In which trek reviews Confessions of a Mega Church Pastor

I decided to pick up Confession of a Mega Church Pastorafter Lendle popped it up in their recommendations to me. This recommendation came after I'd read (and reviewed) Rome Sweet Home;so, a topical recommendation, I thought.

First, I must state that I did not like this book as much as the Hahns' tale. The Hahn's conversion journey was recounted in a he talks/she talks alternation. Hunt, speaking only for himself, has chosen to use an extended metaphor throughout the work. He likens the Catholic Church to an old house and talks about the various aspects of Catholicism as if each one was a room of the house: dining room, kitchen, basement, bedroom, family cemetery, and front porch. If the metaphor had been used to clearly illustrate the journey of the author, I would have liked it more.

The title and subtitle led me to think that this was a recounting of one man's spiritual journey from a place where he felt out of step to a place where he felt at home. The text, however, has less personal journey and more simplified apologetics.

Please understand, I do not object to apologetics. I think that it is a fascinating study and a necessary one for the defense of the faith. On picking up this book, though, I was looking for a retelling of an individual's journey, the challenges and the changes, the discerning of a path - more like Rome Sweet Home. I didn't find that here: what I found instead was a dialogue which justified the foregone conclusion - not a bad book - but not what I was expecting.

I cannot say that this is a bad book just that it is not what I was expecting to read at the moment. There are some very good ideas presented and sound Catholic doctrine but not really an intimate sharing of a spiritual journey.

WABP - now with more medication

The trek family was supposed to go away on vacation this week. Note the operative phrase in that sentence: supposed to go. A Wednesday Afternoon Bullet Post seems the right way to talk about the supposed to go...

• Dr PreciousMetal and I have maintained good control over my allergies and asthma this year. Between judiciously applied pharmaceuticals and immunotherapy, I've not had many bad days at all. Oh, okay, there's been the occasional bad air-quality day coinciding with high pollen or animal dander contact but nothing requiring the use of a rescue inhaler.



• Until the chicken incident.



• Last Saturday, Number Guy and Neatnik went out to mow the lawn. I like mowing the lawn but I am highly allergic to grass and the pollen counts have been quite high locally.



• They came inside one by one afterwards and I sent them both straight to the showers. Still, I could smell the grass on them and my lungs began to complain with a deep cough follwed by a trailing wheeze. Despite the rescue inhaler, I was in some distress and put in a call to Dr PreciousMetal.



• I also called our vacation destination to cancel: we were supposed to visit a new horse ranch for five days.



• The pollen counts up in that area were reporting in 2 points higher than at home and I am also allergic to horses.



• The ranch was quite nice about the eleventh hour cancellation and Dr PreciousMetal called in a prescription to suppress the insanity of my hyperactive immune system.



• Methylprednisolone sucks, in case you were unaware of that little factoid.



• And I've needed the rescue inhaler every day since then.



• Sunday we were driven out of church by all of the incense - Corpus Christi - major feast day.



• Went to a later mass at a different parish but the pulmonary damage was done.



• Since we weren't going to be away from home, I cancelled my proctor and administered my own exams on Monday afternoon. My students were quite surprised and very sympathetic to my plight.



• Of course, I also sounded as raspy as an 80-year old, two-pack a day nicotine addict.



• I also brought them cookies.



• Since the last chapter of the textbook was about tracking cookies, online privacy, and security, there were a lot of bad jokes during the pre-test review.



• This is the first time I've brought a treat to a final but this class was very good. Fully half of them earned As and no one failed - a first.



• While I was proctoring and submitting final grades, Number Guy took Neatnik out to lunch.



• When I got home, I worked on the star patches. I think I did okay. Take a look-see:
  
  
  Twenty achievement stars
• Question of the day: can Neatnik grow faster than her need to pant leg length to accommodate her stars??



• Saw some interesting cloud formations the other day. One both Number Guy and I thought looked like a hippo in a tutu.



• Yesterday, grandma sent an early text message about a news article so Neatnik asked if she could visit for a while. This allowed Number Guy and I to catch a morning showing of X-Men: First Class.



• Not a kid-friendly movie!



• I loved it!



