random thoughts on a slightly snowy day

It snowed a little here in Charlotte, enough to cancel the public and private schools (which is really irrelevant to our family, given that our kids are actually young adults...), not enough to keep me from going by the church for awhile, where I dove into a couple of short and due (almost overdue) writing projects. Both (one for Theolog, the other for Lectionary Homiletics) are intended for that woman or man who is working on this week's sermon, and needs some kind of infusion of something creative...I am not sure that I got there, but I am hopeful, in a modest way. Afterwards I went by the YMCA and exercised. While running on the eliptical machine I read an article in a recent New Yorker about the history and resurgence of Scrabble. Since I grew up playing Scrabble with my great-grandfather, with my grandparents, and play often with my wife, usually when we are in the mountains, I found it to be fascinating.

At any rate the snow, marginal as it was, prompted the usual comments on Facebook, and in other media from persons not originally from the south, but now living in the south (call them transplants) who feel the need to comment about the inability of the southerner to drive in the snow. Being the naturally positive and constructive person that I am, I have learned to listen for what a statement might really mean; the transplant is not really being critical of the native-born person, but instead is engaging in the ancient practice of lamentation. The transplant is actually reflecting on how wonderful life was in Buffalo or Baltimore or Detroit or Cleveland. So I don't take the observations personally. It is not about me.

Speaking about being far from home, I did learn this week to communicate this week via Skype, and, as a friend says, it is the BOMB! We talked with our daughter (in China) for almost thirty minutes one evening, for free. We heard her voice, we saw her face. It took perhaps seven minutes to install, and while I can use the tools of the internets, as someone called all of this, I am not great at figuring out how they work. Which is another way of saying it is a very user-friendly technology.

The evening dinner and studies at the church are cancelled---there is a bit of ice on the ground, and it will be well below freezing after dark. And so we will stay in, I may well finish off those writing projects, we will watch the last two episodes of "Lost" and then perhaps converse with Liz on Skype. Maybe we will play Scrabble. A day with a marginal amount of snow is good for any or all of this.