Thessaly's Tooth

This weekend, as Andy previously expressed, we went to visit his relatives in Ohio. I’d never before spent any significant amount of time in Ohio, but it seems like a very nice place. We stayed with Andy’s grandma, and met most of the other relatives at a cookout at his aunt and uncle’s house on Saturday. I was rather stressed out about meeting the in-laws, but I had a good time.
I’ve been doing a good job of avoiding studying this week. Today I’ve been running errands. I dropped some stuff off at Goodwill and bought some vegetables at the farmer’s market. I’m thinking about buying some plants there for our shady patio area; I tend to dither about small purchases like that for months. Then I went to Sam’s Club. I find that place fascinating, and always seem to spend a long time there. I’m always anxious to get in and out of the regular grocery store as fast as possible, but at Sam’s I spend forever marveling at the giant jars of mayonnaise.
I need to turn my attention to Ancient Mesopotamia for a while now. No mayonnaise; ziggurats.

I’ve been trying to work up the energy to write about some of the movies we’ve been watching lately. The problem is my thoughts about them aren’t very profound, they’re on the level of “hey, that was okay. Now, where are the cookies?” Anyway, these are some good movies I’ve watched recently:
(1) Princess Mononoke: This is one of my new favorite movies. It was really, really long, but I was glad because I enjoyed it so much. Andy warned me that Japanese movies have a different pace than American ones, with lots of long pauses and silences. I noticed when I watched a Japanese “action” movie one time that it was quite different from American action flicks: just as violent, but with different pacing. American movies have these really long action scenes, with the good guy fighting off all sorts of bad guys with a variety of weapons. In the Japanese movie I saw, what would happen would be someone would insult the good guy, there would be a really long pause, and then something extraordinarily violent but not taking longer than 5 seconds would occur; then the scene would change.
Anyway, Princess Mononoke. The artwork was so beautiful, I just loved looking at the movie. I’d love to have lots of stills of different parts of the movie to just stare at for hours. The Forest Spirit changing into the Night Walker is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. The fact that the forest creatures were not lovable Disney types, as many critics seem to have noted, was really cool–it added to rather than took away from the beauty and mystery of the forest. I also found that it was clear that there was no obvious “good guy”–one side placed the well-being of humans over that of the forest, and the other did the opposite, but neither was completely wrong.
(2) The Seven Samurai: I saw “The Magnificent Seven” a while ago on TV and enjoyed it a lot, but had never seen the original. I really enjoyed it. Once again, it was really long, and I was getting pretty sleepy toward the end, but it was great. I seem to remember that “Magnificent Seven” was quite a bit shorter and more what I’d expect out of a movie: mainly focused on the middle part of the story, when the guys were already at the village and fighting off the bandits. I also seem to remember (spoiler) the ending of the American movie being “happier” and less ambiguous than that of “Samurai.” Anyway, it was a very good movie and I learned a lot about Samurai, my previous knowledge of them having been derived from a Trixie Belden mystery.
(3) Catch Me If You Can: I watched this movie through sunglasses with no corrective lenses of any sort due to having developed something called “iritis” in my left eye, for this I have to use dilating drops which makes everything blurry and bright. I think I got the gist though. It was a very fun, enjoyable movie to watch, and one of the best parts was the interviews with the real Frank Abagnale on the “special features” DVD. It is about a teenager who runs away from home due to his parents’ divorce, and makes a living by forging checks (several million dollars’ worth) and traveling the world while posing as an airline pilot, doctor, and lawyer. This really happened back in the 1960s. After the real Abagnale was caught and spent a few years in French, Swedish, and American prisons, he was released at age 26 and has spent the intervening years helping the FBI catch check forgers, and building up his own company which assists banks and companies prevent fraud. Very cool. The movie also reminded me that Leonardo DiCaprio is in fact a really good actor. He was so good in “Gilbert Grape,” but the whole “Titanic” thing made me not want to watch anything with him in it any more.
(4) Ghostbusters: Somehow I had never seen this before, so Andy and I watched it last weekend. It was really funny, and made me nostalgic for those simple, goofy, funny, good movies they made back in the 80s. I don’t think movies like that are made any more; any that try end up seeming just kind of dumb. Comedies now need more sarcasm, vulgarity, and good-looking people, it seems. But, my saying that just means I’m getting old, that’s the kind of thing everybody says about movies/books/and so forth made during their childhood versus today.

Maintenance came today and repaired a broken line in the air conditioner, which I think will put an end to our apartment’s water feature. Apparently they actually did come on Friday, but managed to work on the a/c from the outside, avoiding any conversation with me. Wonder why they’d want to do that ?!?

