2006, Seventh Month, Seventh Day

Wow, another half a billion miles around the sun again. That makes a half a century plus one, or three times seventeen. How time flies when you're working, and sleeping, and praying, and trying to write...

And now - it is the day for the eating of cake, with candles. No,we take the candles off first, but make sure they are not still burning! If friends came by, we might have a nice picnic on the roof, or even in the cellar, and we could read books, and write poems, especially triolets, and nice easy-to-write Chestertonian ballades, and drink wine or beer or water. And then tell jokes. That was one of the great things at ChesterCon, examining the chicken/road joke again. The other day I was reading Gray's Anatomy, and laughing... we can write epithelium jokes... "Why did the Darwinian cross the membrane?" hee hee. It's a party. Then we can play "pin the umlaut on the preposition" and all those college department games. What fun! But I have to finish this posting and then get ready, so...

Yes, 31,536,000 seconds go very fast, even without a computer. Besides work and sleep and praying and trying to write, saying hello and goodbye, drinking beer, and answering questions, there was Christmas and Easter and ChesterCon, and cooking and eating, and buying and reading and printing books, and (shh!) doing der szekret prodjekts (shh!) and laughing, and writing things to induce laughing, and posting things on the blogg, and making comments on other people's bloggs, and deleteing comments that aren't any good (mostly my own!) and all the other usual things that go on here on this wobbly little planet, it would take LOTS of disk space to tell all those things, and probably get boring, even with beer. (Somewhere there's a Chesterton quote about how no one, not even the dull modern aesthetes, would sit through a three hour play of a man laying bricks. Or a man writing software. It's just about as boring. Hee hee.) So I won't tire you with the details of how hard work can be. Beside you probably know all about that. So I will tell you something you don't know. And with the really amazing books that I got when I was at Loome, and at ChesterCon, I probably have nice juicy book-meat to write about for a good while. But you could read the same books - or even own them. So it will have to be something that's not in any book yet.

And here it is:

(No I did NOT go to Iceland last week. Maybe some year.)

That is NOT it. This is it: I am nearing the HOME stretch of my book on Subsidiarity. I've worked through the FIELD, gathered lots of LEAVES, and ....er... oh, yes, these are puns. Sorry. Well, you'll see. (You don't like puns? Why not? You can read and write can't you? Did you know Chesterton thought that writing might have begun due to a pun? It's in his The Everlasting Man.) Anyhow, I am working on the last chapter and the conclusion, and just this week found an excellent term to assist (hee hee) with the explanation. But I don't want to spoil the surprise. (Er, no that's the Chesterton play. Sorry.) Where did I put my beer? (ah!) So please God this will be finished soon - then perhaps I will proceed to the next writing project. People keep asking; what else can I do?

In any case, thanks for going along on this 580-some million mile ellipse-ride with me. (Yes, ellipse! Sorry Galileo, but YOU WERE WRONG! Circles, sheesh. Why didn't you listen to that nice Mr. Kepler?) Anyhow! I'm sure we'll talk again but otherwise I'll see you again about two weeks after the next aphelion.

Until then, as St. Paul instructs us, "Dedicate yourselves to thankfulness":

Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.
Dignum et justum est.

For, as GKC says, "Thanks are the highest form of thought."