It's the First of August

I don't have anything in particular to blog about, but a blog without blogging is like a rainclouds without rain. So here are a few bullet points that I've chosen to blurb about in honor of this, the first day of August.

• In Canada, today is a civic holiday. In Ireland and Scotland, it's a bank holiday. And in the Northern Territory of Australia, it's Picnic Day. (I know all of this thanks to my faithful 2011 wall calendar, which features photographs of outhouses surrounded by picturesque scenery.) But in the United States of America, we have a dearth of holidays, so there's nothing much special about the first day of August.
• Smoky Chipotle Mac-n-Cheddar. Great stuff. My wife has all the details.
• I enjoy writing. I particularly enjoy writing fiction. I wish I could remember that more often. I also wish that there were more hours in the day, or that I needed less sleep, or something, so that it would be easier to find regular time for writing. I wrote for a little while this evening, trying to resurrect a story called The Desert that I started (and stopped) about three years ago. I think it might be going somewhere, finally.
• The week we spent with my family in Georgia (third week of July) was very good. I wish travel was less expensive and time-consuming. Visiting once or twice a year is really not often enough.
• While we were in Georgia, I bought a dragon. Molded plastic, of course, not the real thing. 4.5 inches tall at the head and 7 inches long. Bright green, with flecks of gold on his scales. He sits on my desk. I think I will call him Oswald.
• I've been reading P.D. James' Original Sin, a murder mystery that takes place in and around a publishing company. So far there have been two apparent suicides and one apparent murder. Slightly disconcerting, as I work for a publishing company. But it's a good read. P.D. James does know how to craft a good mystery novel.
• I've also been reading Thomas Oden's Classic Christianity, which I mentioned previously here. I've made it all the way to page 169. Slow going, but very much worth the effort. Here are a few quotes that I found particularly striking, from his discussion of God's acts of creation. The third one is kind of mind-blowing.
  

"The sole motive of creation is God's gracious willingness to share goodness with creatures." (p.139)

"God could have freely created any world, this world or any other world, but this is the one God chose to create—not those supposedly 'better' ones our minds proudly imagine we could have invented had we been in charge. God's purpose is in fact being fulfilled precisely through the struggle and destiny of this world of freedom under accountable conditions, not those fabricated by others." (p.139)

"While affirming the distinction between eternity and time, it is still possible to affirm that the universe is from the temporal point of view 'everlasting,' in the particular sense that before it no time was and at its end there will be no time. Thus creation is rightly said to be as old as time itself, yet eternity encompasses all times. Hence eternity is not chronologically 'antecedent' to time, but, rather, time logically presupposes eternity. For there was no time 'before' creation—the 'before' implies a time, and a 'time' before time is evidently self-contradictory.
"The eternal is simultaneously present to every moment of time, including past and future time. In light of the incarnation, the now is rightly viewed as eternity manifesting itself as time." (p.142)

I guess that's about it for now. Perhaps I'll post again soon, and perhaps then I'll actually have something to say...