Catching up, Quotes,and a photo

We had almost a whole week of winter. On Friday, I headed up north and spent all day Saturday skiing with a bunch of high schoolers. It’s good to know that I can still hold my own (actually, I do even better than that which means I seldom see the kids as they don't spend much time of the most difficult-which aren't that challenging-slopes). My ego was boosted when a ski patrol guy put a sales job on a friend and me, suggesting we consider signing up. If it wasn’t so far! Before I left Friday, I got my daughter out in the backyard on cross-country skis. That’s her in the picture (No, I’m not going to show her face, I'm going to protect her privacy). She and I will have to get out on skis some this week, she’s pretty good, if I could just get her to hold her poles correctly. That'll come in time.

The fire is warm, my drink is cold, I've had a long afternoon nap, the dog is having his nap at my feet, heaven must be near.

I've been delinquent in keeping up my index, but this evening I've caught my book and movie review index up to date. Check it out here.

I’ve been rather delinquent in posting quotes of my readings, here’s some from this past week:

On having an “Economist’s Version” of American Idol, from my favorite economist: “someone explaining why picking your nose is like predatory pricing because you're reducing your air flow in the short-run to increase it in the long-run.” (you just thought economic profs were boring, if we could just get them to write in complete sentences…) fromVoluntaryXchange

"Some of them died. Some of them were not allowed to."
-David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (my review is coming soon)

In only a few years the world of pavement, speed and universal dissatisfaction had extended itself into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics.”
Wendell Berry, “A Return to Port William” in the Christian Century, January 9, 2007. This is an excerpt from his new book, Andy Catlett: Early Travels. (I'll have to get this book!)

"What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. Reading my way out of disaster in the Berkeley library, I had run into Henry Adams. “Chaos,” he told me, “is the law of nature, order is the dream of man.” No one had ever put my life to me with such precision."
-Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

"How lovely it is to be chosen…"
-Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

"Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention…"
-Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (keep that in mine when reading my recollections)

"Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can’t have a by-product unless you had a product first. It’s immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty."
-Charity, in Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

"The two terms, “spiritual” and “theology” keep good company with one another. “Theology” is the attention that we give to God, the effort we give to knowing God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. “Spiritual” is the insistence that everything that God reveals of himself and his works is capable of being lived by ordinary men and women in their homes and workplaces. “Spiritual” keeps “theology” from degenerating into merely thinking and talking and writing about God at a distance. “Theology” keeps “spiritual” from becoming merely thinking and talking and writing about the feelings and thoughts one has about God. The two words need each other, for we know how easy it is to let our study of God (theology) get separated from the way we live; we also know how easy it is for us to let our desires to live whole and satisfying lives (spiritual lives) get disconnected from who God actually is and the ways he works among us."
-Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology