Whew! I'm glad the weekend is over so I can go to work and rest. The fun started on Friday. Debbie and I took the day off work to go to a leadership conference in Grand Rapids with a dozen or so people from our church. I intended to use the morning to catch up on some chores. I started with an oil change for the generator. That turned out to be a big mistake; after I changed the oil, the generator wouldn't stay running. So we dragged it down to the garage, took the truck to the cabin, loaded up the other generator, dragged it up the hill and hooked it all up. Everything worked ok at that point, but we were out of time. So we missed the Friday session at the conference. We put the time to good use doing a lot of things that have needed to be done for weeks.

The snow continues to fall. We had several inches of wet snow Friday. I had no time to plow so I had to make some fast arrangements to get the church parking lot cleared off for Sunday. Fortunately, the one thing that is abundant in Kalkaska is snow plows. We made some other phone calls to make sure we had all our bases covered for Saturday, and fell into bed around 11pm.

Saturday, the alarm went off at 5am to get to the church by 6:30 to catch our ride to Grand Rapids. At least I didn't have to drive. The conference was awesome, as always. It will take weeks just to digest all the information that was thrown at us. We got home around 7pm, had "dinner" at Dairy Queen, and chilled until bed time.

Sunday morning, up early and off to the usual stuff for Sunday: Bible Study, Morning Worship, lunch, nap, choir practice, Evening Worship. After evening service, most of the people that were at the conference headed over to a couple's house that lives out by us, for some food (naturally) and to share what we found interesting, thought-provoking, etc. at the conference. We ended up hanging around afterwards talking until after midnight. After getting home and taking care of everything, I fell into bed around 1:30am.

Monday morning was still cold, blowing and snow. This is really enough. We've started talking seriously of moving to St. Kitts. I never thought I wouldn't like winter, but I'm just tired of it right now.

And the weather gods have taken mercy. Shortly after arriving at work, the clouds blew out and the sun started shining. The temperature is still only 28 degrees F; slightly below average. The weather liars are saying it's supposed to get back up above freezing tomorrow and stay there, but I've heard that line before.

Not much planned for tonight. I need to drag the laptop to the cabin, check e-mail, download some information for my homework, then get busy on the reading for class on Thursday. There is probably a paper due or some such; that always takes me a lot of time. I write very slowly (which is helpful to those that can't read very fast...) largely because I'm never quite happy with how I've phrased something or supported some point. The end result never satisfies me, but it seems to make the instructors happy.

Politics:

Haiti continues to be a boil on the face of the earth. Aristide seems determine to die a martyr; I say let him. He has advocated class warfare the entire time he has been in power and this weekend's events are pretty much the expected result. True there are horrid inequities in Haiti, but somehow I don't think destroying the nations infrastructure and means of production is going to elevate the poor into the middle class. I could be wrong on that, but I don't think I am.

Spain suffered a loss of life in the bombings on Thursday proportionally equal to the deaths we suffered on 9/11. And no, it wasn't Basque separatists. Expect similar attacks in other major western cities to follow. Islam has declared war on the West and the sooner we pull our heads out of our butts and realize these are not isolated, individual incidents, the sooner we can stop playing cop in Iraq and truly engage our real enemy: Islam. But we won't. That would be intolerant and no "crime" carries a heavier stigma in our society today. Ah well, we had a good run. Better than most. We can take comfort in that as we weaken ourselves internally and die slowly from a thousand cuts from the outside.

Iraq: the meatgrinder continues as does the trickle of body bags. I see there are rumors of a "selective draft." What a splendid idea; send the best and brightest oversees to be blown up by suicide bombers and leave the dull, witless, and lazy to run things (into the ground, one supposes) back home. Just splendid.

Enough. Lunch is long over and I need to get some things done.