couldn't keep up with Tom's pace, which had been a bit faster than I liked ever since the top of the Greensprings, and got to the stop a few minutes after he did. He was ready to keep going and I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep up with him on the upcoming 4-mile climb, so he took off and I ate and rested for about 10 minutes before going again. I could feel my lack of rest and my not quite total recovery from being sick, and maybe I could feel the altitude also, so I knew I'd just have to ride within my limits the rest of the way. After the third rest stop, the metric century route I was riding joined the century route, and I was passed by 2 groups of 5 or 6 and several single riders; all of them century riders who had already ridden about 80 miles that day. Since I'd started so late, it was the first time I'd been passed on the ride, and it seemed like they just flew past. I was only going about 6mph on the climb, so they were only going about 3-5mph faster, but even small differences in speed seem big when you get dropped on a hard climb by guys who have ridden 40 miles more than you that morning. Getting to the top of that hill was great because I knew I was about to lose over 3,000 feet of altitude in the next 10 miles. I flew down the hill in a tight tuck at 30-40mph, and to my surprise I passed 5 or 6 people on the descent. Back at Walker school, my computer registered an average speed of 14.0 mph over the 58.1 miles, with 4 hours and 10 minutes of time with my wheels spinning. I had a great burrito provided by a catering service while talking to some people who had come from Roseburg for the ride, and went home. It was a great ride; the weather was just about perfect, high thin overcast with 65 degrees at the start in the morning, between 55 and 65 degrees around the mountain lakes, and 75 by noon in the valley again, with light winds the whole way and many excellent views of the lakes and especially Mt Mcloughlin and Mt Ashland. Even though I wasn't feeling my best, it was great to be on a big semi-supported ride with such beautiful weather and surroundings with so many others. And to my mild surprise, the bike worked perfectly, the shifting and braking was smooth with the new cables and the new bar tape was nice. I don't like writing for others, but since I know that others do read this, I'll put in these links to the 2 pictures taken of me by the professional photographer for the event.

Saturday afternoon I was very tired, but only had a few hours before Vespers and ended up talking on the phone and taking a shower instead of taking a nap. Sunday morning I was still feeling pretty tired but not too bad, and took the kids and a few adults from church on a little 10-mile bike ride on the greenway after coffee hour. By the time we got back, I had a high fever and was extremely tired. I slept the rest of the afternoon and evening, and by midnight my fever was mostly gone. On Monday I felt much better, but still very tired. I guess I just pushed too hard with too little rest, but that's something I've done before and I've never gotten a fever from it. Maybe I still had more of the cold lingering than I realized. Maybe I'm just getting old and can't keep going forever at athletic rates without rest like I could before. At any rate, on Tuesday I was still just a little tired but worked at Margie's house for awhile cleaning things up and getting it ready to rent, and Wednesday I packed my stuff and helped get Ax ready to go, then took him to Corrine's house at 6pm, came back home, loaded my stuff in my car, and went to Portland. I got to Ken's house after 1am, and we sat and talked and messed around on the computer for awhile before going to bed. On Thursday we got all our stuff together and packed for our trip up Mt Hood, went to REI to pick up our rental mountaineering gear and get some other stuff, stopped at a grocery store on the way to get food, and got to Timberline Lodge (6000 feet) at 6 or 7pm. We started climbing up the mountain at around 8pm, expecting to get to where we planned to camp by 10 or 11pm and catch some sleep before setting out around 5am for the summit. We were heading for a big rock outcropping and saddle on the southeast side of the mountain, which looked like it was about level with the top of the Palmer ski lift at 8500 feet. It was about 50 degrees when we set out, with west winds of 10-20mph. We tried to stay on the rocks as much as possible until we got to where it was basically all glacier, where we just walked up heading generally towards the big rock. By 10:30 or so it was dark and cold enough that I got out my bike headlight and gloves and hat, and Ken and I started walking with the ice axes. We kept going for another hour or so, and I noticed Ken kept stopping to rest, and the big rock looked pretty darn close by this time so I decided to just go ahead and get to the saddle as soon as possible to start setting up the tent while Ken caught up. Not long after I left Ken to his own pace, I started breaking through the crust of the snow pretty often, sometimes past my knees. I took the crampons off my pack and put them on my feet, and that helped immensely both with traction and with being able to stay on top of the snow. After that I was following tracks in the snow, and got into a great rythm where I couldn't feel my legs or lungs working hard anymore and just kept going and going without having to stop to rest. Given the cycling I've been doing, perhaps I was in good shape, but I was quite surprised that I could just keep going at that altitude with a heavy pack in the snow, since until then I'd felt the effects of the altitude in my legs and lungs quite a bit. I finally got to the saddle at about 1am, and found another tent set up in the best spot already, but found another spot nearby that looked decent. I signaled down the hill with my flashlight and saw Ken signaling back with his, not too far away. I was a bit concerned that he was having trouble on the climb which was much steeper and longer than I'd expected, and he had all the food in his pack and I was about to faint with hunger, so I left my pack there and went back down to find him. It took about 15 minutes to get to him, and he was doing fine, just going slow. He had his stuff in a large pack and a small summit pack strapped to that, so after eating 600 calories' worth of brownies and several handfuls of trail mix, I took his large pack and he took his small one and we went up to the campsite. We carved out a shelf in the side of the glacier in the little hole formed by the saddle in a spot fairly protected from the wind, and pitched the tent. The stakes didn't hold in the snow, so we used our 2 ice axes for one side and our packs as anchors for the other side. By the time we got our sleeping stuff in the tent and ate "supper", it was 4am, and we got to sleep soon after, in the first light of early dawn, with the temperature just below freezing. As I was drifting off to sleep, I could hear our neighbors in the other tent getting up and getting ready to head for the summit. Ken and I knew we weren't going to make the summit the next morning, so we slept in till 9 or so, and had a leisurely breakfast of instant oatmeal while sitting on our thermarest on the glacier enjoying the beautiful view. We walked around and shot pictures, and by the time we were packing up our tent, our neighbors came back from the summit - a friendly Russian couple. They told us the rock and saddle we were at was called Illumination Rock and Illumination Saddle, and was not really on the path to the summit - that followed the slight ridge further to the west. By the time we got there the night before, we had realized it was both much further east and much higher than the top of the Palmer ski lift, and we found out later that it was at about 9,300 feet, which explains why it took so much longer to get to than we had expected. We started down at about noon or 1pm, traversing for awhile until we could glissade for awhile, then alternated traversing and glissading, covering distance pretty quickly. We got to the bottom of the ski area at the same time as a large group of skiers and snowboarders did, and from their age and skill I guessed that they were part of a school racing team that came to Mt. Hood for the only summer skiing in North America. After we took off the crampons and were off the glacier, it was much harder to descend on the rock and dirt in our rigid plastic mountaineering boots, and by the time we got back to the parking lot, my legs just above the ankle were chafed sore and the balls of my feet were painfully squeezed in the boots. I tried loosening the laces a bit but that made the chafing worse, so I tightened them but that made the pain in my toes and balls of my feet worse. Ken had no pain or problems with his boots, so I guess I just have abnormal feet or stride or something. We got back to the parking lot around 4pm, and got back to Portland by about 6pm. We returned the stuff at REI, and I bought a rear rack and seat post bag for my bicycle, and Ken bought an excellent pair of Vasque hiking boots. Back at Ken and Jessy's I re-packed my stuff for the trip here to Austin and went to Jane's. I got there around 9, and we went to bed pretty soon afterward since we had to be up at 4am to catch the flight at 6:10am. The flight was uneventful except for the shock of the heat and humidity here.

Now it's almost 5am, I've been tired and hungry almost continuously since climbing Mt Hood until I had a nap this afternoon and supper, and I suppose now that I feel fine and used all this time to write instead of sleep, I'll be tired tomorrow. Well, we don't have a rigid schedule and I won't be riding my bicycle for hours or climbing any mountains while I'm here, so it'll be easy for me to catch up on rest... I hope.

11:35PM - Ezekiel 36:24-28

"For I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new Spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. You shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and you shall be My people, and I will be your God."

This was one of the Old Testament readings for the Great Vespers of Pentecost this evening, and as I was reading it I could hardly keep from weeping. My only response can be to say with the Mother of God: "Behold, I am the bondslave of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word."

9:22PM - feverish ramblings

Having a cold and a fever really makes the world seem surreal in many ways. The lights all seem darker than usual, and things seem to get bigger or smaller as I stare at them sometimes. Everything tastes the same, and everything feels strange, amplified in strange ways. Cracking my knuckles hurts a lot more and feels a lot better at the same time, and especially peeing feels really strange, like my urine is acidic or something. Sounds seem to either be alternately muffled or extremely clear, and I can't tell why. I never feel like I'm a comfortable temperature, either shivering or sweating. Walking, especially right after I get up, almost feels like I'm drunk as my sense of balance doesn't work quite right. I have the weirdest dreams, most of them very vivid until I wake up, when they just disappear and all I can remember is that it was really weird and really vivid. It all combines to make the whole world really feel surreal.

A week from tomorrow I'll be riding the 60-mile route of the MLC, and 2 weeks from today I'll be climbing Mt Hood with Ken and then the next day flying to Cedar Park for a week with Jane for Isaac's baptism and to visit Steve and Kristen. I hope I feel all better in a week, because I think even if I don't then I'm going to ride the MLC anyway; it's one of the primary things that drew me into recreational cycling with Siskiyou Velo and got me interested in touring and just doing everything you can do with a bicycle, so I feel like if I don't ride the MLC then I'll be betraying my calling to cycling or something.

Glenn and Burt are leaving this week on their cycle tour of the Coast Ranges between Eugene and here, I talked to Glenn awhile this evening and they seem like their bikes are still just junk and their bodies are not at all in shape for it, but they have pretty low ambitions; they're starting with a 30-mile mostly flat ride to Glenn's parent's house and they'll see what it's like from there. They're giving themselves a month to get here and back to Eugene so that gives them lots of time for 30-mile days and lots of rest in between, so they'll probably be fine. It's not how I would do bicycle touring, but they will definitely have an experience, and by the time they're done their legs will be way stronger than they are now, and they'll know for sure the benefits of a real touring bike. Glenn said he kinda prefers doing stuff this way, because at the end he'll remember how sore and wimpy he was at the beginning and that'll make him feel good about it. Well, that's how it'll be for them. I'll try to give them a ride on my road bike when they get here so they can see how easy it can be to ride an efficient bike.

I'm starting to figure out why so many Orthodox love Lent so much; now that I'm only fasting twice a week, spiritual things seem a little further away and harder to approach. That may not be entirely because of the fast, because I definitely love the joyful Pascha season and the way it balances the fast, and pretty much every Liturgy service breaks through the everyday feel of life to be heaven on earth in a real way, but somehow the layer of everyday life seems thicker and more dense now than it did during Lent, when every day seemed like a very present spiritual struggle. I imagine that it'll take me several years before I start to really figure out what all the liturgy of Church means and what effect it has on me; right now I'm like a baby who just experiences these seemingly random and disconnected things in the outside world and these irrational urges inside me, and tries to piece things together.

5:36PM - long sentences

It's been a while since I've been inspired to write much of anything, and I'm not really inspired now, but I have time and thought this would be a better use of it than most other things I might do now, so here goes.

Almost 2 weeks ago now, Itai took me to Starbucks to have a talk with me, and I thought he was going to say that he needed me to be more consistent with my schedule; not that I was often late (I was usually more punctual than he was) but that's been the almost universal (and almost the only) complaint that employers have had with me, so I just assume that when an employer wants to talk to me about something, they want me to be more on time. Anyway, he said that he liked me as a person and liked the work I had been doing, but could tell that I wasn't really passionate about woodworking, that my heart wasn't in it, that it wasn't something I was going to make a career out of, and that since the job "wasn't going anywhere" then it would be better to just end it now. He offered me some severance pay if I resigned, and I thought of asking if there was anything I could do to change what I'd been doing or change the nature of things so that I could keep working, but I've found him to be sure of himself and not really willing to listen or consider what other people say once he's made a decision (at least in other matters) so since it seemed there was no other viable option, I accepted his offer, and haven't been working since then.

I don't really have any ambitions or dreams for a particular type of work or career, and since I have very low living expenses and had been saving my money for a new bicycle, I haven't really been looking for work, since I don't need much money and don't want to get trapped in a job with a full-time rigid schedule that wouldn't be worth the stress and lack of freedom it would entail. It would be great to have some way to make money on a short contract basis, or work-from-home type thing where I can work and make money but not be stuck in a rigid schedule that doesn't let me visit friends and family. If I needed lots of money I'd just take whatever came along and accept the limitations it put me under, but since I don't need a lot of money, I'd rather have the equivalent income of a part-time job and the ability to take a week off when I want to go somewhere and do something. That sort of thing is much harder to find than a regular job, though, especially since I don't have my own computer so I can't do the contract type of computer work that can lend itself to that kind of flexible schedule.

