LOST season 5 completed a couple months ago now, but in the meantime, we have been watching Freaks and Geeks (only on episode 8) as well as In Treatment (only on episode 10 of season 1).  We both really enjoy these thus far.  We attempted to get into Mad Men, but after roughly 8 episodes, we’re not really feeling it.  After finishing the entirety of The Wire towards the end of last year, our standards have gotten a bit higher, I suppose.

Meanwhile, one of Tiana’s friends and ex- coworkers was in town this past week visiting. It seems like they had a good time. She left yesterday, and they rented a car which Tiana turned in today, but as we were about to get into the car this morning to drive it back to the rental agency, we discovered that one of the small windows in the back had been busted out and there was glass everywhere.  And we didn’t take out the extra 10 quid a day for insurance, so we have to pay a large portion of the deductable.  Pretty infuriating, but what can you do?

If we can get our stuff together (and quickly!), we are hoping to visit our friends Rusty and Lauren in Scotland later this month before they leave to go back to the States.

I’ve been reading a lot of fun stuff lately, but all for my studies, which I will save for another post at some point in the future.

Wrong-side-of-the-road driving, but everybody does it so it's okay.

On Christmas day, Tiana and I drove to Manchester to pick up Tiana’s Mum who was to visit for just under two weeks.  We had to rent a car on Christmas Eve because no forms of public transportation are running on Christmas day.  So, we picked up a car complete with GPS, which was rather helpful.  “Go straight through the roundabout, second exit.”  “Turn left, then right.”  “Turn left, then, left.”  “Turn around.”  “Turn around as soon as possible.”  Oh wait — that’s what happens when you start going in the wrong direction for too long.

Driving on the left (some say wrong) side of the road wasn’t too hard, but it definitely took some getting used to.  Roundabouts were easy enough, but turning right in intersections seemed counter intuitive because of having to pull into the left lane.  Keeping oneself positioned right-of-centre was a little difficult at first (especially since in the States you are left-of-center in the road), but I got the hang of it…after going over a few curbs.  We rented a car a second time toward the end of the trip and I forgot to tell the rental place to get an automatic so I had to end up driving a manual.  Ultimately, I did just fine, it’s just that on the first night when taking it home on New Years Eve during rush hour, I stalled it about six or seven times.  At least I didn’t put it in reverse going 70 mph, like I did once with my old car (Hi, Rusty!).  All in all I probably put in somewhere between 400-500 miles of driving doing two trips back and forth to Manchester, and one trip to Warwick Castle & Stratford-upon-Avon and back.

Here is us at Warwick Castle: (Haley Smith came too! she took the pic)

We were scouting locations for In Reverent Fear's next music video. They love castles, armor, mountains, and all things epic.

Now that I’ve rambled on long enough about driving, we did do some pretty cool stuff, like visiting Warwick Castle on New Year’s Day (see above), which was totally magnificent.  I’m not sure I’ve been to a castle that was still in one piece, more or less (ehem, Nottingham Castle!).  We could have probably spent all day there, but we saw most of what we came to see I think.  Henry VIII owned it at one time but I don’t think he lived there.  Did you know he wore a codpiece?  Dumb!

After Warwick Castle, we drove to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage.  I have some pics of the outside, but they wouldn’t let me take any of the inside for the usual vague “insurance concerns” reasons.  You know, the usual Jedi mind trick of “these are not the droids you’re looking for” can turn tourists into mush.

We had other fantastic times together, walking around Nottingham visiting shoppes, showing Tiana’s mum to decent pub food, visiting Sherwood Forest (the Major Oak lives up to its name), and even did a little exploring in the basement of our building where we discovered a bunch of old photography developing equipment.  There was a box of rejected photos, some of which I kept so that I can write horror stories about their contents later (don’t worry, nothing ‘bad’).

We rang in the New Year by watching a live BBC video feed on our laptop (which occurred the night before the Warwick Castle visit)

Tiana, our kitty Andi, myself, and some dude on the BBC rockin' out to the New Year

One of the high points from the trip was when we went to this posh place here in Nottingham called ‘The Walk’.  My friend Alex pointed it out to me once, indicating that it was an example that there is still some class left in Nottingham.  He was quite right.

