A Well-Tuned Body

Starting my August shape up today. :) 

Not Feeling Well

I had a great birthday yesterday, but I wasn't feeling very well yesterday already. Now, I really feel like I am not well. I had to postpone meeting with Noha and will probably have to postpone meeting with Salma. I hate to do that because she is cooking a lunch for me. I am going to try to go. UGH!

Michele and I meet for a walk at five too. We will see how I feel.

Things I Like About Today

1) Time in Hebrews 3 & 7


2) Listening to Audrey Assad and her new CD. :)

3) Finishing War and Peace (at 1 am)

4) Breakfast with George (Malt-o-Meal)

5) Watching kids pack up their Bionicles and having for floor space and bookshelves!

6) George having accountability with Suburban elders. He hangs with so many younger guys. It is so nice for him to have accountability with men closer to his age and closer to our family stage! YIPPEE!

7) A free Saturday with nothing on the calendar but time with family!

Thursday

Don't have much to say other than I am loving my summer. It is a perfect balance of time with God, time in the word and prayer with friends, time with family and fun activities for the boys, and time just for fun!

An Unexpected Hour

My kids are at golf lessons, Noha postponed our Abraham study because she just got back from camping late last night. I would normally be preparing, but I like to do the morning of because it is fresh in my mind. So, I am here with a VERY quiet house. I love the quiet of a perfect summer day. It is breezy and cool but sunny.


My back is a big wacky. I walked about 1 1/2 hours yesterday (to and from the club), did elliptical for 1/2 hour, and did my weight routine and ab workout. I am thinking my weights were too much, and I should have stretched more after I walked home from the club.


I am in Hebrews. Such a sacred book. I hesitate to approach it for the Bible Book Club because there is so much to dig into, and I have only done the first chapter in an inductive way prior to this. Most of the New Testament epistles and John have been easier because I have studied most of them pretty deeply in the past. Not to worry. It is a great book. I will grow. That is always good.



I met with Jane, and we did the first lesson "Making Disciples" in Discipleship Essentials: A Guide to Building Your Life in Christ by Greg Ogden. I love this book. I love how it starts with "Making Disciples" as the FIRST thing you teach a new follower of Jesus. So cool! Rebekah and I did the first section together back in the summer of 2006, but she wanted something more challenging. It is so perfect for a fairly young believer like Jane though. I love Jane's heart and hunger to grow. I look forward to meeting with her twice a week through the end of the summer.


Our summer will change drastically when seven of our young friends leave for Asia in August. The dynamics of our Jesus Community will definitely change, but I am OK with that.  I have loved being with this group of 20-somethings (and three thirty somethings), but they are all moving on and growing. It is exciting to watch. Wonder what God has for us as we will not be involved with the next group coming through in the fall other than little teaching bits.  I am available for prayer too. It will all be very good. Since it is Michael's last year of high school, I think I will like having more nights free during the school year too. God is good. His ways are perfect.


Hopefully, the study with our friends from Asia will continue too, even though I am not sure what will happen with Shelly and Dave as he applies for jobs. They may be moving in December, Elizabeth, Andrew, and Buck too.



Reading-wise, my Well-Educated Mind reading has been put on hold for the "large loose baggy monster" (Henry James quote) War and Peace. I have a free version on my Kindle, but I also have an audiobook download on my iTouch that I checked out from Library 2 Go. So fun!  The English narrator does great French and German accents, but he sticks to an English one for the Russians. That's OK. It came in handy to listen to this while I was going up to Seattle and back and while I was taking walks in Redmond and around here. I "read" another 10% of the book while walking to and from the club yesterday and plan on reading another 10% today. So, I might be done by this weekend.


Novels are so much more fun than the history that I have been reading in The Well-Educated Mind. I will get back to it though. I hope to finish The History of England: Volume 5 and Mein Kampf in August. 

So Many Goals. So Little Time

Last week was simple:


Get up
Time in Word
Eat Breakfast and tea
Visit with my host (either Sue or Patty) 
Maybe do something fun (Mani, pedi with Patty)
Eat Lunch
Brave Seattle freeway
Drop kids off at Digital Double
Walk or read or walk and read, time in Word, BBC posts 
Brave Seattle rush hour freeway
Eat dinner
Visit with host
Read
Sleep


I came home and looked at all the things I "could" be doing at home, and I said to George, "I think I have too many goals."


So, I am trying desperately not to create new goals for myself and either abandoning or completing old ones. 


