mountainmelody

Lady: It's great to have you in this group, always smiling and being so kind.

Me: It's just because I'm from the South.

Women do less housework when they're single than when they're married.

(The opposite is true for men...hmm...)
more

Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.

—Guinean proverb

The sky is blue,
Roses are red,
The streets are black,
But not the streets in heaven.

• More Christians worship in Anglican churches in Nigeria each week than in all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Britain, Europe, and North America combined.
• There are more Baptists in Congo than in Britain.
• There are more people in church every Sunday in China than in all of Western Europe.

You know you've flown too much when you start to remember the meals:

Flight attendant: Chicken or pasta?

Me: Is it the pasta with the nasty green stuff in it?

Flight attendant: Yes.

Me: Chicken.

We walked...

and we walked...

and walked...

and walked some more.

Finally we came to the heart of the city:

We decided to take the metro and the bus back home. :)

I've recently started getting some Google hits on my site. Apparently, people have found my blog by searching for these terms:

• how to live in the middle of nowhere
• Chinese chicken feet
• Prague

Hmm...

Have you ever looked for food in a grocery store where everything was written in a different language? Let's just say it makes for an interesting shopping trip.

I'm still not exactly sure what all I got, but so far, so good. An online translator tells me that the drink is "wild raspberry." Lucky guess!

I've heard a wide variety of research presentations in the past few days, with more to come. It's really interesting to learn a little about these diverse areas:

• social ministry in early 20th century Russia
• what church planters in Belgium can learn from anabaptists
• Congolese snake cult
• the impact of African-American missionaries on Liberian education
• Russian churches in the US
• preaching and teaching in Ukraine
• missional churches and the Moravians
• traditional worship in Belarus
• missio dei in Eastern Europe
• Dostoevsky's faith
• Singleness in Baptist churches in Eastern Europe
• Mennonite women in leadership
• Russian Baptist history
• Hate speech in Latvia
• Historic Baptist ethics in the Northwest
• the structure of Revelation
• Mennonite church discipline
• Gender roles in Africa
• Jesus and politics
• Pastoral training in Ukraine

Things are fine here--I'm sitting in seminars all day, so nothing too exciting to report besides a lot of big words and scholarly references. I hope to present my proposal tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

I'd just like to say, for the record, that it's been colder in Birmingham lately than it has been in Prague.

http://www.svcc.cz/

building

Tuesday:
left home 10 minutes early
got to work at the normal time

Wednesday:
left home 10 minutes early
got to work 2 minutes early

Thursday:
left home 10 minutes early
got to work 5 minutes late

Dear God, please help me and my brother get along better. My brother has not been getting along with me lately, as you might know.

The word "teenager" didn't become popular in the United States until after World War II.

more

Leader: Who knows what Jesus did for us?

Girl: Built us houses?

Leader: Good try, but it's something else...

Girl: Oh, that's right. God built houses for us, not Jesus.

interesting

As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world.

-Virginia Woolf

Leader: Oh, wait! You have to put the top on your maraca before you shake it!


Girl: Please pray for my dog. He ran away.
Leader: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that! When did he run away?
Girl: When I was a baby.


Leader: Who remembers what muchacha means in Spanish?
Girl: Taco?

Messages on church signs are (in my opinion) often trite, cheesy, or just plain boring. Let's help this church make its sign more interesting by adding words in front of its message.

Any good ideas?

______________________ , Jesus loves you this year too.

Option 1 (any time)
1. Put a large cup under the faucet. Turn the faucet on.
2. Turn on your computer. Check your email or post to your blog.
3. Turn the faucet off.
4. Put the water in the microwave for 1 minute. Get it out.
5. Put a towel around your shoulders. Get your shampoo.
6. Stick your head in the sink.
7. Lather.
8. Rinse.
9. Repeat.