Andy is due home from GenCon in a few hours, I’m looking forward to hearing about it. It’s been a dull weekend without him. I opted to clean and reorganize the closets (we decided to put nonperishables in the dampness-prone closet due to the fact that the leakages appear to be with us for the forseeable future, more on this below). The weather has been looking like rain all weekend without actually raining, so I decided not to make any pilgrimages outside until church this morning.
Last weekend, we had a wet carpet again, though fortunately not the swamp we had over the July 4th weekend. I called the office on Monday and Maintenance came by that afternoon. I asked what caused the leaks, and he said a pipe that ran through the two apartments above us down to us got clogged and the water couldn’t get through, so it leaked. I asked if there was anything we could do to prevent this, and he said not really. I asked if this meant we’d have a wet carpet every two weeks, and he said “hopefully not.” Great.
So after they left I turned on the a/c, since it was rather humid out and I wanted to dry the air out a bit in here so the carpet would dry faster. The carpet seemed to be getting wetter, so I turned it off and called the office again. The woman said she’d have Maintenance come by before they left for the day–as far as I know, they haven’t been here yet. On Thursday I took a letter over to the office about the mildew we discovered (which our lease says we are supposed to do), and describing our wet carpet experiences so far, and requesting that the pipe be periodically checked and unclogged in order to prevent future wet carpets. Andy got a call while I was out. It sounded like the problem was actually fixable–what the maintenance guy had said implied it wasn’t–and they said Maintenanace would be by that day or the next, and someone would be by to check on the mildew and wetness situation the next day. A guy came by to check for wetness and spray for mildew on Friday, but so far Maintenance has apparently not graced us with their presence yet.
Today I turned on the a/c–I thought maybe they’d fixed it while I was out, and I wanted to see if it actually did leak. It does. Yuck.
So tomorrow, more tangling with the office. Or maybe I’ll think of it as tango-ing–sounds like more fun.
This is long and boring, but I don’t care. This whole leak thing has been long and boring too. Ah well, soon Andy will be home to regale me with tales of GenCon.

At the risk of seeming like some kind of Donna Reed wannabe, I’ve added a link to another site to the list. The site is about cleaning your house, for people who do not like to clean house and who are not naturally good at it. People like me, who once figured that keeping the house clean would most likely take all of my scarce spare time, so why bother doing anything at all? If you check the site out, you will notice that it is rife with acronyms. My favorite is “CHAOS” = Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome; i.e. the house is such a mess, if the doorbell rings, you stay quiet and pretend you are not home so that no one will see the place. If you check out the site, you’ll notice that the acronyms as well as other elements of the site are a little on the cutesy side; but who cares, it works. When I first moved into my own apartment, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to clean house. At home I cleaned my room maybe once every few years after plenty of parental badgering, and I had no problem with having to leap over two or three piles of stuff to get into or out of the room. In the dorms my mess was kept down to a dull roar by the presence of roommates, and I even had a few flirtations with neatnikness, but an entire apartment, albeit an efficiency apartment, proved too much for me. As the years went on I got a little better, but I just couldn’t maintain things. Stuff would just get piled up until I couldn’t take it anymore (or someone was coming over) and then I would do a huge clean, and it would stay that way for a while. My huge cleans became more frequent so that the place never got too disgusting; but still at any given time my apartment wasn’t a very comfortable place.

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Perhaps that would be a good new blog name? Things have been going swimmingly lately. The weather is good and I can sit outside and “read” for exams (otherwise known as staring into space, looking at the cat, listening to the neighbor kids, etc.). Studying is going pretty well actually. I’m re-reading some stuff that I previously read for class, including “The Politics of Ancient Israel” by Norman Gottwald and “Reading the Old Testament: An Intoduction” by Lawrence Boadt. I’ve also been compiling bibliographies on archaeological sites and looking for summaries of their histories online, to avoid having to wade through multivolume excavation reports to get the info. In our spare time we are getting the apartment in order after our various floods of the past couple of weeks, and staring down the barrel of the last of the wedding thank-you notes. I have various other projects I need to get back to, like scanning wedding pictures and such, which I’ll probably address this weekend.
It feels good to share all of this information with the world.

I’ve been pretty good about studying this week, but have more or less taken today off. I spent my time well in finally adding some more links to the page.
It’s July, and I’m wearing a sweater. What’s up with the weather?

While much of the nation is gripped by drought, our little apartment seems to be getting much more than its share of the wet stuff. Last week I was surprised by a flood in the back bathroom–naturally, beginning in the closet where we keep the cat stuff. Nothing like the odor of damp litter and Iams. Fortunately, maintenance cleared up that little problem in short order. Then last weekend I found a sodden spot in the middle of the carpeted computer room floor. Yuck. The water appeared to be coming from the closet where all of Andy’s board games were stored. I hauled all of those out and found a wet carpet, mildew on the closet walls, and a moist “Axis and Allies: Europe” box. The rest of the weekend was spent moving furniture (the carpet on the living-room side of the wall was wet too) and trying to contact somebody, anybody, from maintenance. They put in an appearance on Monday and did something to the air conditioner which I’m hoping fixed the problem, and sprayed some sort of mildew killer on the wet carpet and walls (they promised it was non-toxic, and neither we nor the cats have suffered any ill effects yet.) I’m glad the humidity has gone down around here finally–I was starting to think I should try growing gills.
Anyhow, the carpet is drying out nicely and I’m hoping for a few event-free weeks to recover from all the excitement. Incidentally, we had a good July 4th–watched the Grand Rapids official fireworks from the Bridge Street Bridge with the Pikkaarts. Very fun!

