Immeasurably More

TIRMa and I went to the Foodie Festival at Hampton Court Palace over the weekend. We skipped lunch so we would have plenty of room for sampling artisanal cheeses, curry sauces, sheep's milk ice cream, fudge, olives and olive oil and similar things. And I brought home two varieties of sausages - "Game and Red Wine" and "Pheasant and Pear". Pheasants may not seem like dangerous birds, but when you consider that they're killed with lots of little round pieces of birdshot, the risk of chipping a tooth is actually quite high. But these sausages are fantastic!! I will not be detered from eating them anyway.

My new apartment has two bedrooms. One for me and one to share. The sharing one has been in frequent use by one of my female coworkers who lives a couple of hours from the office, when she needs to fly from Heathrow or be at the office for meetings. In return, she drives me to important places like Tesco and Ikea. Because she's going to be showing up in the occasional post, I wanted to give her a name. After considering various options, I've settled on TIRMa (Tall Intermittent RoomMate, pronounced TEER-ma). So, TIRMa, meet world. World, TIRMa.

There is an adage that "You become what you think about". Nervous public speakers are advised to focus on being "confident and calm" and not to think about "not being nervous". Likewise the Bible tells us "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." (Phil. 4:8) In contrast, modern cinema and television have embraced the idea of the anti-hero, the hero who does the right thing even though he doesn't want to, or the hero who wants to do the right thing until he finds out it's going to destroy his relationship with the beautiful heroine. The more guilt ridden, self questioning and waffly the internal conflict, the better. Take a film like Prince Caspian . One of the principle themes of the original book is that it is good to resist using the wrong means to achieve the right end. In the book, the chi...

If you know me (and if you didn't, why would you be reading this blog?)... If you know me, you know that I love movies. At one time I thought I might try my hand at writing movie reviews. However, as a reader of movie reviews, I finally realized that I would never be able to do a respectable job of it. My inner critic gets distracted by the lights and music and can't think of anything witty or insightful to say about production values or the quality of the directing. But I love a good story and it rarely happens that I finish a movie without having some comment to make about character development or plot points. So, I'm going to try a few posts of what I'll call "Movie Musings". Not really reviews, just things that are rolling around in my brain about the time the credits start to roll. I haven't yet been able to convince myself that this sort of post meets the stated purpose of the blog - to celebrate the things God does for us above and beyond what w...

I've been in the UK for 3 weeks now. That's the longest I've been in any one place since January!! And now that I'm finally mostly settled, the church search has begun in earnest. 3 weeks, 3 churches. Because I'm in the UK, I thought I would start with all of the C of E (Church of England) churches in town. (I am told that C of E does NOT equal Anglican. This needs more research which I will dutifully report back to you.) The first church I tried was Parish Church on High Street. All C of E churches are part of a parish, so I'm not sure what makes this church more belonging to the Parish than the ones I attended subsequently, but that's another question as well. There were about 30 congregants, mostly elderly and female. The acoustics were beautiful, and the people friendly, but I had trouble being enthusiastic about the service in general. Parish Church also has a famous painting on one of the walls that is a minor tourist attraction. The second chu...

The US has long given up serious usage of skeleton keys except in places like the old farmhouse where we lived for several years while I was a child. In that house, finding an old key in a drawer and then going through the house testing it on all the interior doors was fun and exciting. Skeleton keys are still very popular in the UK and there are 4 of them associated with my apartment. One of them the landlord refused to give me as my neighbor doesn't have a copy of it, and he wanted to be sure no one (me) would lock anyone else (neighbor) out. Another is for a storage closet outside my apartment door. The last two, together with a normal key, actually give me access to my apartment. One benefit of skeleton keys, of course, is that you are never at risk of hearing the front door click behind you as you suddenly visualize your keys lying on the kitchen table. A second benefit is that once a door is locked, it can't be unlocked without the key or a good lock pick. Let's s...

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