In less than a month I'm planning to go to Austin for Isaac's baptism to be his Godfather, and I'm thinking that instead of trying to find some job in between now and then, I'd be better off using my time to get my motorcycle ready to sell and then selling it. I've been planning to sell it for months but haven't gotten around to it, so maybe now is the right time. That would provide me with plenty of money for awhile, although I'd rather use that money for getting partway out of debt or something that will make a difference in a year or so. Maybe I can work at Labor Ready or find some temp job for awhile; maybe even until after I get back from visiting Naomi and Debbie in August or September, since I'll only be here for about a month and a half in between going to Austin and going to Nashville. I'm pretty much expecting that by August we'll have another housemate living here so that I can leave Ax here for several weeks or a month with whoever else will be living here and doing the house manager stuff.

Probably part of the reason why I haven't been inspired to write much for a few weeks is because I've been spending all of my limited computer time with reading all I can about touring bicycles and people's accounts of their bicycle tours; I've been making enough money to save up some for buying a new bicycle and after reading a lot, decided that the only bike that would do everything I want to do is a bike that's ready to be set up for fully loaded touring, and the only ones of those that are really worth buying are only made by custom bike builders. The only touring bikes that the big production bike makers build are really only suitable for light touring, they use lower quality wheels and frame construction and the components aren't right for long loaded touring, and the by the time I buy that for $1000 and then spend money to put the right components on a production touring bike I might as well have bought a higher quality custom touring bike for $2000 that's exactly what I want in the first place, which will give me all the right options I want (like S&S couplers to take the bike apart for packing in a suitcase-sized case for airline travel). Plus, any bike built by a good high-quality custom bike maker will last me as long as I and my grandkids want to keep riding it, so I decided that if I was going to buy a good touring bike that I would want to buy a high-quality custom bike designed for fully loaded touring, and that costs more than I can afford right now. Then just a few days before I was asked to resign from work, Tom Phillips offered me his old road bike for only $250, which I bought last Tuesday. It's about 15 years old, a Specialized Sequoia touring frame, which he set up just as a basic road bike, with road triple gearing and skinny tires, and he put clipless pedals on it and gave me an old pair of road shoes with cleats to match the pedals. It's not the do-all full loaded touring bike that I've decided I really want that will last me forever, but it's everything I need in a bike for right now, and it can be set up with racks, panniers, fenders, and wider touring tires to be as much of a touring bike as I could have gotten for $1000 from a major bike maker. It's somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds lighter than my old bike, and that combined with a stiffer frame, 24 speeds instead of my old 10, and especially the clipless pedals and shoes makes it so much easier and more fun to ride, especially up and down the hills. Last weekend I went to Portland and visited Jane and Ken and Jessy, and also went to the REI and got a cycle computer, frame pump, spandex bike shorts and polyester jersey, and since I put the computer on my new bike on Tuesday night I've ridden 125 miles, almost entirely in big club rides on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My legs have really been feeling all the workout they've been getting, but on Saturday I rode so much better than I ever have before that I'm starting to think I'm breaking through to being in shape and having cyclist's legs. Tomorrow I'm doing the Lakes Loop with the club, 50 miles with 5,000 feet of climbing, so that'll be a real test to see if I can handle serious long climbing rides. Hopefully this bike will take me on the MLC, the Oregon MS150, and the Mt Ashland Hillclimb race this summer, plus lots of club rides and just riding anywhere I want to go that I don't have to drive my car to take Ax. Later when I have enough money and am planning to actually do serious bicycle touring, I'll buy a serious loaded touring bike which should last me forever, but for now I'm very happy with my "new" bike.

Time for supper, and time for me to stop staring at these little phosphor dots.

1:27PM - The only way to find your limits is to bonk into them

Last Saturday I went on my first bike ride with Siskiyou Velo. It was a nice slow ride, 12-15mph, there were only 4 of us and we talked as we rode, about 40 miles total with a few small hills. We stopped for about an hour for coffee and lunch in Jacksonville, which was nice. The only other time I'd ridden 40 miles at a time before was on a trip out to Williams by myself a few months ago, the route was hillier and I went a little faster, and was pretty tired when I got there. This ride was easier and a lot more fun; it was a beautiful day and I found I really enjoyed the pace and the company. By the end of it I was a little saddle-sore, but not really tired.

This weekend I wanted to go on another Velo ride, and I had a choice of 2 on Saturday. Both were rated moderately hilly and 12-15mph, one was 35 miles and the other was 60 miles. I had been feeling pretty good during the week and had rested enough on Friday that I felt up to finding out what a longer ride would be like, so I went for it. We started at 9am in Phoenix; 10 people showed up, including several of the club officers. We rode the back roads of East Medford to Eagle Point and from there took 62 to Shady Cove, where we stopped for a 30-minute lunch. During lunch I found out that Rick, the club president, is an enthusiastic amateur furniture maker, and he wants to visit Itai's shop sometime to see what he does. On the way to Shady Cove I had been easily keeping up with the group, sometimes leading but usually in the middle, and was feeling fairly good. The ride was listed as 12-15mph, but when I looked at other people's cycle computers or asked them what speed we were going, it was always above 15mph. At lunch one person said we had averaged 17.8mph so far on the ride. On the way back we took the back roads along the Rogue River towards Sams Valley, where I used to drive the schoolbus. By the time we got to my old bus route, about 40 miles into the ride, I was starting to feel a little tired, and was starting to get dropped going up the bigger hills, but I could catch up on the downhills or flats. About 10 miles later, on Table Rock Rd, I started feeling a lot more tired, my legs were aching and didn't want to pedal, everything got a lot harder, and I fell behind a ways. Rick dropped back to encourage me and let me draft behind him, and I pushed hard for the next few miles till we caught up with the rest of the group, who had stopped to rest and wait for us. Rick gave me some Hammer gel, Bob (another club officer, who at 68 years old was passing everyone on the climbs) put some Gatorade-type stuff from his bottle into mine (which was still about quarter-full of water) and Don (who at 71 enjoyed falling back a bit and then sprinting to close the gap) gave me a handful of trail-mix type stuff. With that and about 5 minutes of rest, I felt a lot better, and stuck with the group for the next 10 miles or so. We rode through the west side of Central Point, and by the time we got through town I was starting to bonk again. This time Don stayed back with me to let me draft him, and gave me the last 1/3 of his PowerBar, which I ate while I rode. Near Jacksonville we caught up to the rest of the group, and with less than 10 miles to go, I had some more Hammer gel and trail mix, kindly provided by the rest of the guys who knew what they were getting into and had come prepared. Rick and I trailed the group on the way back to Phoenix, and got there about 10 minutes behind them. It turned out that we had gone about 70 miles, not the 60 that was advertised, and figuring that we were on the bikes for just over 4 hours, our average speed was 16-17 mph. I was extremely tired, with the unique feeling of having bonked (run out of energy on a long workout and blood sugar dropped) and only partially recovered. Everyone was very nice and congratulatory, especially since I was the new guy with the heavy old bike who was pushing his limits.

While Rick and I were riding together, he told me that all the guys I was riding with had around 5,000 miles in their legs this year, and I did a quick guess and figured I have less than 1,000 - including the several weeks when I was commuting to Medford on my bike. That more than anything explains why I was doing great until about 3/4 of the way through, when I bonked and couldn't maintain the pace anymore. Of course, I was at a disadvantage riding my 30-pound old clunker with platform pedals while they all rode fast new bikes under 20 pounds with clipless pedals, and although I ate a great breakfast and lunch, I didn't bring energy foods or gels to keep me pedaling hard for 5 hours, so that made a difference, but I think the biggest difference is that they were all used to riding 60-80 miles at 15mph and their legs had the strength and endurance to make it fun and not hard. During the first half of the trip when I was easily keeping up with the group, people said things like "If you ride this fast on that bike, I'd hate to see you on a racing bike" and "Man, you must really commute a LOT!" but I think it became pretty obvious by the end that while I had the strength to easily hang with them, I didn't have half the endurance they had.

After the ride, I rested in my car for about 15 minutes and then went to Winco to get a few groceries. I got a quart of Gatorade and drank most of it while I was in the store, and got a can of Powerade powder and a bag of M&Ms for the next time I try a long fast ride with the Velo. That won't be this weekend since the only Saturday ride is the Lakes Loop, 70 miles up into the Cascades with over 5,000 feet of climbing, at an advertised pace of 15-17mph. I'm not going to touch that ride until I get a real bike with clipless pedals and some more miles in my legs. Last night I slept through Vespers, and this morning my alarm didn't go off and I slept through most of Liturgy. I feel pretty good now, rested and recovered, but I've certainly found my limits, and next time I contemplate a ride longer than 50 miles, I'll know what I'm getting into and be a little more prepared.

1:36PM - Christ is Risen!

If any man is devout and loves God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast! If any man is a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord. If any has labored long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense. If any has worked from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If any has come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast. If any has arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; because he shall in nowise be deprived because of it. If any has delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing. And if any has tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness. For the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first. He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour, even as to him who has worked from the first hour. And He shows mercy upon the last, and cares for the first; and to the one He gives, and upon the other He bestows gifts. And He both accepts the deeds, and welcomes the intention, and honors the acts and praises the offering.

Therefore, enter all into the joy of your Lord; receive your reward, both the first, and likewise the last. You rich and poor together, hold high festival! You sober and you heedless, honor the day! Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast. The table is full-laden; feast you all sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go away hungry. Enjoy you all the feast of faith: receive you all the riches of loving-kindness.

Let no one lament his poverty, for the universal Kingdom has been revealed. Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shown forth from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Savior's death has set us free. He that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it. By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive. He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, cried: "Hell was embittered when it encountered Thee in the lower regions."

It was embittered, for it was abolished. It was embittered, for it was mocked. It was embittered, for it was slain. It was embittered, for it was overthrown. It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains. It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.

O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown! Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life reigns! Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.


--The Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom, circa 400 AD

8:24AM - Baptism

Brethren, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

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At that time, the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded to you; and lo, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Amen.

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Brethren, rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do; and the God of peace will be with you.

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Six days before Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him), said "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?" This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it. Jesus said, "Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me."

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came, not only on account of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus also to death, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.

The next day a great crowd who had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!" And Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it; as it is written, "Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt!" His disciples did not understand this at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that this had been written of him and had been done to him. The crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead bore witness. The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign.

12:02PM - Confession

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your great mercy;
and according to the multitude of your compassion, blot out my transgression.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my iniquity, and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done evil in your sight,
that you may be found just when you speak, and victorious when you are judged.
For behold, I was conceived in iniquity, and in sin my mother bore me.
For behold, you have loved truth;
you have made known to me the secret and hidden things of your wisdom.
You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be made clean;
you shall wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the afflicted bones may rejoice.
Turn your face away from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and establish me with your governing Spirit.
I shall teach transgressors your ways, and the ungodly shall turn back to you.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation,
my tongue shall joyfully declare your righteousness.
Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.
For if you had desired sacrifice, I would give it; you do not delight in burnt offerings.
A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; God will not despise a broken and a humbled heart.
Do good in your good pleasure to Zion; and let the walls of Jerusalem be built.
Then you shall be pleased with a sacrifice of righteousness, with oblation and whole burnt offerings.
Then they shall offer bulls on your altar.

3:02PM - Of love and fasting

Love is patient. It's not for nothing that patience is the first quality mentioned by St. Paul when he sets out to describe love. There have been many times when I've been almost astounded by examples of love as manifested by immeasurable patience, and often thought I'd never be able to have that much patience. Not that I'm often impatient, but lately in Kristen, Jane, and Fr. Isaac, among others, I've seen such patience as I could only describe as supernatural. In that sense, it's obvious that I could never "have" that much patience, as it is a gift of God in his grace, and not something attainable by me. Perhaps I simply haven't needed that gift, or perhaps I've been too stubbornly selfish and prideful to receive it, but I have often felt that I'd never be able to patiently endure the things I've seen others have patience with.

Since I've been living with Ax, a lot of his behavior has really tested my patience. By the grace of God, I haven't yet lost patience with him, and I have sometimes surprised myself by remaining patient and kind with him when he plays a really dumb song over and over, or talks about some dumb thing over and over, or plays his music loud after I've asked him to use headphones because I'm in bed, or asks to do something himself that I know he'll mess up, or does something else that is the exact kind of thing that often makes me lose patience most quickly. I don't know if this seeming increase in my patience is because of me knowing that it's necessary to be happy living here, or if it's one of the unexpected results of the fast weakening my body and its selfish passions, or if it's simply the grace of God poured out on me in my unworthy need. Regardless of its source, it's exactly what I need right now, and it's what makes the difference between my living here being an intolerable irritation (which it was for Carla Beth) and a nice living situation with a fun friend that needs some care.

