{"id":216,"date":"2007-10-05T23:57:03","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T23:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/10\/still-here-1.html"},"modified":"2007-10-05T23:57:03","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T23:57:03","slug":"still-here-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/10\/still-here-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Still here"},"content":{"rendered":"

..in case you were wondering.
\n\u00a0See, the problem with making a decision to cut down on your blogging is that it makes the decision to actually blog much more difficult to make. For me, at least, it puts so much more weight on what <\/em>to blog, because if something relatively unimportant strikes you as bloggable, but you’ve gone 2 days without blogging, you feel weird blogging the weird tidbit because it give the impression that you thought this was SO IMPORTANT YOU MUST BLOG FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWO DAYS….ABOUT THE BOOK ABOUT THE POPE’S CAT!<\/em>
\nSo you end up…not blogging. Which is fine, too.
\nAnd you forget about comments you’re supposed to approve and such. Which is probably not fine.
\nSo, I’ll just do a round-up, and see if that lights the fire.
\n
\nThis week I’ve been:
\n*Shuttling<\/strong> Katie to play practice. A girl who lives right across the street is in the same play, but because of both these girls’ crazy schedules – they go to different schools, and three days out of the week, Katie has to stay at her school for debate prep until the very last minute, and this other girl has voice lessons and soccer practice and such…I think we’ve swung the carpool thing four times.
\nBut that’s okay, because it’s not like the theater is in South Bend or something. It’s a ten minute drive. Not as nice as the approximately 90 seconds it took me to get Katie to rehearsals , just around the bend of Lake Morton<\/a>\u00a0for the sh0ws with the Pied Piper Players <\/a>when we lived in Lakeland, which was ideal.
\nWell, only one more week of that, and then debate season kicks into high gear, which is not much work for me, unless it involves getting up at 4:30 am to get her to school for a bus traveling to West Lafayette or some other exotic place.
\n(BTW, she’s doing Lincoln-Douglas this year – a first, as well as extemp and Congress.\u00a0 She’s a little disappointed, I think, but she wanted to do something in the dramatic arena of speech, but her coach has convinced her (flattery will get you everywhere) that her brain and ability to think on her feet makes her\u00a0very well suited for these events. We shall see.)
\n*Writing.<\/strong> Chapter 1 was 2500 words or so, but Chapter 2 has ballooned to 4500. Hmmm. Along with the writing goes much, much moral angst and unending discernment about the validity of even spending time on writing a novel, when the first one hasn’t been sold yet, and the fact that I can’t find “When I was bored, you wrote a novel for me” anywhere <\/em>in Mt. 25.
\n*Going over<\/strong> spelling words and listening to a 2-year old bellow “Gimme a BUD Light!” Yes, it must be football season.
\n*Feeling<\/strong> great relief that \u00a0I am no longer escorting said panicked 2-year old to the bathroom every ten minutes any more. It’s amazing how, once they get it – they get it<\/em>. Yes, I’ve done this five times now. Can’t you tell?
\n*Fielding<\/strong> phone calls from two older fellows, mostly about job and car trouble. The two requests I fielded over the past two days were both preceded by “Are you near your computer?” words that in one case were followed by “Can you look up the symptoms of mono?” and the other by “Can you check the Colts injury report?” The results of both research efforts were met with relief.
\n*Exercising.<\/strong> I have been doing the Couch to 5K <\/a>program, even though I was not exactly “couch” at the beginning. It’s great, though, for giving me the discipline I need, and if you’ve a mind to do it, definitely use these excellent podcasts, done by a guy out in California <\/a>– a wonderful service, in which he times out the running\/walking segments for you with only mildly annoying techno-type music, making it much, much easier, since you don’t have to keep time yourself. I’m on week five, and after much dread, actually made it through the 20-minute straight-run-with-no-walking this evening. Ten years ago or so, I actually ran in a 5k in Lakeland (Lake Morton was again involved). Yes, I finished. Not impressively, but I did. Moving up north and having two babies after 40 has taken its toll, though, but I think I’ve hit the point at which getting back to some sort of fighting shape doesn’t seem impossible any more.
