RootsRain

I like to spent at least part of Sunday afternoons listening to some sacred classical music (Bach’s St. Matthäus Passion or Easter Cantata, Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s Die Schöpfung, Handel’s Messiah, etc.). By far my favorite is Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem. I love the personal feeling in the piece. Brahms directed the requiem more toward the audience than toward God or the departed souls (a fairly distinct departure), using colloquial texts from the Bible (and one from the Apocrypha) instead of the latin missa pro defunctis. There are many intensely personal passages in the Requiem and every movement is a chance for the listener to deeply reflect on what he’s hearing in the text and in the music’s interaction with it.

There’s wonderful symmetry in the work. The opening movement (“Selig sind, die da Leid tragen”—”Blessed are those that mourn”) begins with the same coloring as the final movement (“Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herren sterben”—”Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord”)… minor key… dark, somber, plodding. The first movement focuses on the mourner: “I’m miserable… I need help… Lord, you said you’d bless the mourners…” The last movement begins Read the rest of this entry »

by Rob Bell

The subtitle is “Repainting the Christian Faith.” Rob is the pastor of Mars Hill and a generationally-savvy young pastor. His church style is basically Emergent, and his book seems to be a defense of a new kind of Christianity—one that questions and pretty much throws out all of traditional Christianity as “a previous generation’s reading” (their painting… their “velvet Elvis”) and seeks to reevaluate what Christianity should look like in the 21st century (Rob Bell’s/Brian McLaren’s/Emergent’s painting… a new velvet Elvis).

I admire his effort, and he makes some good points, but he’s completely shot through with postmodern (PoMo) critical theory (the text has no fixed meaning, we all approach texts with agendas and therefore there is no objective reading of a text, words have no fixed meaning so therefore everything is ambiguous, there is no certainty of any knowledge, etc.). I’m sure Rob wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable with applying all those things to the Bible (he does believe it’s the inspired Word of God and without error), but his stance on the impossibility of one person saying that one reading of a text is superior to another is very PoMo (i.e., ludicrous). Okay, look… when two people read a text, granted, one of them may have missed something and maybe Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I spent another long Saturday working on the attic. I started out the day by nailing down a sheet of OSB and then realized I hadn’t put any Liquid Nails underneath. Nuts. So I ran to Lowes, bought the Liquid Nails along with a nice DeWalt reciprocating saw (which came in very handy).

So once I had the OSB in, I roughed-in the south wall (leaving a hole for the door access into the storage area) and removed the roof braces that had been splitting up the space. From my estimates, the room will be about 130 square feet (which will add about 110 square feet to our house total because 20 sq. ft. of the room is under 5 feet high, so it doesn’t count towards house square footage).

I’ll be visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Atlanta next weekend so I’ll have to be done work on the attic for a few weeks.

There is one thing I highly prize,
Which wakes me up and makes me rise,
And stumble through the house to find
Warm loaves of bread of every kind.

It sits beside the kitchen light,
And slumbers quiet in the night
‘Til all at once it spins awake!
It’s 3 a.m.! It’s time to bake!

And up I rise (three hours passed),
Pull out the loaf and smell the blast
Of crackling warm and buttered bread.
NOW I’m glad I left my bed.

Oh what sticks memories memorably,
And sells a house commendably,
And wakes you up remarkably,
But a loverly Bread Machine!

Sorry… but some mornings you get really happy for machines that have breakfast ready for you when you don’t want to get out of bed.

Almost as soon as my wife and I moved into our (brand new) house, we started talking about finishing out the attic, which had a lot of headroom. A couple weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a nice, expensive Pella window to make certain I would feel obligated to work on the attic. It’s proved to be a wonderful tactic.

Day One

The first thing I went to work doing was removing some of the studs that were in the way of the window. Then I measured and drew some lines for where the opening should go and cut through the side of the house (through the OSB and the siding). I put in the side studs and cripples and made the header for above the window. Then I removed the center, load bearing stud and put the header in. Then I just finished out the cripples above and below the window and put in the sill. All in a day’s work.

Day Two

I came back a week later and, because it was threatening rain for the whole next day (Saturday), Emily and I put the window in on Friday night. I was very cold and I couldn’t get the ladder up high enough to get good leverage on the window. But with a lot of thinking and a whole lot of my hands getting trapped between the siding and the window, we got it roughed in.

Day Three

About a week later, we were going to have company over and, strangely enough, we needed a place for them to sleep. (We’d taken all the junk out of the attic and stored it in the guest bedroom.) But I figured: “Hey! Another chance for forcing myself to be motivated!” So I borrowed my friend TJ’s truck, bought a bunch of wood, and began working on reinforcing the floor. I had to get it done before the rain came on the weekend (yellow pine tends to do the twist if you leave it in the elements) and before Emily’s family came as well. I had to put 2×10s next to the 2×6s to act as sister-joists to reinforce the floor. Code only specifies an additional 2×6 as a sister joist but I needed to also raise the floor above a bunch of plumbing that was protruding out of the bathroom below. But it worked with very few problems and we laid the OSB sheets down temporarily so we could move the junk back into the attic.

I’m itching to get back in there and put the OSB down in a more permanent fashion… next weekend, I guess. Right now I have to go to work and this evening I need to study for my Macroeconomics test.

See the other posts about this attic remodel.

That pretty much sums it up.

I’m starting a blog for several reasons:

1. I want to tweedle with the site’s XHTML/CSS/PHP and this is the perfect playground.
2. I need an outlet for writing and for improving mine.
3. I need some way to keep up with family & friends without spamming them whenever the fancy takes me.
4. There’s nothing like public accountability to keep you reading and learning.

I hope I can be a good blogdad and update this somewhat frequently, but bear with me as I get started.