Month: August 2023

In the process of unpacking, we left an open box on the floor, containing one of the dogs’ (many) bed/carpets in it. A couple of days ago, Minke noticed it and jumped in, and since then she and Flora have been devoted to occupying it.

I took my morning run (the distance of which seems to fluctuate for reasons I don’t quite understand — today it registered as 1.7 miles, but usually it shows up as 1.6 or 1.5) at a patient pace. It’s darker in the mornings these days, of course, and chillier. Pretty soon I’ll be back to wearing a hoodie as I run.

Sermon for tomorrow is mostly done. I’ll try to finish and print it this morning, and that will leave the train ride for editing.

With one morning run, one trip to church (almost the same route), and one dog-walk, I’m up to four miles already today. Likely I’ll spend the rest of the day sitting down, working on a sermon (or James).

Another one-and-a-half today, at a slightly peppier (still nothing exciting) pace. Home with the ladies, now, while Margaret works on her presentation on ‘Should Commodities Flourish?’, working on my own sermon for an upcoming Special Event and thinking about finishing my James essay.

I have another interview coming up, so that’s comforting — no chance of getting a post unless I’m short-listed first, so this improves the odds (even if I’ve had much of the optimism and confidence sapped out of me). Just now, though, I think I’ll wake up the slum,bering beasts and take them on the walk that they surely need soon.

I woke this morning to the first day on which neither Margaret nor I will be shuttling to or from James Street. Granted that we didn’t exactly choose to relocate, this feels very very good.

My morning route is still a bit short, but I got my run in and it felt okay, at a very indulgent pace. Margaret will head out very soon to spend her morning at work in a cafe; I’ll stay with the canines, working on a sermon or on my James essay. I probably ought to file a job application or two also, but I haven’t checked that category carefully since the gruellying removal process started.

In a few minutes I’ll swing down to James Street, call for a ride, load up our boxes destined for storage, take them to our units, squeeze them in, lock the doors, and that will be that. (Margaret will take some books to Mary Mags tomorrow or Sunday, but we’re not really counting that.) We now live in Headington.

Earlier this morning, I got up and ran my one-point-six. I’ll stretch it back to two miles eventually, but for now I’m content with this route.

We’re back in Headington this afternoon, after spending the morning organising our retreat from East Oxford. We wrought four categories: going to the flat, going to storage, going to Mary Mags’s book sale, bin, and recycle. Once assured that we didn’t have to choreograph our rubbish’s journey to a tip, or our recycling’s journey to… its next cycle, we packed a taxi van with one last load of suitcases and boxes and bags; Margaret, Minke and Flora rode with our stuff, and I hopped on my trusty velocipede and biked to Headington. Sadly, I got a bit mixed up on my way, and ended up taking a grossly inefficient route. Still, time spent on a bicycle is time well spent, and it’s good to be assured that even my rusty bicycling skills sufficed to get me up Headington Hill.

Now it’s gin and tonic time.

So, I tried out a new route this morning — running and walking, trying to find my way — and the planned route came in at 1.6 miles. Our part of Headington is tricky, because (unlike East Oxford) the roads are less tight a network of blocks, and they tend to meander outward with only intermittent cross-streets. I can see a way to lengthen the run, but it would not be my preference. I’ll keep thinking.

No running, though I’m thinking about my (necessarily) new route. More dog-care (we want to keep them quiet; they’ve never lived in a flat before, and we want to help them learn to be good neighbours). Margaret and I have each made a trip to James Street and back. There’s less and less to do, and it’s more and more difficult. I think that tonight will mark a boundary-crossing, though, such that it’s no longer intelligible to regard our old home and neighbourhood as being home any more. We’re Headingtonians now.