• Number Guy said he had a bit of trouble getting into it since he knew it was a bit of a tragedy but then, he has read the comics and I simply enjoy the stories the movies have presented.



• We both laughed at the scene when young Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr made contact with Logan.



• We knew we had seen the actor playing Professor X in something else but we couldn't put a name to his face. Later, Number Guy looked it up: he was Mr Tumnus!



• Cars 2 was playing this morning so we piled into the minivan early and zipped over. This was a fun family movie: Pixar goes Bond, amazing amount of realism in both the explosions and the architecture. A bit more enviromentalist than I would have liked but you can't have everything, I suppose.



• The Muppets are coming back to the big screen in November.



• Had a delicious cinnamon scone for breakfast. Picked it up a a tea shop after the movie.



• Can you really call a meal eaten at 3:15pm breakfast?



• Still trying to come up with good daytrip ideas for the remainder of the week.



• Miniature golf, museums, and whale watching have all been bandied about chez trek since Sunday. Suggestions?

As long as we are home, we're going to take our newly minted green belt to tae kwon do class so this is a good place to stop and wish everyone a happy Wednesday.

In which Number Guy scrounges

Some nights, Number Guy likes to scrounge around YouTube for interesting stuff. The other night he found a really awesome video involving stop action Legos and Johnny Horton's version of Jimmy Driftwood's Battle of New Orleans.

Check out the creatures in the background!

On stars and glue

Neatnik's Brownie troop had their annual end of year party last week. Since they have all just finished the third grade, they "flew up" to Juniors. It is kind of bittersweet: I am proud of my daughter for sticking with scouts and love seeing her conquer new obstacles but at the same time I miss my tiny little baby girl who needed me for everything from diaper-wiping to shoe-tying.

Earned their wings

Our troop has been pretty active. Neatnik has earned about two dozen Try-It badges and the back of her vest is adorned with a plethora of activity patches. Sadly, her vest is the only one which has all of its patches, badges, and insignia affixed. Most of the other moms have tried to rely on ironing on the these items because the packaging says that they are iron on. Here's the catch, though: you can iron them on and they will stick for a while but eventually they fall off again.

I iron the emblems to the vest for positioning and then I machine stitch them for permanency. I haven't been so diligent about Neatnik's tae kwon do pants, though.

Her martial arts school issues little stars for certain kinds of achievements in and out of class. These include gold stars for good grades, silver stars for outstanding attendance, orange stars for community service, and blue stars for reading books. Every ten books earns a blue star. At the last graduation, Neatnik earned four blue stars, three orange stars, and one gold and silver star each.

At the party this week, the troop leader shared that someone at council turned her on to Patch Attach.It looks like your basic while all-purpose glue.You put the glue on the back of the patch, let it dry, then iron the patch to the fabric.

I plan to continue sewing the patches to the scout vest but those tae kwon do pants... You see, the stars are small and, well, star-shaped and they go on the outside leg of the pants. It is a pain to machine sew a patch to a tube and hand-sewing them is out of the question. Last time I tried, I punctured myself repeatedly with the eye of the needle because the stupid stars are so thick and tough to pierce.

The craft store was out of Patch Attach but they did have lots of Liquid Thread.The lady at the store assured me that it would work just as well. The packaging says that you can wash and dry and even dry clean the fabric and the glue will hold.

Neatnik had a belt promotion coming up really soon, so I bought a tube and affixed the nine outstanding stars to her pants.

That's a lot of stars!

I took no chances with the stars until the star application and her promotion. She wore her backup pants for the days before graduation.

Sadly, on graduation day, two stars fell off right onto the floor and several others showed signs of wanting to escape. Number Guy and I each sewed down one of her blue stars on Friday. He bent a needle and we had to chuck it: these are tough stars!

As of right now, Neatnik has five stars sewn down properly, five more that are somewhat glued to the pants, two which were glued down and fell off the pants and eight more new ones from graduation which need attention.

I am seriously considering purchasing some black black grosgrain ribbon,sewing the stars to it with the machine and then sewing the strip to the pants. Hand-sewing a straight line along the edge of the ribbon will be much less painful and much faster than sewing these stupid achievement stars to the canvas pants.

Comments, anyone?

