We’ve been without service for three days now.  Since LightHusband works from home, we pay for a business account at $150 per month.  Supposedly this ensures rapid response when we go down.  Not so.  It simply means we pay more money per month to hope for rapid response when our service goes down.  Oh.  And we get to speak to someone who speaks English as a native language when we call for service.  That’s not particularly appealing to me since I have no problems listening to a heavy accent.

My biggest pet peeve is not being what one appears to be.  Or pretending to be something that one is not.  Essentially lying about one’s being.  So … Comcast stinks.  They are liars and cheats.  We’ve been waiting all day long while one customer service rep after another has lied and bs’ed to us.  We’ll be without the internet all weekend now.

In other news, I’ve been getting a lot of reading and quilting done.  I’m reading four books right now.  On the way out to Colorado, I picked up The Places In Between (you may recall that LightHusband read this awhile ago and I quoted from it).  I’m enjoying it too.  I came across this description of the British soldiers stationed at a crossroads town and thought it quite telling.  The Afghani men were describing the soldiers to Rory.  They thought very highly of the Brits, but were curious about some of their habits which did not make any sense at all to the wiry, desert-wise Afghani mountain men:

“British soldiers have chests as broad as horses.  We wish there were more of them to keep the peace.  Every morning they hook their feet over the bumper of their jeep, put their hands on the ground and push themselves up and down on their hands two hundred times without stopping.  I don’t know why.”

I thought about how strength has different requirements for different circumstances and different environments.  The wiry, small Afghani men are perfectly built for their environment.  They are strong and built for endurance in the arid, high altitude and high temperatures of the high desert.  The British soldiers, on the other hand, were building solid muscle mass which requires a lot of protein intake and water to maintain.  This is not easily accomplished in the terrain they were protecting.  So while they are large and strong by Western standards, they might not last so long in the wilds of Afghanistan.

I’ve also picked up Exiles:  Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture by Michael Frost.  I’m only one chapter into it yet, but it’s an excellent companion to Colossians Remixed.  I’d almost say it’s part 2, even though it’s written by a whole other person.

Then there is Parenting Teens with Love and Logic, by Foster Cline and Jim Fay.  Just opening this book in front of LightGirl is guaranteed to raise her hair and howls of rage.  She is determined to infer that this is about “bad” teens not all teens.  The authors have also written a general parenting book.  If it’s as good as this one, I’d highly recommend it.  They say there are several parenting methods. There’s the “helicopter” approach … where the parents hover and protect the children from everything bad, the children are never allowed to grow or own their own victories or defeats.  There’s the drill-sergeant approach where the parents bark out orders and the children are expected to obey them without question … again, children don’t learn how to listen to their own voice, they end up listening to an external voice.  There are laissez-faire parents who just let whatever happen and this also has fairly disastrous results.  Then there is the method which they recommend, the consultant approach.  In this approach, the parents ask questions about how the child will handle given situations and let them own their own victories and distasters (within reason).  It’s very good and has given me a lot of language to use that takes the heat out of aruguments and bickering with the LightChildren.

Last is a re-read of a book I read almost 20 years ago.  The Crone:  Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power, by Barbara G. Walker.  It’s fairly over the top feminist reading about Goddess worship.  But it is interesting from an anthropological and theological perspective to read about how the Trinity has been reflected in many different traditions from way before Christ (for example).  It’s also sad to read about how abuse of power and the patriarchal misuse of Church traditions took women out of their place of wisdom and healing in European villages and towns during the onslaught of the Roman Empire.  The unification of church and state under Constantine was more damaging than we can ever imagine.

So not having internet access is frustrating, but I’m getting alot of reading done!