I had a somewhat stressful day yesterday. I'm not quite sure why. It started out slightly frustrating, because I had made complex plans which ran into snags. Then I had lots of interruptions -- nothing bad, but there I was, knee-deep in numbers, and there were interruptions. An occasional reminder to myself that there are women in the world who spend their days gathering dung for fuel helped.

At a little past four, I quit for the day and took the dog for a walk. She chased a rabbit, a naturally dog-like thing to do which nearly pulled my arm from its socket. Again, no big deal. Before leaving, I had spoken sternly to my kids about doing their chores, an aberration on my part which they politely overlooked. It was an effort not to be shrewish.

At 5:20, as I started cooking dinner, I got a call from The Princess. The local residential facility for troubled youth wants me to come out and do a workshop for them. Happy to oblige, of course. When? Ah, well, that's it. Today, at 2:00.

They want me to do a session for five teachers teaching kindergarten through fifth grade.

Does that strike you as a wide range? It does me. I have nothing prepared for that particular population, not even handouts. I don't know what's in stock at the store that I can grab to put it together. Since it's only five teachers, I was able to cobble together a minimal kit (before dawn, in my pajamas) of leftovers from previous workshops, and I am hoping that the rest of the things I plan on using will be in stock.

One thing I always do at these workshops is a project with cookies. Naturally, I did not have any white flour. I ran out right after dinner to buy some.

I was in line behind a boy about my son's age who was buying a copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I have appended a picture, for the majority of my visitors who don't know what this looks like. I assume that this is a copyright violation and that it will be gone quite soon, but I want to make sure you know what I'm talking about. He had a package of sliced cheese on one side and a package of lighter fluid on the other, forming a tidy sandwich, the nearly naked cover model rendered essentially invisible. He stepped up to the clerk, a woman about my age.

"Swimsuit issue?" she said. "You'd think they'd be wearing the swimsuits."

The young man was paralyzed. He had probably intended that the cheese would completely camouflage the magazine.

"Not in that particular issue," I said. Now, at that point, it was a kindness on my part. He didn't have to say anything, because I'd said it already. The clerk could have tucked his magazine and cheese into a bag and sent him on out of there. She didn't do that.

"I'd hardly even call that a swimsuit," she said, scrutinizing the magazine.

"That's the whole point," I said. "Right?" I said that to the young man, with a cheerful smile which he didn't return because his face wouldn't move from the horrified expression it had taken on at the clerk's first words.

Was I joining her in ganging up on him? After all, we were moms. We had changed the diapers of boys his age, and hadn't been embarrassed by naked breasts since before he was born.  He was completely outclassed. Maybe she would have stopped if I hadn't been there. I am not sure. It had been a stressful day. "I think the Vogue swimsuit issue is the one where they actually wear the suits," I offered.

The boy was still paralyzed. There he was, in public, and two women just like his mom were making fun of his racy magazine.

This might be the subject of nightmares for him. For years.

There is a point at which old people can say anything they want, it seems to me. I am not there yet. I remember, at 30, pregnant with my fourth child, recognizing that my centerfold figure would never return. At 40, I discovered that I could no longer jump up off the floor in one easy movement if I'd been sitting there for a while. Now, as I approach 50, I have the occasional moment of finding that my eyes don't refocus as well as they should when I look at things close up. I have actual for-sure wrinkles. It takes a while for my voice to wake up enough to sing well in the mornings. For quite a few years now I've thought, "Hmm... maybe I should introduce him to my daughter" when I meet a handsome young man. Have I reached the point at which I feel free to persecute young people?

I think this guy might have been too young for my daughters.

Of course, one could also say that it was a lesson to the beardless youth not to objectify women. Shall we say that?

I went home and made the state-shaped cookies, and then with the rest of the dough I made a bunch of little Scotty dogs for my kids.

Some have cinnamon fur and some have peppermint fur. At Christmas, I made them with coconut fur, which was definitely the cutest so far, but these guys are still pretty cute.

The facility where I'm doing today's workshop is one I've been to before for various educational purposes. As I recall, the entrance procedures were kind of grim. They have a very rapid turnover among their teachers.

I go bearing cookies, Model Magic, Wikki Stix, and numerous amusing stories about our state history. I hope to spread a little sunshine.

Yesterday was the first day that I really had my voice back, and it was a great pleasure to sing for a few hours.