Speaking of the fast weakening my body, that seems the most likely cause for me missing work today. I was extremely tired last night when I got home, and I went to bed early, but it was still very hard to get up this morning - my body ached and I couldn't keep my eyes open. After I made breakfast for Ax and he got on the bus, I felt nauseous and had to lay down for awhile, and when the nausea passed, I got up and called Itai to let him know I was too sick and tired to work, and then took a nap. My body doesn't ache much anymore, but I feel very tired, both mentally and physically. I don't have enough experience with being stressed out to know if that's contributing, but it certainly seems possible. At any rate, my body is weak, and I'm going to use the 2 hours before church tonight to take a shower and mail a package. I hope that my body being weak will be a catalyst for strength of spirit and sensitivity to God, as is the intended consequence of the fast, but right now I just feel too blah to know why I feel this way or what will come of it. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

5:25PM - My last day of winter

This past Saturday was a great day. We had a Vespers for the departed on Friday night and a Liturgy for the departed on Saturday at 8am, and since I bought a Mt Ashland season pass for next year a few weeks ago and this weekend was the last one they were open this year, I went up there right after church. They had just gotten a bunch of snow, and it was snowing about half the time I was up there, so the surface was pretty good, but the mountain was in a cloud most of the day so visibility was pretty poor - a classic Mt Ashland day. I stayed in the trees most of the day, and several times I was able to go fast and stay in control the whole way down, and the powder was so fresh and deep that I couldn't help but shouting in glee when I popped out of the woods into the open run at the bottom. I suppose it could have been better if I could have seen more than 50 feet in front of me more often, but it was about as good of a snowboarding day as I could have hoped for, especially for the last day of the season. We had Great Vespers Saturday night, so I went straight from church to snowboarding and back to church, and I can't think of a better way to spend a day - the church services to feed the soul and spirit, the mountain to feed the body and soul, the taste of divine rest and the exhilaration of bodily exercise amidst the wonder of creation.

So, although the equinox is long past and the time change has happened already, Saturday was really the official end of winter for me. Next week I'll be riding my bike to work every day, and I hope that by then our rainy spring will have given way to a sunshiny summer, but I'm expecting at least a few more weeks of rainy stormy spring before summer really comes. I really love the change of seasons here, each season is so distinct and almost extreme in its own way. I know there are other places like this, but this is the only place I've been where you can escape the early summer 90 degree valley to hike up a snow-capped mountain, where in late summer you can swing on a rope swing out of 115 degree air into a river so cold it shocks the breath out of you, where 3 storms in one week in early winter make the difference between a warm Indian summer and mountain passes so covered in snow it takes days for the plows to dig them out, where late winter means a welcome few sunny 60 degree days before spring storms blow in, and spring days alternate between winter-like storms and summer-like sunshine every few hours. I really love the weather here, all of it, especially when it changes. Not having a car for most of this past winter has meant that I've been out in it a lot more, and the discomfort the weather has created has only served to heighten my appreciation of all aspects of the weather.

Maybe it's because I have some kind of commitment here now, and don't have the feeling of impermanence so much as I used to, but I'm really beginning to like everything about this place, partly the mountains and weather, and partly the cultural feel of the kind of people that live here and the things they're interested in, but especially the small, tight-knit church family I'm becoming part of. I hope and expect to stay here for awhile, and this is the first time I've felt this way here in the States. It's taken 2 years, but I'm finally starting to feel like this is my home, and that's something I haven't felt about a place for a very long time.

12:44PM - The surprising benefits of mortification

I think that perhaps I am starting to find the key to self-discipline, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find it in the Church, but for some reason I am. Mostly during my year of college and the few years afterwards, but really for all of my life, I've had very little self-discipline, at least in respect to time management and related things. Some of the typical ways that a lack of self-discipline often manifests itself in people (addictions, uncontrolled spending, gluttony) just aren't part of my nature, so many of my friends have been surprised to hear that I have such a hard time with self-discipline, and it's been hard to pin down exactly why I've had so little discipline related to time. I still don't know for sure, except to write it off as something that is part of my nature, but in the past year I've been slowly finding that my struggles to be punctual and get things done haven't been totally overwhelming - I've often been able to get to work on time, meet people when I planned to, and most importantly, go to bed early enough to be able to get up on time the next day. Not that it hasn't been a struggle - trying to discipline my use of time is still the dominant aspect of how I face life, but instead of being almost wholly unable to do things when they need to be done as I've been before, I usually have enough discipline to get things done on time.

Mortification means "Discipline of the body and the appetites by self-denial or self-inflicted privation" and "the act of mortifying the lusts of the flesh by self-denial and privation (especially by bodily pain or discomfort inflicted on yourself)". That discipline, and the killing (or at least weakening) of the appetites and lusts of the body has been one of the primary effects of the Lenten fast for me. I had previously thought that my lack of punctuality and timely discipline was something to do with my mind, or reason, or psychology, and that it wasn't something that was driven by my body and its appetites. After all, my struggles with discipline haven't been about fulfilling the needs of the body (like gluttony or alcoholism), so I had assumed that it was a mental discipline that I needed. Well, perhaps I do need a mental discipline, but that's not to say that it's unrelated to a bodily discipline. As I said, I'm a bit surprised to find that as I'm participating in the Lenten fasting from foods, and exercising a bodily discipline, I'm also much more able to exercise a mental or psychological discipline, and I'm finding that my struggle with timeliness isn't primarily a losing battle - it's becoming primarily a winning one. Perhaps I should have figured this out before, but I've never really thought of myself as being such a connected whole person in this way, and I've never done this kind of fasting before, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to have unexpected results from it.

I was talking to Father Isaac about this some yesterday, and he mentioned that Gandhi said that no self-discipline was possible without the participation of your whole self, which meant that a fast was necessary in order to achieve self-discipline. I also found several quotes by Gandhi on fasting:

• A complete fast is a complete and literal denial of self. It is the truest prayer.
• A genuine fast cleanses the body, mind and soul. It crucifies the flesh and to that extent sets the soul free.
• What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.
• My religion teaches me that whenever there is distress which one cannot remove one must fast and pray.

Again, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised to find these truths which I associate with Christian asceticism coming from the Hindu East, but for some reason I am. I have been finding out more and more that the ancients had a wisdom and knowledge of humanity and self which we moderns, for all our scientific knowledge about the world, and all our technology to shape it to our desires, simply don't have. I'm finding that submission to the ancient traditions of Christianity, whether I understand it or not, is good for me in some unexpected ways.

9:37PM - Memory Eternal

With the spirits of the righteous made perfect Give rest to the soul of Your servant, O Savior; And keep it safe in that life of blessedness that is lived with You, O Lover of Man.

In the place of Your rest, O Lord, Where all Your Saints repose, Give rest also to the soul of Your servant, For You alone are immortal.

Let the Lord God establish his soul where the Just repose; the mercies of God, the Kingdom of the Heavens, and the remission of his sins, let us ask of Christ, our immortal King and our God.

O God of all spirits and of every flesh, Who did trod down death and overcome the devil, bestowing life on this Your world, to the soul of this Your servant John Paul, departed this life, do You Yourself, O Lord, give rest in a place of fight, in a place of green pasture, in a place of refreshment, from where pain and sorrow and mourning have fled away. Every sin by him committed in thought, word, or deed, do You as our Good and Loving God forgive; seeing that there is no man who shall live and sin not, for You alone are without sin. Your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and Your Law is truth; for You are the Resurrection, the Life, and the Repose of Your servant John Paul, departed this life, O Christ our God; and to You do we send up glory, with Your Eternal Father and Your All-Holy, Good and Life-creating Spirit; both now and ever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Give, O Lord, to Thy servant John Paul, eternal rest and memory eternal.

2:30PM - Terri "Baby Doe" Schiavo

Unfolding today / a miracle play / this Indiana morn
The father--he sighs / she opens her eyes / their baby boy is born
"We don't understand / he's not like we planned" / the doctor shakes his head
"Abnormal" they cry / and so they decide / this child is better dead
I bear the blame / believers are few / and what am I to do?
I share the shame / the cradle's below / and where is Baby Doe?

A hearing is sought / the lawyers are bought / the court won't let him eat
The papers applaud / when judges play God / this child is getting weak
They're drawing a bead / reciting their creed / "Respect A Woman's Choice"
I've heard that before / how can you ignore / this baby has a voice
I bear the blame / believers are few / and what am I to do?
I share the shame / the cradle's below / and where is Baby Doe?

It's over and done / the presses have run / some call the parents brave
Behind your disguise / your rhetoric lies / you watched a baby starve
I bear the blame / believers are few / and what am I to do?
I share the shame / the cradle's below / and where is Baby Doe?

Those lyrics are from a song published in Steve Taylor's 1984 album "Meltdown". I found a good description of the case on someone's blog:

In 1982, a Bloomington, Indiana child with Down's Syndrome was born with a connection between his food-pipe and windpipe, a condition know as trachea-esophageal fistula. This prevented the child from being fed since food could not reach the stomach.

A routine operation could have been performed by several surgeons in a 50-mile radius. Because the child had Down's Syndrome, the parents refused to grant permission to operate and had decided to starve the child to death. When word of the situation became public, a dozen families came forward and offered to adopt the baby.

The parents refused. Though it would have cost them no money, time or effort to allow someone else to raise their child, the parents, their doctors and the Supreme Court of Indiana said they had the right to starve the child to death.

The child died seven days after birth, before the U.S. Supreme Court could hear an appeal to the Indiana decision.

In addition to the horrible injustice, another troubling aspect of this case was the the reaction by pediatricians and pediatric surgeons. More than two-thirds stated that they would go along with the parents' wishes to deny life-saving surgery to a child with Down's Syndrome. Almost 75% said that if they had a child with Down's Syndrome, they would let the baby starve to death.

Here's Steve Taylor's notes on the song from his 1994 collection "Now the truth can be told"

"I must credit both the Christian philosopher Francis Shaeffer and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff for their influence and inspiration in helping me to develop a foundational belief in the sanctity of human life. Ten years after the events described in this song occurred, the alarm they and others sounded rings prophetically true. But it continues to be drowned out by the rhetoric of 'freedom of choice' and 'quality of life'. A baby was born in Bloomington, Indiana with down's syndrome, and despite numerous outside pleas for adoption, the parents, doctors, and ultimately the courts agreed to allow Baby Doe to starve to death, right there in the hospital. I began writing this song with the sense of outrage that fingers those responsible and demands justice. But the more I thought about what had happened, the more I realized that I shared in the blame -- that my silence had helped clear the way for Baby Does' suffering and death. Hearing this song again leaves me feeling empty and a little numb. In our democratic society, the battle for the sanctity of human life is being lost. And when that window closes, nothing will be sacred."

Hitler and Stalin both would have said that they considered human life valuable and worth saving, but not all human life; only the lives they thought were best or were in line with their ideas were the ones worth saving, and those were so valuable that the quality of those lives must be enriched at the cost of all other lives. This thinking begat the holocaust and the Gulag, the former of which killed 6 million, the latter of which imprisoned (during its 70 year history) over 50 million, of which over 20 million died. These were all imprisoned or died to preserve or enhance what others considered their quality of life - their existence was in the way of what those in power wanted for themselves. In the same way, those who champion the freedom of choice of some to decide whether others live or die also believe in the value of human life, but not all human life; the valuable ones are those who have the power to decide the quality of their own life. Only those who have a voice and a choice about their lives are valuable, the lives of certain others over whom they have the power of life and death are not valuable. This is well hidden in rhetoric about their freedom of choice over their own life and their right to a high quality of life, which seem like good and even noble things, until you realize that inherent in our decisions about our lives is the quality and even existence of the lives of others who have no voice and no choice, whose care is our responsibility - the unborn, the disabled, the elderly.

