For the past several weeks, I've gotten up on Sunday mornings and studied weather reports. I've enlarged screens to better study the radar and try to figure out where precipitation is falling. Last week the forecast was for freezing fog, but we didn't see any impact on road conditions.
Yesterday I knew we would encounter some precipitation between Arden, NC and Bristol, TN, but I was surprised by how much was falling. The roads were mostly wet, but at the highest point, there was more snow sticking to the pavement than I expected. I felt a bit of panic and wondered if we should turn around. But I also knew that road conditions on the way back were likely to be just fine, and once we headed down the mountain, the road conditions went back to being wet, not white.
To view the recording of yesterday's sermon, head here to my YouTube site. To read the manuscript, head over to yesterday's blog post.
I'm glad I had a chance to be with the congregation of Faith Lutheran yesterday. My sermon went well, as did the rest of the service and Confirmation class. The trip back was fairly easy, and we had a restful end of our Sunday.
We spent the majority of our time watching YouTube videos of Josh Johnson, a comedian whom my spouse first noticed on The Daily Show. We didn't see any news reports about the death of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner. I woke up yesterday morning to the news of the shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach, Australia, but by the end of the day, those shootings were not foremost in my mind. I can't decide whether or not to be worried about my ability to synthesize the news of shootings and just move on. I'm not numb, exactly. I'm certainly not jaded and blasé. But I am aware that the issue of guns and mass violence is vaster and harder to solve than most people want to think about, and I don't have much in the way of solutions. I remember a time when there was less regulation of guns and less gun violence at the same time. I think of my high school in Knoxville, TN, where kids drove to school in trucks that had gun racks with guns in them, and we didn't shoot each other. So I'm one of those strange people who doesn't think that guns are the problem, but there is some sort of other problem that's rooted in alienation and isolation and lack of rootedness in institutions that keep us from killing each other.
Happily, last night I didn't spend time on those thoughts about gun violence.
I sorted Christmas fabrics and made another log cabin patch and read a bit of Adam Haslett's Mother and Sons--what a wonderful book! The 3 books I've read over Christmas break so far (this one, Ian McEwan's What We Can Know, and Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History) bear re-reading, a reading where I'm not racing through the book anxious to know how the plot turns out.
Today I will leave my spouse at home, tending to the pipes for a night, while I go to South Carolina to catch up with some grad school friends. I'm leaving the computer behind--it's that rare moment when I don't need to monitor classes, plus I'm not going to be gone long. It will be good to be away from the relentless drips and drumbeat of bad news.
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