The solo went well, and then I spent the Sunday School hour working on some other music. With musicians, actually. Since I spend a lot of my music time with non-musicians, it is noticeable when I get to work with musicians. I'm not sure why. The obvious first thought is the quality of the music produced, but it isn't always that. Think how bad I am at bells. It might be the ease of talking about what you're doing with people who share your perceptions and vocabulary. Or the fact that musicians are less likely to get their feelings hurt if you suggest a change in dynamics or going for a straight tone on some particular song or something.

At one point, while working with the choirlet, I had suggested a diminuendo on a final note, and the woman who was singing the high G assured me that if she was actually able to hit that note, she wanted people to hear it. This is not the kind of thing musicians say.

Sjohn and CD and I made a pact, that we would frequently criticize one another's singing in the choirlet, so that the others would see having people say, "I think you're a quarter tone flat on that note" as a mark of membership in the in group rather than as a slap in the face.

Bigsax, hearing this, told us about his first job as a church musician. He had held the first "grace" in "Amazing Grace" for two beats, as it's written in the hymnal. A congregant cornered him in the hallway after the service. "Young man," she said, "that note should have a fermata, and it should be held for at least 5 counts. If you can't do any better than that, you should rethink your choice of profession."

That might have been more of a slap in the face.

I also prowled around seeking whom I might devour recruiting soloists for the early service. I was hampered in this at first by uncertainty about the terminology. In Baptist churches, I know, you would ask people to "bring a special," while Presbyterian churches ask people to "sing a solo" or "play a duet," or whatever the case may be. Having checked with my Sunday School to be sure I had the right terms for Methodists, I set out confidently on the hunt.

"I'd sure love to get you on the calendar for special music," I said warmly while passing the peace.

"I have a trio I think you girls would really enjoy doing. You're not saying no, are you? What about you? Did you say no? No? Okay, I'll get that music to you!" I said, having pounced upon a group of teenagers in the hallway.

"I hope you'll consider singing this with me some time," I said to the Secret Tenor, pressing a piece of sheet music into his hands. He started to speak, then stopped. "What is it? Were you going to say that you never want to sing with me? If that was it, then go ahead, tell me." I can't swear that I didn't say that roguishly.

I have changed so much. Ten years ago I had the task at another church of recruiting greeters for the door. I had agreed to do this because it didn't seem possible to me that people who called themselves Christians could refuse to greet their brothers and sisters at the door of the church.

They did. They refused freely and frequently. And I was not good at this in those days. I would call a couple of people and be turned down, and I would give up and do it myself, in my choir robe, scuttling into my place in the choir room at the last second and leaving latecomers to fend for themselves.

I've improved out of all knowing.

 #1 daughter got a call right after lunch informing her of some emergency in jury selection, and had to race back to Texas. She took her computer along, which required us to redo our computer network at the house. This required the guys who were doing it to undo the window treatment and move all the furniture, and in the course of that, I got the chance to notice something about the ottoman.

Namely, that is has gone from cottage charm shabby chic to just plain shabby. Look how it has faded!

Last week was living room week, and I got most of the janitorial stuff done -- dusting and so on -- but didn't finish because #1 daughter was here for the weekend and I wanted to spend time with her instead.

I might have let it go, but since I clearly have to recover the ottoman, I am going to give Living Room week an extension and get it finished.

Errands, today, and analysis of statistics, and this evening I'll do the ottoman. The thrills never end.

Yesterday's meeting was useful, the new products and recipes were cool, and Janalisa came home with me afterwards for tea and conversation, which was fun.

I stole a speaker's notes.

Yep. I really did.

The speaker was presenting on an area of the business in which I really need to improve. She has quite a bit of authority in the area in question, and average sales 10 times mine. She kept scanning her notes and obviously skipping sections because she was short on time. I wanted to know what she had to say.

So, after the session, I was cleaning the tables and I came upon her notes. They were printed out, so she obviously has them on her computer, so I wasn't depriving her of anything. Still, I had three options. I could have treated them as left-behind papers and thrown them away. I could have tracked the speaker down and returned the notes to her, or indeed asked her permission to keep them. I could have scanned them quickly to see what the audience had missed. I could have tucked them into my stack of goodies and kept them to read later. I chose the last option.

I don't think there was anything very wrong with this. However, I was interested to see the mental process I went through after making the decision to keep those notes.

First, I told someone else. There's another woman on my team whom I don't know well but whom I like. I seek her out when we are both at meetings like these. She came up and I told her what I was doing. I guess this allowed me the chance to be convinced that I was doing wrong. She could have said, at that point, "Oh, don't do that! I just saw the speaker over in the other room -- go ask her permission." I would have done that. Not as a matter of compliance or peer pressure, but because another perspective would have persuaded me that there was something wrong.

She was kind of admiring of my daring, actually.