My life has consisted mostly of organizing the apartment and making some halfhearted efforts at studying for exams lately. As Andy reported, we had an exceptionally fun weekend last weekend though. We had a surprise wedding shower with lots of good food and talk with friends at Brian and Rachel’s beautiful new house. We had lots of fun with friends and Moby the dog, and we even have some Polaroids of the event to enjoy for years to come. Jay’s home-brewed beer was quite good in my opinion, though my beer-drinking experience is quite limited.
We also saw the Matrix on Friday (the first time I’ve seen it), which was good, but some of the elements were just too predictable, and we saw a few of the new special effects a few too many times. Also, it was confusing–the philosophical background to the story was explained in a handful of long speeches which I didn’t really grasp. The first hour of the movie didn’t do anything for me at all, but it improved a lot toward the end, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do in the next movie.
This weekend we are headed to Nebraska for my good friend Jen’s wedding. I talked to her a couple of days ago, and she’s a lot calmer and more organized than I was the week before our wedding.
I was listening to some conservative radio guy this morning (I can’t remember his name), and he maintained that if Jesus were here today he would be a conservative Republican. Of course claiming God for any political movement sounds a little silly, but this got me to thinking. One would obviously want to belong to God’s party, if there was one; but I think that if Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be aligned with any political party or group–he would say and do things that would irk and trouble just about everyone. (That’s a problem I have with the whole “WWJD” movement–it relies on one’s ability to know what Jesus would do, which isn’t always clear). Jesus and the apostles don’t strike me as very political. They reached out to individual people and didn’t expend much energy on reforming the political power structure of the time. In fact, in some cases their approach to Rome was apathetic to the point that modern sensibilities are offended: Jesus’ judgement to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” Paul’s apparent condoning of slavery, or the command to obey whatever monarch is in power because his (pronoun appropriate for the time period) power is derived from God. This has sometimes made me wonder about political activism on both sides of the fence: there are no clear Biblical precepts for how to participate in a government such as ours.
It’s my belief that how individuals conduct their own lives is more important than what type of political system we have. As long as humans are imperfect, any political system will be corrupt and some people will suffer under it. If people were kind, compassionate, and uncorruptable by power or wealth; it wouldn’t matter what kind of government we had–communism, democracy, or monarchy. Since people aren’t, I believe that our system is better than any other at preventing such abuses, but no system of human government will ever be able to solve all human problems–which is why I don’t identify myself as a liberal, because I think that liberals expect government to do things that government can’t do. On the other hand, though most people would probably consider me to be pretty conservative; I hesitate to label myself as a conservative either, since I think the government definitely has a role in protecting the environment and regulating business practices, since history has pretty much proven that there are plenty of people who would abuse their freedom from regulation in these areas.
I think that we really like to see God as being like ourselves. The radio guy saw Jesus as being like him; and equally I am making him out to be like me–a registered independent who believes that the key to positive change is in the way individuals conduct their lives rather than through the actions of government. It’s interesting to see the way we construct God in our own image; and leads one to take anybody’s claim that God is on his/her side–even one’s own–with a grain of salt.

We’re back home and working on settling down to real life. The wedding was perfect, thanks to our families and wedding parties. Soon I’ll write more about it, but now suffice to say that it was a beautiful day–I got to marry my best friend and love of my life, and all day we were surrounded by our family and friends. It was great to see people that we don’t get to see very often–people need to keep getting married so that we can all get together once in a while!
The day started off on a rather silly note. I couldn’t sleep the night before the wedding, and at about six a.m. I started writing out a detailed list of instructions complete with a diagram of the amphitheater indicating where the decorations should go. After having handed over my crazy scrawlings to my amazing bridesmaids, however, our wedding party and families took over and everything fell into place. Andy and I met for a few minutes before pictures, which was very cool. We did the pictures before the ceremony which was really nice, because that was the last item of work to take care of (except the cleanup after it was all over–thanks guys), after that we could relax and enjoy the proceedings. The ceremony went perfectly, better than I could have envisioned it, and even the Nebraska weather cooperated–the day before it was 90 degrees and the day after it rained, but the day of the wedding was sunny, in the 70s, and breezy. The reception was lots of fun. Somehow, somebody with hitherto unsuspected magical powers apparently spirited the decorations and PA system from the amphitheater to Mallet Lodge while I was up front getting hugged by dozens of people. The food was good, and nobody seemed to be too scared by our choice of buffalo as one of the lunch options. We even got to eat at our own wedding! I think the cake was good too, though I only got the one little bit. We decided to serve the cake ourselves so we could greet everyone again, and that turned out to be a lot of fun though the cake pieces we produced were not exactly uniform. Oh well.
Our honeymoon in Colorado was lovely. We stayed in a cabin between Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. We went for a few short hikes around the park, drove up Trail Ridge Road, and experienced lots of interesting weather which included sun, rain, and snow. Fall River ran right behind our cabin, and elk appeared several times grazing and napping on our lawn. It’s great to be in our own apartment now, and we are bracing ourselves for post-wedding tasks-thank-yous, photo-related decisions, and so forth.