The Time Has Come

I've decided to officially abandon this blog after having practically abandoned it already.  Keeping up two blogs wasn't working, so I'm closing up my When In Rome blog (the iWeb format is a pain to deal with) and leaving this one.  I've started a new blog where I'll post about our European adventures and whatever else is on my mind.  Please visit me at Europeanne and bookmark it or add it to your feed reader. I'm still tinkering with it and adding to my blogroll, but it's up and running.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Books I've Read in 2010

JANUARY

~ Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter - Thomas Cahill
~ The Bacchae - Euripides

~ Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity - David Allen

~ What Is a Healthy Church Member? - Thabiti M. Anyabwile
~ Republic - Plato

FEBRUARY

~ Augustus Caesar's World - Genevieve Foster
~ Art and the Bible - Francis A. Schaeffer
~ The War With Hannibal - Livy (selections)

MARCH

~ The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle
~ Get Outta My Face! How To Reach Angry, Unmotivated Teens With Biblical Counsel - Rick Horne
~ Antony and Cleopatra - Shakespeare
~ The Blind Side - Michael Lewis

APRIL

~ Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - Jules Verne
~ The Annals of Imperial Rome - Tacitus
~ Eclogues and Georgics - Virgil
~ Phantastes - George MacDonald

MAY

~ In the Beginning Was the Word:  Language, A God-Centered Approach - Vern Sheridan Poythress

JUNE

~ Punic Wars & Culture Wars:  Christian Essays on History and Teaching - Ben House
~ Blonde:  A Novel - Joyce Carol Oates

JULY

~ Peace Like a River - Leif Enger
~ The Overton Window - Glenn Beck
~ The Help - Kathryn Stockett
~ Practical Theology for Women: How Knowing God Makes a Difference in Our Daily Lives - Wendy Horger Alsup
~ That Old Cape Magic - Richard Russo

AUGUST

~ Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome - Robert Harris
~ Nine Dragons - Michael Connelly
~ Face of Betrayal - Lis Wiehl

SEPTEMBER

~ The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
~ Anna of Byzantium - Tracy Barrett

~ The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down - Andrew Young
~ Four Seasons In Rome:  On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World - Anthony Doerr
~ Seven Daughters and Seven Sons - Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy
~ Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together - Ron Hall, Denver Moore, and Lynn Vincent

OCTOBER

~ The Vikings - Virginia Schomp
~ So Brave, Young, and Handsome - Leif Enger
~ More Than Dates & Dead People:  Recovering a Christian View of History - Stephen Mansfield
~ Home - Marilynne Robinson
~ War - Sebastian Junger

NOVEMBER

~ Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor of the Printing Press - Fran Rees
~ New York: The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd

(Full disclosure: If you click on one of the links above and then make a purchase through Amazon, I get a tiny percentage. I then use it to feed my insatiable book habit. PalmPilot would appreciate your frequent clicks!)

Quote of the Day

From CDR Salamander:

Vote. Wallow in the glorious imperfections of our Representative Republic and vote. If you don't vote - then shut up. You are a slave; act like one and take what you are given.

Tagged By My Daughter

My daughter tagged me for a meme, and since I've been far too sporadic at posting, here goes:


Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:

"This means that it will likely say something not just about the four literary works themselves, but..."
From Writing Aids (Tapestry of Grace)

Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?

My desk

What is the last thing you watched on TV?

I rarely watch TV here.  Probably FoxNews.  

WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what time it is:

2:30

Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?

2:50

With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

My iTunes playlist -- Coldplay's "Yes" at the moment

When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

I went out on the balcony to figure out what the commotion was a couple of hours ago.  I heard a man's voice on a loudspeaker, and of course it was all in Italian.  No one else seemed concerned, so I guess it wasn't an emergency.  We caught the word "cucina", but our kitchen is fine so far.  :-)

Before you came to this website, what did you look at?

I looked up an article on Dennis Prager's website because I'm composing a blog post in my head.  I hope I can take it further than my head and actually type it up at some point.

What are you wearing?

Tonight is International Night at my husband's school.  There are over 30 countries represented, and we're all bringing food from our country and dressing the part.  So I'm wearing jeans, a blue & white gingham Gap shirt and a red tank under that.  Thanks, PalmGirl, for loaning me your tank. :-)

Did you dream last night?

I honestly don't remember.  I took Tylenol PM for a headache and don't remember anything.  

When did you last laugh?

We laugh a lot around here, but I really can't remember.   I'm sure I'll be laughing a lot tonight at International Tonight.

What is on the walls of the room you are in?

Some small black and white prints of Roman landmarks (I like these), a large print of a Giorgio Morandi painting that I don't like at all, a botanical print that looks out of place here, and two prints of old ships.  Also a small painting of a crucifix.  Our landlord has eclectic tastes, apparently.