Then I left the notes on top of my pile for a few minutes. Having told someone and also put the papers on top of the pile, I was not being secretive. The speaker could have come in at any moment, asking for her notes, and had a sporting chance of getting them back.

Having accomplished this ceremonial openness, I then tucked them under some other papers. I wanted them, after all.

I have two services again this morning. I am singing a solo in the first service -- a Lenten song to the lovely Welsh tune "Ton y Botel." Then the choir has a fine anthem for the second service and maybe it will sound better in the service than it did in rehearsal. I did some housekeeping yesterday and finished quilting the middle of the table runner. Since I have determined to read my Book Club book on Sundays (having given up novels for Lent), I will carve out some time for that this afternoon. I will be spending as much time as possible with #1 daughter, as well, and getting my Living Room tasks done as much as I can without interfering with those higher priority goals. I have some phone calls to make, but intend not to get too caught up in work. My current nonfiction book, Serve God, Save the Planet, is pretty convincing about the value of observing the (or, indeed, a) Sabbath.

I don't think that I will get caught up in a downward spiral into a life of crime, but I'll let you know if I do.

I'm headed for the regional meeting this morning, and am engaged in making wee quiche tartlets for the occasion, so this is going to be brief.

#1 daughter came home last night for a visit. We were right about the town she's in, she said. In fact, she is finding as much culture shock there in East Texas as she did in The Frozen North. I said she should just think of herself as a foreign exchange student. Her story of the wild boar the guys brought her to admire was quite funny, but I figure it will all lead to greater elasticity of the brain, always a worthwhile goal.

Over dinner, she told us all about the murder trial she was in on, and the penetrating remark she made to the prosecuting attorney during a break, which allowed him to step back in and catch the miscreant out in a lie.

I also like the story of the file that The Texas Ranger sent specially to her, labeled "For ___ from The Texas Ranger." It could almost have seemed like a gallant gesture, had it not been a file about a floating corpse.

Everyone is being very nice to her down there. The D.A. stops by to make sure she has enough lunch money, and the Grandma invites her over for cake.

Regional meeting is our chance to try out the new recipes and see the new products. The quiche tartlets are pretty tempting.

The Empress and I met yesterday to determine strategies for postmodern retail marketing. I'm also engaged in preparation for a meeting on postmodern worship... you'll probably be hearing more about that. I haven't thought of myself as particularly postmodern, but who knows?

When we were checking out the leaders in our industry yesterday, I was pleased to be able to show The Empress that we are hot stuff in search. The company just slightly above us has 2,650 fulltime employees and revenue of 1.07 billion a year. The only ones significantly above us are big boxes. The folks The Empress thought would be eating our lunch are way below us.

And yet we are not flooded with orders and coining money with our online store. There is widespread agreement in our industry that ecommerce is the future, but it doesn't look as though anyone but the big boxes has much online presence. Perhaps there are some brick and mortar stores that get lots of local online orders and thus fly under the radar for the perameters I can look at, but it looks like no one's getting fat on this except the two big boxes.

So does that mean that search is not what we need to be good at? Arkenboy told me last year that we had reached the necessary goals for search and ought to start advertising. Maybe he was right. It doesn't sound very postmodern, though. It may also be true that no one except the big boxes is doing anything online in our industry, and we are therefore poised to be the postmodern favorite, offering concierge service and a high level of personalization and all that stuff on the Retail Trends list, and being the little fish safely cleaning the teeth of the big box sharks.

I made phone calls for my business last night. I hadn't done it since my voice got froggy and scratchy and Cookie Monster-ish, and so I had just gotten out of the habit of it. It is easy for me to get out of the habit of making these calls, because I hate the telephone.

When we had a home phone (a land line, I mean, a term which always sounds to me like an alternative to ship-to-shore), I rarely answered it, until I Overcame Agoraphobia and had to force myself to answer it. Now I have a cell phone, which I always answer if I happen to have it with me, but it is really only for work. I don't give people the number, I don't keep it with me if I'm not working, and I don't call people for inessential interaction. It is much less of a burden to me than a telephone in my house, with a public phone number, was.

Ozarque has been writing about IM and text messaging and email and the phone, and I've been discussing it with my kids on her behalf, so I have some new insights.

My youngest kid can't remember life before email. He thinks of email as something formal, for work or school. IM is normal interaction, and he IMs in abnormal English. I don't see him IMing these days, because he is at a secretive age, but I remember that I always noticed that he -- and not the older kids -- had a distinctive IM style that wasn't like ordinary English. Texting, he says, is for talking to people at school without getting in trouble.

