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We’ve been watching the NCAA Tournament lately. Not that we’re basketball fans the rest of the year, but there’s something about the tournament games – the crowd frenzy, the energy of the teams, just the stakes involved for the folks on the floor. I’m not in a pool or anything. The point of watching the games is to enjoy each game, not to pick the final four, two, or one. I’m usually not even cheering on a particular team. Just enjoying its excitement and athleticism.

Watching these guys (sorry, ladies, I haven’t caught any of your games) makes me want to shoot some hoops. I’ve never played competitively, other than against my siblings, but my body tenses up as I watch the games and I mentally berate players for missing “simple” layups or jump shots. I want to be running up and down that court. I want to be passing to my teammate, driving past my opponent, maybe even finding that my legs have been spring-enhanced to allow me to finally dunk.

Tennis doesn’t do it, gymnastics definitely doesn’t do it, and ice skating leaves me cold. Basketball, football, rugby, baseball – I want to jump into the game! The tournament will be over soon, and then baseball will begin, and I’ll suffer through a new kind of wanna-be athleticm through October. I could have caught that ball that just flew over the outfield wall. I could have legged out a bit more on that hit.

Now returning to the reality of life as a software engineer and a mom… otherwise known as a lump with no time.

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I’m completely and utterly exhausted. And when I get tired, I get cranky. Bear-just-having-been-woken-up-out-of-its-hibernation cranky. Mountain-lion-that-hasn’t-been-fed-in-three-days cranky. Koala-bear-jostled-out-of-its-eucalyptus-tree cranky (I hear those cute, cuddly looking bears are actually real nasty beasts). My recent attempts to stay decaffeinated merely seem to make it worse – not that caffeine would refresh me, really, but it might give me the energy to fool myself into thinking I’m not as tired as I am. Two hours (one way!) on the Beltway this morning didn’t help, either. Bumper to bumper traffic, moving so slowly as to lull you into near snoozeville, and so slow that the ride is interminably long to be fighting drooping eyelids. I remember being tired in college, but not as tired as this, and not for as long as this has been – weeks now, really, where I’ve stolen any chance to take a nap, and spent hours of afternoons hoping fervently that Cora would take a nap so that I could, too.

I think I’m going to bed. If I make it that far before just falling asleep. The pool table’s at least long enough to stretch out, and I wouldn’t have to make it up the stairs.

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“Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.” – Teresa of Avila

From a site called Pew-Fellows, which I ran across via Nu Cardboard. Nu Cardboard connected me to Pew-Fellows via a discussion on when it’s too late to repent. Pew-Fellows caught me as soon as I started reading the various question and answers – they’re generally well-considered and gentle. No flaming, no vehement arguments (that I’ve seen so far, anyway). Interesting articles all written by young Christians (young in age, though not necessarily in their time in faith) who are younger than 21. Check out Ben’s article on the trouble with perfection for an example.

The quote from above just catches me today in the right vein – had to capture it here to remind me again and again. A great application of 1 Cor 12:27

Just in the mood to share. . .

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Sitting here at work, eating cold Chinese food for lunch. After accidentally flipping a forkful of fried rice across my table, I noticed a tiny little bit of Rice Chex hidden beneath my keyboard. Made me smile and think of my daughter, she of the iron-fisted Chex grip. Crushing them one at a time, she leaves little Chex bits scattered around her tray and on her. Apparently one rode on her outfit and then got transferred to me, finally reaching a resting place at work. Instead of take my daughter to work day, it’s take my daughter’s crumbs to work day.

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I have to think evolution isn’t the real story, at least based on the concept of survival of the fittest. Every toddler I’ve ever seen has been prone to rip-roaring temper tantrums, mine now among them. (I think we’ve had three today so far. Unknown as the reason – Cora’s language skills aren’t yet advanced enough for her to tell me “Mother, I’m more than mildly peeved that you’ve…”) I just can’t see a cave-dweller armed with a club who’d put up with that for very long. For one, that sound would quickly alert predators that there’s a mini-meal in the vicinity. Similarly, there’d be no potential food for the cave dwellers within a ten mile area of that piercing cry. The healthily wailing tyke would be promptly bopped over the head by their mom or dad, and that would be the end of that kid. Unless there were a whole contingent of toddlers on hand, and they were remarkably quick on the uptake that loud tantrums meant a longer night-night than the usual nap time, kids just wouldn’t survive past the toddler stage. The species would have been wiped out, one wail at a time.