Seen anything weird lately?

Pretty much every day in Italy just because the culture is still so foreign to me.  Nothing yet today, but I'm bound to see something weird tonight when I visit the Brits' table where haggis will be served.   

What is the last film you saw?

"Life as we Know it" with Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. We were on the navy base in Naples and really wanted to sit in a dark theater, eat popcorn, and relax American-style.  This was the only movie playing at the time we could go.  It was predictable but served our purposes.

If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?

First?  Probably a vacation somewhere in Europe for the PalmFamily over Christmas break. 

Tell me something about you that I don't know:

See next question.

Do you like to dance?

Yeah.  Back in the day, PalmPilot and I won a dance contest at a Christmas party.  But I can't remember the last time I went dancing.  

Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her? What if it's a boy?

Thankfully my daughter has let me off the hook with this question.

Buon Compleanno, PalmPilot!

Happy Birthday to the man I'm blessed to walk this life with.  

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

We've been living in Rome about two and a half months now, and I think I'm only just now catching my breath from all the changes our family has gone through this past summer.  It's all shaking out okay, but I think part of my weariness the past week or so has been a bit of a crash from everything catching up with me.  Since June, a few things have been different for our family:

First change:  We moved from Hawaii where we'd lived for eight years and put down roots.  The PalmKids consider Kailua their hometown, and we're all still homesick for it from time to time.  We have close friends there and a church that will always be special to our family.

Second change:  I left my job at Trinity Christian School.  I loved teaching there, and I miss the students, staff, and ministry.  Leaving that job meant I left a crazy busy schedule.

Third change:  PalmBoy has gone to college.  He loves Covenant, and I'm happy he's happy.  But we miss him badly.  Last night I pulled four napkins out when setting the table, so I guess I haven't come to terms with his move still.  And I can't wait until he comes home for Christmas.

Fourth change:  We moved to Italy.  We love the adventures we're having in Rome, but there is some culture shock and much to learn.

Fifth change:  I'm only homeschooling one child now.  My work load has lightened a great deal.  I don't feel so under the pile in my preparations, and that's a feeling I haven't had in years.

Sixth change:  Our apartment lease includes a cleaning lady.  Sweet Monika cleans for us three hours a week, and this has changed my life significantly!  For the better!

Seventh change:  Travel!  PalmPilot's school here includes the best field trips ever, and I get to go on them.  We've got two more big trips coming up, and I'll be an expert packer by the time they're over.

More changes are on the horizon as we have another move coming up in February.  When the orders are in hand, I'll share more about that.

As I contemplate all that's happened in the past few months, I can't help but thank God for going before us, sustaining us, and blessing us far beyond what we could ever deserve.  When everything else changes, He never does.

Then & Now

I'm still slowly working through Bruce L. Shelley's  Church History in Plain Language, and I enjoyed the chapter on "The Nectar of Learning" which explained Scholasticism, the time during the Middle Ages when "a distinctive method of scholarship arose and...a unique theology of the Middle Ages emerged."  I shared a quote from that chapter yesterday.

An article I read earlier today made me think of something I read in that chapter, and how far scholarship has fallen since the Middle Ages in at least one particular area.  When we disparagingly call them the Dark Ages, we should think on this (from Church History in Plain Language):

"As a young monk, Gerbert had been so brilliant a student that his abbot had taken the unusual step of sending him to Spain to study mathematics. Although Gerbert's mentor there was a Christian bishop, he was also exposed to the broad and tolerant culture of the ruling Muslims." [Shelley is quoting Anne Fremantle in the two preceding sentences.  What follows is Shelley.]  This was the first of a number of significant contributions Muslims made to the Christian intellectual awakening.

Gerbert returned to Rheims deeply impressed by the inquisitive, questing spirit of Muslim scholarship.

Contrast "the broad and tolerant culture of the ruling Muslims" to this:

A few months ago, I sat in a magnificent Victorian lecture hall at University College London. It was once one of finest centres of intellectual inquiry in Europe, thanks to the efforts of its founder, the sternly anti-clerical philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It did not take me long to realise that fear of clerical fascism had led Bentham's trembling successors to abandon intellectual inquiry and basic intellectual standards along with it.

I had come along with hundreds of others because, on Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former UCL student, tried to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear and kill the 278 passengers and crew on Northwest Airlines' flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. After such a narrow escape from mass murder, I thought that no one could deny that the universities needed to confront campus sectarianism. I reckoned without the limitless capacity for self-delusion of British academe.

Read the whole thing if you want to be even more discouraged about the state of academia today.  Are we in the Dark Ages now?