#1 son remembers when we got internet access -- rather late, because we were so rural. He doesn't have clear memories of what life was like before the internet, necessarily, because he didn't have a lot of contact with others outside his home and neighborhood before that time, but he remembers school without the internet. He has the agoraphobic tendencies, I'm afraid (it runs in families; it's an issue for #1 daughter as well), and sees texting not only as good for secret communication, but also for sending a message without the awkwardness of having to talk on the phone.

My daughters remember life before the internet. They email for basic communication. They talk on the telephone socially, and #1 daughter actually prefers phone communication over computer. They use punctuation -- not exactly as in written communication, but in a rule-governed fashion. They can write letters on paper, if called upon to do so.

I can tell you almost exactly when I first heard about email: January or February of 1990. I can remember when computers were the size of refrigerators. I use punctuation and paragraphs for email. Occasionally, I even use greetings. When we first began using email, we wrote letters, just as though they were on paper, and then sent them off. I know people older than myself who still do this. And we couldn't use email for formal things, such as thank you letters or bread and butter notes or job applications; they didn't count. In fact, boys and girls, this was just an update of an earlier rule, which specified which kinds of letters could be typewritten and which had to be handwritten or they didn't count. A typewriter was a machine sort of like a computer, in that it had a keyboard and made letters, but it made marks directly on paper, and was not hooked up to a computer in any way. When we first got computers, we wrote letters on them and printed them out, as an update to the typewriter. You can still see typewriters in old movies sometimes. You probably think they are computers.

Bread and butter notes were informal notes you wrote to your hostess thanking her for her hospitality, and stuff like that. Courteous people still do this, but mostly by email nowadays.

I still feel, in my heart, that you ought to write thank you letters for wedding gifts by hand, on paper. Keep this in mind if an old person ever gives you a wedding gift.

Email is normal communication, for me. I also IM a lot, but only with close friends and family. I wouldn't refuse an IM from someone else, but I don't tell people my IM info or initiate IM conversations with others. For me, IM is the good alternative to the telephone for random chatting.

"Chatting," by the way, was when I was young an old-fashioned term for desultory talk. My kids use the word as the normal term for electronic talk. My youngest told me that if you want to specify electronic talking via IM or during gaming, which he usually just calls talking, you can say "chatting." So you can't say that you and your friend were just sitting on the porch chatting when you talk to young people. I don't know what you would say. Maybe we will have to go back to "visiting," a word I associate with grandmothers. If that won't do, we'll need to come up with a new word for friendly aimless face-to-face talk, or we'll lose the custom entirely, and that would be a shame.

My kids also don't mind talking to robots on the phone. I hate it. I hate it even more than I hate talking to humans on the phone. There is always a point at which I cry, "Isn't there a human I can talk to?!"

Yesterday, I was making a call to the insurance company, and I said that after 15 minutes or so of frustrating attempts to get a question answered by a robot, and --- behold! -- the robot said, "Customer service? Is that what you said?" I said, "Yes," with a great sense of relief, and they hooked me up with a human being, who was of course able to answer my question immediately. It was very sensible of the company to teach their robots to recognize the word "human" -- or possibly the agitated tone of voice.

When telephones first came into fashion, there was concern that they might be used by scantily-clad people. You might, folks feared, be talking to a member of the opposite sex who was not properly dressed, and you wouldn't even know it. I don't know how people resolved this; maybe they just got over it.

When people from my husband's country first encountered telephones in the 1980s, they had an enormous problem with answering the phone. Their language has a variety of greetings, depending on the hierarchical relationships of the speakers. It is impossible to know how to greet someone if you can't see who they are. This was before caller ID, which would have solved the problem. At first, they would just answer in silence, and the person who called and who therefore had a better chance of guessing their relationship with the one who answered, had to essay the greeting. This didn't work well with American callers. Eventually, they switched to "Hello."

Cell phone etiquette has been an issue within my memory. I remember that when we first began having a store full of people who were talking on phones, we discussed it, The Empress and I, and decided to behave as though the people were in phone booths. That is, we ignored their existence till they were off the phone. Now we behave as though they were talking with a person who was physically present.

As further communicative options arise, there will be linguistic and cultural issues with them as well, I am sure. We have always had to be able to adapt these things. We just have to do it a lot faster now.

Bigsax spoke querulously. "Why am I not hearing the B and C where they should be?"

He might have had a right to be querulous. He had had to sit in a meeting with me discussing things like emergent and experiential worship, and then when bells were supposed to begin I had slunk off to the sanctuary to run through my solo (I'm subbing for Mlle. Tussaud, down with the flu) with the pianist, so there I was, half an hour late, playing badly.

