Ed & Zoe

My friends Ed & Zoe got married a couple of weeks ago. Here are some pictures from their wedding:

You can see more here.

My Little Chick

Well, Caro, I don't have any graffiti pictures handy, and I missed Wednesday, in any case. Hopefully this will do.

My little chick has been away for a few weeks, and I have missed her like crazy. I've been looking at some pictures and thought maybe I'd share some with you - in these ones she's reading a big book that she can lay down on the floor and climb right on top of.

You probably don't miss her quite like I do, but I hope you like these, anyway.

Oh, and there are a few more here.

Rotten Apple

So, the last mp3 player I had was a Creative MuVo Micro, with a whopping 1 GB of memory (a lot for when I got it). I think I had it for about 6 years, and over that time, I had to update the firmware a couple of times (about 2 minutes with a USB cable). No, I couldn't watch movies on it, but it worked, and worked, and worked.

Contrast that with my iPod Classic: I just took it in to the shop today. It crashed and I couldn't do anything on my PC to make it better: couldn't restore it through iTunes, couldn't reformat the disk... nothing. Last time this happened, the guy plugged it in to one of the Macs in the Apple shop and it reformatted okay. This time, no go.

So, I've had it for 8 months, it's gone down twice, and this time it's beyond repair. Back to Apple, and theory is that they will send me a new one. That's okay until we get to January '09, when my warranty runs out.

So, I love the memory. The battery life is quite good. I've enjoyed watching Survivor in the plan on my way to Munich and home again each week. It's cool to be able to have a few of my favorite pictures with me wherever I go, too. And now that I've figured out things like using Apple lossless to encode the music and doing some gain reduction on my mp3's to keep them from distorting when I use the iPod eq to bump the bass up, the sound is pretty good as well.

But if the thing only works for 6 months at a time, it's a pretty high price to pay for what I got. Here's hoping I just got a lemon the first time and the next one is a little better...

My Olympic Question

They train for decades. They wear skin-tight clothes to reduce wind resistance. They spend years getting the lightest shoes possible. Some of them even shave their heads to be just that much quicker.



And then they wear 3 pounds of gold around their necks, diamond earrings, and giant watches. Because the only thing more important than winning is... what? Impressing women who really dig men who wear a lot of gold?

I've got a little secret for you, boys - if that's what she's into, she's probably not actually going to be that tough to get. I bet you could even save the chain for after the race and still do okay.

Fireworks

We went to see some fireworks, and I had my camera along, so I took a couple of pictures. I like these ones because they don't really look like fireworks to me... I kind of imagine them being stars and planets and solar systems.

I guess that Astronomy 101 in university is really paying off now.

You can see the rest here.

And In Lane Six

Can you imagine having worked your whole life to get to the Olympics, and you end up being in the qualification heat against Michael Phelps?

Would that ever suck.

The Olympics

Ah, it's great. The French are showing Judo; the Germans, women's air rifle.

One thing that will not be difficult to leave is the European concept of what constitutes a sport that should be shown on TV.

[EDIT] The French seem to have discovered the error of their ways. They've switched over to dressage - horses with fancy hair, trotting in a circle. Now if that's not a sport that's truly in the Olympic spirit, I don't know what would be.

IHEARTU

I didn't really steal it.

I just borrowed it and haven't given it back yet. I guess that's a bit too common for me - I have been known to borrow books or CDs or DVDs or whatever for, well, years. I know it's not good, and trust me... it's not really what I'm aiming for. I guess the bright side is that it's not that different when I lend things - I forget pretty quickly who has them, and I'm very free to give out what I have. This has been a blessing and a curse at times - on one hand, the source of more emails than I would like to a whole bunch of friends asking if anyone had seen the book I felt like reading. On the other hand, though, getting a CD back from a friend after a couple of years of thinking it was lost is, in a somewhat perverse way, a pretty nice experience.

