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New experience: reading a birthday card that's really a love letter in tiny snatches whenever my visiting mother stepped out of my one room to put in laundry or go to the bathroom, and trying to be cool and not starry-eyed when she came back into the room.
A lot's been going on the last few days... Friday was my birthday, and my mother was visiting from Saturday morning until a few minutes ago. Birthday doings at work on Friday, on Friday night, and on Saturday night. Eprime knit me a beautiful scarf in multicolored aplaca yarn on very small needles, and my parents surprised me with a new laptop, a lovely slim Dell. Aunt L and Uncle P and the boys gave me a nice case to go with it. As Eprime said, saying goodbye to the now-nonfuctional Mac powerbook that saw me through college and even much of the first semester of grad school means the end of an era.
My little cousins DA and NK, as well as my aunt L, were baptized this morning. I was expecting a prefunctory assembly-line routine, since they attend a pretty staid Lutheran church that has the mindset, administratively, of being full of people when in actuality it stands half-empty every Sunday except Easter and possibly Christmas. Instead, I found it was a nice private ceremony in the little chapel where the boys have Sunday School, with just the pastor, the baptizees, my uncle, my mother, me, and the boys' best friends and their mother. The pastor explained things clearly but not condescendingly to the boys, who seemed a bit nervous and quite awed by the proceedings. They were intensely engaged, though, especially N, who hung over the font with the most soulful look in his big brown eyes. Aunt L, who is an intensely practical person focussed on the concrete and visible, surprised and touched me by beginning to cry silently when the pastor wiped the water from her forehead.
A lot's been going on the last few days... Friday was my birthday, and my mother was visiting from Saturday morning until a few minutes ago. Birthday doings at work on Friday, on Friday night, and on Saturday night. Eprime knit me a beautiful scarf in multicolored aplaca yarn on very small needles, and my parents surprised me with a new laptop, a lovely slim Dell. Aunt L and Uncle P and the boys gave me a nice case to go with it. As Eprime said, saying goodbye to the now-nonfuctional Mac powerbook that saw me through college and even much of the first semester of grad school means the end of an era.
My little cousins DA and NK, as well as my aunt L, were baptized this morning. I was expecting a prefunctory assembly-line routine, since they attend a pretty staid Lutheran church that has the mindset, administratively, of being full of people when in actuality it stands half-empty every Sunday except Easter and possibly Christmas. Instead, I found it was a nice private ceremony in the little chapel where the boys have Sunday School, with just the pastor, the baptizees, my uncle, my mother, me, and the boys' best friends and their mother. The pastor explained things clearly but not condescendingly to the boys, who seemed a bit nervous and quite awed by the proceedings. They were intensely engaged, though, especially N, who hung over the font with the most soulful look in his big brown eyes. Aunt L, who is an intensely practical person focussed on the concrete and visible, surprised and touched me by beginning to cry silently when the pastor wiped the water from her forehead.