In which trek reviews The Nasty Little Writing Book

I borrowed The Nasty Little Writing Bookby Madelyne Simone Rovenhauer from a fellow Lendler this week. It looked like an interesting tongue-in-cheek treatise on the publishing industry and in some respects that is what it is.

Rovenhauer (a pseudonym) opens with a disclaimer tagged "READ THIS FIRST". She then goes on to say that this is a satirical work and not a plan for actually becoming a best-selling author. Her description of what you should do with your copy of the book if you do not agree to abide by the terms of the disclaimer are amusing.

In terms of a work of fiction, the book is kind of funny and the satire is decently well done. A number of times I found myself thinking that the author was cynically describing exactly the opposite of real life - such as when she describes the publishing industry as "just about as warm and fuzzy as anyone can stand" (location 258). Other times her descriptions of how a writer might dress or how he might get the daily work done very well matched descriptions of writing environments I have heard directly from a writer's own mouth. Of course, she contends that writers lie all the time so as to hide the glamor of their true lifestyle from the reader. One other plus for this book is that Rovenhauer is unafraid to use esoteric words in her prose: readers who like to expand their vocabulary may find themselves grateful for the built-in dictionary of the Kindle. Of course, any book that uses the word asthete five times in only 132 printed pages is suspect (locations 54, 743, 920, 167, and 1606).

Having praised the Kindle's features, I must now criticize the Kindle edition of this book: it is just one more instance of an ebook being substandard in both layout and editing.

In my Kindle for PC client, the layout of the text is pretty good. It looks like any standard book. In my Kindle Wi-Fi,however, it looks very poorly planned. Vertical spacing between section headings and paragraph text is missing, for instance.

I noticed very early on (location 116) that the word "often" was being presented as "of ten". The first time this happened, I chalked it up to a miss on the part of the editor. When it continued to occur, I became a bit frustrated. Searching the book for the word "often" yielded a mere three hits (locations 115, 288, and 753). Searching for the string literal "of ten" returned a whopping 25 hits, fairly evenly distributed throughout the text. This is not the only species of typographical error I noted, just the most egregious. Another consistent misspelling is "of her" which is regularly transformed into "other" (as in "skin other shoulder" at location 594).

Several times a comma was replaced with another character, either another letter or a non-alphabetic character. While a reader with any intelligence at all can figure out the intended word quickly, it still interrupts the flow of the narrative to have to stop intermittently to re-read a word or phrase in order to bring sense to the sentence. Punctuation seemed to be optional occasionally, too. In some places, one sentence's ending and another's beginning was indicated only by a capitalization of the next word - no periods, period.

As interesting as this book began, I have to say that I am glad I did not shell out any cash for it. Granted, the current price for the Kindle edition is only 99¢ but I am glad that I didn't pay even that much for it. Shame on the publisher for bringing such a substandard edition to Kindle.

Also available in hardcover,where one hopes fewer typographical errors dwell.

Feathers on Fridays: Second edition

Hi, this is Neatnik, guest blogging for Mommy again. I was supposed to tell you all about our second week of owning chickens. Alas, we learned by last Friday night, that Mommy has extreme allergies to chickens! It started out with some itchiness and then she couldn't breathe after she handled them.

Wah-wah-WAH!

Daddy sent text messages to people we know who already have some chickens - but nobody could take more chicks. Then on Saturday morning, we got a phone call from the pipe major of Daddy's band. One of the chicken owners had forwarded Daddy's message to him. Pipey had a chicken coop in his yard already. All he needed was some chickens.

Mommy's Note: Pipey and his wife had been planning chicken ownership for two years and they had decided that five chickens was the perfect number for their yard. She said to him earlier last Friday that they should get chickens on Father's Day but he was hemming and hawing about still wanting to tweak the coop setup some. Then Number Guy's text message got forwarded to him - saying that there were five chickens in need of a new forever home. Yeah, it was meant to be.

Daddy delivered Elle, Emma, Dee, Ash, and Red to their new home right away. Daddy called their new home a chicken mansion.

Pipey says I can visit when I like but I haven't visited them yet. We are supposed to go over there tomorrow and I hope to take some pictures then.

I am glad they have a nice home, but I really am missing them, too.