\n*Celebrating <\/strong>the return of my BBC radio shows, after their summer break – Start the Week <\/em><\/a>and In Our Time<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Because the running only takes me once around Foster Park, and I like to go twice, which makes it almost 5-mile total trek, and nothing makes that brisk walk go down easier than 40 minutes on…antimatter! <\/em>
\n*Ripping up<\/strong> carpet, which I find perversely enjoyable. Our house was built in 1940, and the floors are all hardwood. The upstairs floors are all finished, but only the hallway is downstairs, which strikes me as very strange – that in almost 70 years, no one got the urge to just sand and finish these floors? \u00a0But they didn’t, and I’ve waited for way too long to get this done.\u00a0 I could say, “I don’t know why,” but I think finding places for the furniture and moving said furniture\u00a0and then not living in the downstairs for a week would probably explain my sloth. The guys are scheduled to come in about a month, but I’ve started slowly preparing – moving books and bookcases downstairs, and today I took up the carpet in my study – I wanted to get it done before the trash guys came, and lo and behold I did. Not an idiotically simple tasks because what I thought was padding was actually an indoor-outdoor carpet that had – you guessed it – been glued to the floor. Oh, not all over, but in strips. And the underpadding to that <\/em>was cheap and, I assume, old, and disintigrated into masses of black dust, which was a nasty mess for 9am Friday morning. I got it all, though – all but the patch under my desk, a desk which is not light, and which holds a computer I didn’t feel like disconnecting. So that can wait until closer to D-day.
\n*Reading<\/strong> Bridge of Sighs, <\/em>which, I’m sorry to say, is not grabbing me. I’m enjoying it at a certain level, but so far I’m only halfway engaged with it. But…final judgment is reserved.
\n*Still reading<\/strong> God and the World, <\/em>of course. I need to start posting excerpts.
\n*Watching<\/strong> The Office<\/em>, but which is making a huge <\/u>mistake with these hour-long episodes,which are padded and unfunny way too much of the time. Plus, they are getting way careless about their outdoor shots. Not that they care, probably, and not that we don’t all\u00a0 understand that this show is actually not shot in Scranton, PA, but still, when they’re driving around, and right in front is a series of rolling brown-beige hills topped with scrubby trees, and right to the left is a palm tree…Not Scranton.
\n*Watching<\/strong> Mad Men<\/a> <\/em>on AMC, and comparing notes on it with Nancy Nall.<\/a> It’s better than most stuff on television, has some interesting storylines, but, I think, is hampered by the trembling immanence of “THE 60’s” at this point.\u00a0You watch it – this show set in a 3rd-tier NYC ad agency in 1960, and the whole experience is too often overwhelmed by “Wow – things were so different <\/em>then – and let us snort at the unenlightened as they smoke constantly and drink while they’re pregnant” \u00a0and “Oh…THE 60’s are coming…watch out ladies!”
\nI was thinking today that it would be an interesting creative challenge to do a period piece suppressing that kind of hindsight. The awareness of what is coming is not an illegitimate choice, because the seeds of the future are planted in the past, but at the same time, as Nancy said, the girls all sitting around waiting for feminism to hit gets a little tired.
\nBut I’m a bit intrigued by the central character’s mystery, really like the scenes with the creative guys at the agency, and think the subplot of Peggy, the secretary being slowly given her chance at copywriting in this very male world, \u00a0is very interesting and well done so far – far more interesting than any well-worn treatments of sexual liberation, blah, blah, blah. The creator\u00a0is Matthew Weiner, who was part of The Sopranos<\/em>, and\u00a0it shows in the story-telling and character development. \u00a0
\n*On the Internet, reading <\/strong>about Episcopal problems, <\/a>Benedict on St. Cyril<\/a>, Benedict on Hope<\/a>, more and various Protestant stuff <\/a>and interesting places<\/a> the TLM is popping up,<\/a> motorsports at Belmont Abbey<\/a>, discernment in Columbus<\/a>, the Connecticut bishops on Plan B<\/a> and the Papal Nuncio with famous Italian Politicians <\/a>one of whom Whoopi Goldberg would do<\/a>, \u00a0as well as about various episcopal ordinatio<\/a>ns and installations, all of which is being covered very well in all kinds of places, and about some of which I even get first-hand reports.
\nAnd wondering<\/strong> why in the world the Archdiocese of New York permitted Carrie and Big’s wedding…to filmed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
\nI mean…if only because of what’s on her head, people. Please.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

..in case you were wondering. \u00a0See, the problem with making a decision to cut down on your blogging is that it makes the decision to actually blog much more difficult to make. For me, at least, it puts so much more weight on what to blog, because if something relatively unimportant strikes you as bloggable,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ephemera","category-family","category-life"],"yoast_head":"\nStill here - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/10\/still-here-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Still here - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"..in case you were wondering. \u00a0See, the problem with making a decision to cut down on your blogging is that it makes the decision to actually blog much more difficult to make. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}