shoulder pimples and breathing again

on this tuesday, the day after our church conference, i am breathing a sigh of relief.  now that all that paperwork and nominating work is done until next year, i feel like standing up straight and breathing again. 

that feels nice.

so, i thought i'd give you a light and fun post today.  even though it is ravens week, and all i can really do is lie awake at night with visions of rashard mendenhall running over ray lewis dancing in my head.  but i'll try and give you something besides steelers this week...

here is cade from his thanksgiving program at school (the one where they told us the kids were making us a thanksgiving lunch, only to find out that this meant little itty-bitty rolls of turkey lunchmeat on a toothpick with a one-inch square piece of cornbread and some popcorn.  i was thankful for my son's smiling face, and for the pizza in the fridge at home.  here he is with the turkey he made:

one day last week, in fact it may have been a week ago today, right around 4pm the sky turned into this amazing pink and orange and blue kaleidoscope of color that kept changing every few moments.  it was stunning.  i ran inside to grab my camera and i took a ton of pictures because i couldn't believe it.  none of them fully captured the awesomeness, but i share these with you and want you to know that i did not doctor them in ANY way. 

equally amazing, though perhaps a bit less majestic, is the following picture which i took one day when jack appeared in the dining room wearing a necktie and beads and sunglasses and a backwards hat making all these crazy moves.  when i asked him what he was dressed up as, he told me, "a dude."  so, without further ado, here is jack, the dude:

in other news, yesterday was the opening of deer season here in pennsylvania which not only means that all the children get two days off of school (since i presume most parents are trying to kill some deer), but that people of all walks of life get to carry a gun through the woods and shoot at things.  it is a rhythm of life that i'm not really familiar with but is very prominent here in this neck of the woods.  as i was driving up rt. 11 yesterday i was imagining the souls of countless deer rising through the gray sky, like some sort of deer rapture.  well, that, and i was remembering that parks and recreation show where she shoots him, but that's another story.  anyway, i just hope nobody gets hurt and people don't just kill animals because they like to kill things. 
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we've started the decorating process here, which is an enormously more difficult task when you're in a new home.  you can use the "where did we put it last year" approach.  it's a completely blank canvas, which is cool, but a little overwhelming, too.  deck the halls!
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did i mention that it's ravens week?  have i also said here that i would really like to talk to roger goodell?  i need to understand how the two players who ripped each other's helmets off (after the whistle!) and started throwing wild punches at one another's heads, making a spectacle of themselves and really embarrassing the league (in my opinion) only got a $10,000 fine, while james harrison continues to get huge fines levied against him for borderline plays before the whistle blows!  look, i don't understand what goodell is thinking with some of this stuff, but maybe someone could convince me (i doubt it) that he's older and wiser and knows what he's doing.  okay, fine.  but at least be somewhat consistent!  this is really becoming a joke and it is sadly affecting my love for the nfl.  i still love my steelers, but i'm becoming less and less a fan of the nfl.  sadness.
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today is the last day of november.  holy tempus fugit, batman. 
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also, it's christmas music time.  time to start pulling out the christmas cds and coming to terms once again with the fact that i do indeed own a mariah carey album, and that i (gasp) actually enjoy listening to it.  man, where are my convictions?  perhaps a post on favorite christmas music is in order....
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on a gross note, when we have leftovers here in the milinovich home, we usually make the kids shirley temples as a special treat.  they've gotten used to this tradition.  but cade hasn't quite caught on to the name, because last night as we were warming up the leftovers, he shouted, "i want a shoulder pimple!"  a shoulder pimple.  yummy. 
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and on that note, don't forget to breath, and have a great tuesday.  it's ravens week, people. 

8-3

here are my picnik.com creations from yesterday's steelers game, which the steelers barely won in overtime.  it was a nailbiter, and if that term were anatomically accurate, i would have only bloody stubs on the ends of my fingers.  thankfully, it's not. 

in any case, the game was crazy and hard to watch, but the steelers, despite injuries all over the place, showed that they can win the close ones.  now, it is ravens week.  holy heck. 

just want to point out in the picture above where mendenhall is scoring that the steelers were playing in buffalo, where you would expect to find bills fans.  but look at the stands behind the end zone where he is running.  what do you see?  black and yellow, black and yellow!  steeler nation rocks. 

and how are you supposed to tackle someone?  i don't like where the nfl is going, and it's really pretty pathetic to watch it happening.  i wonder that the Chief would say about all of this, were he here today. 

have a great monday.  be great. 

nom nom nom

don't know if you're thursday was as yummy as this, but mine sure was.  and my friday will likely be about as frenzied.  hope you enjoy this video from the realm of the utterly random. 

thanksgiving prayer

caedmon has recently been learning his "prayer before meals" at preschool.  for now, he is very anxious to practice it at every meal.  it has taken on a couple incarnations as he's learned it, which is good because it started like this:

God is great,

God is food,

let us thank him

for our food. 

which, one could argue, has some theological truth to it.  then for about a week we had seemingly mastered the whole thing:

God is great,

God is good,

let us thank him

for our food. 