Mostly about reading

Not a creature is stirring here at chez trek on this second day of summer, except me, obviously. A good time for a Wednesday Morning Bullet Post. As soon as I grab my tea, that is...

• Ah, tea!What a lovely thing. Piping hot with a splash of milk and a scant bit of sugar. Heaven on earth.



• Since I sent in all the Box Tops before school closed, our little balsa wood collecting box is very empty. Wondering if I should launch another Boxtopapalooza this summer. Would a new contest garner more comments?



• Neatnik's report card arrived in the mail yesterday. The children used to bring them home with them on the last day but now they mail them.



• We are so very proud of our Neatnik: straight As for the last term and final averages. Way to go, my child!



• Sadly, Number Guy was on a business trip yesterday. We are postponing academic celebration until Daddy is able to join us.



• Speaking of terms, the summer term is almost finished. My students have only today's class and then finals on Monday.



• As much as I enjoy this crop of students, I am ready for the school year to end. In past, I've not taught summer term and always had a few weeks between the end of my school year and the end of Neatnik's school year.



• This year I did not and I missed it.



• I was also planning to have the hardware from the Infamous Ankle Incident removed in May but now am putting that off until the fall.



• Nobody needs limited mobility during the summer.



• Did I happen to mention that one of my students came to the first class in a cast? Or that the same student showed up a few days later in a sling?? Or that two other students showed up in casts and bandages a few days after that???



• Could this be contagious?



• I am really enjoying Lendle. So far, I've borrowed 14 books and have three more queued to accept the loans. I've also loaned out 22 books and I convinced Abigail to sign up!



• If you leave your Lendle handle/URL, I promise to visit you there.



• Had a little issue with my Kindlethis weekend. The battery started draining like mad.



• Kindle support recommended restarting the unit then recharging and seeing if that fixed the problem. They thought it might be a software glitch.



• Didn't work. Was back on the horn with them on Monday. Got a guy who mumbled about indexing but wouldn't tell me what to do - just wanted to send an email. What if I had more questions?? I asked for a supervisor and he hung up on me.



• Eventually got a supervisor who told me what needed doing and also sent written directions after the call. Said to leave the Kindle on the wall charger for 24 hours to complete the process.



• I am in the middle of Antiques Bizarre,which is a Lendle loan, but I started a library bookwhile the Kindle was in hospital.



• Didn't want to be chained to the wall.



• Reminded me of when we were kids and the moms all had the loooooooong coiled telephone cordin the kitchen so that they could see down the hallway to where we were getting in trouble.



• I'm pretty sure our phone cord stretched a good ten feet under all that strain.



• The Kindle appears to be all charged up. I really hope this has fixed the battery drain problem as the Lendle loan is due on Saturday.



• I had a heap of loans all come through at the same time so this is the last of a batch that had to be read immediately.



• Unlike the library, there are no renewals on ebook loans.



• Time out: I need to reheat my tea...



• Ah, much better. Where was I? Doesn't matter, change of subject. That's what's so nice about a bullet post!



• I signed Neatnik and myself up for the summer reading programs at the local library.



• Personally, I think that the program's parameters are a very sad statement on literacy in America. The program runs from the beginning of June to the middle of August. I think there are about 72 days in the program. For the young ones, that works out to under seven minutes of reading a day. Adults would have to finish a book every 18 days.



• I'm pretty certain that nobody reading this bullet is at all surprised that we have both achieved our goals in the first week. The bar, after all, was set very low.



• Neatnik has read 68 69 new books this year, coinciding with completing her second summer reading incentive and I am planning to bring her to the book store to select her reward book.



• Note to self #1: Check to see if the library has the Happy Meal incentives yet. I hate fast food, but allowing the child a Happy Meal as a treat a couple of times a summer? That I can do.



• Even if I need to clothespin my nose shut while she noshes.



• Note to self #2: Come up with new summer reading incentive ideas.



• She is also keeping up very well with her math homework. The school sent home a math workbook this year. I have Neatnik doing two pages a day on weekdays and she get weekends off.



• Note to self #3: Print out multiplication and division math fact pages for review.

I need to wrap up here: Neatnik just made her way down the stairs and said that her tummy hurts. Prescription for a generalized tummy hurts complaint: bit of reading on Mommy's lap therapy.

