I was born in the northern cold and raised in the Sonoran heat. I’ve tread the Peralta, swum in the Supai falls, walked Tito’s halls. I’ve launched fire and death in the ice of the Bering and scorching heat of the Persian. I’ve been initiated into the mysteries of the deep, walked the lands of my forefathers and forged the bonds of brotherhood from Budapest to Tirana. I’ve seen the sun go down over Addis and rise over Pretoria, seen the lightning flash over the Tanganyika. Known the joy of a woman unparalleled in mind and spirit and the love of my God who carried me through it all. And He is not done with me yet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about trying to create and generate instead of just consuming. Going to take another run here at more regularly posting - we’ll see.
I used to to have a volume of output that kept multiple sites going, I’ll see now if I can just keep one getting new content with some regularity.
We are blessed to have our whole family back together this Christmas. Our girls were able to fly in from the states and we all have some special time to spend together. I hope this Christmas as wonderful and full of love for you as it is for us.
I started writing poetry for myself in high school. Like many things that I had the time for back then, as I got older and life got busier, it dropped by the side for the most part. It’s been in my head, fragments of things, but not much put to paper.
I really enjoyed reading poetry in school and would write things to emulate the poetry I really liked. My junior year I wrote a pretty long poem about the crucifixion of Christ and I did a whole gloss with scriptural references, sort of like what I’d seen with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. That was probably the longest and most disciplined poetry I’ve every written. A lot of the rest was typical teen angst written in a song lyric kind of format.
Friday was All Saints day and that meant a 3 day weekend. I was reasonably productive in terms of some projects around the house. But some of the best parts were spent with the new Jimmy Eat World album and the Foreigner Saga by C.J. Cherryh.
I really enjoy the new album. The books I had started back in the 90s when the series was new. I had dropped off after the second book I think. I don’t remember for sure. But I started over a while back and I’ve been enjoying it very much. I just started “Conspirator” the 10th book. I’ve always enjoyed Cherryh’s writing. I don’t remember what I read of his first. I want to say it was the Chanur books. But it could been Union Alliance or some other work of hers.
I really like this picture. I think it looks pretty cool but more importantly it reminds me of a pretty special evening.
It was a time of saying goodbye which is something we do a lot in our line of work. I don’t know if it’s more or less than more traditional careers or ways of living, but being expats and missionaries it feels like people come and go at a more rapid pace than when we lived in the US with “normal” jobs.
I’m going to try to be more regular here. I just need to build a habit.
I spent the last couple days working on getting my Hugo setup working again. There have been big changes in the software and the theme changed a lot - but I had customized some things. Only the new versions took more work to fix.
With wordpress I’d do a child theme. In this case I’m not sure what is the best way to go about it. I really want the changes I make but I also want the updates that come from the regular development of the theme. We’ll see what happens.
This is my first go at my own post and sorting my front matter.