By our hands

we are all fed

thank you, Lord,

for daily bread.

but i guess that was too long for him, so we've sort of settled on this rhyme-challenged version over the last several weeks:

God is great,

God is good

thank you for

our daily bread.

and while it isn't exactly a good rhyme, it is a good reminder to me each time i sit down with my family to eat: the goodness all around us comes from God.  and while i am so prone to focus on the un-goodness of my life (my food is too hot, i have to hurry up because i have a meeting to go to, why is my skull so flat in the back?, etc.) caedmon reminds me of the blessing of taking the posture of thanksgiving.  to simply proclaim, right in the midst of all my ridiculous abundance: God is awesome!  and all of this is God's good work!  thank you, God! 

have a grateful, grace-full day.

ghost in the wind

"ghost in the wind"

mixed media collage on hardcover book board

november 2010

gregory a. milinovich

i write today just to say hello from this crisp and cracking little corner of the world, complete with a pre-winterly cold sky that tells of things to come.  the wind, which i can feel in my joints, carries an omen - a ghost - not only the voices of the millions of fallen leaves, their colorful ending swirling at my feet, but also of the coming harshness.  it is a season of death, as much as we don't want to think about it.  the crops are harvested.  the fields have been cut down.  even the comic-book-yellow mums are browned with dying.  the anxious trees bend their creaking bones in a hollow wooden cadence. 

it is autumn.  and there is a ghost in the wind.  a death all around us.

but in the midst of all this death, all this foretelling of freezing, we take a moment - a day, even - to stop and realize all we have for which to be grateful. 

even in the mdst of so much death, we are blessed with abundant life. 

so take a moment this week.  stand up to that ghost in the wind, grasp ahold of all that wild life growing inside you anyway, and give thanks.  give thanks.  

looking around

when i was a young boy i played midget football: a frightening and yet exhilarating experience for a young boy.  always one of the most difficult parts for me, was trying to impress the coaches.  since i already had an unhealthy tendency to need to please adults, i approached football with my regular overachieving ways.  but my football coaches made it difficult for me to succeed in my normal ways because they rarely communicated clearly, choosing instead to bark out random commands and expect us to pick up the game from these guttural syllables.  every once in a while they would pull out and brush off another tool from their coaching arsenal, and this one was the out-of-context-football-phrase-that-no-10-year-old-really-understands.   "hit the hole," they would yell, and we would just keep doing what we were doing, but trying to make it look like we were hitting some hole while we were doing it, since none of us had any real idea what hole we were supposed to be hitting. 

one of my favorite random phrases was when the coaches would interrupt their regularly programmed grunting to shout out, "keep your head on a swivel, boys!" 

what?  i had no idea what this meant. 

these last few weeks at church i've been doing a series called "looking around."  i could have just as fittingly called it "keep your head on a swivel," because the main idea was that we have to keep looking all around us if we are going to be successful Christ-followers.  i'm afraid that too often too many of us get way too focused on ourselves, on our own circumstances and feelings, our own understandings and our own comfort.  we can be like a ball carrier, getting the handoff, completely unaware of anyone around us, about to be blindsided by that huge defensive end about to drop us for a loss. 

and so to avoid this destructive self-obsession, we need to keep our heads on a swivel - we need to keep looking around.  i think there are at least 4 ways we need to look around:

first, we need to look back.  that is, we need to keep taking looks backwards to see where we've been and how God has been good to us.  we need to constantly remember the story about how we were outsiders - sinners - and God welcomed us with a wide, warm and wild embrace.  we need to be sure that we never forget where we were, so that we truly appreciate where we are, and so that we can offer that same kind of embrace to others along the way.  we must look back. 