Anyways, an anonymous reader of TYC lent me a DVD while visiting Geneva a while ago. I was (am) supposed to send it on to another friend, but hadn't quite gotten there yet when we had a bit of a quick change-up at YAGS (a group from my church that meets weekly, and that I help to lead): I was supposed to lead a discussion on kind of short notice.

And something kind of strange happened: I found myself without anything to talk about.

If you know me, you'll know that this is kind of out of the ordinary, and it threw me for a bit of a loop. Usually, when someone asks "Hey, can you teach?" I respond with a rather prompt "How much time can I have?". But this last week, I didn't have many ideas, but I remembered this video, and thought maybe ît would be a good one for us to watch and discuss together.

Turns out it was.

It is about the life and writings of Henri Nouwen. I didn't know tons about the guy before - a friend had given me one of his books (Return of the Prodigal Son) that was good... good in the general sense of being insightful and well-written, but also good for me. I knew he had written a bunch of others, but wasn't that familiar with them. He had quite a life, and wrote from a place of pain and longing much of the time. The video (called Journey to the Heart) was good, well worth a watch, if you can get a hold of it (and aren't waiting in line after me for anonymous' copy). I'm going to read more of his books now.

But I tell you all that to tell you this: there was one idea in there that just reached out and grabbed me by the heart. It's this: God loves us - he has loved us since before we loved him, before we were born, before the world was created, before time began. And he has given us just a little bit of time on this planet - 20 years, 40 years, 70 years - to be able to say, "I love you, too".

Well, I think that the reason for creation is a little more complex than that. And I guess Henri probably did, too. But that doesn't take anything away from the truth of how beautiful it is to hear a real "I love you".

The little chick has been able to understand some of what love is, and to choose to demonstrate it for a while now (she is, as she will tell you, a big girl now, at three). But there is still something mind-blowing about those little arms being thrown around my legs, that little head burried in, and a muffled "I love you, Daddy" escaping in the midst of it. As she learns more, it becomes more and more meaningful: she wants to share with me. She wants to include me in what she's doing. She wants to know how I feel, and wants to see that she makes me happy in her love for me.


So I wonder: how much of my so-far-at-least-35 years on this planet am I spending telling (or showing) God that I love him?

I have also known "I love you's" that aren't quite like those I get from the little chick. When no expression of love is forthcoming it can be painful, but there is far more damage when an "I love you" offered is not truly heartfelt - or, worse, when it's a lie - than when it's just absent. Those are words that should never be spoken out of duty or obligation - where there is that kind of obligation, there is no real love.

And so I wonder about something else: how many times have I said or sung those words to him without really meaning them?


Three little words, but a lot to think about.

Good Bye

It's been kind of a tricky year.

I like Geneva... I like it a lot. Sure there are things that bother me: the language, mostly. The fact that I live, more or less, in a parking lot, frequently populated by people who take the "outdoor voice" concept to a bit of an extreme. Oh, and prices; but then, with store hours being what they are, that's not much of an issue.

But at the end of the year, I'm moving back to Calgary, and so it's added a distinct sense of season to my life that wouldn't otherwise be there.

It hit me, again, as I was wandering through Montreux a few weeks ago, from the train station to the concert hall to see Alicia Keys: this could be the last time I do this. The last time ever.

My last spring, last YAGS retreat, last birthday, last concert season... and the list goes on. Now, I know, it's not like I've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, but still - it's tough.

I've always had trouble saying goodbye. I have tended to kind of shut myself off, to protect my heart, and to withdraw well in advance of the actual event. And I'm trying like crazy to change that now, to live here, and now, and to be open and available and vulnerable, but it's getting tougher.

My heart and my mind are starting to turn to Calgary. There are some wonderful, wonderful things that await me there... some I know, some I anticipate, and I'm sure there are many others of which I have no idea, yet. But I don't want it to keep me from still being able to experience my last fall, last winter, last vin chaud, last roast chestnuts, last fondue on Swiss soil. First or last, I don't want anything to get in the way of what I am living today - the people I love, the things I put my heart into, the things that I will see and do and know that will never be the same.