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Lemon meringue, cooling on my stove top. Mounds of fluffy white sugary confection globbed over a thick lemon goo. Beautifully brown crusts, tightly encircling, and bounded themselves by a silver pan.

Waxing poetic over the pie. No mention of the stack of dishes that surround my artwork, or the wrung-out lemon peels, or the cracked and crumpled egg shells in the sink. With any luck, my husband will write that prose.

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Seen in a recent cnnfn article: “chatter that we may soon nab Bin Laden helped stocks recoup their losses”.

I know hope springs eternal for an end to the mostly down movements of our stock market over the past three years, but bin Laden’s various terrorist movements have done little to impact our economic policy (Bush still won’t admit that the war’s going to cost anything, hence no policy change) and have impacted very few companies. Airlines could complain, as of 2001 and into 2002, but if they’re still complaining about bin Laden and the 9/11 attack, then they’re looking now into fairly ancient history, as far as business impacts go. So, how capturing bin Laden should cause the future business potential of any company to go up (and thus its stock price), I don’t know. You could say that markets react to the threat of war, because war increases uncertainty, which makes predictions for future economic prospects less dependable. Using that logic, capturing bin Laden reduces the threat of war, and so reduces uncertainty, and thus there’s more confidence in economic predictions. But our major threats of war right now have nothing to do with bin Laden (OK, little to do, since one of the claims against Iraq is that they support terrorist organizations like that of bin Laden). Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have no connection to bin Laden, unless they sell them to him and North Korea’s brinksmanship has not been linked in any way to our fanatical foe.

Maybe what the stock market is really reacting to is the idea that, as American investors, we’re not really scared of Iraq impacting us personally, or North Korea making an impact to our daily lives. Yes, our military will end up in harms’ way, but not us personally. Whereas bin Laden was very effective at least once. Maybe the stock market’s not breathing a sigh of relief that companies are going to do better or that the country won’t go to war, but maybe that we won’t personally be killed before we can spend our money. Or, looking at it even more perversely, since we don’t think we’ll be killed by the Taliban madman, we need to stop living for today by buying the bigger hotuse or that SUV with the great deal, and instead invest our money, since Social Security sure isn’t going to support us in our newly rediscovered future old age.

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I was pleasantly surprised this evening to discover that my post on Cora’s “girly-girl”ishness caught the interest of 14 year old Whit. Hi, Whit! As part of her comment, she said that at 13, she “started to realise girly-girls are almost all alike and it was much more fun to not be so girly. Then I discovered that both are fun in someways and not so fun in many ways, so now I am just myself”.

Whit, I happen to agree with you that I need to teach our daughter to be accepting of others and to choose what is right for her, regardless of whether that falls into the “girly-girl” realm or in the “tomboy” arena. That my daughter is a fan of dolls and ferocious hugger of stuffed animals is a delight to me, actually, as I get to see her developing into her own little person. As my mother reminds me (often. . . mothers remember these things and make sure that we’re aware of them), I was a little girl who wouldn’t play with dolls, who’d rip the heads off of any dolls presented to me. So Cora’s enjoyment of the things that I would have destroyed is an amusing example that this little girl that I love so fiercely may be grow up to be very unlike me. And that’s really cool. God makes us – our parents get to help teach us, but the basics of who we are is this amazing example of God’s artistry. And, in the case of children with personality traits not quite what their parents expected, His sense of humor, and His promise to teach us the things we need to know. (Like patience, humility, and more love than we’ve ever known we could give.)

Whit, thanks for commenting and making sure I stay on the right path. Maybe my daughter won’t grow up to be a rugby player or enjoy climbing trees and skateboarding, but she’ll turn into her own person who’ll be a delight to get to watch grow.

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More flakes falling outside of my office window. Every week now for at least the past four weeks, there’s been some significant snow event. I’m keeping track of it by the number of “Mommy and Me” classes Cora and I have had cancelled – three so far, with tomorrow’s looking in doubt.

As a kid, I remember wishing that it’d snow, that we’d have some chance of getting a day off of school. The kids in my county have had at least one day off every week for the past month. Lucky them, they’ll be sitting in school until July trying to make up the missed time.

Nowadays my outlook on missed days is different – days missed at work are days that I either need to take out of vacation time or that I need to try to figure out how to make up within the pay period. Software companies’ revenue targets don’t change with Mother Nature’s whims. I was relieved this morning to find out that there was only 2.5 inches on the ground, that I could take an hour to shovel and still make it to work reasonably on time. The office is pretty bare so far – maybe other folks aren’t yet so jaded, or have more vacation time to spare.