next, we need to look into, which is to say that we need to regularly examine ourselves.  we ought to be in some sort of system of accountability, some kind of checks and balances arrangement that will help us live our lives in balance.  it is so easy to allow our busyness and our own desires to begin to shape our behavior and our attitudes until we are living life out of balance.  i find micah 6:8 a great reminder of what kind of balance our life should have: acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.  wesley's three simple rules would be another great status report.  whatever you use, just make an effort to regularly look into your own life and be sure that you are still walking the path that God called you to walk. 

third, i believe we need to keep our heads on a swivel so we can look forward.  too often we are so self-absorbed in what's going on now that we have lost all touch with where we are going.  scripture tells us that where there is no vision, the people perish.  that's not to say that we have to have everything completely spelled out, leaving no room for the guiding of the holy spirit or the changes that come our way, but it is to say that we should have an idea of where God is leading us.  we should be asking God to give us a picture of the vision, so that we can faithfully follow it.  we must look forward, because if we walk around with our heads down, we're mostly just going to be bumping into one another, not really getting anywhere. 

finally, we talked about how we need to look out.  we need to get our eyes off of ourselves and our church dinners and our social gatherings and our friends and we need to start to look out.  when we open our eyes, we discover that God keeps showing up in the most unusual places.  in fact, we read in matthew 25 that Jesus shows up in the others that we meet along the way, and so if we really want to be Christ-followers; if we really want to follow Jesus as we say we do, then we must keep looking out to find the Jesus in the "others" that we meet. 

so keep your heads on a swivel, kids!  keep looking back, looking into, looking forward and looking out - keep looking around - so that you can more faithfully live the life you've been called to live, and more passionately share it with a world desperate for it. 

ps.  big thanks to shannon for the artwork!

7-3

shew.  what a relief that was after the debacle that was the patriots game.  this week, an angry and hopefully embarrassed steelers team took on a surging raiders club at heinz field and, although starting a little slow (assisted by just about every variety of questionable personal foul call you can think of), dominated.  i liked what i saw yesterday, other than the continual rash of injuries not just on the offensive line, but across the board.  i believe this steelers squad to be one of the most talented ever, with a real chance to go deep in the playoffs, but the injury bug is an uncontrollable factor, and has been too much of an issue here in 2010.  it stinks, but it's life in the nfl.  and rather than let it demoralize them, or use it as an excuse, what we witnessed yesterday was a steelers team who played hard and passionately, all the way to the whistle, and within the rules of the game.  i nabbed this pic of harrison from yahoo sports and added my own detailing because i think it is ridiculous the way the refs are calling these steelers games. 

if you watched the game, you saw all-pro richard seymour, a defensive lineman for the raiders punch ben roethlisberger right in the jaw.  hard.  long after the whistle.  and i was angry about it, and the refs rightfully ejected him from the game, and he'll probably get a fine and maybe even a suspension, but the thought occurred to me that (just like lamar woodley said earlier this week) i think it really matters who you hit in this league (or who is doing the hitting).  if we had seen that same punch thrown last week, and it was james harrison doing the punching against a certain tom "golden boy" brady, do you think the reaction would have been any different?  you betcha.  i see a growing two-facedness in this year's nfl.  i understand that you want to protect players, but it sure as heck looks like you want to protect certain players ($$$) more than others.  and that's not ok. 

so, besides that bit of frustration, it was nice to see the steelers dominate the oakland raiders 35-3, with a determined effort by the defense and by roethlisberger, who used his arm and his legs to get the job done. 

if i had a gameball to give, i'd give it to "potsie" james farrier, who is about 73 in NFL years, and yet continues to get it done.  he looked slow and over matched quite often last year, but he has returned with a vengeance this year, displaying a knack for being around the ball and making hard hits both in the running and passing games.  it's good to see the old guy get after it, and he gets my game ball. 

from one extreme to the other, it is so refreshing to see our rookies contributing.  i know that we gave up smoketonio holmes for nearly nothing this offseason, and that he is helping the j-e-t-s avoid heartbreak these last couple of games, but once we came to terms with the loss of a super bowl mvp, we had to put some hope in our two rookie wideouts, emmanuel sanders and antonio brown.  it was so good to see them both on the field together for the first time this season.  not only that, but they both contributed, and that is a good omen for the future of this team.  way to go, boys. 

now, let's do what the bungles couldn't, and beat those bills next week. 