"I'm playing the B and C," I explained helpfully, "and I lost my place."

Once I lose my place in bell music, sometimes I just can't find it again. In this case, I had to look down while switching from the B to the B flat, and I just wasn't sure where we were when I got my eyes back on the music. I was guessing, and had apparently guessed wrong.

"Do you need help?" This was not querulous. It was more like elaborate patience.

"Well, yes," I answered. Not sure what kind of help he had in mind, there, but obviously I wasn't playing right. I guess I needed help.

"What can we do for you?"

"Calling out the measure numbers would do it." One of the ringers had brought her husband with her. "You, sir," I said to him, "would you like to call out the measure numbers?"

"Do you need someone else to play one of the bells for you? Is it insurmountable?"

"Well," I said, saying "well" a lot, I realize, but I was on the spot, "I wouldn't say it was insurmountable. This is the first time I've tried it. I'll try to do better."

I was going for chastened and  repentant. I left out the part where I looked around for someone to play the B flat for me, but no one stepped up. They all have four bells. They had been having to imagine my bells while I was gone. They all knew that offer from Bigsax was strictly for effect. 

I struggled through the bells. Choir came next. Bigsax made his choice of anthem for Sunday, a flashy baroque arrangement of "Can It Be" which will sound very good with about three more weeks of rehearsals.

"This would sound a lot better if we had another week or two to work on it," I said, continuing in my role as thorn in Bigsax's side.

"Take it from the top," he growled.

"Let's pray first," said I. And then, when people laughed, "What? We're a church. It's not inappropriate."

Bigsax led us in prayer. He's very good at public prayer. He used to work in a Baptist church, and that skill has stuck with him.

We got quite a lot of the fiddly bits better that time, but still ended a bit glumly. I'd like to report that everyone took their music home to work on it in order to have it perfected for Sunday, but that is not the case. Also, only about half the choir was there last night, and the rest will show up on Sunday with no idea what we're doing, and sing anyway, so last night's work on the piece will be of limited effect anyway.

Someone mentioned this -- not me; I had done enough -- and Bigsax told us that we would just have to drag them along with us.

Ah, well.

I came home and made a late supper of turkey gyros sandwiches. The boys chopped vegetables for the purpose. I then settled in to finish God and the New Physics. I have really enjoyed that book. Davies sailed through quarks and gravity and black holes, and concluded that what we've learned about the physical universe in the past century is simply not in accord with our physical experience. It is surprising and mysterious, and calls up a lot of questions.

Given this fact, we are left with two logical positions.

Since there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not, and since I am one of the latter, I have to mention here that we have a third option. We can follow Kant  and say that our perceptions about the physical universe are a product of the way our brains are put together. We naturally look for patterns, and that is therefore what we see. All is illusion. I don't believe this, myself, because people have set up experiments to check on the surprising observations, and have themselves been further surprised. Planck, Einstein, Hawking, and the rest of the boys very definitely did not see what they expected to see. They saw things that no one could possibly expect to see.

So then we have two logically consistent positions available to us. We can say that there are all kinds of things we don't yet know, but that once we know them, we will be able to explain the mysteries of the universe entirely through natural laws and processes. We can also try to explain the mysteries through recourse to Big Ideas. Among the Big Ideas, Davies points out, is God.

None of the possible Big Ideas is easy to believe, obvious, or provable. I am okay with God, myself, and I also like the anthropic principle, while you may prefer the multiple parallel universes bit or the Hidden Principle hypothesis or something else. But it is not reasonable to choose one of these Big Ideas and say that it is proven and scientific, while the rest are farfetched and superstitious. All of them require faith. So we have agnosticism, or our choice of faiths.

Here's what Plato said, having explained all that was at his time known of the universe:

  And so now we may say that our account of the universe has
  reached its conclusion.  This world of ours has received and
  teems with living things, mortal and immortal.  A visible
  living thing containing visible things, and a perceptible
  God, the image of the intelligible Living Thing.  Its grandness,
  goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled.  Our one
  universe, indeed, the only one of its kind, has come to be.

I think that's quite beautiful, and a nice thing to contemplate. It would make a good hymn, even.

I'm still reading Peter Davies's God and the New Physics. It always takes me longer to read nonfiction, or at least nonfiction with new information or big ideas in it, because I have to stop and think a lot in between reading.

The new physics in this book isn't new to me, just a reminder. I always enjoy reading about quantum physics, even though I am already pretty familiar with the ideas. Indeed, my thoughts that I have to stop and think, when I am reading about quantum physics and the theory of relativity, tend to be things like, "Gosh."