This’ll be the first weekday in our new digs. Margaret plans to go to a local cafe to work this morning; I’ll stay here with the dogs, who are still very anxious about having moved. I’ll try to make some headway on sermon and essay while at home. Then, later in the day, one or both of us will go back to James Street to advance the cause of emptying and tidying the residuum of our goods. Of course, this is the gruelling stage, not quite the ‘Forget it, we’ll burn it all’ phase, but is still the ‘I’d hate to bin this, and then find occasion to wish I’d kept it’ phase — as I observed on BlueSky yesterday:

Two days ago I bid a fond (not really ‘fond’) farewell to two lengths of cat-5 cable, and pondered the long-ago days when it was a vital necessity.
Yesterday I realised that the only way to connect the internet to the vintage 2011 television we’re using is…

Ah, liminality…

For the time being I’m not running, though I may change that as soon as tomorrow. The trips to and from James Street take a lot out of me, though, and I have intervals of hobbling around with flare-ups of the fasciitis.

It’s a long story, but the short version is that our move out of college housing was accelerated (to our surprise) and we had to do our relocation act sooner and more intensely than we had expected. Last Wednesday, the BRitish Heart Foundation took away some of our furniture, and a lucky online ‘buyer’ (we asked a nominal £10 to fill in the ‘price’ blank on a form) took away our long black sofa. Thursday a crew picked up our boxed goods and some furniture and deposited it in two storage units just beyond the ring road. Friday we began transporting our remaining goods to our new residence pro tempore and slept here for the first time. Yesterday we made multiple trips to and from James Street, pushing ourselves past the breaking point, and slept here again. I think we have the hang of the sleeping part. This morning I went to church in my new local congregation (St Andrew’s, Headington, though I expect to visit Holy Trinity on occasion), and made a single round trip to take care of our bicycles and to gather up some slipped-through-the-cracks daily use items. Still so much to do… I described moving homes as the process wherein the closer you get to the end, the further you are from the end — that is, at a certain point you enter the interminable ‘What will we do with this? What even is it? Oh, it’s that’ phase, where each reduction of the apparent total amount of gubbish is nullified by the ambiguity of the stuff’s status (and often your emotional investment in it). It’s going to be a long month, especially cos I have a sermon, an academic essay, and a job interview (and should finalise applications for a couple other posts).

No run, cos my socks and trainers are packed somewhere, and we need the time to finish up packing all the goods that are going into storage. Right now, it all looks distinctly bleak, but once everything’s gone we’ll be in a position to begin a new (and, we may hope, a short) phase.

Vanilla morning run, two miles 11°, not much more to say.

This morning, the British Heart Foundation swings past to pick up several large items of furniture. This afternoon the sofa goes. The dogs are very anxious.

This morning was a bit brisk (11°), and I felt a little rusty after skipping yesterday’s run, but otherwise no real noteworthy aspects. Two miles.

Heavy rain this morning, so I haven’t run. It’s not unthinkable that I run later in the day, but it’s unlikely.

One of the dogs has a moderately dramatic digestive disruption, so Margaret got less sleep last night than would be ideal. We woke up together, I to run and she to clean up a puddle of puke and some gelatinous other dog by-product; she went back to sleep, and I run under light clouds, 14°, at an indulgent pace, and I tallied another two miles.

I came home, showered, breakfasted, corrected some typos in thos morning’s homily, and meandered down to Fairacres. We had Mass, the sisters prayed for Margaret and me in our housing… situation, home again, and I feel distinctly as though I’ve done enough for a day (though there is so much more to do as far as preparing to vacate the premises)….

Did I mention that Käthe came to stay with us a couple of weeks ago? Last night she blogged about the multi-staged holiday she took that included her stay in Oxford (Margaret and I make a cameo appearance — don’t blink or you’ll miss us!). But making links is one of the vital virtues of the internet and blogging, so I had to note and link to Käthe’s.

/waves vigorously

Two miles, uninteresting conditions, although just as my warm-up was transitioning into full-on running, I think I may have experienced a few moments of the breezing I observed in another runner earlier this week. I do not infer from that that I’m about to experience a breakthrough in limberness and energy, but it’s fun while it lasts.