harry potter and the deathly hallows

i have been waiting to write this post for about a week, but i figured i'd wait until the release of the movie, since there will be a great deal of cultural buzz this weekend.  i'm sure #harrypotter will be a trending topic on twitter, and we'll be seeing news coverage this morning of people lined up in front of theaters last night to see the newest film installment of the harry potter series at midnight. 

there's certainly no avoiding it: harry potter is now an unmovable part of the cultural lexicon.  whether you love or despise the stories, they're not going anywhere.

i, for one, love them.  i always have.  i started reading them with some curiosity, seeing as how some of my own church people at the time were slandering the story, saying that it was "of the devil" and "a force of evil."  so of course i went out and bought one as quickly as i could.  i remember my first time through that paperback copy of "harry potter and the sorcerer's stone," amazed at how much it felt like i was reading the Bible. i was amazed at how much i could see Christ in the pages.  i couldn't understand what people were so upset about.  sure the little guy used a wand, but it was just a story!  the real spirit of the story wasn't about magic, but about love and sacrifice and friendship and community and the kind of virtues you read about in a william bennett book.  it told the story of love and hope in a way that i desperately wanted to, and in a way that the Christian fiction of lindsay and peretti and lahaye have never done.  it wasn't a story that talked about love, but a story that actually showed it in a compelling and moving way.  it was, at least for me, remarkable.  and it also showed me how Christians can so easily miss seeing Jesus all around us, probably because our eyes are full of giant blind spots (Jesus called them logs). 

all these years and 6 books later and i am still amazed. 

***HUGE SPOILER ALERT HERE.  DO NOT CLICK TO READ MORE UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE LAST HARRY POTTER BOOK!  YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!***



i just finished the final book last week, and i was stunned.  i literally wept.  not because it was some phenomenal piece of literature.  not because it was so sad (though that was part of it), but because it told a story full of death and fear and hate and injustice (in other words, a story just like real life), while managing to hold up the idea that truth and hope and life and love are stronger than all of that in the end. 

seriously, think for a minute.  where else to you find a story like this today?  most of what passes as Christian fiction is either watered-down romance novels featuring a good looking pastor's family, or end-times theologically gobbely-gook meant to scare people into a particular worldview.  the rest of it is the stuff of readers digest.  there is very little mainstream fiction that bears the label "christian" that actually speaks to my experience of the world. 

and then there's harry potter. 

no, i don't know any wizards or sorcerers.  and that's not the point.  do you hear that, fundamentalism?  it's not the point.  harry isn't a wizard, he's a young man, discovering that he's been marked by sacrificial love, and learning to stand up to the hate and fear and injustice that he finds in his world.  and he finds that he doesn't have to do it alone, but he has others who will go with him, who will use their gifts, and together they will be a community (a body).  i read about the same thing once in a letter written by the apostle paul. 

anyway, i wrote this post to say something pretty simple: i think the harry potter stories are amazing.  in the end, after doing a very good job of demonstrating the world can be a very dark place, they stand up and shout the belief that the light is stronger than the darkness.  they resonate with a resounding hope that love is stronger than death, and that, in the end, death will be defeated.  i know that story!  i read it in my Bible.  and now i have an avenue to share that with others who may not have read the Bible before, but who have read harry potter. 

the harry potter series is as insufficient theologically as most of the stories in the old testament (less so, actually), or the parables of Jesus.  it isn't meant to be a systematic theology.  it is just meant to be a story.  but in the process, it has become a story that tells the truth in a way that many stories fail to do.  you can disagree with me about the values or pitfalls of reading harry potter, but my experience is that reading harry potter has brought me into a deeper and stronger relationship with Jesus Christ, who i believe is the one whose sacrifice has marked us and called us to love with all our selves, regardless of the risk. 

like after

here's a collage i made in the last several weeks.  for me, it's about eternal life and what happens when we die.  thought you might enjoy seeing what i've been working on recently.  i've actually been fairly productive (sometimes i'm most prolific when i'm busies with other stuff....weird), and have several projects in the works.  don't forget that you can look at my collages available for purchase here and get one as a christmas gift!  i'll be adding more soon, so check back in. 

