May Potpourri

Well, this is going to be a bit of a hodge-podge of a post with lots of little and unrelated things to report...sort of a potpourri of news!!

David and I went to go see Akeelah and The Bee last Saturday. It was a very inspiring story about a gifted African American girl in a lower-income area of LA finding support and strength in her community to reach her full potential. I highly recommend it! It brought back memories of doing fairly well on spelling bees; I think I got pretty far into into the district bee until they fired "effleurage" at me. Damn them! Amazingly, that word was also in the movie! David said that one word that cost him a spelling bee was "pastiche", which was also in the movie. We loved it!

Oh, and you're going to just love this story.

About a month ago I was pulling into our garage and saw this cute, fuzzy, brown and white mouse scurry under the corrugated shelving to the left of where I park my car. I felt my Oberlin hippy roots and thought, "I'm going to be an animal lover here. I am not going to freak out just because some little cute innocent creature has chosen to find a home in my garage."

Well, yesterday I got into my car, which I remind you, is still only 5 months old. It still has New Car Smell (at least for now).

I opened up my glove compartment and wouldn't you know it, some of the napkins I keep in there were shredded, a la small rodent, and there were several mouse turds on the other napkins. I was horrified.

Instantly my hospitable feelings toward the mouse I had seen were gone. It was no longer cute, and I was suddenly not so enthused about sharing my garage - much less my new car - with any animals, much less nimble rodents who are obviously fond of mastication. I asked Paul, 4th horn in the MSO and car buff, about it and asked him how on earth mice could have gotten into my glove box. He laughed and said they must've gotten in under my hood, and that I should really be careful because mice can eat through electrical wiring in your car. Lovely. I told him about a humanitarian form of mouse removal that was a box trap that caught the mice in a box and you went out into a field and set them free without harming them. Paul laughed even harder.

Screw the mice. We're buying mousetraps today.

Let's see, what else? The youth group at my church is going on a Habitat for Humanity trip and they're holding a gourmet dessert auction on Sunday. I volunteered to bake a cheesecake from scratch, since I never have, and baked a trial NY Style Cheesecake from a recipe out of my Betty Crocker book. It turned out phenomenally, though for the actual auction cake (which I'm baking tomorrow afternoon) I'm going to double the crust because I thought it was a bit thin. Anyway, now we have two people under the same roof who love to bake cheesecakes from scratch! Isn't that cool? I gave away 3/4 of the cake to friends who raved about it, which made me feel good. :)

Oh, and a follow up on the digital music dilemma - my friend Mark, a computer guy out in California, emailed me the best and easiest solution! He said to rip the iTunes AAC files to a music disc, and then using the other program that imports tracks as mp3's, to import the AAC files. This will convert them and bypass the "Protected" status that makes it impossible to convert the AAC files directly. Way cool! Mark, you rock! Thanks for that!

Let's see, what else? Oh, yeah - reading! I finally finished The End of Faith by Sam Harris. I enjoyed parts of it but man, he really got on my nerves near the end. I personally agree with him that religion in general causes more division in the world than it does unity (The Crusades, The Spanish Inquisition, The Holocaust, 9/11...the list goes on and on) and that there are other ways (better ways for some people, myself included) to attain universal truths and spiritual sustenance than religion and dogma. So those parts were really good, and I really enjoyed them.

But his argument that you can't be a devotee of a particular faith without being a violent fundamentalist was just ridiculous and irritating. Just because you don't follow the parts of the Bible that advocate violence against nonbelievers doesn't mean you're not a Christian and that you can't find meaning and strength through Christianity. David pointed out that the author of that book sounds like a fundamentalist who's completely against religion, and that he isn't any better than those he argues against. I agree with him.

But I'm glad I read it. It was very enlightening on many levels, particularly about the Muslim faith. I have an entirely new understanding of 9/11 and the situation in the Middle East - from a religious perspective. It changes everything.

So now I'm reading Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. I resisted it for so long because it was so hyped and I had this image in my mind that it was historical fiction. Well, it's well- researched fiction, but it's set in the present day, and it's much more of a mystery/thriller. After that last book, which was like reading for a college Philosophy class, I need something more fast-paced. And I definitely want to see the movie!!

Okay, enough of my rambling! That's all for now.

XO Darcy