Option 2 (rainy days)
1. Put on your bathing suit.
2. Go outside. Take your shampoo. (Soap is also helpful, but beyond the scope of this tutorial.)
3. Lather.
4. Rinse.
5. Repeat.

___% of Alabama's students graduate from high school.

One in ___ Americans anticipates the second coming of Jesus Christ in 2007.


(No fair cheating if you've already read these facts somewhere!)

I got home today and found my front door wide open.

Hmm.

It had been that way for at least a couple of days. (I was out of town.)

Everything seemed okay... I think the last person who left forgot to lock it, and the wind blew it open.

43 percent of American families spend more than they earn.

Yikes!

11 hours
15 pages
137 sources
3982 words
1 dissertation proposal

yeah!

Gen Y

The apostasy from Christianity will not come about openly by everybody renouncing Christianity; no, but slyly, cunningly, knavishly, by everybody assuming the name of being Christian.

-Søren Kierkegaard

76% of people living in Alabama were born in Alabama.

Two mice just chased each other around and around the room--multiple times--while I was sitting here.

Hm.

The average American will spend nearly $800 on gifts this Christmas.

• read your mail
• call a friend
• eat a snack
• clip your fingernails
• make a shopping list
• change clothes
• take a shower
• clean the house
• take a nap
• read a book
• watch a movie

High-speed internet is not available here. But on the plus side, I get a lot of other stuff done while waiting for pages to load...

70 degrees set on the thermostat
55 degrees inside (after the heat has been running non-stop for hours)
17 degrees outside
6 degrees wind chill
4 blankets on the bed
3 pairs of socks
2 shirts
1 winter coat (inside)

If I wanted to live in Alaska/Minnesota/Siberia, I would have moved there! :P

Forecast:
55 degrees
0% chance of precipitation

Actual:
sleeting

All she ever does is extrovert!

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to represent any of the fine readers of this blog, or to imply that extroverts are in any way inferior to introverts. (I didn't want to put that part in writing.) ;)

Each commuter in the Birmingham area can expect to spend 27 hours a year stuck in traffic.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

--quoted by Anne Lamott

Dear mouse,

Did your mother never teach you to twist the end of the bread bag to open it, instead of chewing through it? This chewing is just not polite. It makes a mess, and plastic can be hazardous to your health.

It's not a good idea to chew into an old bag of bread anyway--it's probably stale. And it's not nice to chew through the new, replacement bag of bread either. First of all, you didn't pay for it. And besides that, what do you expect me to eat?

Let me make this clear: bread is for humans. Mice should eat--I don't know--cheese and such. (Don't even think about looking in the refrigerator!)

The bread has been moved to an undisclosed location. Need I remind you that I have mousetraps?

Less than 20% of young workers stayed in their first job for three or more years.

(Disclaimer: This is not about me, but about "young workers" in general.)
:)

The dumb have already inherited the earth.

The first website was created in 1991.

If I were home sick, lying in bed feeling miserable, would I want anyone to come visit me?

Not unless they were a doctor or nurse. (And maybe not even then.)

So why, when people are horribly sick--feeling awful and looking worse--does everyone and their mother come visit them in the hospital?

It's beyond me. If I'm ever in the hospital, you can tell Cousin Fred and Sweet Miss Margaret to just send me a card.

Traffic report: ...There are a bunch of other wrecks out there--just be careful!

My God, I pray better to you by breathing,
I pray better to you by walking than by talking.

-Thomas Merton

By 2050, Yemen will have more people than Russia.

Attention retirees, stay at home moms, students, and all others with flexible schedules:

The polls are open all day. Your vote will count just as much at 1 PM as at 7 AM. There is no need to rush to polling places first thing in the morning, when most of us are trying to get to work.

Sigh...If only the world would listen to me! ;)

This morning I was attempting to take some comp time and sleep late.

At exactly the same time my alarm normally goes off, I was jolted awake by a loud "BEEP!" Apparently my smoke alarm battery had decided that moment would be the perfect time to die.