"like after"

mixed media collage on hardcover book board

gregory a. milinovich

why i write

the rationale

a poem by greg milinovich

(side note: the word poem is a widely defined word, and by poem here i simply mean that this is a collection of words particularly put together to express what is in my heart, without deference to rules of grammar or the norms of communication.  this is not a poetry in the classical sense, but only in the sense that it is a cornocopia of letters and words that, when arranged a certain way, say what i need to say in a way that can't be said in any other way.  that is all.)

i write.
i write because i need to. 
because not writing smells deathly and dead.
because, strangely, there is blood coursing through all the inches of tangled tubes inside my skin, and it is pounding out a rhythm that i can't quite make out.  just below the surface it keeps speaking to me, saying, "i am alive because...." and then i never hear the rest. 
so i write.
i write because i still see so much and
because there is infinitely more that i know i'm not seeing. 
i write because sometimes it seems so much like summer, like great bulbous words are just being birthed all around me and i can't help but walk through the fields of my life and pick them from the vine - they're so colorful! - and make a mess of myself eating them there on the spot, swallowing their sweetness and spitting out the seeds. 
i write because that wild-toothed madman uncle walt would have me continue to discover this america, even if it isn't always the burpingly industrial teenager he once celebrated but has become a stubborn and confused adult.
i write because i am a geyser, the pressure building in me relentlessly - faithfully - until it springs up uncontrolled and angry, vertically, toward the maker and babel-mixer of language.
i write because the words practically beg for me to write them, and i simply find myself submitting to the nature of things; for the same reasons that
i breath,
i write.
i write because sometimes it seems so much like winter, like the words are crystalline and serene, lying around like blankets of snow, just waiting for me to slightly melt them and put them together and new and different ways; that through my digging around in them and holding them in my bright red hands they might become more than they once were: a fort, perhaps, or the great fat belly of a leaning snowperson, or even a snowball to be hurled through the freezing white sky right at you.
i write to hit you square in the face.
i write to scratch that spot that i can't otherwise reach.
i write to try and make sense of situations and circumstances, to take the great piles of words around me and start gluing them together in ways that i can see through - ways that take shapes that move around and move me.  and maybe move you.
i write because the spirit says write. 
but sometimes i write to seem clever.  or because guilt tells me it's time.
i write because sometimes it seems so much like spring, with words falling  like rain, just drenching me, so that all i can do is tuck myself under an umbrella and watch the great sheets of them falling from heaven.  each bit is a tiny reflector, a wet and life-filled drop of something from above, something i both desperately need and instinctively shelter myself from.
i write because sometimes life squeezes me - crushes me even - until the words start oozing from my pores, without my control, without a filter, and the words then are wildly honest and authentic.
i write because sometimes it seems so much like autumn, when the wild wind shakes me and the words cling to me like clothes, like dried up pieces of fire ember desperately hanging on.  when they are finally pulled from me to their dancing descent, i am naked and exposed, all my awkward bony joints showing and cracking right in front of you. 
i write because i can't let the trees of the field do it alone.
i write because i pray.
i write because life is too unbelievable to just receive it as it comes to me.  i must write it out.
i write because i'm tired of the same old strings of words in tediously predictable chains, wrought of iron and typically used to restrain and order and prohibit.  i write because i need words to invite, to inspire to encourage and to enlighten. 
i write because i play.
i write because there are too many weeping pencils, shedding great yellow tears for the untapped potential and their pointed ends.  i write for the scrape and drag of graphite on fibered paper.  i write to add my stroke - my stitch - to the quilted question mark that humanity has been making all these generations.
i write to discover the moon, and the man inside the mirror. 
i write to say i love you.
i write because i believe.
i write because i need help with my unbelief.
i write because i'm broken.
i write because i want to scratch myself into some tree bark, to make sure i can be heard among the ageless and countless voices echoing down the hallway: i am here!  i am alive!  i am amazed at all this!  can you hear me?
so i write.

6-3

while 6 wins and 3 losses doesn't sound too bad, last night was simply awful.  just terrible. 

this picture pretty much sums it up.  we looked overmatched in just about every phase of the game.  while the 2010 steelers are facing some really serious injury situations, the fact remains that there are no excuses for what happened last night.  it was embarrassing, and i hope that it will serve as a rallying cry for the guys who are suiting up next week against oakland.  if not, we can kiss the 2010 season goodbye. 

and, dear mr. brady, you'd better hope that you don't cross paths with these pittsburgh steelers again anytime soon, after that little spiteful demonstration you put on in the end zone.  yes, we know you can throw the ball for 9 yards every play when our starting defensive line isn't playing and james harrison is suffering from back spasms.  thank you, captain obvious.  but you'd better just hope that you can finish out your year without having to face what will certainly be an angry and bitter defense.  i, on the other hand, will be looking forward to redemption. 