Have you noticed, though, that physicists say things like "Time distortions... really do occur" and then go on to give examples such as what happens when one twin goes to visit a star and returns ten earth years later to find his earthbound twin is now ten years older than he is?

In what sense does this "really occur"?

Physicists and mathematicians do this all the time.

I remember once I was looking at some Zome constructs like these with a mathematician of my acquaintance and he was describing some elements of the design which I couldn't see. I mean, we were standing and looking at it and he was describing it, but I couldn't see the things he was talking about. I mentioned this, and he explained, startled, that those things he was describing were in another dimension.

Now, I am not a stickler. I spend a lot of time thinking about and discussing religion, music, and people's relationships, as well as math and physics. I can handle a little mismatch between observable reality and Higher Truth.

But it does seem to me that describing star travel as something that "really occur"s is a bit off. And physicists do it all the time. It may give them very elastic minds. Last night I was reading about the parallel universe hypothesis (the various universes have differing cat populations, quipped Davies, and those of us who read this stuff regularly can laugh here), and it struck me that actual belief in that hypothesis, which has absolutely no evidence for it in this universe, except math, would be some kind of test.

I have trouble believing that anyone actually literally believes that, as distinct from entertaining it as an interesting mathematical concept. Davies claims that someone at Austin really does, but we know that UT is a party school, don't we?

That seems to me to be quite different from things that give you a headache when you try to hold them in your mind are hard to believe, and yet seem actually to be true. These would include counting a single long note as a triplet, Bell's inequality, and the other big topic I read about last night in Davies, God's relationship with time. Oddly enough, I have never had trouble with Einstein's thoughts about time. They seem to me not only sensible, but also to be borne out by observation, though I am told that time feels completely different to most people. But God's relationship with time is a lot harder to grasp.

Last night in class we were reading Matthew 16, which has a lot of rather slippery time stuff going on, not to mention the Doctrine of Election, and it fit right in with Davies. I have discovered, however, that people do not like to talk about physics. They get bored really fast. Chances are, no one is even still reading this. However, the good thing about blogs is that we can talk here about things that no one in our daily lives cares to discuss, and anyone chancing by can leave when they're bored, and we'll never even know.

Once, when I was much younger, I had a brief friendship with a theoretical physicist. It was a brief friendship because I really enjoyed talking with him about the philosophy of science, which I was studying at the time, and theoretical physics, about which I knew even less than I now do, but he thought we were dating. Yep, those walks on the beach talking about dead and yet still alive cats were dates, in his mind.

When I discovered this, I was astonished. I mean, literally, jaw-droppingly astonished. Being a well brought up young girl, I couldn't say, "Are you kidding? You are old! Have you seen my boyfriend? How could you have thought I was dating you?" It is likely that the expression on my face said all these things for me, and the guy had a complete emotional meltdown, for which he apologized some years later when I encountered him in a post office.

Now, thinking as I have been about physics and faith, it seems to me possible that this guy, being a physicist, had such an entirely different relationship with reality that the misunderstanding was practically inevitable.

I don't remember his name, but he is probably still alive. He seemed extremely old to me, but he was probably 30. If I ever encountered him again, I would apologize.

Here are the labeled piano keys, and yes this photo did inspire me to dust.

I've been running through stacks of music, and getting pretty quick with it. I still have to adjust sharps and flats by ear, so I suppose I need to learn that stuff.

It might make my bell choir director quit yelling "It's two sharps!" at me in what he appears to think is communication, but is actually meaningless shouting on his part. When shouted at me, that is. He could just say, "Beep! Beep!"

There was also work going on chez fibermom yesterday, and scrubbing, and Pilates. Cooking and baking.

Quilting, even. This is the table runner I started last year around this time. The middle sections are quilted, and I should be able to finish the red parts this week. Then I have to decide how to do the outside borders. I was thinking clam shells to maintain some semblance of French style to go with the fabrics, but I don't think that would be as enjoyable as some nice curvy lines.

I have to decide whether it would be more satisfying to have the chance to quilt the sinuous shapes, or to look at it in future, should I ever finish it, and see the French style evident in its quilting.

It will be covered with pies or salads, regardless.

Today is Darwin Day. Go read Darwin here, if you have never done so before. He was an interesting guy. I know that there is a widespread belief among those unfamiliar with Darwin's work that reading it is somehow dangerous, but I have to say that there are altogether too many people running around today discussing Darwin without having read anything he wrote.

