Promises

The lesson was not a resounding success. I thought they would be more into Assyrians than they were. I kind of calculated a lot more discussion time about their battle preparations than we actually used. But we ended the lesson early and I learned about their new school year.
My point is, I will not be discussing Margaret Barker and her essay on Josiah's temple reforms. I highly suggest you listen to it if mind-blowing awesomeness interests you though. You can find it here, though only in mp3 format. It was a devotional or forum at BYU.

Here are some other promises I have not made good on:
- Jeremy, if you read this, I never did participate in your dissertation study. I meant to and I think I told you I would, but I didn't.
- Sascha Struffi, I know you are not going to read this because you are a German guy that I met at the Olympics 6 years ago. You told me to read Conversations with God and write you an email telling you what I think of it. I have not done that. I even have the book. Anna bought it for me to make me feel bad and I tried to read it once but it was too hokey and I think I even left the bookmark in it. Anyways, Mr. Struffi, I packed up that book and it is going into my storage unit for at least 6 months and I doubt I will get to it in the next year. So... hopefully I do that sometime.
- Remember how I promised everyone that followed my blog an ice cream sandwich about 2 years ago? I am pretty sure that I wont make good on that promise. Perhaps someday in the future, but I wouldn't count on it.
- Some of my coworkers from the jail made me promise to visit them and show them the baby (that would be Josie) after she was born. I never planned on doing that. That was always meant to be a lie.
- Anytime I leave a job and my coworkers somehow finagle a 'Man, I am going to miss working here' out of me, that is a lie too. I have never felt bad about leaving a job.
- Growing up Lisa and Bryan and I would make oaths with each other. We felt it was ok to break your word or a promise, but we all understood that you could never break an oath. I am pretty sure it is because Mom explained to us that an oath was a promise that you couldn't ever break no matter what. When we asked what happened if you broke an oath, she told us that you can't break one so it isn't a question of if. That was impressive. Also it is impressive that kids would pick up oathing from the Book of Mormon. Ha ha. And then Mom made us stop because she thought it was blasphemous for us to oath about stealing candy or doing chores.
- Totally off topic, but remember when we would watch Lion King or The Brave Little Toaster and fight about who got to be each character? Remember how we would get into real fights and sometimes there would be tears? Man, why was that so compelling? Is this a common thing for kids to do?

loser post

I promise that tomorrow will be a better post. I found out tonight that I will be teaching the older youth Sunday School class tomorrow and I am preparing a lesson. I am pretty sure we are supposed to be on lesson 32, but I was told to teach lesson 30. Lesson 30 is about the temple and the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah. There is a really great talk about Josiah's reforms by a Methodist Preacher named Margaret Barker. She is a biblical scholar who specializes is ancient temple theology and is President of The Society for Old Testament Study.
I will post tomorrow what I learn after I study tonight and teach tomorrow. The youth I am teaching are really sharp too. Last time I taught them, we talked about Sampson and they wanted to know about the Nazarite vows and covenants.
I ate a lot of grapes and peaches today. It is nice to have fruit sitting out, especially knowing that we will be moving soon so it all has to go. We were talking about leaving early today if we get everything packed up. That could be kind of fun, leaving whenever you feel like it.

I have come by the highway home

And lo, it is ended.
I am finished with temp work! I have been working temp jobs since May 2009 and I will not work one (hopefully) ever again. In three weeks I report for Basic Combat Training at Ft. Benning and then I will have full-time salaried work on out. I was thrilled to leave work. I think Cain put it best in Moses 5:33:"I am free". Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
But really, temp work stinks. Even today my manager made me stay later than I ever had before to finish petty filing and some small tasks on next week's schedule. When you are paid hourly as a peon, no one cares about your ideas or capabilities, only your heartbeat and gross motor skills. People will squeeze you to the last minute to get their money's worth from you and still feel ripped off.
In my head I am trying to figure out how to make "temp work" and "chump work" sound funny together in a sentence, but I think it only works if you hear me say it. I will go try it out on Anna. If she laughs, I will assume you all would have laughed and I will take the credit for a joke well conceived...
Awesome. She laughed and asked me if I was done writing my post yet. It might have been a pity laugh, but it still counts.

Also, I gave up on my goal of doing 2000 jumping jacks and settled for eating 9 mini bagel pizzas. That is not such a big change in goals but I felt ethically bound to disclose my alterations. I still consider myself a hero.

We will probably start packing up the house tomorrow. I am pretty excited to get cracking. It is always fun to load up packed boxes and furniture in garages/trucks because it is like macro-tetris. Considering I moved and packed all last summer as a minimum wage day-laborer (my many years in the Elder's Quorum Transport Co., LLC notwithstanding) I have become quite the moving and packing profi.

victory!

I did 300 pushups yesterday. I had to stay up late to do them, and I ended up finishing them 5 at a time, but they got finished.
My next goal is to do 2000 jumping jacks. I don't even know if that will be hard or not. I have never had much respect for jumping jacks because I don't see their point. Rhythmic hopping and flailing don't really build muscle and it doesn't seem like a really effective cardio exercise but maybe I will feel differently tomorrow.
That is another thing, I will do them tomorrow. We have guests coming over tonight and I don't want to hop around all evening. I'll do it as my celebration for finishing my last day of work tomorrow. I will eat a carton of donut holes (they are on a super sale at the grocery store down the street) and then do 2000 jumping jacks.