saturday song: break out of the trance

okay..it's saturday, i have a house full of company (a total of 5 kids in our house aged 6 and under, and my very sanity on the brink of utter destruction), so i don't have any time/energy for anything more than the following saturday song.  this song is by a guy named greg x. volz.  in the early 1980's he sang for a christian band called petra.  then, in 1985 or so he left petra and went solo.  i had his 1986 album called "the river is rising" on cassette.  remember those?  the clear plastic credit card-sized contraption of joy, mysteriously embedded with wicked gnarly 80's tunes?  do you remember the smell of one of those cassettes, newly opened?  heaven.  but i digress....

anyway, in 1986-7, you would have found me next to a tape player with this album on.  as soon as the side hummed then clicked to an end, i flipped it over and listened to the other side for 4,593rd time.  i loved greg x. volz.  i mean, we shared the same name, and his middle initial was x.  that was enough to make him my here right there.  then, the fact that he was singing christian music that didn't sound like psalty's songbook?  awesome.  looking back, i recognize that these songs aren't instant classics, and that my own sense of nostalgia colors my hearing of them, but i still dig greg x.'s mid-80's aweseomeness.  i don't expect any of you to listen, but in case you want to imagine yourself watching little 11-year old me, with very light brown curly hair, playing with star wars toys and listening to some of the best that christian rock had to offer, have a listen.  break out of the trance. 

thank you, veterans

in the interest of full disclosure, let me start this way:

i hate war. 

i hate the idea of war.  i hate the word "war."  i hate thinking about or imagining or watching films or newsclips about war.  the very idea of two nations disagreeing enough to send their young men and women to go and try to kill the young men and women of the other nation is beyond staggering to me.  i am admittedly pretty comfortable in my own little corner of the world, with all my freedoms and luxuries and apparent entitlements.  so i acknowledge that it's pretty easy for me to hold that position. 

but when it comes to veteran's day, it's a different story.  all i have to do is imagine one lonely soldier, standing in a field in korea, or vietnam, or germany, or iraq or afghanistan.  all i have to do is imagine them standing there in camo, armed, maybe afraid.  all i have to do is imagine that human being standing in the midst of God's good creation, wrestling with all the uncertainties and yet feeling certain that something is worth protecting.  all i have to do is imagine you, dear veteran of war, and i am compelled to say thank you.

thank you.

thank you for saying yes.  thank you for facing your fears.  thank you for holding a gun for me.  thank you for putting yourself in a place where you had to send letters to your loved ones, and hope..pray..wait for a letter to return - a letter you surely held to your nose as you tried to absorb the home you were certainly fighting to protect.  thank you for those early mornings and those uncomfortable nights.  thank you for the countless mess hall meals and friday nights spent in foxholes.  thank you for facing the really difficult questions of life and death and protection and freedom that i don't usually have to think about.  thank you for your sacrifice.  thank you for being willing to face the ugliness of life, even though you would have probably rather stayed at home with your friends and family.  thank you.  on this day, at the very least, i realize that, though i'd rather not have to think about it, it is because of you and your willingness to sacrifice that i enjoy the life i lead today. 

6-2

the steelers played monday night, and i would have written about it yesterday, but i was just too exhausted from staying up so late not only watching the game, but not being able to sleep afterwards because i was so amped up. 

and by amped i don't mean "oh man i'm so wired because that was such an awesome victory and now i just want to bask in steelers glory for the next 92 minutes." 

no, not so much. 

instead, by amped i mean "holy crap i can't believe we almost let that game get away and i swear every game this team tries to give me a combination of an ulcer/heart attack/acid reflux and i am literally not going to live as long as i should because this team can't hold onto a lead in the 4th quarter." 

if you want to watch the highlights, click here.

or, if you'd rather not, here's what happened:
the steelers capitalized on stupid bengals mistakes to take an early lead. 
the steelers maintain and build on said lead by outplaying the bengals for most of the game.
the steelers realize that they've reached the 4th quarter and proceed to take a nap until the game is nearly lost.

along the way, rashard mendenhall had a great performance, constantly dealing with bengal defenders in the backfield, and often finding a way to turn it into positive yards. 

also, i have to give kudos to steelers wide receiver mike wallace, who keeps adding to his yards per catch numbers with his speed and his willingness both to adjust and take a hit.  for that, mike wallace has earned my "sometimes you just want it more" picture of the game.  nice work, anchorman. 

also have to give shout outs to:

