150 year anniversary

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. - Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863, as subsequently autographed and signed by Lincoln

Catching my breath

My goodness, what a whirlwind weekend. Literally.

Friday I left work early for a change, necessitated by needing to go set up the supplies for the Marriage Encounter weekend at Maria Stein. It isn't often enough that we get to support couples who are working on their relationship together in this special way, and I love it! I wish we could be a presenting couple, but that's just never going to be possible for us. At any rate, we agreed with the couple who was delivering the supplies to be there by 5:00, which meant leaving home by 3:45. We were picking up our dear friends who were going to help us set up, and killed two birds with one stone by dropping off something else that we each needed to deliver for one of the couples making the weekend.

When we arrived, we spent about ten minutes on the lookout for the couple bringing the supplies before discovering that they'd already delivered them to the main room. We called them to find out they'd left already, but there was another couple from their circle who was coming up to help us set things up. We turned out to have a a couple issues with the power:

• We had three large pots to get going, one, each for regular and decaffeinated coffee and another for hot water for tea and hot cocoa. There were two power strips, but heating up any two pots at the same time on either of them would trip the breaker on the power strip.
• Also, heating three pots on the same building power circuit would trip the circuit breaker. And, of course, all of the outlets to which we had access were on the same circuit.

Through trial and error, we finally figured out that we could run one coffee pot on each power strip, and when one of the pots was finished we could then heat the hot water on the same power strip as that coffee pot, which at that point would be mostly resting. The issue then was that we knew that they would need to repeat this exercise on Saturday and Sunday morning, so we needed to talk with the presenting team who would be there all weekend about how to make it work. So we waited around for them to get back from dinner, then headed out for a late supper of our own at the outset of the drive back home. 

Saturday we tried to sleep in a bit, thwarted by our four-footed family member. Still, we kept a mostly relaxing morning. I forewent my planned afternoon bike ride due the overcast and windy conditions, instead concentrating on cleaning up the bike room so that we'd have someplace to store the supplies at the conclusion of the Weekend. It was quite a chore, but even with the supplies in place looks way better now that I have my old bike frame and assortment of bike wheels and old tires and tubes out of there, along with having everything more organized.  We could actually have one of our circle couples meet in there for dialogue again if need be. By the time I was finishing up with that, it was getting close to the time we wanted to head over to the Family and Youth Initiatives dinner at one of the local parishes. Unbeknownst to us, a couple from our circle was being recognized for their years of dedicated service to the organization. We were so glad to be there for this occasion!  We had one eye on our phones for news from the primary supply circle as to whether they were going to have anyone available to help. When we didn't hear anything before we left the dinner, we made a point of lining up potential help from the other couples from our circle in attendance who might be available to help on Sunday.

We bid on a gorgeous sleigh decoration that was filled with other very nice Christmas-themed items, which ended up going for $300, double where Teri had dropped out of the bidding, though it was probably worth more than that in total. The woman who got it had that determined look in her eye that indicated she didn't intend to leave without it, and at one point in the bidding her husband just shook his head and handed her his wallet. Our friends who had been honored at the event also left with an equally expensive item: a gas-motorized mobile bar stool. I should have taken a picture. I can't wait to take a seat on it at our next circle meeting at their house!

It was good that we made those arrangements for extra help before we left. On our way home after the event we received a message from the main supply circle indicating that they had no one available to go up on Sunday. I suspect that if we have two Weekends next year we will probably leave our trainees on their own for Sunday, too. Having been there to unpack and set things up on Friday, we were pretty aware of what packing up would entail.

After I sent them an e-mail before Mass on Sunday, my wife called the younger couple from our circle who had indicated they would be available to help on Sunday. We hadn't been home all that long when the phone rang, and the caller id indicated it was them. However, I couldn't find a phone, and my wife wasn't where she could answer one. Finally she got to a phone before I did, which was exactly in the place she'd tried to yell at me that one was while I was trying to get one from two places where one should have been. This is a frequent frustration of mine when the phone rings, as in our house we seem to have a habit of not returning phones to their charging bases. I know that I do this, too, sometimes. But I use the phone so much less that I don't perceive myself as being as guilty of this, and I was definitely not the culprit this time. Things got pretty unpleasant between us after the call was over, and that was largely my fault. Finally we each retreated to separate activities, and eventually - during the long drive north - the episode blew over.