Davies continued to write about the mind and then about the soul and the self. He does not discuss evolution and mentions biology only glancingly, but puts a lot of thought into the question of whether the mind/soul/self exist in time and space. Having brought up numerous interesting arguments on both sides -- and, really, interesting though that is, I find that it is impossible for me to entertain the possibility that the soul/mind/self doesn't exist at all, since I only have my mind/self/soul with which to entertain the possibility. Anyway, just as you feel as though your head might fly away with the complexity and slipperiness of the whole question, Davies explodes it. "Do you believe in haircuts? Where are they?" he asks. And goes on to list all sorts of things that clearly exist, without having physical existence in time and space.

He was just toying with us. Or else he was trying to make photons more palatable. Feynman explains how photons come into being by saying it's like words: before you speak words, they don't exist. Nor do they not exist. That is how photons appear when electrons make transitions. And that also, Davies suggests, is the way it is with souls.

My Wednesday afternoon study group has the habit of asking, "How is your soul?" This always strikes me as an unanswerable and maybe a foolish question. Obviously, my soul is fine. How else could it be? My body may have the flu, my mind may be troubled with worldly problems, but my soul is in God's care and I really don't have to worry about it at all.

Davies, while agreeing that the mind must have some physical connection with the brain, since it can be affected by drugs and brain damage, still finds himself unable to draw a clear distinction among the mind, the soul, and the self. Our thoughts about ourselves and our feeling of having a self must take place in our minds, so how can we prove that there is a self distinct from our minds? And if we have a soul which lives on beyond death, he says, how could we know that if we didn't have memories or characteristics of our mind and self which also live on with our souls?

So this gives us something interesting to contemplate while we do our daily tasks today. I will be up at the store, probably mostly faxing press releases and stuff like that. If there are people signed up for the workshops next week, I'll be making their packets. If not, my soul won't care at all.

Last night, after I finished working and before I got back to reading Davies, we were trying to help #1 son with his job hunt.

It is not hard to find jobs around here, but #1 son is suffering -- as I might, I admit -- with the feeling that there is probably nothing out there that he really wants to do. His job hunt is thus hampered by his settled belief that all steps toward employment will lead only to misery.

I think he is wrong. I went online and read out to him all the various jobs that are available in town right now, for which he might be qualified. They need a lot of engineers around here at the moment, I must say. But there are also plenty of service sector jobs that a young man with no particular skills or training can do.

I had just told him about the job weighing stuff at the quarry (see, I would never have guessed that there was a job like that; I didn't even know there was a quarry here), when his dad weighed in with poultry work. Apparently, there is a job that involves walking softly around the poultry farm looking for sick chickens, which you then have to kill.

We stared at my husband in consternation. Did he really think #1 son was suited to that work? Apparently it pays well. However, when you are doing this with turkeys, he told us, you have to go very softly, because if you walk quickly, they will have heart attacks and die.

I thanked him for this useful information. #1 son assured his dad that there was no way he was going to take a job that involved killing poultry.

My husband then went on to explain about the jobs that are actually about killing poultry. And cattle. He has a lot of very detailed information about the whole abattoir industry. I don't know why he knows this. Unable to interest #1 son in such work, he proposed that I could do it. It would pay better than my current work, he said, as well as offering insurance.

"Have you known me very long?" I asked him. "Do you really think that that would be a good job for me?"

He was not paying attention, though. He was demonstrating in mime how exactly one would slice up a cow hanging from a hook.

#2 daughter was participating in the discussion via IM. "Does he understand that he would have to become a vegetarian if you had that job?" she asked.

Actually, I think a job like that might be bad for my soul. Or at least for my mind.

Here is where #1 son went for the weekend and what he was doing.

(Is it only me, or does xanga like to upload half a dozen copies of each picture on your computers, too?)

My weekend was less exciting, but I am feeling much better today. I even got a walk in yesterday, and also made some things.

I made some bath gel. Now when I say that I made it, I just mean that I put the scent into the base. No chemistry, just art. I put in moss, musk, and sandalwood for the bass notes -- or I guess, the bass, baritone, and tenor. Then honey for the alto, rose for the mezzo, and a flourish of lily for brilliance at the top. This makes a beautiful, sexy scent, if you are ever in the mood for such a thing. I buy the base a gallon at a time, and the price per ounce for my homemade stuff is very low, but the quality is very high. I highly recommend it.

I scrubbed the bathroom. Housework is one of the things that I really let slip while I was ill, with predictable results. So, without undoing the good work of resting up a bit, I still did some scrubbing.

I also worked on a prayer shawl and the quilting of the table runner.

It felt good to have a productive day.

