Saturday, 18 November 2006:

Today I finished bringing all my stuff in and unpacking. There is no way I should have brought all this stuff, but I am a skeptic by nature and training, and I never do learn from others' mistakes. I have to make them for myself... Someday I hope to have this character defect taken away from me. Still, I lack nothing. I have gracious digs in a big ranch house, the pool looks terribly inviting right out the sliding glass doors in the family room where I am sitting right now, and my every wish is anticipated and fulfilled by my doting sister. My back feels better and my soul is momentarily at rest.

I worked most of the day on this blog, getting the first 4 days documented and uploaded to my homepage, where you likely have navigated if you are reading this. I use Microsoft FrontPage to edit pages and update the website. This is a static site, no Javascript or fancy stuff.

I hung around the house most of the day. In the afternoon I washed and polished the bike - it is so purty! - and I rode over to a nearby Walmart for some essentials. In particular, I picked up a sweet little 4.0 MP digital camera for 99 bucks! I'll be taking pics from now on and including them in these pages. I also got a little battery powered airplane for my nephew Joey. We'll fly it tomorrow in a big containment pond the size of 2 or 3 football fields across the street from the house. Don't worry, the pond is bone-dry. Seems the developers never could get it to hold water. When it pours down rain it fills up a little, but the soil underneath apparently is very porous and it just drains away by next day. When I got back we ordered Chinese and watched a movie on the big screen TV.

I brought three books with me:

1. The Birth of Christianity, by John Dominic Crossan. This is an examination of canonical and non-canonical (apocryphal) texts from the early 1st century CE, archaeological and anthropological evidence, and modern historical, textual, and literary critical methods, to reconstruct what might have actually happened in the 20 years or so between the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ and the more well-dated and documented evidence from the times of the Apostle Paul and afterwards.

2. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbons. This is not the full massive 4-volume tome, but a single volume excerpted from the original to focus on causes and effects from a Western European perspective.

3. How to Play a Bridge Hand, by William S. Root. Yes, I play bridge. Self-descriptive, with a caveat that  this is an intermediate to advanced text, liberally peppered with highly interesting and instructive deals to illustrate the points in question.

I was (re)reading Crossan before I left, but I started Gibbons when I got down here. Should keep me occupied and out of most trouble...

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