It's only 2:45pm as yet, I just walked in the door from being downtown at church, but I stayed up way too late working on getting this page set up last night, so I'm kind of wiped out -- which I'd rather not be, all things considering. Once again, I stay up late and regret it the next day. The Derek of today tends to always be frustrated with the Derek of yesterday even as he resents the demands of the Derek of tomorrow.
So I got to church late (just as the sermon was ending), but what I was there for after that was fine, beautiful music, as usual. After church, I went with some people to take communion to a woman whose best friend was sitting behind me in church (or, since he was there on time, no doubt, whom I sat in front of, I should say) and I noticed she wasn't with him. I didn't think much more about it until after when I learned she'd had a stroke yesterday while the two of them had been buying a pumpkin for Halloween.
I'd already planned to help take communion to someone after church -- the bread is consecrated during the regular service along with the rest of the communion hosts, so it's just an extension of the church's usual Eucharist -- but had been thinking it would be one of the members of the church who receives communion at home every week, but this was a far more serious situation, of course. She was still in ICU and they'd only allow 3 in at a time (there were four of us, and two family members already there), so three of us did the short communion service with her; she was able to hold the order of service in one hand, but hand a tough time turning any pages or then going to the gospel lesson, etc. The nurse said they didn't want her to try to swallow anything, including the communion host, because they weren't sure if the muscles in her throat were working, so the three of us each held her hand while we took the "Body of Christ, the bread of heaven."
Then two of us said goodbye, gave her hand another squeeze, and left so another friend from church could go in and also visit with her.
Then I took the subway home and read an excellent article from last week's Sunday NYT magazine about children who grow up with gay parents. (Already in their archives, so I can't link to it for you.)
It's a beautiful day in New York City today. Tonight, kids will drop by my apartment to trick-or-treat (I bought a ton of candy yesterday to hand out). You can have a stroke, an aneurysm, a heart attack at any moment, just as there could be a terrorism attack at any moment. The lesson: life is too short.
The lesson's corollary: we keep forgetting the lesson.
Two days before the most important election in my life and I'm only now getting around to creating a blog. And I need to go to bed (even though it's DST tonight; it's still 1:30pm after the DST switchover) because I need to go to church tomorrow morning.
But I've had this site, this URL/domain, for years, and never used it for much of anything beyond e-mail. You can see what my old homepage was like. Har har. That was, essentially, my homepage for almost nine years, I think, until tonight. Time to retire it, but I'm sentimental enough, I couldn't just trash it, right? In Web years, that's practically museum material.
Anyway, before I go to bed, I should at least explain why I made some of the choices here I did. Blogging is one part navel-gazing, best I can tell, and if you're read this far, you're certainly not so demanding your day will be ruined if I explain a few things:The color and other aspects of the site are dependent on my CSS design, and since this is an evolving thing, some things may look really nuts and may always ... or I may eventually get them fixed. Stay tuned.