In the end, the battle lines are not drawn between liberals and conservatives, or between ideologies of life, or even between the right and wrong thing to do in these cases. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart." The battle is fought not in the courts or in the press, but in our own hearts. The victory is not won when others change their mind about the sanctity of human life, but when we, when I, with the power of Christ living in me, defeat the evil in me. The battle is won when I let go of my self and my ideas about the quality of my life, and let Christ dwell in me, when I become the temple of the Holy Spirit and no longer the habitation of sin, when my self is defeated and I allow God to redeem the world through me. Only then can good come to the world, only then does the battle for the sanctity of life have meaning. I bear the blame for this and for all things. Sin and death is not individual, but common to all. There is none who lives and does not sin, and there is none who is innocent and blameless of these faults. I like to whine and cry about the injustice of being convicted of 2 recent traffic violations which I did not commit, and having to work hard to pay the fine, and in a human sense I was innocent of those things and unjustly sentenced. But in a divine sense, in a real sense, that fine is a small, even insignificant one to pay for the many traffic violations I have committed for which I was not sentenced, and that work is a small, even insignificant penance for the multitude of my sins. Justice does not rest in the individual being caught and punished for every individual offense, and righteousness can not be found by us never committing offenses - we are all responsible for the sin and death in the world, and we all can be made righteous by the gift of God. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

11:37PM - Fast food is good for you

There's something I don't understand about how keeping the fast by what you eat with your body affects your mind and spirit, but the Fathers understood it (or they at least passed on faithfully the revelation they recieved) and I'm finding out it's a very real thing. Last week as I was keeping the fast strictly, my spirit responded to the church services and my mind was focused in humility on my sins and I was thus able to feel the mercy and grace of God being poured out on me. This week, partly because I was visiting Glenn and Burt in Corvallis for the first few days, and partly because it's spring break so I'm off work and feeling lazy around the house, I haven't been keeping the fast as strictly - eating eggs and cheese and stuff with Glenn and Burt, and eating more than I need to today around the house. When I'm someone's guest, I eat what they have and what they give me regardless of what fasting rules I'm supposed to observe at the time, and accept all things for the goodness of God that they are, and don't consider that breaking the fast. But even though I ate slow food with thanks to God, it was still eating slow food and not fast food, and it still had some effect on me. Tonight at the Liturgy service I was participating with my mind and body almost exclusively - my spirit did not respond. As I didn't have the discipline to keep the fast strictly today, I didn't have the reward of a humble spirit tonight.

Fasting is one way we've been given to mortify the flesh, to put to death the passions that rule us and accept with a humble and contrite heart the mercy of God. It used to seem almost silly to me to think that what I eat or don't eat will make me spiritually humble or proud, but I'm finding out more and more that it's true. Somehow, fasting affects me spiritually, bringing me into a humble reliance on God, preparing me to recieve his mercy.

The discipline of fasting also begets disciplines of many other types, and I'm finding that a lack (even a small lack which is not really breaking the fast) of the discipline of fasting begets a lack of other disciplines, and I find that I'm lacking the discipline to keep writing this when I could be happily wasting time reading worthless technology news, or reading a potentially edifying book, or just sleeping. Not having a schedule for this week is part of what's making me lazy and undisciplined, but I think that not keeping the fast strictly is a big influence in this journal entry being shorter and less focused than I had hoped it would be.

12:56PM - Sayonara, Jane. Goodbye.

Literally translated from Japanese, "Sayonara" means "Since it must be so." Our own English "Goodbye" comes from "God be with ye". These two seem the best thing to say as Jane is leaving tomorrow, moving back to Portland indefinitely. I have very much enjoyed the times we've spent together taking walks all over Ashland and the wooded hills above it, our phone conversations, the way we've done church things together, and just hanging out at her dorm room or wherever. I don't often miss people much, but I'm sure I'll miss her when she's gone, partly because she has been the only good friend I've had here since everyone else moved away, and partly because we have slowly built a close friendship that means a lot to me.

Life will be very different for me in some ways with her gone, since I'll have nobody to go for a walk with for an hour and end up at Vespers, nobody to call with a small question about church or something and end up talking for over an hour, nobody to plan an adventure with on weekends, and nobody to just share some of the little everyday parts of life with. I'm sure I'll get used to it before long, but it will be hard and not fun. I'm sure it will be good for both of us, but that goodness is mostly unseen and unwelcome to me right now. Her being gone will create for me the spirit of Lent, that of fasting, wandering in the desert alone, more than probably anything else could if she were here, and in that it will mean that the spiritual purification of Lent will be given more focus and more power than it would otherwise. However, that is the only sense in which I can see this as being a good thing - the rest will be revealed later, and probably not without hardship, as is the case with most good. I expect to be baptized and chrismated at the end of Lent, and I keep hoping (sometimes foolishly I think) for that to give meaning to a lot of the trials I now have and to reveal a lot of the things that are now hidden, such that I understand a lot of what makes life hard now. That may happen, but it seems unlikely, since if I understand these things, most of the reason for me to have faith in God will be taken away - I'll be better able to walk by myself and will need to rely less on God's guiding hand and saving grace. I suppose we'll see, but I still can't help hoping and wishing for this time of Jane being gone during Lent to be made better or easier after Pascha - not hoping she'll be back since that's pretty much out of the question, but hoping that me being here with no good friends will be made easier or better, and require less faith on my part.

This happened to me about 3 years ago when I lived in Dallas - I had moved there knowing only one person, and met some others (Steve and Kristen) and through them met some others (Dan and Saralyn, Marc and Gayle), and then within about 6 months, they pretty much all left, and I was there with basically no good friends. I spent a lot of time with Gayle and Marc and Genna, and that was mostly pretty good, but when I didn't have a job there and my good friends in Oregon offered me what seemed an amazing job there, I moved without a moment's hesitation. There are some major differences here, though: I don't live with my aunt and uncle whose TV and materialist American attitudes are oppressive, I live in a place I love whose beauty continues to amaze me, and I have a church community that means a lot to me. If I were out of a job here and offered a great job and place to live with good friends somewhere else, I would consider long and hard the benefits of each place before moving - I am not ready to give up the natural beauty and cultural feel of this place, and especially not willing to give up my church family here. I am not looking for a reason to move, as I was in Dallas, I am rather looking for goodness in my current situation, and hoping that comes in the form of friends.

So, goodbye Jane. May you find the blessing of God in everything you do, and may you continue to seek him with singleness of purpose and purity of heart.

8:28PM - Goodness!

I've been reading C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, and I came across something in Perelandra the other night which, out of its context and in my own, puts into words something I've experienced and had a hard time expressing. The context of the quote is the narrator's experience of meeting a being or entity of light (the "creature" in the quote) from Mars that visits Earth. My own context is that of experiencing God in the Orthodox Church in a way I haven't before.

My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it - also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played. For a second or two I was nearly in that condition. Here at last was a bit of that world from beyond the world, which I had always supposed that I loved and desired, breaking through and appearing to my senses: and I didn't like it, I wanted it to go away. I wanted every possible distance, gulf, curtain, blanket, and barrier to be placed between it and me. But I did not fall quite into the gulf. Oddly enough my very sense of helplessness saved me and steadied me. For now I was quite obviously "drawn in." The struggle was over. The next decision did not lie with me.

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter 1

Last winter, sometime in October or November, my experience of God in the Church was very much like this. Struggling for words, I said at the time that it was as though I was unclean in a clean place, or was unworthy of the glory of God, or could not stand having my sinfulness so close to the goodness of God, much as I assume Isaiah once felt. These were all true descriptions in some sense, but I think the above quote expresses it more fully - I was having a real live visceral experience of the truth and goodness I had always wanted and tried to associate myself with, and it turned out to be something I couldn't stand - I wanted it to go away. I put every possible distance, gulf, curtain, blanket, and barrier between myself and the goodness I had experienced in Church: I stopped going to church for several months, and did my best to stop communicating with everyone, since every encounter with people, even those not associated with church, was a sort of reminder of my struggle with the goodness that was too Good for me. All of life was to some extent that reminder, because this world is God's good creation and everything I did was imbued with the inescapable goodness of God. I wanted to stop living, not to kill myself but just to do nothing and be nothing; as Job and Jeremiah lamented their birth, I wished I did not exist.

After a few months, the pain and oppression of my broken communion with life subsided to a pervasive spiritual numbness, and I somewhat helplessly began going back to Church, talking to people, living "life as usual". I had very much before this felt the inexorable pull of Orthodoxy, with its full and rich communion with God and the saints, but it was something I thought I wanted, and I sought it. Now it was more like I had passed the event horizon of a black hole, and despite feeling like I didn't like it and didn't belong and wanted to stop and be nothing, no power could now pull me away - not even my own soul-numbing despondency. As in the above quote, my helplessness had a lot to do with my salvation, as I realized that there was no decision I could make that would affect my closeness to the Church and thus to God and his ineffable goodness. The struggle was over, but the effect of it lingers still, as an underlying numbness and disconnection.

Just two days into it, Lent has brought some of that sense of despondency back to me, as I look within and find my numbness, disconnection, purposefully broken communion, my stubborn prideful rebellion, and as I'm surrounded even more than usual by the goodness of God in the Church. The services and the readings and all experience in church now is very focused on our sinfulness, our need for repentance, and our selfish refusal of it. It all has a very humbling effect, and makes me want to just be quiet and still and focus on my desperate need for the goodness of God to take over my soul. I suppose that Lent is having its intended effect on me. Knowing the goodness that is in some sense so easily accessible, I want to draw closer and drink fully of the goodness of God and experience a communion with him that is salvation, but I also know that requires me to let go of myself and let God in entirely, and every time I attempt that I find it's harder than it seems. Church is hard work, but it wouldn't be worth going if it were easy.

12:00PM - Lent

Today is the first day of Lent, and I'm already hungry. I think I will just have to get used to it.

This is the first year that I've cared about Lent, and partly because of that but partly because I'm expecting to be baptized at the end of Lent, it seems like it really matters. I'm not sure I'm ready for fasting, praying, almsgiving, introspection, the "bright sadness" of repentance, but my ideas about my readiness has never seemed to matter to God as I've been drawn into the Church, and now that Lent is upon me, it looks like I'm stuck with it now, just like I'm stuck with the Church even though sometimes I don't like it.

Life is a little simpler now, which is good because that likely means less distractions and stress. I bought a car a week ago, an '83 Toyota Tercel 4WD wagon, and got it insured and did the title transfer today, so a lot of my previous transportation hassles are no longer hassles. That also means that I'm driving practically everywhere now instead of riding my bicycle, so I'm getting fat and lazy, but fasting during Lent should help with the former, if not the latter. I'm pretty sure that by June I'll have a job near home, so I'll be commuting by bicycle, and maybe doing some club rides and races if I have time. That will definitely keep me from getting fat and lazy.

Life is still pretty uncertain, as I'll be moving in a few weeks and I don't know where for sure yet. Agafia called me last night to tell me that Ax's house manager will be leaving in a month, so they are looking for another house manager and wanted to see if I'm interested. They are also looking for a roomate, but not as urgently as they need a house manager, and I could realistically be either. Tomorrow I'm going to talk to Mark, a guy who has a room for rent cheap in Ashland, and see his place. That should help me decide where the best place to live might be. I'm thinking that I probably won't be a good house manager for Ax because of my job; I'm gone for so long every day right now and I have no idea what I'll be doing in June and after, and that kind of uncertainty doesn't work with Ax's requirements. So, I at least have some options, but sometimes I'd rather not have choices because life is easier in a lot of ways if you're just forced into stuff, and since I don't always choose what's best, I might as well just live with whatever's given me.

I'm apprehensive about the purifying fires of Lent; dying to self is neither easy nor comfortable, but it's the only way to receive the goodness of God. May I not shrink away too much from the fire of communion.

1:15PM - Honesty in corporate America

Today I got an email from Dan, in which was the text of an email he'd gotten from the HR people at Plexis, advising that because of what they'd read in my personal journal (my webpage address is on my resume, as my resume is on my webpage) they decided not to hire me because my "writings did not shed a favorable light on his work ethic and professional judgement." At first I was rather surprised, because I couldn't think of anything I'd written that would make them think that. But reading over some of my journal entries that mentioned using the computers at FTD for personal use, and maybe when I was so tired that I called in sick, I think I can see what they mean. After all, HR people's job is to look for ways to disqualify applicants, so I guess they decided that was how to disqualify me.

The difference in worldviews presented here was really striking to me. I believe that total honesty and full disclosure, even (perhaps especially) publicly, is always better than deception or omission, whether that is by intent or carelessness. Even when it's misunderstood, and even when it hurts or seems like a bad idea, honesty is always rewarded by goodness. In this specific situation, it seems to me that the HR people at Plexis had a rare opportunity to actually understand one of their applicants in a way that no applicant would purposefully disclose, and find out my character in a way that they could only otherwise find out after knowing me for quite some time. So, it seems to me that instead of seeing the fault they found in me as a disqualification, they would have been better off by using my honesty and their knowledge of my character as a way to know how best to deal with me. Their attitude really reminds me of what I've read of the mindset of the leaders of Soviet Russia in The Gulag Archipelago, in the way they ascribe to a sort of ideal of behavior and ideas, and expect everyone to attain that ideal. In this case, they prefer to hire someone about whom they've found out only things they like, rather than someone about whom they have found out something they dislike, and that might seem logical, except that there are things about everyone that people will dislike or disapprove of. Deciding not to hire someone because they've read his admissions of fault on his personal journal (which he is bold enough to make public) and instead hire someone about whom they don't know anything personal seems to me like a bad idea. They probably think that by hiring someone else instead of me, they are hiring someone who doesn't have these disagreeable characteristics, someone more perfect in their mind. That might be the case if there were such people, but "There is no one righteous, not even one" and thus it is more valuable to hire someone who readily talks about his faults, so that you know them and can deal with them, than someone whose faults you have yet to find, perhaps after they have cost you a lot of money.