Happy Wednesday!

Updated Wednesday, June 22nd, 5:34pm If you'd like to torture yourself, the second chapter of Ghost Storyis posted here.

Cool factor

Number Guy's car is getting kinda, well, not to put too fine an edge on it, old. It just passed its eleventh birthday and, like us humans, it isn't exactly the same unit that rolled off the assembly line anymore. Aside from the normal wear and tear of a car in its second decade of life, there some somewhat more major items requiring repair all of a sudden. For example, the front suspension is making some interesting clunking noises and when the door locks engage one hears a rather impressive grinding noise which rather resembles the sound of the starter protesting when one attempts to "start" an already running car.

This is the point at which one begins to wonder whether it would be better to repair the current vehicle or to invest in a new one. I know, it seems pretty much like a no-brainer. Old car facing major repair bills usually means replace me now. The thing is, his car has only about 52,000 miles on it. He uses it for getting to and from work and band practice. For family driving and long trips, we take the minivan, which has more comfortable child-seating arrangements and a DVD player.

On a whim, we went to visit a couple of dealerships this morning. Since we are very early in the data-gathering phase, not knowing for certain whether we are repairing or purchasing, we decided to go for the cool factor in our test drives. First up, the Mini Cooper.

This was quite the posh dealership. The franchisee itself is brand-new and the building was custom-built. The had complimentary bagels and coffee available and the paper towels in the bathroom were actually neatly folded microfiber napkins. No loud air dryers or cheap c-fold paper towels for them.

We took out a convertible and the sales guy climbed into the backseat next to the Neatnik and her booster seat. He spent the entire test drive backseat driving. Told us exactly where we were allowed to take the car on the test drive and described for us, in great detail, how a turn signal works. We were rather stressed by the time we returned to the car lot and I was glad to be away from there.

Final assessment of the car? You are paying for the Bond-esque cool factor and not much else.

Next up was a trip to the Jeep dealer. The salesman photocopied Number Guy's driver's license, slapped a temporary plate on the back, and said, "See ya soon". He even waved.

If you have ever driven a truck, you have an idea of how a Jeep feels. There's quite a bit of "play" in the steering wheel and you are really high up off the road. We tooled along a bit and then Number Guy pulled over on a residential side street so that we could execute a Chinese fire drill. While I was adjusting the seat, a guy in a red Jeep passed going the other way. He slowed way down, pointed at the window stickers and gave me the biggest grin and a thumbs up. It's a Jeep thing, I guess. Washed the sour taste from the Mini test drive right out of my mouth.

Final assessment of the Jeep? Loads of fun to drive and great if you want to go off-road but not very practical with respect to gas mileage. Yes, you are paying for cool factor here, too, but you get much more other stuff for your dollar. And way more cool.

Updated, Sunday, June 19th, 9:25am The Jeep sales guy called us later in the afternoon to personally thank us again for test driving.

Feathers on Fridays: First edition

Hi, this is Neatnik, guest blogging for Mommy. We picked up five chickens on Wednesday evening. We have been working on naming them. Their blog names are: Elle, Emma, Dee, Red, and Ash.

From the day we got her, Elle has gotten faster and faster. She is black and white. Emma has "sparrow" feathers. She, Red, and Dee are mostly golden. Emma is my favorite chicken. Dee has buff-colored wings. Red has reddish wings. Ash is small, black, and has flecks of white.

In size order, they are: Elle > Red > Dee > Ash > Emma.

My jobs are to make sure they have clean water all the time, medicated chicken food , with grit, every morning, and scratch at night.

The girls - now with names!

Science project

Meet Neatnik's summer science project: the girls

Sorry about the lawn mower in the background...

Come visit tomorrow: Neatnik will be guest blogging the first installment of Feathers on Fridays.

Hamsters and fishes and chickens, oh my!

In honor of today being the last day of third grade, I thought we would have a nice little Tuesday Morning Bullet Post.

• Yesterday's mail brought us another envelope of Box Tops for Education from a blog reader - thank you to all who have helped to support Neatnik's school!



