I made a bookplate! I don't know why, I just decided I wanted to. The woodcut is by Albrecht Durer, the Reformation-era artist who also painted some famous praying hands you may have seen.
I just liked the phrase "Ex Libris Rhinoceros" -- it sounds like a band name or something. And I imagine a rhinoceros's library would be quite similar to mine. Anyway, if you borrow a book from me, you may find this on the inside cover!
This week I went to the dentist and had a panel taken. Nothing says "I live in a dystopian dreamworld" like having clamps hold your head still while you bite down on a hunk of plastic and big white rectangles rotate around your head, shooting your skull full of x-rays.
Anyway, I went to the dentist because my gums are really sore at the back right side of my mouth. This tooth is the problem:
It's the first of my wisdom teeth to come in. The dentist said I should get them taken out, so I guess I'll do that.
One cool thing is that when Kaeta's teeth start coming in and she's uncomfortable, I'll be able to sympathize, since I'll know just what it feels like!
New Photos! Click the "Photos" link at the top of this page (or click here) for new pictures of Kaeta, mostly from Easter. We entered one of them in a national "cute baby contest," so we'll keep you posted if we hear anything about that!
Here is a video demonstrating an easy way to peel the skin off of a potato. (Warning: the video is all in loud, exuberant Japanese.) A few nights ago, I gave this a try.
First, you make a thin cut around the center of your potato. Then, you put it in boiling water:
I left it in there for about 10 minutes. Next, you pull the potato out and stick it in ice cold water:
Wait about 10 seconds, then pick up the potato and squeeze the skin off. Well, that's the idea, at least. Apparently, the Japanese are more skilled at this step than I am -- for me, the skin came off easily, but in about 20 little pieces. Also, I sloshed water all over the counter and floor. But it did work, sort of:
We had a pretty big hail storm pass right over our house for 10-15 minutes today around 5:15pm. Here's some video of the hail in our front and back yards:
Picture this: It's Tuesday evening, and I've just returned from the grocery store. Being a man, I am attempting to bring in all of the groceries at once, so I have 5 heavy plastic sacks looped over various appendages, a 12-pack of paper towels hooked under my armpit, and I'm trying to pick up a 6th and final plastic sack using my one free pinky finger.
But this sack is not structurally sound. It's engineers never intended that it should hold a can of corn, some coffee creamer, and a large salsa bottle. I get it by just one loop, which immediately breaks, the bag plummets, and there is an explosive sound. Salsa fills this little plastic bag faster than a certain family member can fill a diaper.
Anyway, this happened Tuesday, and I was quite grumpy about it. I was looking forward to that salsa! I had plans for a hot date involving me, the salsa, some chips, and a pre-recorded episode of The Office. Alas, 'twas not to be. So, I put the other groceries away, threw away the salsa bottle, rinsed off the coffee creamer, and got on with life.
At some point during this, I should have thought, "Hey, didn't I buy a can of corn?" But I didn't.
So, yesterday (Wednesday) when we got home from work, I noticed an even spray of little yellow particles all over the driveway behind the car. Baffled, I walked around and saw this:
Apparently, I had backed over the corn that morning on the way to work, leaving it all day to dry out into little corn raisins that stuck to my driveway and were a real pain to clean up! What a mess. But still, on some level, isn't that kind of hilarious? This story doesn't have a moral, but if it did it would be something like, "Just because you dropped the salsa doesn't mean you have to back over the corn." Ponder that.
It's strangely disconcerting when two completely unconnected lines of thought suddenly join up.
Today I read this review of the movie V for Vendetta, which says that while the movie is ostensibly anti-fascism, the main character is actually (and without a sense of irony) a fascist. Further down in the article it mentions a book called Modern Fascism by Gene Veith, an author I can highly recommend.
So I popped on over to Veith's blog, where he was talking about the death of humanism and that we should revive the Reformation term "Christian humanism."
I didn't know what that was, so I googled it and found this article about Christian humanism. It mentions a guy named Desiderius Erasmus as "the most influential of the Christian humanists," so I looked up his book "In Praise of Folly." It was written for Sir Thomas More, who I recently read a book about, but that's just an aside.
Okay, here ends path #1.
Later, apropos of nothing, I was trying to remember the name of the pope during the Reformation. So I googled and found this page and read about him (Pope Leo X).
Right below him was something about Martin Luther, so I read that, and it mentioned that he wrote Bondage of the Will against Erasmus! (I knew I'd heard that name somewhere! I'm sure my liberal-artsy friends are chuckling at me now.) Sure enough, I found that Erasmus wrote Freedom of the Will against Luther's theology of salvation!
It's just weird to me. Why did (1) reading a movie review, and (2) wondering who was pope during the Reformation, lead to the same guy?
My knowledge of history is woefully incomplete, but little things like this are what make me want to read more history to fill in the holes.
Tonight Johnathan had a concert at his house that was really great! We played one song together, called "Decatur, or A Round of Applause for Your Stepmom!" by Sufjan Stevens. Although we are both really into music, we haven't really played that many duets together, so this was really special for me (and fun!). Here's a video of it; if you notice a baby cooing/squealing in a couple of places, that's Kaeta singing her part :-)
Bible Explorer is totally free Bible software that's stuffed with features and has a growing library of electronic books (currently around 150 free, plus over 1400 additional books for sale. Click here for a list of the free books). I highly recommend giving it a try! I work for WORDsearch, the company that makes it.
Instaverse is a free progam that makes Scripture references pop up when you mouse over them in a web browser. This is nice if you read online commentaries, devotionals, etc. that refer to verses without quoting them. If you have the Bible memorized, please disregard.
(If you don't know about RSS feeds, I recommend spending 5 minutes at bloglines.com. I'm hooked on it -- it's a great way to check multiple sites for updates in one fell swoop, and you can keep up with news, your friends' blogs, and anything else with an RSS feed very easily.)
If I put our names here, maybe googling for them will someday lead people to this page, so here they are: Derek Kurth, Karianne Kurth (formerly Karianne Leikam, aka Kari Leikam), and Kaeta Kurth.
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