I've been struggling a bit with letting that bit of Isaiah 64 swallow up the power of God to redeem... so I've been trying to balance that piece of truth with another that's in I Corinthians 15:56-58.

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

I am very thankful for this. When I say I am nothing without Christ, it's not just a trite bit of Christian phraseology designed to prop up a sense of our neediness for Christ--because I can't seem to grasp any assurance that my life and what I am working at right now is going anywhere worthwhile apart from him.

I'm honestly too busy to post anything else, but since this is what's really going on I figure it counts.

But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

I don't post photos generally, but these are just too good to pass up. I was on my way out the door yesterday morning when I caught my younger sister at the sink, blissfully...well... let's just say we've finally figured out why it takes her so long to do the dishes.


...where did she get that?


...oh.


It crawled down her arm, back into the depths whence it came.


Yeah, those dishes are getting pretty clean! (Note the fabulous bedhead 'do).


Going for a record. Or something.


Caught in mid-pop!


"For the record, I've been this way the whole time...the other photos are just...cleverly photoshopped."

(Title selected because if they made colored pencils long enough to draw on the ceiling from one's bed, this little goofball would buy out every store in town.)

Dani told me my blog was boring because it was "all words." I disagree (that "all words" constitute "boring"...I will not be so vain as to deny that a blog filled with nothing but my words is boring...). So in the spirit of disagreeing with her, I'm doing exactly as she suggested--taking all the pictures off my camera that have been collecting for the last semester and posting all the ones that I like.


This is one of those "others" in the title. Mutti brought us this enormous cocoon and we hatched it in our old frog tank. The poor thing was limp and weak and I do doubt that it survived, but there was something beautiful about its frailty.


We found this guy in a tree one day. I was fascinated, but a certain matriarchal authority (I think that sounds more imposing than "mom") would not allow me to get any closer. This would be the enmity thang.


The loveliness of all the snakey coils...I've got chills.


Heads or tails?


The spirit of our garden: one in which the weeds grow so much more heartily than the flowers that we feel compelled to take pictures of their (the weeds') great beauty before we pull them.


Sunset.


Sunrise.


The essence of Fall: smudged with dead leaves and broken sticks.


So I've been in love with the way the light hits these trees in the morning pretty much since we moved here...


...which might be why I can't resist taking picture after picture...


...and sometimes you just have to step back to get another, bigger picture.


These last ones (sunrise and light on trees) were taken this morning, in case anyone's wondering. It's been a while since I went about with a coat over my pajamas and took sunrise pictures, but I resumed the habit this morning with much delight.


Love this road...with its badly-done city-commissioned patchwork and funny grooves and the way it practically melts and squishes under the feet in summer... best road in the world...but it doesn't go ever on and on; that's why there's a sign in front of our neighborhood saying "DEAD END." That means that the road isn't going to go on forever--in fact, the end is very, very near.

Like this.

DEAD END.

...only I'm talking about a post, not a road.

The title of today's post goes out to Miss RAS and the famed Comp I paper. I think we learned a good deal about a certain author on Saturday, didn't we?

By way of things-that-are-going-on, I'm trying to get an early start on my final paper for history (I'm trying to avoid all the tiresome politics and economy which I was forced to think about for the last paper. This time I am writing on Religion. Booyah.) I'm also dissecting passages of Greek in preparation for the final exam... and trying to find time to get all the Calculus principles that have been rushing at me of late ingrained in my brain. A somewhat futile attempt to stay with the winter retreat planning is always in the mix...somewhere...

The weather is gorgeous. There's something so satisfying about crawling into bed when the house is just a wee bit chilly...and it's such fun to shiver, even when one is not very cold. Makes one feel desperate and happy at the same time. As the venerable Jane Austen said, "They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for cold weather early in life." ...Well, she might have said "nature" instead of "cold weather." But she would have said the latter had she thought of it. Surely she would not have disagreed.

Moving on from that strange topic...

Books. He Knew He Was Right, by Anthony Trollope (the name makes me crack up every time I catch sight of the book cover); Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell; The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. I raided the forth floor of the U library a few weeks ago. Progress has not been immense, but it's still such fun to have them around.

I also borrowed some of Wilde's fairytales, but they were moralistic and not quite what one expects to see from Wilde. Some of them had bits of humor thrown here and there--the intellectual who tries his hand at romance and in the end goes back to his dusty tomes made Ruth and I feel quite satisfied--but the general attitude of "O little children! be good!" overwhelmed most of the humorous phraseology that Wilde can't escape even in morals. Hans Christian Anderson would have found his own writings apathetic in the face of these. Elsie Dinsmore would seem a heathen. I could go on.

Well, I'm off to vanquish the dragon of aorism and storm the castle of elision.

I know, I could just say "study Greek." But that would be dull.