• Look for some School at Home posts over the coming weeks. I am not particularly thrilled with the summer reading list sent home from school but The Secret Gardenand Peter Pandid make an appearance on this year's list, so that's something.



• I entered Neatnik's summer reading club minutes on the county library's web site yesterday. The goal for the entire summer is 480 minutes of reading. Neantik's got over 930 minutes logged since June 1st. The hours in the car this weekend sure helped.



• :: sotto voce :: I knit on a sock for the Neatnik in the car on Sunday afternoon. Got half a leg finished. Just thought I should slip that in here unobtrusively since this is *supposed* to be "the wool and the word". That is all. Back to the "word" now...



• Neatnik has already redeemed her Barnes & Noble summer reading incentive. She picked Braving the Lakeas her reward book. This is one of those decision-driven books and it has an online extra component. Nice.



• She's halfway through her Borders incentive and has read 65 new books this year, including two loaned Kindle books from Lendle: The Pizza Mysteryand The Mystery of the Stolen Sword.



• I've read over 100 new books this year but I know it would be more if I spent less time puttering around on Lendle. If you view my profile over there, you'd understand.



• I am in the middle of two books: False Pretensesfrom the library and Moving Is Murderon Lendle.



• False Pretenses begins a spin-off series following the last Sophie Trace novel, The Right Call.I like the author's style but in this book she has dueling dialects: Cajun and four-year-old lispy. I may not finish it; I really hate it when authors write a dropped "r" for little kids.



• Moving Is Murder is starting out slowly but I am hoping that things pick up soonest. I would feel badly about not finishing a Lendle loan: after one loan, you cannot loan again and it would mean I didn't finish a book some other Lendler might have.



• Lendle alerted me last time I placed a request. Said I have a lot of books on request and reminded me that I only have two weeks to read a book and maybe I wouldn't be able to read all the lends in the allotted time.



• Go ahead and laugh; Number Guy laughed out loud when I mentioned that to him.



• Besides, I am requesting for two readers: the Neatnik and I both. There are are more juvenile books available on Kindle than you might expect. Sadly, the Agency Model publishers seem to be the biggest offenders with respect to disabling lend privileges. Do they not realize that they are diminishing their returns this way?



• I told my class about Lendle. One student in particular was interested. She owns a first-generation Kindle and signed up as soon as she got home from school. She also has told me that she is Catholic so I told her about Rome Sweet Homeafter class yesterday. She was way impressed and said she was going to order it from Amazon last night.



• We currently have a pet hamster, Magellan, and an assortment of tropical fish. Magellan is a family pet but the fish are Number Guy's responsibility. We may be adding to our little menagerie soon: a local kindergarten teacher hatched a half dozen chicks in her classroom this month and they are ready to find a new home. Yup, we are looking into becoming backyard chicken farmers.



• I was inspired by Jessie.



• Spent some time last night with fellow parishioners who already have a little flock of Bantam hens. They sent us home with some fresh eggs and I scrambled them up this morning for Neatnik and Number Guy. She said they were the best eggs ever. Scheduled to pick up our chicks Wednesday.

The sun is shining at the moment but we are anticipating heavy storms later today, so I should probably end here and see if I can't enjoy the rays while they last. Uh, oh, between starting that sentence and finishing it, the sun went away and it is looking all dark and omnious now. The weather has been so bipolar lately.

In which trek reviews Rome Sweet Rome

Quite some years ago, I'd heard about a guy by the name of Scott Hahn from a couple of people. They mentioned that he had been a virulent anti-Catholic Presbyterian minister who converted to Catholicism.

Last week, I requested Rome Sweet Homefrom a fellow Lendler. The loan came through and I downloaded it on Friday. I am so glad that I did.

Number Guy's bagpipe band had a weekend gig out of state so we all packed up and piled in and drove seven hours up mountains and down valleys, to our destination. As frustrating as the heavy traffic and delays were, they were nowhere near so annoying as Alice, who decided to come along on the trip. It's bad enough when she drops in unexpectedly at home, but to commandeer a weekend trip? Talk about pushy!

If Alice's joining us wasn't bad enough, the weather turned foul overnight. Torrential rains and a drop in temperature resulted in Number Guy hitching a ride from the hotel to the gig with another piper while Neatnik, Alice, and I zipped to the nearest mega-mart for long pants and sweatshirts. At least that went well: grabbed two full changes of clothes off the clearance rack for the Neatnik for just seventeen dollars.

