I'm sick

Well, I'm sick.... really sick. We did not sleep at all last night. I would get up every two hours with bad stomach pain, only to be relieved by vomiting. I'm just glad Jesse isn't sick. He's been wonderful taking care of me. I feel like crap.

Wedding

We went to my uncle Tom's wedding on sunday. It was up on Highway 1 north of the Golden Gate Bridge along a stretch of freeway where some eight years ago Adam Richman and I tried to find the Point Reyes Lighthouse and nearly ran out of gas. The location was the Pelican Inn, which is just above the beach, and the plan was to have the wedding on the beach there. We were an hour late arriving and as we were walking out to the beach we found the bride and then a slew of other people who told us that the beach was a no-go, evidently there was too much cold and too much wind, so really, we missed nothing but being cold. They finally had the ceremony up on the lawn of the Inn.

After that we sat around and ate and talked and generally had a good time. They had a small band there with an upright bass, a clarinet, and the lead singer with a ukalele and a kazoo. They were great, we'll post some pictures later. They even dedicated a song to my wife.

Numbers 22-28

Update note: Melissa and I have a Bible study at our apartment on Thursdays and I saw someone else blogging the Bible, so we wanted to write about what we talk about and get some feedback on questions and ideas from you all. We're finishing up with Numbers now, so here goes:

Numbers 22:
Balak (a king) tries to get Balaam to go curse the Israelites, because there's a lot of them and they're getting ready to invade Canaan. Balaam doesn't want to because he doesn't want to go against the Lord his God, the Lord talks to him when he sleeps and tells Balaam not to curse the Israelites, but Balak sends more people and the Lord tells Balaam that he should go with the people if they ask him to (v. 20). A few chapters pass and Balaam blesses the Isrealites four times, saying each time he can't say anything that the Lord doesn't tell him to. Why then does Balaam get compared to false teachers in II Peter 2:15, loving the wages of wickedness? Is it because he goes with the people when they don't come and call for him? Because that's when the donkey talks to him - in the King James by the way, it's a dumb ass. Reminds me of Red Foreman every time I read it.

It's also interesting that Balak lives in this place with all these worshippers of Baal and Molech, and probably other ones I'm not remembering, but when he actually needs something done he goes to the guy who follows the Lord.

Numbers 25
There's a plague and I don't know when it starts or who's getting killed. The people of Israel commit whoredom with Moab, that's bad, OK. Plus they start worshipping Baal. I think it's been some thirty eight years since the last time the Lord stood against them, so maybe they forgot the price of this kind of thing. Anyway, the Lord tells Moses all the people that have been joined to Baal need to be killed. While Moses and the rest of the leaders are prostrating themselves in front of the tabernacle and they see some prince of the Simeonites brings one of the daughters of the Midianite leader into the camp. The priest Eleazar goes and spears through the man and the woman in one shot, I guess they were engaged in some up close and personal activity for that to be feasible... At any rate that stays a plague that we only learn there was afflicting the Israelites and it kills 24,000 of them. Can someone tell me what's going on there? Was this not the first time he brought her into the camp? Was the plague just the Lord's way of dealing with those who were making nice with the Midianites instead of letting the judges do it? Or was it a separate punishment for the Israelites letting a Baal worshipper into their camp?

Anyway, that's what we got.

Dan Simmons

This message from Dan is fantastic. Skip down to the part that says 'Enemies of Civilization.' Dan Simmons talks about American 'fundamentalism' versus the European variety, as well as transformational theology/thinking and what's really going on. Being no friend to organized religion, and featuring the catholic church as villains in one of his series, makes his critique of those who critique Christians seem a little more compelling.


If this stuff isn't interesting to you, please don't read it, you'll just get mad at me.

Dave Barry

Dave Barry has accurately described my experience of the Everglades:

"We rented our houseboat at a place called Flamingo, in Everglades National Park, waaaaay down on the bottom of Florida. At that point, Florida has totally stopped pretending to be a normal United State such as Pennsylvania, the kind of state that has been constructed in compliance with the Official State Building Code on a solid foundation of dirt and rocks. Lower Florida looks like solid ground in places, but it's actually a gigantic floating clotted mass of decaying vegetation and shed snakeskins, drifting on a sea of aromatic water and muck. You get the feeling that you need to keep moving, because if you stand still too long, you'll sink into the clot until the only thing sticking up is your head, which a bird will come along and build a nest on.

There's wildlife everywhere down there. Maybe too much of it. For example, when we arrived at the Flamingo marina, we drove into a parking lot, which sloped down gently to a boat-launching ramp into the water, and lying on this ramp, watching us, were three major alligators. They were lined up parallel to each other, halfway out of the water, as though a National Park Service employee had been in the middle of launching them, but then he stopped for some reason, such as they ate him.

That evening, we dropped anchor maybe 100 yards from a mangrove island, many miles from any sign of civilization. We stood on the deck, and, as the sun set, we experienced a sensation that I will never forget: the sensation of being landed on by every mosquito in the Western Hemisphere. There were so many of them that they needed Air Traffic Control mosquitoes to give directions (''OK, No. 86,742,038, you have clearance to land on his left elbow, but make it quick, because he's almost out of blood'')."

Thanks for that Dave.

Saturday Night

Melissa and I had a long Saturday night. Her cousin Jessica was graduating on Sunday morning and we couldn't find the tickets, so we were in the process of tearing up the apartment at ten thirty or eleven, when we hear yelling from out in front of the leasing office/pool area. We have a pretty good view of that area so we turn off the bedroom lights and watch what's going on.

A rather large man is yelling and posturing at two asian guys and a girl. The man's wife is yelling at him to drop it, but he won't, and a short, portly woman security guard is nervously trying to keep them separated. After repeating things to the two guys like: 'You're going to jail a**hole!!' and 'F***ing gangsters!!' and 'You pushed me, you going to jail a**hole!!' The guys wife throws her hands in the air and storms off. I hear one of the asian guys yell at the belligerent man that he's going to jail for abuse. This goes on for several minutes and someone yells from one of the other apartments 'Shut Up!!' The big guy starts to get tired (and likely was a little drunk) so he goes and sits down, but keeps yelling, calling the others gangsters and drug dealers.

Another security guard shows up, this one a very tall muscular man. The big guy stands up again and starts yelling all over again, the same three things, with the addition that he wants the asian guys' car searched because there are drugs in there.

A few minutes later four squad cars show up, one of them a K9 unit. The dog in said unit starts to bark, so all the dogs in the vicinity also start going nuts. The police question both groups of people as the big man yells that they're drug dealers, and the girl is a prostitute, when he says that one of the other guys starts to come after him, but is of course restrained. The big guy is arrested in a few minutes and everyone leaves.

I figure based on where the asian guys' car was parked and the way everyone was acting that the big guy was coming back from the pool and was in some was being abusive to his wife, verbally or physically, or whatever. The asian guys saw it and stopped to restrain the guy before the security guard showed up. So kudos to them.

This post is getting long, but that wasn't the end of our night, around eleven thirty we decided to go check for those tickets in San Jose at Melissa's desk. I knew that San Jose closed Market street on Friday for Cinco de Mayo, but they did the same thing on Saturday night. It was easy to get in, but it took nearly an hour to get out, dodging drunks and gangsters and all that whatnot, someone even yelled 'white boy' at me from a low rider next to us.

The tickets were on the coffee table. In our apartment.