The really telling thing from the email was "I would suggest you tell your friend that [putting his personal journal on the webpage linked to from his resume] is not a good idea." Obviously, they think it's a bad idea for me to talk or write about things that would make people think poorly of me (even if those things are true and relevant), or at least that it's a bad idea to make them available to the public (and especially in a place where they can be easily found by someone looking at my resume). In their mind, deception for self-advancement (or whatever other "good" cause you have in mind) is a good thing, better than honesty in some cases. It's as though they said "He should have been smart enough to hide his journal from us, because then we wouldn't have known the truth about him, and would have hired him." Thanks for the suggestion, corporate HR, but I think I've chosen the better way.

"For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. . . God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. . . so that no one may boast before him. . . Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."
1 Corinthians 1:20-31

May this entry be not boasting in myself, in my choices, in my honesty, and may it be not ridiculing the HR people at Plexis; instead, may it be an example of the foolish and the weak things of this world manifesting themselves in me, that I may boast only in the Lord, and not in myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note on the date of this entry: This entry is back-dated, meaning I posted it Thursday, March 3, and dated it as though it were posted Wednesday, February 16. I did this because I wrote almost all of this on February 16, but ran out of time at the library to finish and post it, so I saved it and have only just now come back to it. Later, when I read back through my journal and read "Today I..." it'll make more sense this way.

12:04PM - Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll

Items found in the back of my bus after my morning bus route today:

1 intravenous needle; the type used when I sell plasma with a hose attachment, 14 gauge, used

1 empty Durex condom wrapper

2 size AA batteries

There's a reason Valentine's Day is also known as VD.

2:02PM - There is no remedy for love but to love more.

That quote is by Henry David Thoreau, and it's on the FTD calendar for February that's hanging in my cubicle. I thought it oddly appropriate.

It seems like every other day, I'm reminded that nothing in this world is permanent, everything is constantly changing, and nothing can be counted upon. A few days ago I got an email from Dan about a position open at Plexis, the software company where he works, and I applied for the position. I would be a PC support technician, mostly installing and maintaining computers on a network, both at Plexis and at their customer's places (healthcare businesses). It sounds like the kind of computer job that I'd be good at, and Dan's description of the people there and the corporate culture sounds very attractive. The thing that's most attractive, though, is that it's located in Ashland, so it would be a 10 or 15 minute bicycle ride to work and back, and I'd be working 8 hours a day instead of 9 or 10, and I'd be gone from home only 8.5 hours instead of 12-14 like I am now. I expect to hear from them next week, and I certainly hope I get the job.

On Wednesday, the manager here at FTD asked me if I had gotten my schedule yet, and I said it only went through next Wednesday the 16th, and he said that because of my schedule restrictions, that's probably all they would have for me right now but they would like to have me back for Mother's Day in May. So that's not definite, but it's a pretty big hint that I won't be working here after the middle of next week. That's not much of a surprise, since they need to hire lots of seasonal people for not more than 2 weeks, but I had certainly hoped to be able to keep working at Laidlaw and FTD both for at least until the summer.

Yesterday morning when my alarm went off, I couldn't really get out of bed - I sat up and thought about the stuff I had to do, and then it was suddenly 10 minutes later and my alarm was ringing again, and I tried to get up and get my clothes on and then woke up 10 minutes later laying on the floor with my alarm going off again. I had only gotten 4 or 6 hours of sleep every night for the past week since I had been working so much, and I realized that I wouldn't be able to drive a bus or do anything without sleeping a lot more. So I crawled to the phone and called FTD and Laidlaw and said I was sick and couldn't work, which was true, but they probably thought I was sick like a cold or something, which wasn't true - I was just so tired from working so much and not sleeping that I felt sick. I slept till noon, and felt great when I got up. I knew that I had to quit doing the long schedule that driving a bus requires, and especially quit commuting to Medford to work. I decided that even though I like driving the bus, and like the people at Laidlaw, and had decided to try to keep working there at least until the summer, I wouldn't be able to do it - the commute and the long schedule was wearing me out. So I went to Ashland Sanitary and Recycling and applied to be a garbage or recycling truck driver, figuring that I need to find a job in Ashland as soon as possible, and if Plexis doesn't hire me then I need some other good options. Hopefully having my CDL already will help me get the garbage truck job. If neither of those happen, then I don't have any other good ideas and I'll just hope for something to present itself.

I hate working on weekends. I used to not mind working on Saturdays as long as I could go to church on Sundays, but now I feel like if I have a day off in the middle of the week then it's kinda wasted, as I can't plan cool stuff to do with friends, and if I don't have the weekend off then I feel like I never get a break. I'm on the schedule both days this weekend for 9am-5:30, which means I won't be able to be in church either day, and if they ask me to work more hours, I probably will, since I don't really have anything else worth doing now that I can't go to church. I'm only working this weekend because FTD said that all of their employees are required to work this weekend because V-day is on Monday, and if I did keep working for them then I'm sure I wouldn't be working any other weekends. Something that I like about Laidlaw is that you're basically guaranteed to never work on a weekend, and both jobs I've applied to in Ashland are never open weekends, so that's another reason to hope I get one of them.

I'm surprised I have so much time with no calls to write here, just 2 days before V-day, but I guess that means FTD is staffed well enough this season. I can't think of anything else worth breaking the rules to write, so I'll go write some emails now. The sleep I've had was a wonderful thing that cleared my mind and made me feel like I can do things.

5:30PM - Comfort and convenience are addictive

I need more sleep, less work, and a new battery for my alarm clock. Yesterday was my day to sell plasma, so even though I work so much now that I really don't need to anymore, I was feeling ok and I had the Suburban to get home afterwards so I sold plasma after work. Yesterday was also the last day to use the last WIC coupon Steve and Kristen gave me when they moved, and I didn't need the milk or cheese so I arranged to give it to Father and Vonna, and went to the co-op in Ashland to buy it but found out (with my basket full) that they don't take WIC, so I went to Safeway to get it. I didn't get home till 9:30, and by the time I made supper and oiled my bicycle chain and got other stuff ready for today, it was almost midnight, and I went to bed. My alarm clock woke me up at 4:17, but then it just stopped ringing of its own accord, so I fell back asleep, and then woke up at 5:10 and realized I had way overslept - if I leave at 5:05 and ride my bicycle to work (as I'd planned to do), I get there just in time. I realized I could drive the Suburban and still get to work on time, so that's what I did. I was so tired driving the bus this morning that singing to myself just barely kept me awake. Maybe I should have called base and had them send another driver out, but after the first 30 minutes I was awake and feeling fine. Still, I need more sleep. I should have just gone home last night instead of selling plasma, so that I could get to bed early enough. Hindsight isn't 20/20, but it's clearer than foresight.

I knew this before, but now that I have the Suburban, I know I have a choice between it and my bicycle, so even though it costs almost $10 to drive it here and back to Ashland, and even though I'm not sure if it's still on Steve and Kristen's insurance, it's hard to psyche myself up to riding my bicycle for more than an hour in the early morning dark and freezing cold when I know I could sleep another 30 minutes and get to work warm, comfortable, and lazy. During the day, when I'm feeling good, not hungry and tired, it seems dumb to pay $10 to be lazy and get out of shape when I could be building muscle and fitness for free, but when I'm warm and comfy and sleepy in my bed and my alarm rings, it seems ridiculous to get up early and work hard when I could sleep and be comfy. Yesterday when I gave plasma, my heart rate was 48 bpm, which is below the 50bpm lower limit, so they had to re-take it (after I jumped and danced around to raise my pulse). Several months ago it was usually 70 something, and it's been dropping slowly as I've been riding my bicycle more, but yesterday was the first time it's been that low, so apparently my fitness level really is improving as a result of bicycling so much. Yet despite that somewhat concrete indicator of how good it is for me, and despite me enjoying it, it's not nearly as comfortable and convenient as driving, so it becomes a hard option to choose. I prefer simply not having a choice, or at least having a choice only between motorcycling and bicycling, because then it's obvious that I have to ride my bicycle, so I do, and although it's not especially comfortable, the good feeling from the excercise and being outside outweighs the discomfort. Plus, the astonishment of my co-workers when I arrive in the morning and they ask "Don't you live in Ashland now? Did you really ride your bike all the way here?" really makes me feel good, in a prideful sort of way.

Monks eschew comfort and convenience, setting themselves up in an atmosphere where the only option is the hard thing to do, and that's how they live such ascetic lives. I dare say that the benefits of asceticism are not enough to outweigh the initial discomfort, if the choice is left up to the everyday impulses. The only way to gain the kind of benefits that an ascetic, monk-like life offers is to make the decision while you have strength, and set up the kind of environment where you won't have a choice later when you are cold, hungry, tired, and want to quit. That, to me, is the attraction of the monastic life, that it forces you into doing the hard thing, the right thing, and doesn't leave room for the easy, lazy, comfortable life, and thus forces you to develop reliance on God alone for your strength. In a way, I'll be glad when the Suburban is gone and I'm forced to ride my bicycle every day again, because that lack of choice is the only way I'll consistently do the kinds of hard and uncomfortable things that build strength, and that is good for me in more ways than just the physical fitness.

2:06PM - illegal!

I'm at work at FTD, breaking the rules on my first day back (we're not allowed to use the computers for personal use). I'm kinda off in a corner with nobody behind me, which is how I had it last year when I was here, so I'm not expecting to be caught. I just took my first call, it seems pretty slow right now. I imagine we still have enough new people in preparation for Valentine's Day that it'll be slow these first few days. I haven't gotten my schedule yet so I don't know when my break and lunch times are, and I don't know what days they want me to work (they told me my schedule for this week on the phone last week but I don't know beyond that) but I'm sure I'll find that out soon. I didn't get any real training, just had one of the supervisors sit down and go through some of the basics and some of the stuff that's changed since I left, and I looked through the V-day catalog and looked around on the website to try to remember what stuff we sell and how to make customers buy it. I've taken 2 orders now, and it's surprising how much of it I remember, the little things I say and the buttons to push and such. I think after tomorrow I'll have the hang of it and be remembering most stuff. The real test will be when I get a customer service call and have to figure stuff out instead of just taking orders like a machine.

I'm really reminded of what a professional atmosphere there is here, and how much of a front everyone puts on to be nice and business-like, how nobody here can ever be a real friend, since they make such an effort to keep up the wall of professionalism and don't let anyone in on their personal lives. I'm reminded how I noticed that the people at Laidlaw, while they're professional about their jobs, are personal with the people they work with, sharing details of their lives, being warm and genuinely friendly, and I just got used to that, so this detached coldness of professionalism is quite a contrast. It's not that people here aren't friendly and helpful, because they certainly are, more than in many workplaces, but it is detached, impersonal friendship, not close personal friendship.

Hopefully having this (illegal) computer access at work will mean that I don't have to go to the library and hope for an available computer anymore, although I expect that as V-day gets nearer I'll have no time for personal stuff.

I just got my schedule, it only goes through Wednesday of next week, so I'm still not sure what happens after that. Maybe they only want me for the busy V-day week, but I sure hope they give me the regular hours I want after that, and at least until after Mother's Day. Hopefully I'll do well enough that they'll be convinced it's a good idea to keep me.

Last Friday I got Steve's Suburban from the transmission guy he had left it with to get fixed, and it seems to work just fine now. Since it was raining last night and they predicted rain today, I thought it would be a good opportunity to double check and make sure everything works just right in the Suburban instead of riding my bicycle here in the rain. Yep, it works fine, keeps me nice and dry. This Thursday and Friday I don't have work here at FTD so I'll probably drive to Medford those days also and use the time in the middle of the day to get the Suburban all clean and waxed and ready to sell. This is the first time I've driven from Ashland to work here in Medford, and it was kind of a revelation how easy and comfortable, even relaxing it was, and how that affects the whole day. Instead of being freezing cold and cranky (motorcycle) or a bit tired and almost hot (bicycle), I'm just warm and comfy, and feeling kinda lazy. I know that if I keep doing this instead of bicycling, I will actually get lazy and have a harder time doing physically exerting stuff like bicycling or hiking or whatever. These past few weeks I've felt my legs being a bit tired every day and feeling them getting stronger from all the work, and if I don't keep that up then that strength and fitness will be lost soon. Well, the Suburban will be sold soon, so I won't have a choice for much longer.

6:32PM - "So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself."