-the steelers defense...for bending but not breaking

-hines ward....for keeping the streak alive and making up for your fumble

-the o-line...for overcoming some serious injuries

  so, at the halfway point of the season, the steelers are 6-2, having played half of those games without the franchise quarterback.  i think we're in a good place.  next come the new england cheatriots - who just got embarrassed by the brownies - so it doesn't get any easier.  but at least now we have the talisman that will surely be the steelers charm on their quest for 7:

our weekend in amish country

this weekend we had the wonderful privilege of spending an evening in lancaster, pa with some friends of ours from new jersey.  we met there on friday night and quickly proceeded to the bird-in-hand family restaurant where we made light work of the fried chicken on the buffet.  after waddling out and heading back to the hotel, we spent the next part of the evening with the kids in the swimming pool. 

after a good night's sleep, we woke up and went to intercourse (i'm not joking) to the kitchen kettle village. 

more of our adventure after the jump. 

all seven us of us took a ride through the countryside in an amish style buggy, driven by a man who had been born and raised in an amish family.  it was fun for the kids, but also really informative and interesting for the adults, not to mention beautifully scenic. 

after the carriage ride, we proceeded to eat our weight in kettle corn.  from there we went to the jam and jelly store, where we tried every imaginable jam and jelly, not to mention salsas and pickles.  the boys also got to ice their own gingerbread people:

after a lunch of pizza and french fries, we went to a railroad museum which was really cool.  the kids got to go on old railroad cars, go into a working train engine, see people in 1940's era costumes, and see a very impressive village made entirely of legos.  you can see from this picture that our children are very friendly with one another:



so we had a great weekend (albeit too short), in which we not only enjoyed an awesome amount of excellent eating, we simply enjoyed catching up with some friends.  big thanks to them for making the weekend possible, and making another memory for our family.  we had a great time. 

the quest for 7

it's a monday.  they sometimes play football on mondays, right?   a quick check of the schedule tells me that the steelers play tonight.  tonight!  the steelers!  are you ready for some football?!? 

so, in honor of the greatness of the day, i thought i would share this picture with you.  a picture of something i just received in the mail on saturday.  no, not the car.  but my new license plate! 

you may think that the #7 is in honor of ben roethlisberger, and that would be fine, even though that isn't why i got it.  at least not completely.  i mostly chose number 7 because the steelers are on a quest for championship #7, and i hope it comes soon.  i will wear that hope on the back of my car so that everytime i pass a browns, ravens, cowboys, bengals or eagles fan, i will remind them of the greatness of the greatest franchise in the history of greatness.  they will be humbled by my dazzling license plate, or else wonder why i can't spell "steelers" (they only allow 7 characters and "steelers" was taken, fyi).  either way, i will be content. 

oh, and i will purposely leave my headlights on when i go to special events like school concerts where they will have to announce over the loudspeaker, "if you drive a blue sedan with the license plate STELRS7, you left your lights on."  and i would overtly stand up, pretending to be embarassed and say, "oh, how foolish of me, HERE WE GO STEELERS, HERE WE GO!!!!!!!!!!"

another lego day off

yesterday, on my day off, Caedmon and i decided to play with legos, which is a pretty regular activity around our house.  he mostly plays with the lego "guys," and you can see here what he came up with:

i, on the other hand, was hearing the voice of hank williams jr. in my head, and looking forward to monday night, so i made this:

go steelers!

germs are friends, not foes

i love television's the office.  for years now, the show has been dramatizing and hyperbolizing real-life awkwardness and making us all laugh uncomfortably at it - and maybe ourselves - in the process.  dwight schrute, one of the most ridiculous characters on the show, has always been over the top with his extremism, whether it be in beet farming or volunteering at the scranton police force.  last night's episode was no exception. 

the show opened with a discussion about office hygeine, and one character suggested that she would set up hand sanitization stations around the office. 

this suggestion was greeted mostly with enthusiastic nods of agreement from coworkers.  but not dwight.  true to form, dwight took the opposing view, and took it (hilariously) to the extreme.  saying that he believes we need to stop coddling our immune systems, he opposed the idea of hand sanitization stations.  he said we need to toughen up and give our bodies a chance to fight the germs and sicknesses.  picking up on the weaknesses of his argument, other characters began to back dwight into a corner, suggesting that they sneeze on him so that his immune system would be particularly strong.  unwilling (as ever) to back down, dwight halfheartedly agrees that this is a good plan.  the next montage shows several characters sneezing on him, and even one character sneezing directly on the english muffin he's about to put into his mouth.  still unwilling to admit defeat, he slowly and ruefully takes a bite of that germ-covered muffin.  hysterical. 