We have houseguests coming in a week or two. You know we are hospitable people and have houseguests fairly often, but it struck me that it has been years since we had a houseguest over the age of 25. One of the guests this time is 30. He might expect more in the way of comfort than lots of food and a bare spot to sleep in.

In fact, this guy is the first non-kid we have met in the position of Individual Dating One of Our Kids. This position has naturally always been filled by kids. My son-in-law is a kid, in fact. We're always courteous and respectful to kids, anyway, but it is possible that the dynamic may be different. Maybe we need wine and lovely salads rather than large roasts and video games.

I'll think about that.

I need to spend some time with my calendar today, in fact. I have been doing the work with the highest urgency rating and letting it go at that, but it is time to look beyond that and see what longer-term stuff I've dropped.

If nothing else, I have three cooking shows and two workshops scheduled in this month, as well as the houseguests and another meeting or two. I also hear that this week's soloist is down with the flu, so I may need to prepare something as a backup for her, in case she's not improved by Sunday. And I need to call the insurance people and see exactly how much of the large sum of health care money they would reimburse, supposing I were able to come up with it.

#1 son is heading out for some serious jobhunting today, he says. I may have the house empty and quiet, which would definitely facilitate the serious planning I need to do.

The party was pleasant, I got the errands done, and then I took a broom, a sponge, and a bucket of hot water spiked with lavender and sage soap out to the porch. Scrubbing and sweeping and straightening improved the porch no end. It was a clear, cool, beautiful day, perfect for such an undertaking.

I scrubbed in the kitchen, too, and did several loads of laundry, and labeled the piano keys and played through my upcoming solo, and worked on quilting a table runner.

In between times, I read about the religious implications of the steady state system vs. the big bang in  God and the New Physics, by Paul Davies. Davies points out that large quantities of the new physics are not only not supported by our experience, but that they make a complete nonsense of much of our direct experience. Embracing these concepts requires us to accept things that we cannot imagine, and to trust in things we can only dimly comprehend through metaphors that we know are inaccurate. Sort of like contemplating the Trinity, or thinking about heaven and hell.

Indeed, these concepts in physics require a level of faith in math that rivals religious faith. He points out also that, given such faith, there is no reason to choose faith in God over faith in math. Aquinas argued that the necessary existence of a first cause for things in the universe was support for the existence of God. Davies says that once you are prepared to accept God as first cause, you could just as easily accept the universe itself as a first cause. Logically, he suggests, there is no difference between faith in something as difficult and counterintuitive as God, and faith in something as difficult and counterintuitive as modern mathematics.

This argument is supported by simple diagrams of infinity, which I found kind of cool.

I think it was Richard Feynman who said that infinity was like dirt... you always found bits of it in everything.

Davies also wrote about the mind. Now, Lewis wrote about the mind, too. and so did the book called Kluge that I read a couple of weeks ago, and it is not so long ago that I read a section in The Science of Discworld on the subject, so it was interesting to compare the various viewpoints. Lewis, of course, was writing before computers mattered much, so he didn't bring computers into the discussion, and he went with earwigs rather than spiders, but otherwise he said pretty much what there was to say on the subject. Davies had some electricity in there, being a physicist, and I think everyone included dogs. Anyway, Davies reminded his readers that there is nothing in the molecules of our brains that is in any way different from other molecules, and that there is in fact a steady stream of molecules coming and going from us all the time. The existence of God, he says, solves the whole problem of "why" for us; without God, it is very hard to come up with any kind of reason for the mind. I really liked the reason Davies attributes to God: He created a world with such an interesting arrangement of photons and stuff because it makes for an interesting universe. Interesting to whom, Davies does not say. Either us or God, I suppose.

Dawkins would deny that there was any need of a reason, explaining that the desire to make up reasons for things is, along with sweat and music, a quaint byproduct of biological processes.

I had to stop sometimes and think about these things, so I worked on the quilting and watched Pushing Daisies on the computer. I enjoyed it very much. This program, when it is shown, is during choir practice, so I would not be able to see it if my kid had not told me how to watch it online.

Today I have rehearsals and singing in both services (not, fortunately, solos, so I will sing like Tallulah Bankhead and people will just have to lump it), followed by ministry meetings.

But then I intend to read a novel. Lots of people take Sundays off from their Lenten sacrifices. I have always considered that a wimpy thing to do, but I have to read my book for Book Club, and my Booksfree book, so I plan to spend the afternoon doing just that, and thus completely get rid of the ailment I've had.

A teacher at the party yesterday told me that what I have had is this year's strain of the flu. I'm glad to be nearly over it, and hope to get back to the gym tomorrow.