This past Thursday I found out something surprising and unsettling: Olga's daughter is going to move in to live with Olga downstairs (where I now live) pretty soon. Her daughter has some kind of health problem, and lives in Prineville, where she's a schoolteacher. Her contract with the school was going to end in 2 or 3 years, at which time she was planning to move to Ashland and live with Olga, but just recently her doctor said she couldn't do a lot of moving and lifting things, and she was granted disability status by the government, so the school decided to release her from her contract and give her a "medical discharge" which basically means since she can't do everything she was doing before in her job, she's fired. So she's going to be moving in soon, but she (and thus Olga and I) doesn't know when. She has to sell her house and move all her stuff, so I guess it'll be more like a month from now than like a week from now, but that's still pretty soon.

This means, of course, that I'll have to move out by whenever Olga's daughter moves in. At least all my stuff is still packed up in boxes and such, so moving again won't take any more effort than finding someone with a car to put all my stuff in and take it to wherever I'll be living. Where I'll be living is still a mystery, though. Father Isaac (who had the idea that I could live with Olga) has a few ideas of ways to find somewhere to live, and I'll be pursuing those this week. I'm hoping to stay here in Ashland, since basically everyone I know and everything I want to do is here (except my job, of course, but that will only last a few more months). I've thought about moving somewhere totally different, like Nashville since Naomi and Debbie (who are both pregnant) live there, or Austin where Steve and Kristen are since the job market is good there and Lydia and Joe live near there, but I really want to stay here. I like the weather and especially the mountains around here, I like the culture and people in general, but most of all I want to stay here because I'm part of a neat small church community here, and I don't want to leave these people who are quickly becoming my family. I guess I'll just have to see what happens, though, and wait and look for opportunities to open up for me.

Steve and Kristen found a place to rent in Austin, or actually in Cedar Park on the NW side of Austin, a nice duplex with an attached garage, 2 bed 1 bath, basically just what they were looking for. It's a few miles from the church they'll be going to, and Steve has been encouraged by the people at the church to work as a sub for the Cedar Park schools, so that looks like it might work out. They gave me their new cellphone number when I last talked to them a few days ago, but it turned out it was the wrong number, so I guess I'll have to wait for them to call me with the right number.

FTD called me last Thursday and said they have a position for me starting this Monday, 9am to 2pm, which is exactly what I needed, so it appears that it'll work just fine for me to drive the bus straight from the school in the morning to FTD, talk on the phone for 5 hours, then drive straight back to the school and do the afternoon bus run. Since Valentine's Day is this Monday, I'll have to work both days this weekend, but after that I won't work any weekends, which is good since I already commute to Medford enough. Hopefully my position with FTD will continue part-time weekdays until after Mother's Day, soon after which time my school bus driving will be ending and I'll have to find another job anyway. So I will continue to be very busy, but at least now I'll be making about twice as much money with all my busy-ness as I have been.

This weekend has been nice, on Saturday I went with Jane and Father and Michael to Mill Creek Falls, and we climbed down the gorge into the river and hopped around on the rocks a lot, ate lunch and skipped stones, Michael slipped and fell in and soaked his pants and boots and I hit my knee pretty hard on a tree, so it was a real adventure, and it was fun too. Today after coffee hour at Father's house Jane and I walked up to Lithia Park and walked around a lot, and now I'm using her computer to write this. Soon I'll walk home and get ready for the week and hit the sack, and life just goes on despite the uncertainty.

"Each day has enough trouble of its own."

1:20PM - What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Something is going to have to change soon. Living in Ashland and commuting to work in Medford without a car is harder than I thought it would be. Last Thursday was the first really cold day that week (normal temperatures, really; near freezing at night) and I was so cold by the time I got to work that I could hardly get off the motorcycle. That afternoon I put the new points on the motorcycle just before going home, and instead of running better like I thought it would, it runs worse. I fiddled and adjusted for awhile before giving up and just riding home, with a max speed of about 45mph. I decided that was the end of motorcycle commuting, so the next day I got up 45 minutes earlier (at 4:30am) and rode my bicycle to work. There was a very strong tailwind the entire time, sometimes up to 20mph so there was no wind moving past me, and I made the 19 miles in just under an hour. I took the bus home that afternoon, which worked well I wish the bus ran early enough to ride it to work also. Saturday and Sunday I had community service work days, and since the bus doesn't run on weekends, and I expected to be pretty tired at the end of the day, I rode my motorcycle to Medford both days, and it was cold and the bike was slow, but it wasn't that bad. Saturday we washed county cars all day, but there was only one hose among about 15 people, so the person with the hose was always busy and everyone else stood around a lot. Sunday we cleaned the same cemetery as we had the week before, but this time I got on the leaf blower all day and for some reason we took a really long lunch, so I wasn't nearly as tired. Also I forgot my lunch on Sunday, which would have been disastrous, but God's hand of providence sent a bunch of rolls and doughnuts for us to eat, so although it was mostly sugar, it was the calories I needed to get me through the day. Monday I rode my bicycle to work again, and found that without a tailwind it takes an hour and 5 minutes. I didn't take a nap in the middle of the day, but sold plasma and did some other stuff, and when I got to the bus station just before the bus left at 5pm, there were already 4 people with bicycles in line in front of me for the Ashland bus, and the bus can only take 2 bikes on its bike rack, so that meant the other 3 of us were out of luck. The other 2 people took the next bus at 5:30, so I had to wait for the 6:00 bus. While I was waiting, I got the mail from our old mailbox and checked my email at the library, but still, getting home an hour late meant I was gone over 14 hours that day. Tuesday (yesterday) I rode my bicycle again, and got on the 5pm bus this time, which meant that I got home in time to grab a snack and go to the Vespers service that evening for the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Church is as close as we can get to heaven while we are on earth, and for me, that service was especially refreshing, a true break from this world. This morning when my alarm rang I was so tired, both my legs from all the bicycling I've been doing, and just in general from trying to do so much and not sleeping enough, that I slept too late to have time to ride my bicycle, so I had to take my motorcycle. It was 28 degrees, and I was freezing and frustrated when I got to work again today. Bicycling takes twice as long as motorcycling, but I arrive warm and with the good feeling of having just excercised, so I much prefer it to motorcycling, at least in the morning. Now that I'm here in Medford, I'm glad I have my motorcycle because it makes getting home much easier.

Since I moved to Ashland last week, I've been wondering how the commuting thing would work, and so far it's been a beast. Every day I'm gone so long, and either tired from riding my bicycle or cold and frustrated from riding my motorcycle which doesn't work and I don't have time or motivation to try to fix, that I can feel the burnout building up in me. Having to work here in Medford both days this past weekend certainly contributed to that, but even with weekends "free" I don't think I'll be able to get enough rest to really feel like I can be alive and do things. Plus, being stuck here in Medford and not having any employment for the 5 hours in between bus routes every day makes it so that I'm gone all the time and exhausted, but still only working and getting paid for 5 hours of work a day. FTD still hasn't called me back, and I'm going to start applying at jobs in Medford and Ashland - dumb jobs in Medford like grocery store or gas station to fill the time in between my bus routes, or real full time jobs in Ashland, hopefully driving something like a garbage truck or cement truck with my CDL, so that I can quit commuting to Medford and have a job this summer also. I'm going to have to find a job this summer anyway, and that job will be in Ashland or Talent so that I can ride my bicycle there, so it doesn't make much difference if I get that job now or in a few months, except that Laidlaw will be stuck with having to put a sub on my route, which they will hate, and I will have a much easier time getting to work and will have more time to live.

Steve and Kristen made it to Austin on Monday night, and they are in a hotel room and have the truck rented until this Friday, so they have several days to drive around and try to find a place where they want to live. Hopefully they'll find something soon that is what they need. I'm starting to feel the loneliness creep in, which I think is partly because I've been so busy that I don't have time to order my life at Olga's how I want it, and partly because I'm basically living by myself now. Jane is my only friend here that's my age now, and it's been great to see her and talk on the phone with her sometimes, but I think I'll just have a period of loneliness while I get used to living alone regardless of how much communication or time spent with friends I have. Plus, knowing that Jane is moving to Portland in March means that the sort of loneliness I feel is waiting to happen when she moves tempers the benefit of our friendship now.

It's a sign of my being so busy and consumed by the everyday mechanics of just living that I can't think of anything else to write. In a different mood, I could muse on the effects of public school and pop culture on teenagers as I see them in my bus, or on the way commuting is a part of our culture and how that affects a lot of things, the disconnect between your job and your "real life", or any number of other things, but for now my time is short and none of that seems worthwhile. Not that what I just wrote seems that much more worthwhile, but...it's "the news" so for some reason it gets written first.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but I think life is having the former effect on me, and not the latter.

1:39PM - Boom!! The best laid plans of mice and men...

FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It's a term used by industry analysts when they talk about ad campaigns that seek to make people afraid of some competing product or something. If you're familiar with Ralph Nader's book Unsafe At Any Speed, you know what I mean. Well, that's what Steve and Kristen got a double portion of this week.

They left Monday at 5:45pm, and got about 20 miles up the road when Dave called and basically told Steve that they (Mary and Dave) were going to make these changes and go back on these promises of how things would be, and that if Steve and Kristen didn't like it, they could just shove it. Partly because of the changes being serious things, but mostly because of the way it was just forced on them, with none of the politeness you'd give a stranger, the respect you'd give a business partner or employee, or the sacrifices you'd make for a friend, Steve and Kristen decided they couldn't go to Aloha and do the resident manager thing, and decided to wait at least a day before deciding what they were going to do. They went back to Ashland and stayed with Tom and Maureen for a few days. They were in a unique sort of pickle, with all their stuff packed up in an expensive rental truck, their house up for rent, a baby and 2 pets to take care of, and nowhere to go. After talking with their family and some friends, yesterday (Wednesday) they decided to move to Austin instead of Portland (and instead of staying here), and try to find a place to stay and a job for Steve. Steve's parents are graciously paying for their moving and initial living expenses in Austin, so that makes it possible.

Last night right after I got home from work at about 5:30, Steve called and asked me to help right away, he had to get the truck back to the rental place ASAP to avoid huge extra rental fees. The truck was still packed and the Subaru was still on the car trailer behind it, but the rental place is allowing them to park it there as is with all their stuff in it and not charge them for it until they come pick it up again when they move to Austin. I hopped back on my motorcycle and went to Tom and Maureen's, he gave quick directions and drove away in the rental truck and I was to drive his Suburban there and pick him up after he dropped off the truck. When I started to drive it, the transmission was slipping some, and it wouldn't go higher than 2nd gear, but it seemed to work OK at low speeds (35mph or so) as long as I took it real easy, so I drove up to the Budget place in Medford. Steve had been there for awhile, and he hopped in to drive back to Ashland. We checked the transmission fluid and found it was full, so decided to just drive and see what we could do. The transmission started slipping more and more, and he thought he might want to leave it at a transmission shop in Talent, but then it seemed to be working better so he decided to keep going to Ashland, but it was smoking and slipping and finally just north of Ashland it wouldn't go anywhere anymore, so he found a place to park it at some shop. He had his cell phone with him, and we called Tom and Maureen who came to pick us up, and we went to their house and had supper, and I didn't get home until after 11, way past my bedtime. I was really tired this morning and had a nap on the bus after I finished my morning route. As of last night, Steve's plans were to unload the Suburban and put the stuff in the rental truck, try to drive the Suburban to a local transmission shop, have them fix it, then have me pick it up and park it on the street at Olga's while he sells it on eBay. Steve knew the transmission had problems, and had been planning to sell the Suburban, but knew it would sell for 5 times as much with a working transmission, so he held off, and had planned to drive it to Portland and sell it there once the transmission was fixed. Now, however, with it as it is, the only reasonable choice is to sell it here, and it'll be more cost-effective to pay a shop to fix it and then sell it than it would be to sell with a broken transmission. Hopefully that works out as planned.

They're planning to leave for Austin tomorrow morning, and will drive down there and try to figure out something. It's all a huge uncertain guess what that something will be, and it seems impossible for something good to happen without huge costs and headaches - they'll arrive there with an expensive truck full of their stuff, with no place to unload it for maybe a few days, and no place but maybe a hotel to live in for a few days until they find a place to rent. It seems like such a ridiculous long shot, but it's what they've decided to do, and at least their moving and initial living expenses will be paid. The job market is better there than here, more good jobs are available, and the rental housing situation is better also, more good places are available cheap, so hopefully they'll find something soon that's better than what they had here. Steve's hoping to be a school teacher, starting as a substitute and working into a regular position.

I'm at the library and have less than a minute left, so this is all for now.

12:42PM - Ashland

Well, it's done. I now live in Ashland, and Steve and Kristen now live in Aloha, and I only know 2 people from church who live in Medford, everyone else I know lives in Ashland. I'm at the Medford library, I haven't looked at Olga's computer yet so I don't know what I'll be able to do with it.

