Tennessee Pastoral

After a hiatus of a few years (since the dot-Com bomb), The Golden Gryphon is once again a going concern – or, at least, has a license to consult and do software design and development for various and sundry members of the general public. I had to assure the licensing folks that no heavy equipment would be in use, and the neighbors were unlikely to be disturbed by the din of business being conducted on the premises, but it is now a done deal, and we have a business account associated with the enterprise.

Judy had to go down to New Orleans for a conference, and I decided to go along, as the Hotel, like most of them in this day and age, promised broadband access. We flew in a day early (my first trip on SouthWest airlines), grabbed a cab to the Hotel (the , which may rate an entry of its very own), and spent the afternoon re-acquainting ourselves with the French Quarter, starting with stuffed crepes at the Palace cafe. We then found a new-for-us used book store to spend a rainy afternoon at, discovering old favorites and the kind of obscure, old, out of print books that you can never find at amazon, and which can only be seen at the olde booke shoppes around the world.

To me, New Orleans is about food. Come to think of it, lots of fun things in life are anchored around food . And this time around in the big easy, we got to sample a new restaurant – , where the chef (Kevin) leads a class of cooking the meal that you are about to eat, all the while regaling the crowd with quips, history, cooking tips, and local color. It was a great performance, both of culinary skill and a stand up routine, drawing the audience in while preparing a stupendous meal – and I have learned how to make Bananas Foster and Pecan pralines.

While Judy was busy at the conference, I worked through the morning, then went walking, soaking in the soul of the big easy, visiting old friends like Jackson Square, the Bakery down exchange alley, the Ursuline convent. On Sunday, Judy and I continued revisiting old acquaintances – Beignets for breakfast on Royale – and making new ones, discovering another used bookstore, going up and down the river in a paddle boat to the .

So, get up in the morning. The Cab drive is here – I only managed to get about 3 hours of sleep, but, the phone is still in the cab, despite him having other fares after me last night. Go to US Air. Spend an hour in the queue. Us Air confirms the flight is still cancelled, and find me a seat in continental – but then they discover I am really a united fare, and they can’t just transfer me over – I have to go back to United.

Stand in Queue again. United tries Continental – but the seat is gone by now. Try all kinds of other combinations, and nothing works – until they find a Delta flight. Move to Delta ticketing, wait in line. Delta rep can’t find the flight. Brief panic moment until they realize that United just had a typo in the flight number. So, I am heading off to Cincinnati. I probably can even make the Firestone 200 Indy car race at the Nashville speedway.

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This is probably the most messed up trip I’ve been on, except perhaps my trip to India in ‘98. Starting back home from a two week trip to DC (a trip I spent cooling my heels waiting for work that never started, but that is another story). It started off nice and easy too – I had dinner early, by 6pm, and headed in to the airport a couple of hours before departure at 9:45 pm. Ticketing and Security were a breeze – suspiciously so. The Gate I was at required two people-mover shuttles (take one to terminal D, and then go to the end and take another to terminal G) – I made both shuttles with almost no waiting. This is too good to be true. I sat down at the United Airlines terminal, and that’s when the fun started.

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Carved my very first fruit basket from a watermelon – actually, I messed it up; the handle was very barely attached due to an faulty early design decision. The family tree printouts were very well received. This is a place holder entry, I may have pictures here later.

Stay tuned.

Spent the day talking to family, and happily trudging through nearby cemeteries where relatives were buried, squinting at headstones trying to decipher the dates. Learned a lot about the Shardos and the Chappies and Littmans in Darke and Shelby counties, going back to the mod 1850’s.

In the evening, Judy’s brother Jon came in with large Boxes full of documents and funeral books and a genealogy report for part of the family done in 1950, and things like copies of reports from Ellis Island and so on. We have data for over 200 people now.

Stayed up late playing reinstalling windows on Reyna’s computer.

Drove to Ohio today. It was a nice enough drive interspersed with four thin fingers of thunderstorms – heavy, torrential rain on I65 and I71 that only lasted for a few miles, but reduced visibility to 20 yards or so.

Judy read from the Gnostic Gospels. Fascinating read. Gnosticism’s Christian form grew to prominence in the 2nd century A.D. Ultimately denounced as heretical by the early church, Gnosticism proposed a revealed knowledge of God (gnosis meaning knowledge in Greek), held as a secret tradition of the apostles.

This book talks about a recent (well, circa 1945 or so ago, but recent based on the scale of events) find at Nag Hamadi of a bunch of gospels (Thomas’, Mary Magdalene’s) which was declared heretical and virtually stamped out by the orthodox church by the start of the second century after Christ when the orthodox churches were combined into a “catholic” church and the gospels that did not meet the party line were excised and destroyed.

I learned a lot about the politics of the church in the early years (including how having witnessed the resurrection was a keystone in acquiring legitimacy in the church). The revelations about Mary Magdalene were very interesting as well.

Gnostics focused on the self rather than the community. They were utterly non-judgmental, to the point that they would not confer superior status to any one individual, as the Catholics did with their bishops, but rather they would share the duties of worship leader, hymn leader, deacon etc., and take turns alternating different people through the positions. Women participated in the worship service on an equal basis with men, rather more like modern Protestants than the seemingly misogynist Catholics of that era. The gnostics believed that those who received gnosis, or hidden knowledge, transcended the authority of the church.

It struck me that the forbidden Gnostic gospels were very similar to the teachings of Hinduism (Gnosticism celebrates God as both Mother and Father, shows a very human Jesus’s relationship to Mary Magdalene, suggests the Resurrection is better understood symbolically, and speaks to self-knowledge as the route to union with God, the deity being in all of us, the material world merely Vishnu’s maya, etc). Too bad that this version of Jesus’ teaching lost out politically, I find it more palatable than the conventional teachings.

It was a very fun drive.

Well, no, not in June. These are images I discovered on my camera from a storm back in March and are here to tell our friends in the frozen northlands that, yes, we do get snow, even down here in Tennessee. And I think the picture of the red barn in the snow is well worthy of a postcard.

On January 23 Asa had six puppies. Recently, I found a set of puppy pictures when cleaning out the CF memory on my camera and decided to throw them together. There are pictures from their first excursion downstairs away from their warm cozy bed into the cold of February. There also were issues with complicated things like food bowls. Then we have pictures from March, when a rare snow storm blanketed the area. By this time the puppies were living out in the heated workshop (where the puppies still live). There are non-software pictures of the early days of the puppies, but they still need to be scanned in, so there is much more to come.

We kept two of the puppies, Banshee (named so because she spent the first couple of days of her life wailing like one), and Champ, named for his tendency to be a champion for his family, regardless of the size of the aggressor. We found the other 4 puppies good homes (it was really easy to find them new humans; just taking them to the flea market had people oohing and aahing over them).

There was also the episode of Banshee and Essie taking off for 4 days when they were 6 weeks old, but that is another story (and another set of pictures).

Banshee and Champ can be seen in more recent pictures and you can see how fast they are growing. Four months, and already they are over 30 pounds each.

When we first moved to Tennessee from Mobile, AL, we rented a house (having failed to find a suitable house prior to moving). This, we hoped, would afford us time to properly look for a house. The rental house was nice enough on the outside, but had been empty and unmaintained for far too long and things like the oven did not work. And it was also, umm, design challenged; so our stay was quite uncomfortable. Add to that the fact that we knew we had to move again shortly, so we did not unpack most of our things; it felt like a prolonged camping-in.

After about 6 months of actively looking for a house all we had was a near miss – and we were getting very frustrated. We had an excellent real estate agent, and I was beginning to feel guilty about the amount of work she was putting in for us. We had almost given up and had nearly decided to buy a 5-acre plot to build on. We had talked to the builder and even had a floor plan started.

And then our agent called about a house just going on the market that week, so we drove down to check it out – more out of a sense of due diligence than out of any expectation of finding something we would like. And as Judy’s car topped the hill, we saw what you can see in the pictures below and my heart beat accelerated.

This is one of the few houses, which look good from the outside and you don’t feel let down after looking inside. We moved in less than 4 weeks after the house was put on the market.

We have been out of touch with far too many people for far too long. And finally, there seems to be a bit of technology that actually may have a shot at really helping us communicate. Thus, welcome to our blog!