Back at the hotel, Neatnik dragged Alice and I to the pool. I tried to get Alice to bug off while soaking in the hot tub for an hour. This did not work very well, sorry to say but it was warming. Afterwards, we dressed as warmly as we could and drove over to meet the band for lunch. With Neatnik fed and a break in the rains, I thought things might be looking up. Then the rains resumed and poor Neatnik started shivering. Back to the hotel and pool.

While Neatnik imitated a dolphin on speed, I read Rome Sweet Rome. It was riveting. The book is arranged in successive life segments. First Scott writes about what was going on in his life, then Kimberly responds with her own story in the same time interval.

Scott describes his childhood as nominally Protestant. In high school, he became serious about Scripture from his association with an organization called Young Life. He studied Martin Luther and John Calvin and became very anti-Catholic. He was convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was in error and worked diligently to pull Catholics away from teh Church to a purer Christianity. Kimberly's childhood was quite a bit different as she was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Her family life revolved around church and church-based youth activities.

Somewhere during the early years of Scott and Kimberly's marriage, I decided Neatnik was sufficiently waterlogged and pulled her from the pool. We decamped to the lobby to wait for the soggy pipers to return, she playing on the computer and me reading.

When Number Guy reappeared, cold and soggy, my Kindle reminded me for the third time that it was tired and wished to cuddle up with some alternating current, please. I was in a quandary: Scott had just become a Roman Catholic and Kimberly was feeling lost and abandoned by all. I couldn't in good conscience abandon her - though I was still wishing that Alice would abandon me.

I put my Kindle on the charger in the minivan and downloaded the book to Neatnik's Kindle and kept going.

I finished Rome Sweet Rome in less than a day. I don't often opt for biographical or autobiographical works but this one, the story of a journey to find a spiritual home, drew me in completely. It was easy to identify with Scott's searching and studying at the same time as sympathizing with Kimberly's feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

Scott's writing voice and Kimberly's are definitely different and not merely the difference between a male and a female writer. His comes across more passionately; hers is more reserved but very erudite.

Scott describes the story as detective in the beginning, horror in the middle, and romance at the end. While I can see and understand his descriptions of the parts of the journey, I see the story as a whole as a tale of bravery. Takes a brave man to risk all and he nearly did.

The answers to his questions led Scott to resign from his (successful) pastorate and his teaching position. Protestant friends became cold and distant, perceiving Scott's conversion as a degeneration into heresy.

Stepping out in faith, despite the risks, paid off: eventually, Kimberly also converted to Catholicism and Scott took up a teaching position as Professor of Theology at Franciscan University (Steubenville, Ohio), one of the most Christ-centered Catholic universities in the country.

An excellent read.

In which trek is easily amused

I was borrowing a book on Lendle today for the Neatnik. I put her Kindle down next to mine and they both went to sleep and you know how pets start to look like their people?

Very easily amused!

In which trek reviews Over the Edge

I picked up Brandilyn Collins' Over the Edgethis week and once I started, I could not put it down - literally, not a figure of speech I could not put it down.

When I visit the library, I tend to make my way to the new releases bookshelf. This week, Over the Edge was there. I have read several of Collins' books in past and enjoyed them so it was natural to scoop it up and tote it home. Honestly, I didn't even read the back cover before I opened to the first page.

Although Brandilyn Collins is known as a Christian fiction author, this particular book was very light on the Christianity. It was, instead, very heavy on the suspense and medical research angles. An excellent read.

The stage is set in the prologue in which a camouflaged man enters Janessa McNeil's house as she and her 9-year old daughter, Lauren, sleep. He creeps into the master bedroom and as Jannie starts to awaken, he douses her with chloroform. Then he deposits three deer ticks, known to be carrying the Lyme spirochetes and three coinfectors, onto her head. Thus begins the denouement of his vendetta against her husband, Dr Brock McNeil, Lyme researcher. By deliberately infecting the doctor's wife, the assailant hopes to force the scientist into recanting his long-held position regarding chronic Lyme. Brock McNeil has been a leader of the camp that insists that there is no such thing as chronic Lyme and that a two to four week treatment with antibiotics is sufficient to cure the disease.