I might have enough time now to finish writing the entry I started awhile ago, but it's saved on a hard drive I have and I forgot to put it on my website so I can't get to it now. Even computer ninjas get left in the computer lurch sometimes.

Brief history of the past few days: Friday after work I wanted to go to Olga's and take some stuff there that was already in boxes or ready to go, and Steve and Kristen wanted to take the couch to some people and the dining room table and chairs to some people, all in Ashland, so that evening we loaded up the Suburban full of all that stuff and went down there and dropped it all off, picked up Jane, and came back. Saturday I had community service work all day for an unjust traffic ticket, did weed whacking and leaf blowing with about 15 others in a cemetery, got home at 4:30, ate and took a short nap, then started helping pack stuff. Steve had gotten a giant Budget rental truck, and had put some of his motorcycle stuff in it. Kristen and Jane had been cleaning out the house and packing stuff in boxes, and we all worked all evening, by midnight we had all the big garage stuff and the washer/dryer in and all the boxes loaded that had been packed, and went to bed. I rode my motorcycle to church Sunday and left it at Olga's and rode back with Steve and Kristen, we all napped and then started packing again at 5 or so. We knew we needed some help, and I needed some way to get me and my stuff and my bicycle to Ashland that night, so I called Father Isaac and Maureen and Tom and left messages for them. Maureen and Tom came over at 8 and helped pack, which left me free to pack my stuff, which I had done and loaded in their car by midnight. We got to Olga's about 1am, and I found my key didn't work in her door (the same key that had worked in that door Friday night when she gave it to me) so I went to the side deck door, used my phone card to pop open the locked screen door and the key to open the solid door, then moved my stuff into my room downstairs. I got out the stuff I expected to need the next day and left everything else packed, and by 2:30am I was setting my alarm for 5am the next day, realizing I'd only be getting about 2 hours of sleep. If I hadn't been so tired and sleep-deprived already from the whole weekend, I would have just lived with that amount of sleep, but I knew I'd fall asleep driving the next day, so I got up at 6 instead and called Laidlaw to tell them I couldn't drive the morning route, and went back to sleep. I got up at 10 and went to Steve and Kristen's, helped them clean and pack the last few things, went and drove my afternoon bus route, went back and found Steve and Kristen had the house empty and clean, I went and dropped off the carpet shampooer and came back and said goodbye, and they drove off at 5:45. They had originally been planning to drive straight to Aloha, but thought it might be better to stop in Corvallis at Glenn and Burt's for the night and then have to rent the truck another day. Regardless, they should be in Aloha by now, unpacking things. They had to have the truck back at 1pm (7 minutes ago) or rent it for another day, so I'm sure they've decided by now. I should call them when I get back to work this afternoon to see how it went.

Almost 2 weeks ago now I submitted my application to FTD and hoped to be training or working by now to fill the time between my morning and afternoon bus routes, but I haven't heard from them yet so I went by today to give them my new address and phone info and see if they decided anything, and they said they'd call me by the end of the week and set up some training. I hope that's true; I really don't want to have to find some other job to work in the middle of the day and it's really silly to keep commuting by motorcycle this far and have such a big chunk of time in the middle of the day with nothing to do but maybe sell plasma and hang out at the library or whatever.

Today was unseasonably warm, 40 at night and 60 in the daytime, close to record highs for this time of year. It certainly made my first day commuting by motorcycle a lot nicer than I had expected, I got to work cold but not frozen. The forecast for the rest of the week is similar, and hopefully the warm weather will last. I'm sure there'll be plenty of days when it's below freezing in the mornings, when I get to work and can hardly move my fingers, but the average temperatures are warming up, so hopefully those cold days will be few before spring comes.

Over the next several days I'll be unpacking some of my stuff and trying to move the furniture out of my room or at least move it all to one side to get it out of the way - the room is mostly full of a double bed, 2 bedside tables, a daybed, and 2 dressers, with very little floor space. I've been sleeping in the bed for lack of floor space to put my thermarest and lack of time to disassemble or move stuff out, and I hope that changes soon. Also I'll be figuring out how my schedule and Olga's work together to see if I can cook dinner for her at night. Right now she's on a liquid or soft food only diet because of recent oral surgery, but she'll be able to eat regular food soon. Most of the details of how things will work with me there remain to be figured out, but we'll have time for that.

It seems strange that I seem to have more time to write in my journal now that I'm forced to use the library than before when I had a computer at home, but it's certainly less distracting here, and watching the little timer count down certainly gives you motivation to get done the things you consider important. I suppose I'll keep coming here to use up time in the middle of the day until I start training with FTD, by which time I'll probably figure out Olga's computer situation.

1:25AM - So many words, so little time

Two days ago I started writing a long entry with all the "news" or whatever, stuff that's been happening lately and my plans for the future, pretty much all connected with moving, and only got a few paragraphs done before I was interrupted by something else, and this is the first time since then that I've been on the computer.  That entry is still saved but it needs a lot more words before it's ready and I don't have time for it now.  By the time I have time and computer access enough to finish it, it will probably be so outdated that it'll be worthless, but oh well.  I haven't written in such a long time because I've been so busy, mostly with work and partly with a number of other little things, and because I never feel like I can write unless I have a big chunk of time when I won't be interrupted.

Today I had to do community service work all day, cleaning a graveyard, got very tired and then came home and had tons of packing to do here.  Steve and Kristen are planning to be moved out by Sunday night, they rented a giant truck and we've been packing it all evening.  So far we have basically everything from the garage in there and most of the stuff from the house in boxes in there also, so tomorrow we just have a few pieces of furniture to load and several odds and ends.  Friday night we took a bunch of furniture to people in Ashland, and took all the stuff that I never use which was already in boxes or otherwise ready to go (which is most of my stuff) to Olga's and I saw the place where I'll be staying.  That's all the work I've done towards moving myself, about 30 minutes' worth.  I haven't even started to pack anything in my room, the stuff that I use.  I have 3 boxes and 2 backpacks to fill, that should take about 3 hours, and then I'll have to find a way to get it to Ashland, and get my motorcycle and bicycle there also.  Maybe I'll brave the cold and ride my motorcycle to church tomorrow and leave it at Olga's so I won't have to worry about it later.  That would be a good idea.  Maybe I'll just go to bed and worry about it later.  That's probably a bad idea but I'm probably too tired to do anything else.  I'd write more but I'm so tired that I'm past the normal inspiration to write that fatigue usually brings and I'm just bleh.  My life will be very different in a few days, so I might have time to write then.

2:16AM - Abandonment

Everything in my life is changing now, and I suppose I will write the details of all that soon enough, but right now I just want to note that I'm feeling abandoned, both in the sense of being left alone by people, and perhaps more in the sense of having abandoned my will to what the ancients called Fate, what the modern call chance, and what I believe to be the hand of God undergirding all things.  We just watched all the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy movies, and one thing I was impressed by in Tolkien's fantasy world is how the material structure of things was directly and immediately affected, even to the point of its very existence, by the mystical spiritual realities of the characters.  The ring of power is destroyed and immediately, Sauron's tower falls and the ground swallows up his minions of Orcs mid-battle; Aragorn is crowned King and at the ceremony, the White Tree flowers for the first time in a thousand years, and countless other examples.  This brings to mind Colossians 1:15-20 and the way that God through Christ holds all things together, both spiritual and physical things.  In light of this, I cannot help but abandon myself to the divine will of God as expressed in the realities of life in this world.  The physical world is not entirely evil and thus to be escaped by the spiritual self, as the Gnostics held, nor is it simply the collection of particles governed by physical laws, as modern science holds, nor is it simply our temporary surroundings while we wander around and either accept or reject God, as many Christians now believe.  The world is the divine creation of God, and in that sense it is good, and is the means of our salvation - not our salvation out of the world, but our salvation in the world by the redemption and transformation of ourselves unto the good that was created in the beginning, and the resulting redemption and transformation of everything in the world around us, to the point where all of creation declares the glory of God, all is subject to his will, all creation magnifies its Creator, and thus Heaven comes to earth, and earth to Heaven; thus God comes to us, and we to him.

I write to console myself in the face of much confusion, doubt, and uncertainty, not all of which is material and physical.  Jesus advises to "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness," and I will do well to do that, not just in where I live, what I eat, or what treasures I store up, but also in what hopes and plans I will make and how I will pursue those things.  I will do well to remember that the pursuit of God is the only pursuit which is rewarded with all good things; all other pursuits, ambitions, and desires fade.

3:51AM - Blessed Nativity!

Although we haven't kept the Advent fast, I still feel some of the spirit of the feast now that Nativity is here.

Christ is Born!  Glorify Him!

We're not doing much to celebrate, other than attend the Saturday Vespers and Sunday Liturgy services which we usually do anyway - we didn't go to the Vesperal Liturgy service yesterday afternoon mostly for reasons of us not going.  Our Christmas celebration will be composed of Steve and Kristen opening the gifts they got in the mail from their family and friends and having a bit of special food.  This will be my second Christmas in the Orthodox Church, but last year I excluded myself from life as much as possible during most of November, December, January, and February, so I didn't participate in Church life at all during Advent, Christmas, or Theophany.  This Christmas will be different in the sense that I am participating in life, and in Church life, but I still don't feel anything like the kind of excitement I have associated with Christmas.  I think it's been 10 or 15 years since I've felt any real excitement at Christmas, but when I was a kid Christmas held more excitement than any other time of year, and I still can't forget that and think that's how it's supposed to be.  I imagine that if I enter more closely into the life of the Church and keep the fasts and attend the services, the excitement of Nativity will be reborn in me, but in a different sense.  I imagine that it might be in the sense that Pascha (Easter) held excitement and joy when I celebrated it last year.

Babies everywhere!!  Three weeks ago I found out that both my sisters are pregnant; Naomi with her 3rd and Debbie with her 1st (after only 6 months of marriage).  Then a week and a half later I heard about my friend Rachel having given birth to her second child, another boy.  Last weekend our friends Glenn and Burt visited us on short notice, and announced their pregnancy.  My sisters and Burt are all due in early September, and I'm sure I'll have to find some way to visit my sisters in Nashville around that time or soon after.  I'm not sure what form that'll take, I have visions of an epic bicycling tour, but it seems more likely that I'll do something like ride the bus there and back; the bus fare would be cheaper than buying food for the 2 months it would take to get there and back on a bicycle.

Steve and Kristen have been talking for a few months now about moving somewhere else where Steve can find a good job.  They've been looking primarily at Austin, TX since almost all of their family is in the Houston-Dallas area and Austin seems to have a good job market and is the least disagreeable place in TX to live.  They recently found out about a possibility of taking a position at a resident care place in Portland with Dave's friend Mary, where they'd live in a resident care place with a few apartments and be the resident care center manager, meaning that they'd be taking care of the 4 or 5 old or disabled residents 24 hrs a day 5 days a week.  The benefits are free rent, utilities, and food, plus a small salary.  After Christmas we'll be going up to Portland and they and Mary will be finding out if that will work, and then Jane will ride with us when we come back here.  It'll be interesting if they do move, since that will mean that I'll need to find some other place to live, and on short notice.  I don't really know how that will work or what form it'll take, but it seems that now that I have my CDL and am certified for driving a school bus, I should be able to very easily get a job doing that anywhere.  Hopefully I'd be able to keep living here in Medford and keep my current job that I've waited so long and worked so hard for, but if Steve and Kristen do move, then basically everything will be up in the air.  Fortunately, I lost a lot of stuff when I moved here from Dallas, so that means I can easily fit everything I own (besides my motorcycle and bicycle) in one small car, and I can be satisfied with a rather small living space.

I just read a number of emails I had written and received about a year ago, and realized that my writing at the time seemed to be much more immediate and personal than my writing is now.  I also remember that during that time, I thought of my writing as fairly detached and impersonal, or at least formal rather than informal, me writing what I wanted people to read and think rather than me writing myself into the page.  That thinking was as compared to the months before that, during which time I kept the blog which is now archived on my website.  Several weeks ago as I was compiling my old blog entries into their present format, I read through a number of them and was struck by how personal the writing style and content was, and how transparent it was, as I tried to pour myself into the words with as little self-consciousness as possible.  I didn't think I achieved that very well at the time, but now as I read it and remember my life at the time, it seems to me that I mostly succeeded in that - the writing was a rather clear window into myself.  Now as I look at my writing style and content in emails and in this journal, I realize that I write now with a detached formality that I've only ever used before when writing to those I didn't know very well.  This formality seems especially out of place in my journal, which is supposed to be transparent writing for myself, unaffected by thoughts of trying to communicate with others.  I have said many times recently (sometimes in response to people asking why I no longer blogged) that the reason I don't blog like I used to is because I can't now write with the personal transparency that I used to, and I think I'm finding out now how true that really is.  Perhaps by writing and by reading my writing from the past, I'll be able to come to some semblance of open transparency.  Perhaps the things I experienced last year that made me withdraw from life as much as possible, and the changes that wrought in me, mean that I simply am how I am now and that means I can't write without my mask of formality and distance of impersonality, the false safety of self-consciousness.  I also don't know if I can change the things that make me write the way I do; since I didn't effect the changes that made me change the way I write this past year, I don't think I can now effect changes that make me write one way or another.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

8:10PM - The Good Earth

I got a cold on Wednesday, and drove the bus on Thursday with a fever, stuffy/runny nose, and sore throat, but that was the last day of school before Christmas break, and it's a good thing too, because if I had had to work today, I probably would have called in sick.  Steve and Kristen's friends Dave and Mary are here for the weekend, and they want to go to the beach tomorrow and see the redwoods, so if we get up early enough then we'll go, and that should be fun.  Hopefully I'll be up to riding in a car for hours and walking around some.  Now that I think about it, though, we're 6 people total, and we can only fit 5 people in any of our cars, so I guess that means that we either take 2 cars or someone stays behind.  I guess I wouldn't mind staying behind, since I've been there 2 or 3 times, and I won't feel like running around and having fun there anyway.  We'll see what happens.