Bag + pushups

Thanks Kathy for the awesome tote bag! It came in the mail today and I have been trying to think of all the sweet things to tote around. I finished Sunrise over Fallujah last night (at 12:30, after I went to bed at 11) so I will probably go to the library with Soapy tomorrow and we'll see how it works out. Probably the librarians will be jealous of my sweet prize and wish that they had placated me with a win. But no. This is better than anything I could have won from Lincoln City Libraries. Thanks Kathy.

Also, I was sitting at my desk at work trying to think of a new goal and I decided to do 300 pushups before I go to bed tonight. I figured that maybe if I did that, then I would have a good story to tell, and if I didn't then I would have an even better story to tell.
Anna came and picked me up from work (I usually ride my bike, but I have been getting a lot of flat tires lately and I work seven miles from home and it is annoying to fix a tire in the work parking lot and the pump I use gives me blood blisters but mostly I am lazy) and I told her about my goal:
Anna: "Wow" She responded in a disappointingly neutral tone "Are you sure you want to do that?"
Me: (deflated and worried I wasn't impressing her) "Why, isn't that a lot though? Won't you be impressed?"
Anna: "Well, its just that it will take a long time and you will waste both of our evenings."
Me: "Whatever. I will do them in like, 5 seconds. I will do them while I catch up on those THREE EPISODES of Heroes you watched while I wasn't there."
Anna: "Man. You are totally right. I am scum and I should probably go buy you some ice cream to go with the brownies that I always want. I realize now that brownies without ice cream are offensive and even though I won't ever take any of your ice cream, I will never have any unless we have ice cream to accompany it."
Me: "I am glad you see it my way."

That is verbatim. But actually Anna is hard to impress. 300 pushups should be enough to impress anyone, right? I think she is beginning to get too used to me. I think my only solution is to run 700 miles away for 6 months.

Forms

I listened to a lot of my lectures (Odyssey of the West II; a Classic Education through the Great Books: From Athens to Rome and the Gospels) today and covered the section on Plato and Aristotle. I have taken philosophy courses before but I had forgotten how much I enjoy them.
One of the ideas I like most discusses how we recognize anything. Every time we leave the house we see an entirely new world. The trees we see are not the same trees that were there the day or even the hour before. Cells have died and fallen away, branches have broken, leaves have moved, there are different animals in or around them, but we still deal with it ok. We do not have to reevaluate our world and our understanding of it every time we encounter something new.
I took a class on Immanuel Kant and we spent a lot of time reading about Kant's attacks on empiricism, or the idea that you can only gain knowledge from experiences. If you could only know what you have experienced, then you could never anticipate anything, because any sort of anomaly is given the same weight as what we would consider a natural law. There could be no natural laws because physical sensation does not prove any natural law, it only confirms what is happening.
The example I liked best was one where my teacher dropped his pen and said that if we were true empiricists we could not be surprised if the pen stayed in mid-air or even shot to the ceiling, because we would have no other knowledge to create shock. I thought that was kind of cool.
A little off topic, but the reason I wanted to write about the lectures, was the presentation I was listening to about imagination. I don't remember what the big idea behind it was, but the professor said that people go to the Grand Canyon (a big hole) to be astounded. I haven't ever been but I would like to go because of this example and a West Wing episode. The speaker said that when you look at the Grand Canyon it is impossible to take it all in. It is such a huge spectacle that when you close your eyes or turn away, you cannot recreate what you have seen because it is too massive- it is too immense to comprehend.
In West Wing, Toby Ziegler said "You know when you go out West how they
say, don't miss the Grand Canyon, it's one of the few things in life that when you see it, it doesn't disappoint? That's Roy Ashland." I think Roy Ashland was a senile Supreme Court Justice in the show, but I hope that it is true for the Grand Canyon.
If I go and am disappointed, I will give up on nature and probably get engrossed in video games or something. Nature, that is a threat.

Uhhh

I don't know how Bryan posts everyday. I forgot I had to do something until a few minutes ago. We had pancakes for dinner tonight. Anna used a new recipe but doubled it like we did for our old one so we had twice as many pancakes as normal. That was pretty exciting. Soapy wanted syrup on her pancake but then just licked it off. I put a little bit on the side of her plate, but then she just tipped it and drank it all. Speaking of Soapy, she has this new fascination with trains. She will sit in a cardboard box and make chugga chugga noises. We went to the library and got a bunch of train books for her. We would have read them tonight but she was acting kind of hyper and cried about really small things. She stepped on a book and it slid an inch and she started bawling. I don't think she had a very substantial nap today.
I had some Care Bear fruit snacks in my lunch that I swiped from Soapy.
I only have four days of work left. Then we will pack for a week and drive to Virginia.
Man. I have got to start planning these posts out in advance.