but, the truth that this little 2-minute segment of situational comedy pokes fun at is that we, as a culture, are really becoming germaphobes.  dwight's extremism represents an overly ambitious response to this, but there is a sense in which he is right, that we are hurting ourselves when we don't give our bodies a chance to naturally fight the millions of germs that are all around us.  when we howard-hughes ourselves into germ-free living, we rob ourselves of some of our own God-given ability to fight those germs. 

howie mandel, a comedian and host of tv's deal or no deal is a well-known germaphobe.  he has written in his book "Don't Touch Me" about his fear of his germs and his obsession with anti-bacterial hand sanitizers.  in this interview with greta van susteren, he explains where this eventually led: 

MANDEL: And then I took the -- I had a surgical scrub that surgeons use, and I would wash my hands so much so that I killed all the antibodies in my hands.

VAN SUSTEREN: Really?
MANDEL: Germs are actually good. That kills enough, but I killed too much, and I ended up getting -- it's not because of this, because of overdoing it with the surgical scrubs and that, I ended up having -- I got viruses. Whatever I touched, I ended up getting warts. And I went to the doctor and said what are these things? And he goes you've got no antibodies.

so, it's not at a dwight schrute level, but here you even have a germaphobe realizing that we need to have exposure to germs. 

but where this whole germ repulsion thing drives me the most crazy is when it comes to children.  in my opinion, children were designed to play in dirt and eat bugs and swallow snot and eat without washing their hands.  i used to play with my matchbox cars for hours on the bathroom floor, because of the linoleum in there, and, knowing myself, i'm sure i didn't wash my hands before i ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  is it disgusting at a certain level?  yes.  but is it part of life, and, ultimately good for you?  yep. 

and if we keep moving as a culture in the direction that we seem to be heading, we may find out just how much we miss our exposure to germs.  now, it seems, just wiping your children's extremities with antibacterial wipes (which we can then thoughtlessly throw away to go and fill a landfill somewhere away from us) isn't enough anymore.  now you can buy these:

yep.  you can buy gLovies, little gloves for your children's hands for when they use the bathroom or are out in public places.  then, when you're done with them, you just throw them away where they magically disappear (or take years to biodegrade while seeping all sorts of interesting chemicals into the earth).  when i saw this product, i couldn't believe it. 

it all makes me want to stand up and yell, in some dwight schrute-ish frenzy, "stop it!  stop it with the fear of germs!  we need germs!  we need each others' dead skin cells and we need all the insect matter in our food and we need all the little germs that are all over the towel dispenser.  we need these little guys because they make us stronger.  look at me!  look at what i've done, and i'm still alive and quite healthy!  stop putting gloves and masks and helmets on your children and stop sheltering them from the world.  let them live!"

okay.  rant over.  carry on with your friday now.  and just remember: germs are our friends. 

i love autumn

here are some pics from our house this halloween.  my lovely wife has an amazing eye for decorating, and so you never know what kind of fun stuff you'll see adorning shelves and mantles during the various seasons of the years.  for this halloween, she asked me if i could take some of the black and white photos from my collection and make it look like the portraits on the walls in those old scooby-doo cartoons, where it looks like the eye holes have been cut out of them and someone (some masked ghost, of course) is peering through the holes.  so you'll see those, as well as an assortment of other festive decorations. 

autumn is my favorite season.  i mean, i love all the seasons for different reasons, especially when the time is ripe for the next one to arrive, but if i had to choose one that i wouldn't mind getting perpetually stuck in some groundhog day repeat mode, i would choose autumn. 
with the fresh blue skies set in contrast to the surrendering summer leaves, flushed with color at the embarrassment of their downfall;
with the crisp air ushered in, as if the migrating birds have pulled it in like a window blind as they head south; with the sound of referee whistles and tea kettle whistles and train whistles rattling through the barren cracking limbs of naked trees;
with the smell of cinnamon and pumpkin and wood smoke wafting through the air like some holy incense meant to remind us that there is more to this than what meets the eye;
with the impending winter crouched and threatening, waiting until its time to strike;
with the melancholy memories that all things die in their time;
and with the hopeful sense that even after death there is life again,
autumn falls. 

i hope your home and heart is as festive and faith-filled as can be in these days, and that you are as happy to be alive as i am.  grace and peace.