I recently finished reading The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. It's a fiction novel about a Chinese farmer and his family in the early part of the 20th century, covering most of his adult life. It was a relatively quick and easy read, entertaining and edifying. Despite its simple style and its focus on the narrative of the story, it had a lot to say about life and values.

The following is a sort of review focusing on a few things I was most impressed by, and contains a lot of plot spoilers.  If you want to read this book and don't want the plot spoiled for you, stop reading this, and come back to read my thoughts on it when you're finished reading the book. Or, you can read what I have to say about it now.















What I was most struck by in the book is its portrayal of the value of hard work, suffering, and denial of self-gratification. I don't think these are points that the author was specifically trying to make, but their value is quite evident in the story. At the beginning, the main character Wang Lung, a poor farmer, gets married to a slave girl from a rich house. The first two-thirds of the book is the story of their life as they work the land, have children, deal with relatives, fight famine by moving to a city in the south for a year, and eventually become relatively prosperous. During this part of the book, the only time the happiness or peace of the characters is mentioned, it's in connection with the work on the land and the harvest from that work. Especially in times of famine and suffering, the strength of character of Wang Lung and his family is powerfully evident, as though their souls have been purified by their hard work and their extreme need.

Then a flood comes, and floods all their farmland, but due to their previous hard work, frugality, and good business sense, they are mostly prepared for the resulting famine. Then because there is nothing to do, Wang Lung begins to frequent a "tea house" in town - basically a brothel, but he only drinks tea and occasionally talks to the other patrons. After some time he is tempted to wonder about the women upstairs, and his curiosity begets idle desire, which begets a fierce longing for one of them. Partly because of this desire and partly because he wants to display his wealth, he buys the woman he has been seeing and brings her home. Unlike his wife O-lan, who is submissive and industrious and spends all her time serving him, his mistress Lotus is temperamental, demanding, and useless - she brings her maidservant with her when she moves to Wang Lung's house because she doesn't know how to work. From this point on in the book, Wang Lung's focus shifts from working the land and bettering himself and his family to the gratification of his desires. Up to this point, Wang Lung had been pursuing what was good for him despite what suffering it might entail, but after bringing Lotus home, he is only concerned with making himself happy despite what ruin it might entail. For the rest of the book, it is mentioned many times that "Now [having solved the immediate problem] Wang Lung thought he would have peace and happiness, but he did not." He and his family remain prosperous, but this is due more to the good management of his neigbor who works for him and the good weather than due to anything Wang Lung does, as he is now mostly concerned with keeping himself happy and satisfying his desires.

By the time his children are grown, he and his family move into town, into the "great house" from which he bought his wife O-lan, since that family squandered their wealth and was ruined by the famine. Wang Lung continually tries to seek peace and happiness, but only attains it for short times at most. His weakness of character is now plainly evident, as he sacrifices his integrity, well-being, and the happiness of others, not even noticing their needs, to seek his own gratification. He seems to have completely forgotten the hard work and discipline that made him more wealthy than his neighbors, and instead of sacrificing his temporary wants for the long-term gain of himself and his family (and thus showing incredible strength of character, as at the beginning of the story), he sacrifices everything for the satisfaction of his personal temporary desires.

Through the whole story, his wife O-lan is a constant example of the discipline and self-sacrificial love that brings Wang Lung all his blessings at the beginning of the story (and the lack of which brings him no end of strife at the end). As I read the first part of the book, I was impressed by the hard work, discipline, and suffering that they both went through, and had great respect for their characters. However, after Wang Lung brought Lotus to his house, I quickly lost respect for Wang Lung and his self-gratification.  Through many various hardships the like of which would send the typical American to a shrink or an insane asylum, O-lan continued to show nothing but loving service to Wang Lung, even when he brought another woman home, squandered their wealth on his selfish desires, took away a special gift of pearls he had given her and gave them to Lotus, and specifically told her that he didn't love her.  Although the main character in the story is Wang Lung, and he appears to have had the better life by far, I thought much more highly of O-lan for her self-restraint and self-sacrificial love, and I'm sure that she was closer to heaven by far than Wang Lung.  Her simple life of unconditional service and love afforded her a peace that Wang Lung, with all his desires and striving after happiness, could not even approach.  She had a loving devotion to her husband that, despite its being unrequited, gave her the matchless peace that comes only from loving fully.

4:51PM - Baby!

I'm holding Steve and Kristen's 9-week old son Isaac on my lap, and he's sucking on his pacifier and falling asleep.  I played with him for about 30 minutes just now, and that was enough to wear him out, so now he's tired and...yeah, he just fell asleep.  I always knew I wanted kids, and I've had fun babysitting my priest's kids (elementary school age) but there's something about an infant that really stirs emotion, and few things are as satisfying as playing with a baby and having him fall asleep on you.  I've enjoyed having him in the house, taking care of him sometimes when Kristen is doing something else.

I keep trying to think about this journal as though nobody ever reads it, and write it just for myself and not be self-conscious, but knowing that people do read it, I should mention that I've made a website with lots of pictures of him.  We keep updating it every week or so, and you can visit it here.

11:58PM

It seems that I am continually fighting with my "biological clock".  Today I was up relatively early for church, then right after coffee hour we went snowboarding, then had supper at a friend's house, and after this long and tiring day, I am still not tired at all now that it is way past time for me to go to bed.  Last week I didn't get enough sleep because my schedule changed and I had to start getting up early, and I couldn't go to bed early enough for when I was getting up, so I just didn't sleep much.  I didn't sleep any extra this weekend, less than 8 hrs per night, and yet even after all that, I am still wide awake at midnight, 3 hours after I should have gone to bed.  I'm sure I'll be tired tomorrow morning after I get home from work, and since I won't have anything to keep me busy, I'll probably end up taking a nap before going back to work in the afternoon.

At times before when I have had to start getting up earlier than I'm used to, I go through this same fight, and usually end up eventually getting so tired that I fall asleep at every possible opportunity, so when it comes time to go to bed, I'm actually tired enough that I can sleep, and then after awhile I get used to the schedule.  I suppose the same will probably happen with this schedule, but I'll have to fight it twice, since after next week it'll be Christmas break and I won't have to get up early for 2 weeks or so, and then I'll have to get used to it again when school starts again in January.  Such is life, though; nobody ever became more like Christ without struggle and suffering, and the easy life of pleasure never made anyone stronger or better.

8:12PM - snapshot of my life

I finally got a job with Laidlaw as a school bus driver.  I applied and started training in October, and after finding out my license had been suspended and getting that taken care of (2 weeks delay), and then getting in a bicycle accident (I think I got hit by a car but I had a concussion and there are no witnesses so nobody really knows) (1 week delay), and then waiting 3 weeks to get my driving record from Texas, I finally was finished with training and had all the paperwork done right, so on Wednesday I took (and passed) my CDL test, and drove my route on Thursday and Friday.  It's about 2¼ hours in the morning and afternoon, with about 5 hours in between.  So far it's gone well, the kids behave well and I'm quickly figuring out the route.  So after about 6 months of being unemployed, I'm finally earning enough money to live, and that's almost an odd feeling.

I haven't gotten the bill for my 2-hour hospital stay from my bicycle accident, but I don't have any insurance that covers it, so I basically won't be able to pay it, and I don't know what's going to happen with that.  I can get on a payment plan, but I'm expecting it to be several thousand dollars, and I know from having tried to pay off other debt for a few years now that unless I get some high-paying job soon, there's no way I'll be able to pay that off in less than a few years.  It's possible that now that I have my CDL, once I get some driving experience, I'll be able to get that kind of job, but that's all just a guess for the future.  Right now I know that the pay from my first few months of work will be used up by living expenses that I've either been putting off or piling up in debt, and I'll have to find some other job for the summer when there's no school to drive a bus for.  Uncertainty isn't always fun, but it's life.

Mt. Ashland got about 3 feet of snow this past week, and opened this weekend, and I was going to go snowboarding today with a kid from my church, but this morning I found out my motorcycle doesn't work - it doesn't turn on when I turn the key, so it's some electrical problem that I'll have to figure out.  But that meant that I couldn't get to his house, so we were both disappointed that we couldn't go.  Hopefully we'll be able to go next weekend or something.

Our cat Armstrong was injured about a month ago, hit by a car or attacked by a dog or something, and after about a week he was healed except for his tail which was totally limp and numb - spinal cord was broken right where his tail joins his butt.  A few weeks ago the end of his tail started shriveling up and getting dry and hard - the joints were solid (rigor mortis), like what happens to dead bodies after a week or 2.  We called several vets and, not having any money, decided to cut it off ourselves.  A few days ago we put a tourniquet on it, and today we cut it off.  We got a big hammer really hot on the stove, held Armstrong still, cut off the rubber band and cut the skin some with a razor blade, and cut off the tail with a pruning shear.  It didn't bleed much, but we cauterized it immediately with the hammer, and sewed it up with some mono filament nylon thread.  He was pretty uncomfortable with us holding him and doing something to his tail, but since he couldn't feel anything and didn't know what was happening, he was mostly calm.  We cut out a milk jug and taped it around his head so he can't scratch and bite at his tail nub until it heals.  Putting that on was the worst part for him, since he knew what we were doing and didn't like it.  He's pretty calm and sedate now, mostly lays around like usual.  When he walks he kinda crouches, and often walks backward or paws at the milk jug around his head, but he's pretty lethargic.  We're glad that went well, and we'll keep putting antibiotic on it for awhile until it heals.  He looks like a bobcat or something now except that he's all black and has no hair on his little tail nub.

3:33AM - First Post!!

After much persuasion by friends whose LJ entries I have been reading (and occasionally posting replies to), I finally started thinking seriously about getting a LJ account.  At first I resisted the idea, since nearly all the blogs I've read that use these type of ready-made blogging services are used as a means of communication in a group of friends, with friends commenting on each others' entries.  It's not that I think that's a bad thing; it's rather that I think that if I try to participate in and contribute to that sort of thing, I'll end up just writing about whatever random trivial things come into my head, and I'll likely write self-conciously, as though my entries were some sort of popularity campaign among the group of people who read and comment on each others' entries.  So it's not that I've been avoiding getting an LJ account because I didn't want to be part of a group of friends or because I have higher standards for my writing, but because I'm afraid that I can't participate in a group the same way the others do, because I suspect my pride would turn my entries into meaningless attempts to be thought cool.

So, I started reading about the features available on LJ, and found a few things that made me decide that I could get an LJ account and still be able to write honestly, for its own sake.  I found out that I could disable comments by other users, and that I could use my own custom colors and embed my LiveJournal into my website using frames, so it would appear as part of my website.  I decided that I could use those options to make my LJ the blogging extension of my website instead of a thing in itself, and in that sense I could use it as an easy article-based blogging system which would be part of my website.

Besides the fact that many of my friends use LJ, I found out a few other things that convinced me to use LJ for this purpose instead of some other blogging service:

• It's based on open source software, and much of the support and development is done by volunteers, so it's likely to be the most flexible, customizable solution that its users can make it.
• Its business method is to offer premium services for subscribers, instead of using advertisements or spam to support the costs of the service.
• It's based in Oregon!

To close, I'd like to offer a cookie to anyone who can give me the source for this quote which expresses my fears of what this might become if I keep writing for my audience:

"I don't write in here half as much as I want to. It's like all these thoughts get stuck in my head and can never come out, save once in a while, and even then it's not the most important things that come out, just random trivial things that don't really matter. I think I need to get out of the habit of writing for people on my friends list, and not just treating this like a regular journal. But when I know it's going to be read by a lot of people, it makes me self concious. I need to stop with that."