COMPLETED and Returned to the library:
Art of Reading lectures by the Teaching Company
The Producers movie
Precious Movie


COMPLETED:
Tennis registration
Golf registration
Jesus and the Qur'an registration
Fall term registration for Michael (he did it all, but I had it in my mental check list)


ABANDONED and Returned:
The American Nightingale (Book Babes reading)
How to Read a Book by Adler (second attempt)


ON HOLD:
Mein Kampf
History of England, Volume 5


ONGOING: 
War and Peace
2 Timothy - Revelation


So, there you have it. I don't even have scrap books on my summer agenda anymore. I don't know why. I will have the goal of completing Michael's for his high school graduation. That will be all. :)

Why Read the Classics

Italo Calvino

1. The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, "I am rereading . . . " and never "I am reading . . . "
2. We use the words "classics" for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them
3. The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
4. Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
5. Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.
6. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
7. The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).
8. A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives much pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.
9. The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.
10. We use the word "classic" of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the "total book," as Mallarmé conceived of it.
11. Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
12. A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
13. A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
14. A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.

Italo Calvino
"Why Read the Classics" (excerpt)
from The Uses of Literature

Loving My Day

I have had a good day. Time with Sue at her house this morning. Now the boys are at their Animation Immersion Program, and I am Starbuck's for some time. I am not as intent today as yesterday. I got two posts done yesterday and read a ton of War and Peace. I have gotten a little of that book read, but I am just goofing off today. :)

Boy, this Starbuck's is BUSY!

June was a BIG Reading Month

You can always tell when I am finished with homeschooling for the year, especially when I am done with the literature class, because my reading goes up!


I had two major milestones in that I completed the Medieval time period and the poetry genre of The Well-Educated Mind!


My list is on the side, but I thought I would add it here:

KEATS

58. "Hyperion: A Fragment"

59. Endymion

HOPKINS

60."God's Grandeur

61. "Pied Beauty"

62. "The Caged Skylark"

63. "The Windhover"

64. "Carrion Comfort"

65. "No Worst"

66. "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

YEATS

67. "A Prayer for My Daughter"

68. "The Cap and Bells"

69. "Down by the Salley Gardens"

70. "Easter 1916"

71. "The Coming of Wisdom with Time"

72. "The Lake Isle of Inisfree"

73. "Lapis Lazuli"

74. "Leda and the Swan"

75. "The Magi"

76. "Memory"

77. "Sailing to Byzantium"

78. "The Second Coming"

79. "The Secret Rose"

80. "September 1913"

81. "Three Things"

82. "The Wheel"

83. "When You Are Old"

84. "The Wild Swans at Coole"

85. "The Fiddler of Dooney"

AUDEN

86. "As I Walked Out One Evening"

87. "The Common Life"

88. "Compline"

89. "Epitaph on a Tyrant"

90. "The Fall of Rome"

91. "In Memory of Sigmund Freud"

92. "In Memory of W.B. Yets"

93. "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love"

94. "Lullaby"

95. "The More Loving One"

96. "On the Circuit"

97. "Propero to Ariel"

98. "September 1, 1939"

99. "The Shield of Achilles"

100. "Under Which Lyre"

101. "The Unknown Citizen"

102. "Walk After Dark"

LARKIN

103."Annus Mirabilis"

104. "Aubade"

105. "Deceptions"

106. "Essential Beauty"

107. "Far Out"

108. "High Windows"

109. "I Remember, I Remember"

110. "The Importance of Elsewhere"

111. "Is It for Now or for Always"

112. "Long Sight in Age"

113. "Modesties"

114. "The Old Fools"

115. "Story"

116. "Since the Majority of Me"

117. "This Be the Verse"

118. "To Put One Brick Upon Another"

119. "Toads"

120. "Why Did I Dream About You Last Night"

121. "To My Wife"

HEANY

122. "Blackberry-Picking"

123. "Bogland"

124. "Casualty"

125. "Digging"

126. "Death of a Naturalist"

127. "Field Work"

128. "Hailstones"

129. "The Haw Lantern"

130. "Lightenings"

131. "The Ministry of Fear"

132. "Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication"

133. "Personal Helicon"

134. "Poets Chair"

135. "Squarings"

136. "Tollund"

137. Idylls of the King by Tennyson

138. Journal of a Solitude

139. Essays of Montaigne, Screech translation

140. Ecce Homo by Nietzsche

141. The Communist Manifesto

142. 2 Corinthians

144. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

145. The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur

146. Galatians

147. 

Be Free

148. 

Ephesians

149. 

Be Rich

150. 

Philippians

151. 

Be Joyful

152. 

Surprised by Joy

153. 

Colossians

154. 

Be Complete

155. 

Holman New Testament Commentary: Galatians-Colossians