I noted a while ago that Jenee Woodard sends traffic this direction to my New Edition post. It occurred to me that I hadn’t taken a look recently to see what has generated most traffic to this blog over the past decade or so. The old favourites are Plural of Impetus (for obvious reasons) and Genotext and Phenotext (reflecting the opacity of the distinction in the writings that originated the terms). Rough Injustice was my description and criticism of the first step toward dissolving what was once the General Theological Seminary, when the GTS8 (Deirdre Good, David Hurd, Amy Bentley Lamborn, Joshua Davis, Mitties McDonald DeChamplain, Andrew Irving, Andrew Kadel, and Patrick Malloy) were fired on the tissue thin pretext that they had implicitly resigned.

But the blog the is more than twenty years old, and in the past ten years I’ve had steady traffic coming in for posts that transcribe other texts: Guido Sarducci on UFOs from an early episode of Saturday Night Live, Weren’t No Kin on the lyrics of the popular R&B/Gospel/pre-proto-rap song ‘Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt’, and more recently Some Things Are Important on the lyrics of the Toots Hibbert (and the Maytals) song ‘Pomp and Pride’ and the song ‘Draw Your Brakes’ by Scottie.

And scattered posts about my own vocational tale of woe and intrigue, my arguments about hermeneutics, miscellaneous sermons, the various digital editions of texts I’ve transcribed (now all to be found in my directory in the Internet Archive — I’m especially proud to have transcribed Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews into four volumes with in-text footnotes), fountain pens, some of my memorial posts, and a couple of April Fools posts of which I’m inappropriately proud (Franciscans Sue Starbucks and Not That Happy).

It’s still tough to remind myself to blog every day (as we see), especially now that I have accounts on Mastodon and BlueSky as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts I haven’t yet given up on. But it’s worth keep the ol’ site going.

I got distracted yesterday, apparently, but I did run, and then trundled down to Fairacres, and then came back and eked out a bit of writing for the essay that I must, must, must complete this month. 14°, humid, cloudy, but a decent pace, two miles.

This morning’s run was a bit odd, in that it was about 18° when I set out, and the humidity must have been 100%; the air condensed around me as I ran into it. (It occurred to me that there should be a weather portmanteau such as ‘hu MISTity’ to designate this phenomenon. Anyway, I slogged along at a desultory pace through this near-but-not-quite drizzle, getting hotter and hotter in the high temp and humidity. Thus, another two miles.

I post most of my photos to Flickr, with a Creative Commons licence. Most of them are of only personal interest, but some have been selected for book covers, so that’s an agreeable outcome. A long-ish while ago, I got a comment on one of my photos on Flickr noting that another Flickrite had used one of my photos on her blog, and thanking me. She did everything right: all my photos are licensed through Creative Commons (attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs), so she (a) linked the photo to its place in my Flickr feed, (b) wrote an acknowledgement and (c) pointed to my overall Flickr account.

Sometimes people just go ahead and use my photos on the ‘Well, CC is public domain’ theory. Tsk, tsk. Or they ask me how to use a photo they like, as though it were rocket science. (Kara, is it rocket science? No, I didn’t think so.) Or people ask me if they may use them; but the whole point of a CC licence is that you don’t have to ask unless you’re selling. Now, it’s good manners if there’s even a slight risk of money changing hands, but at the heart of CC-licensed material lies the principle that if you do what the licence says (in my case, attribute the photo to me, don’t make money from it without making an arrangement with me, don’t remix it without my agreement), it’s all clear from the get-go.

Esther did it right. She posted the photo, with attribution, unedited, to her non-commercial blog. Then she directed my attention to it, a polite gesture but not strictly necessary. Bingo! All according to Hoyle.

Now, if you want to licence some of my photos for commercial purposes, (a) Great!! and (b) just get in touch. I’m a cheap date.