Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make
movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art
as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence,
a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be
expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on
everything to prove its Orthodoxy.
-- Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things
This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.
He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.
![[christian fandom]](http://www.valdyas.org/~irina/blog/graphics/page/cf125x125.gif)
2004-02-26
In the first week of Lent we have Great Compline with the Penitential Canon of St.Andrew of Crete. Usually twice: last year on Monday and Thursday, this year on Monday and Wednesday. We could theoretically have it four times but it’s hard enough on the choir to do it twice.
Last year, I dared wear a headscarf to this service for the first time. This year I did it again. It’s the only time when I’m confident enough not to think of what people will think.
2004-02-25
I’ve been stuck. I’ve been very stuck. Two days of zero words, a couple of days of a hundred and something, and then I wrote pure drivel for a few days merely to produce wordage and have something to fill in on the spreadsheet.
My little brush with the Tax Office got an unexpected sequel. Today, a blue envelope dropped on the mat, giving me a sinking feeling (“oh, no, another tax thing”) but it was an apology for their mistaken demand. And it turned out that the uneasy feeling I had then was right all along: I don’t need to do anything, it will sort itself out.
2004-02-04
I fell in love with this tree years ago, when it still had all its branches. Though some were damaged by a storm last year and had to be brutally lopped off, I don’t love it any less for that.
When we got the digital camera I decided to take a picture of it every first Sunday of the month. Then I forgot to take the camera along every single first Sunday of the month since then until last Sunday, when we had a baptism and Rebecca wanted to take the camera to church anyway to take pictures of the font for her school speech.
2004-02-03
Trouw has a weekly comic, Het Dagboek van Anton Dingeman (Anton Dingeman’s Diary), a Day in the Life of a Civil Servant thing, ranging from boring to hilariously funny, with occasional peaks of high satire. Unfortunately, it’s not online.
Monday, January 19, was one of those high
points. For copyright reasons, I can’t scan and display the whole
thing, but I’ll give the text in translation.
This is Lionel. He (or perhaps she, or it; I don’t know whether blobs have gender at all) is my useless blob. I’ve wanted to adopt a useless blob for a long time, but never had a place to put it. I may put him in a box in the sidebar when he falls off the page, but he’s all right here for now.
No, I don’t know why he’s called Lionel. That’s just his name.
You can adopt your own useless blob too: click on Lionel to go to spacefem.com (not a bad place to be anyway) and get one.
We let Naomi quit swimming class. She can swim — she has been able to swim expertly for months — but she can’t succeed in doing one thing that’s necessary to get a swimming certificate, namely, to swim nine meters underwater and go through a hole in a plastic sheet without surfacing in between.
Unlike things like breaststroke which you can be weak, good enough or excellent at, this is binary: you get two tries and if you don’t make it you’re screwed, even if you do everything else perfectly.
2004-02-02
Yes, there really is a cat in this picture.
A bit of tail and (I think) hind leg can be seen on the far left. It became easier when she moved along a bit and showed her eyes:
The red book with the dilapidated binding is my trusty 1970 Concise Oxford; the shelf, in fact, is my store of indispensable things. Though I could probably put the 2001 and 2002 church yearbooks downstairs again and use 2003 instead.
