A Line of Poetry, A New Book

Today as I browsed through a book display a line in a book of poems by Canadian Steve McOrmond caught my eye. In Primer on the hereafter, Ormond writes of contemplating the ruins of a church and as he does so he is struck by "the power of religion to give the infinite a name." I thought to myself, "yes, that is it, that is it, it is all about "language," about embodiment, about incarnation, about naming. As I continued my browsing in the bookstore I was taken with the title of a new book: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. The author is Francis D. Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Glancing through the book I notice that Collins refers to the work of another scientist Richard Dawkins author of The God Delusion, the recent book that makes the case for atheism. It will be interesting to look at Dawkins and Collins together and I hope to do some posts as I read this new book.

Whew!! First I have to get through the several other things I have on the go! Right now it is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. I hope to have this finished for my next book discussion meeting.

Lunenburg

Wacky Weather Woes

Today I was in Lunenburg for a medical appointment. It's about and hour and a half drive from my home in the Annapolis Valley and cross country from me on the Atlantic coast. For several days we've been under the influence of a huge nor 'easter that is bringing heavy rain and strong winds, especially to the coastal communities. Today I hoped to take some photos of the town and its wonderful harbour and some of the interesting buildings. Lunenburg is a heritage town, a protected UNESCO historic site and a great place for browsing. Alas, with the driving rain and wind this afternoon, the closest I came to a streetscape was this quick picture taken from the parking lot of the Fishermen's Museum!

My Latest Painting

My Latest Painting

Here is a pic of my latest painting - a 12 x 14 acrylic titled "Jasper Park in Fall" - in which I've tried to cpture some of the beauty of our famous Canadian Rocky Mountains. I did the painting from a reference photo I had taken near the Jasper Park Lodge in September about ten years ago.

Serendipity

Do you notice happy coincidences? fortuitous meetings? Do things just seem to fall into place for you? They very often do for me, or, perhaps it is that I tend to be aware of or find them worthy of note or remark. The dictionary defines "serendipity" as "the faculty of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for," and I just had one of these serendipitous little incidents. I'll explain.

I know there are newer ways of accounting practice but an organization for which I am the treasurer uses a ledger for record keeping, and today as I was bringing the ledger up to date by copying debits and credits in from the cheque book, I failed to leave two spaces for the end of the month of March to record month and year totals and went on to enter about ten entries or more for April. The thought of applying whiteout to correct all those entries was maddening, yet not doing the book correctly was more than my perfectionistic self could take. Looking at the entries, I noticed that I'd recorded one of the first April ones in the wrong order (fortuitously? lucky happenstance?), so all I had to do was whiteout the entries on the two needed spaces, reverse the order and squeeze in an entry in between two others and everything else fell into place. Instead of correcting ten or twelve lines it only involved correcting two - and all because I'd made a recording error in the first place. Serendipity!

Spring Cleaning

Well, there is something to be said for doing your own spring house cleaning. Yep. It hurts. You're aching all over from the moving, the bending and the reaching, and your hands are cracked if you're like me and you hate wearing rubber gloves. But, by doing the job yourself, rather than hiring a cleaning service, you do get to sort things out, declutter, and organize things as you go along. Don't get me wrong: cleaning services are nice and I wouldn't turn down the offer of having a maid on a regular basis were the good fairy to send one my way! However, there are many positive things about being a do-it-yourselfer: you save money; it's good exercise; and there's a lot of satisfaction in the accomplishment of getting the job done.

As you get the heavy duty vacuuming and floor cleaning out of the way, you can turn to really doing a job on that bookshelf you've been meaning to spruce up or to those files you've planned to tackle for some time now. If you're in the right mood - and for me, that is when I am not clamouring to be doing something else - decluttering, especially sorting through the paper accumulation, is a rather pleasant way of spending a few hours. With a supply of new file folders and a recycling box nearby, it's gratifying to begin to see order emerge out of chaos!