Living in a state that has had many cases of Lyme, I have known quite a few people who have contracted the disease, including a former pastor who eventually succumbed to complications of chronic Lyme at age 76. Despite all of this, I was unaware of the current controversy over treatment modalities and the denial of a large segment of the medical community to acknowledge the chronic Lyme. Over the Edge was very educational. I can't say that I will accept the author's position as unerring truth, I will say that I'm going to learn more about Lyme diagnosis and treatment: I once found a deer tick climbing up the front of my shirt.

Selected further reading on Lyme:

• The Clinical Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention of Lyme Disease, Human Granulocytic Anaplasmosis, and Babesiosis: Clinical Practice Guidelines by the Infectious Diseases Society of America


• Lyme Disease Association

In which Neatnik meets Ralph

You know you are truly a parent when a living creature has peed on your shoe and barfed all over you in the middle of the night. A related indicator of parenthood occurred yesterday. Allow me to use this indicator to regale you with a Tuesday Afternoon Bullet Post...

• Yesterday morning, I had a phone call from the school nurse.



• It was not unexpected: Neatnik had complained of a bit of a tummy ache before school and didn't want much breakfast.



• No fever, no barfing, so we sent her to school.



• This summer term, she has been staying after school on Mondays. Thought she just didn't want to go to after care.



• Got a call from the school just as I was writing the homework assignments on the board for my students: Neatnik barfed during recess.



• She had asked the playground monitor to go inside to the bathroom and was rebuffed with the statement, "Recess is almost over. Wait."



• So, my kid barfed all over the door mat.



• Poetic justice.



• I quickly called Number Guy and he picked her up.



• My students were very sympathetic and understanding.



• Probably helped that I let them go an hour early.



• No, we didn't scrimp on the lessons.



• Matter of fact, we finished yesterday's work and made in-roads on tomorrow's excessive workload.



• Why, no, I didn't set the syllabus - the course coordinator did.



• You can't send the child back to school until they are 24 hours fever- and barf-free.



• The DVD playerand the Kindle are getting workouts.



• She's feeling quite a lot better, the soupis staying down, and she even asked if she can go outside to practice bike riding.



• Back to school tomorrow! As of 6pm tonight, the fever has returned - no school tomorrow.



• I, on the other hand, have opted for a liquid diet today.



• Use your imagination. I'm sure you'll put it together quickly enough.



• Decided to sync my Kindle this morning. I've got over a dozen lends out on Lendle and I've borrowed a few ebooks, too.



• I've earned a whopping 19 achievements and have 159 request "vouchers" available to me at the moment.



• Kid with a new Christmas toy here.



• At first, I thought that I would have to reassign my returned books to their proper collections but I did not: when the books are lent, the Kindle remembers the collections to which they belong and returns them to their appointed spots.



• Just like in a library.



• Sweet!



• People complained vociferously on the discussion boards about Kindle books not having page numbers.



• The reason behind the decision to use locations instead of page numbers was fueled by the need to sync content between devices and the fact that readers can change the font size on their display. An Androidor a CrackBerryBlackBerryphone displays far fewer characters than a Kindle for PC clientdoes on a 17-inch desktop monitor.



• Still, Amazon noted the complaints and has now implemented pages for Kindle.



• Both page and location are now displayed when you press the Menu button.



• I sent in 100 BoxTops for Education into school last week. Thank you to the two bloggers who sent me envelopes of BoxTops.



• Maybe we'll reach our school goal this year!

Neatnik is now clamoring for me to pull out the board games and entertain her, so I guess this is as good a place to stop as any. Hope Ralph avoids your house this week.

On DRM and reader rights

I came across the following post this morning and am republishing it per the original poster in it's entirety (emphasis, where applied, is mine):

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations


• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses


• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright


• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

The instructions at the bottom of that post included a directive to repost, retweet, and even to print and tack the Bill on neighborhood telephone poles. These are our rights, mine and yours. Will you help spread the word?

The original poster has placed this Bill of Rights in the Public Domain, per the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" policy, waiving all copyright protections.