We knew there was rain in the forecast, and heavy wind. I was hoping that we might tour the prayer and meditation gardens while waiting for the end of the Weekend, but it was too windy for that when we arrived, though dry. We'd had a strong tailwind out of the south on the drive up.  We were able to meet with a young couple we'd been praying for throughout the weekend, then started packing up the supplies. By then it had started raining, and while I was packing the van the wind suddenly picked up dramatically, blowing items across the driveway. Storm sirens soon began to sound. So we had our second unanticipated delay of the weekend at the retreat center while we waited out a pair of tornado warnings. As a result, we ended up stopping for supper on the way home, as opposed to cooking a very late meal on our arrival home. After all, we had all of the supplies (supply bins, large coffee pots, coolers, Mass kit, etc.) to carry into the bike room from the van, too.

Except for a brief time early Sunday afternoon that I need to learn from, it was a very nice (if exhausting) weekend.

Today's words

Just as I was lamenting the lack of decent WOTD material:

conurbation \kah-ner-BAY-shun\ - an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities

I might have guessed at this one in context. I wonder how this would compare to the word I've heard used to describe much of the northeastern seaboard: megalopolis. 

homologate \hoh-MAH-luh-gayt\ - to sanction or allow; especially : to approve or confirm officially

I wouldn't have guessed this one.

WOTD speculation

The latter part of last year and most of this month have both been marked by a dramatic drop off in the number of words-of-the-day on Merriam-Webster's site that are not already firmly established in my vocabulary. I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning of this year when the quality of WOTD's suddenly rebounded. Now it seems to have quickly eroded once again.

I wonder if this is an annually rotating assignment? If so, whoever has the end of the year does a poorer job with it than his or her coworkers do.

Dust blindness?

Maybe, just as there are people who are physically incapable of seeing the difference between red and green or between blue and yellow, there are people who are incapable of distinguishing between "dusty" and "clean."

I suspect I may be married to such a person. I've long been frustrated by being the only one in my home who seems to notice the presence of dust on surfaces, or dust bunnies along the floor molding or behind doors, or dirt accumulation in the corners of the stairs.  But last week I learned that I may also be the only one in the house who notices when a surface is already clean.

We've been having trouble with our new television and broadband service (from a company that the federal government broke up in the 1980's). The technician was scheduled to come out late Thursday afternoon to have a look at it. I had commented on an earlier evening how dusty the house - and particularly the entertainment center - was looking. When I was home for lunch, I got out the duster and cleaned up the area, as well as some other spots that I noticed needed the attention. I also swept the stairs, which had been getting increasingly grungy. These things needed to be taken care of anyway, even if we didn't have company coming over on Saturday evening.

Later in the evening I asked my wife if she'd noticed that the technician hadn't had to contend with a layer of dust. With dawning comprehension, she replied, "Oh, you dusted at lunch time? No wonder it didn't look that bad when I did it!"

Of course, I suppose this could just mean that I did a terrible job, but I don't think so.

Finally, a new word

First one in over a week:

gormless \GORM-lus\ - lacking intelligence : stupid

I've seen this before and knew it in context. When I saw it by itself I felt like a gormless dunderhead over my inability to recall its meaning.

Annoying typos I've seen lately

(including at least one I've made repeatedly despite very much knowing the difference) 

I put a few (not of these) on a Facebook post once, and got a bunch of comments with others' most hated, mostly very common ones. I'm not by any means trying to list the most common or simplest spelling errors people make, nor the ones that drive me crazy(er).  These are just a few that I've run across lately, most of which (except for the last two) strike me as a matter of people overreaching their vocabularies:

• adverse for averse
• regiment for regimen
• unchartered for uncharted
• peek or peak for pique
• access for assess
• aloud for allowed
• it's for its (which I'm including only since I have done it with annoying frequency, usually when I'm in a rush or teal deer-ing)
• pretty much anything my third or (honorary) fourth daughters misspell in every other FB post. Especially sware for swear.