Our new cat door!

Intrepid examining our new cat door.

The real story is that they brought the wrong bath the other day, so we still have a gaping hole in the side of our house. But we find that humor helps! So we call it the cat door. And there is a silver lining to this most recent trouble. We get to enjoy the local hotspring. Ordinarily it seems "too expensive" but when we "have to go" we certainly enjoy it! There's an outdoor bath which is lovely in the moonlight. (This weekend is full moon.)

And the cats are certainly enjoying their new catdoor!

Singing while you work (walk)...

...is definitely more difficult than its cracked up to be. The songs song by chain gangs, galley slaves and the men who built the railways (or was that the chain gangs?!) always sound so cool. And I thought they did it to make the work go easier. But how did they do it?! I can't even sing when I walk without my voice breaking!

Why I don't answer my mail anymore

... nor a great many other things!

I'm slowly going blind. Or at least that's what it feels like when I try to work on my lame laptop.

SHARP PC-CL1-5VE

Moby Dick as Sarah christened my laptop is slim, light, has a DVD player and lots of memory... but the fan is always running. In the photo its propped up on hymn books so that it won't overheat. And, maybe because it overheated too many times, the backlight (inverter?) died just as I was about to leave for summer vacation in Miyagi Prefecture at the beginning of August. Naturally this was just a few months AFTER the warrantee ran out.

Matthew, who was staying with us at the time, showed me how to hook it up to an old monitor that I borrowed from another missionary. So now I have a non-portable laptop that is slowly driving me blind.

I suppose I should take it in to be fixed SOON but backing up the files is such a daunting a task!

I miss my old IBM.

Guilt and Innocence

"Why, I wondered, was there so little Russian outrage at the Gulag? Why did its perpetrators live on unpunished? I became dogged by the idea of a national collusion, in which everyone was guilty, everyone was innocent."

- p. 153 Colin Thubron, In Siberia

This paragraph from Colin Thubron's (very depressing!) book reminds me of the situation in Gosh that I have been writing to our prayer partners about... The inertia of good men (and women) has my stomach in knots. But surely God reigns.

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;

do not fret when men succeed in their ways,

when they carry out their wicked schemes. PS 37:7