It was really nice to have Tiana’s mom visit.  It was good to have a lot of things to do during our first Christmas away from home.  I miss my own family quite a bit.  We did a little bit of Skyping on Christmas day which was nice, but it’s not the same.  Over the last year or so, I’ve grown rather fond of visiting my hometown of Merced.  For reasons I won’t go into, the only reason I have wanted to go home since I moved to San Diego in 1998 was to visit family — and that’s absolutely it.  I had no friends in Merced by the time I left for college, so aside from visiting family, there was nothing else for me to do there, so going home was always bittersweet.  It seems like it finally took about ten years for me to look forward to visiting the actual town–perhaps because I was about to move to the UK for three years.  Or more importantly, because my brother and sister-in-law have an extremely adorable daughter that I love so much.  I guess one way to inject life into a situation is to actually, um, give birth to it!

Pictures of all of the above will most likely be forthcoming in a soon-to-be-made Flickr gallery.  In the meantime, visit Tiana’s  blog where she’ll have a much more picture-laden post with her own set of highlights from the past two weeks. [Update: Here's Tiana's blog post.]

One nice thing about the food over here is that just about nothing has hydrogentated corn syrup, which is usually the #1 or #2 ingredient on most foods in the states.  Real sugar, FTW.

We’ve been trying to walk as much as we can to save on tram and bus fares.  I walked to campus again yesterday (about 3 miles each way) and it was a good walk.  My pants [ehem! that means something different in the UK, Eric!] trousers are starting to get a little looser, but at this stage I could just be dreaming it.  While on campus, I had a good lunch meeting with my adviser who gave me a run-down of what to expect for the coming months regarding my experience, and I’ve already got some more good book suggestions to start me out in my studies.

A few days back I tried to get at least a little gaming in before my studies ramp up full-bore and I beat that most awesome game called Portal (found in the Orange Box, trailer here).  It’s such a rad first-person puzzle game.  It’s almost a year old now but it shouldn’t be missed.

I’m looking forward to my studies beginning next week, although technically next week is mainly orientations and meetings with the department.  I’ve ‘staked’ out a spot in the research room in our new department building called the Highfield House.  Not everybody uses the room on a daily basis but I am going to try and get as much work done there as I can–at least to start out.

Here we go.

Anthony Paul Smith has been incredibly helpful showing us around the area and helping us move in.  The first evening we were here we met Mike Burns, Jeff & Meghan Biebighauser and all of us had dinner at Sir John’s pub just a short walk away.  Yesterday we had help from Jeff & Meghan in getting to IKEA which was about a 25-minute bus ride away.  At the moment, Tiana & I are waiting for the IKEA delivery people to show up to deliver all of the stuff we got (desk, bookshelf, etc).

Backing up a bit, the second day I was here, I decided to walk to campus.  It’s a 3 mile trek, and I got lost in the first 20 minutes, but I’m glad I decided to make the hike because it really helped in figuring out the lay of the land around here.  We’ve also been quickly figuring out the tram and bus systems which are quite efficient (if only San Diego could take better cues from just about any other city with public transportation).

The University of Nottingham campus is astonishingly gorgeous.  Well, most of it anyway.  My first entrance into the campus was through the part of campus with the engineering buildings which were quite boring, but everywhere else I’ve been on campus is stunning, especially the area surrounding the Trent Building and Highfield House.  The Trent Building is where the Department of Theology and Religious Studies is currently situated and the Highfield House is where our department will be moving to in a few weeks.  Here is the Trent Building:

And here is the Highfield House:

The area surrounding the Highfield House is like a garden of sorts.  It at least feels that way–it is quite serene.  Currently the English/Lit department is in this house and they will soon be moving out so that we can move in.

We’ve been having to figure out other things like getting a bank account (still in process) and trying to decipher how the heating in our apartment works.  Speaking of our apartment, I’ve posted a gallery on Flickr which includes some in-progress shots of our apartment.  Also, I took some scenery shots and posted them in a separate gallery:

• First couple days in Nottingham: arriving, apartment, and University of Nottingham – Gallery || Slideshow
• Nottingham Scenery: landscapes and buildings – Gallery || Slideshow

Once our stuff from IKEA arrives and we put it all together with the infamous allen wrenches, I’ll take some new pictures.  There’s also some other stuff that I think I was meaning to say, but my mind is a jumble of stress at the moment with having to get things ready for next week’s Rome conference in order as well as write a paper for it.  So, hopefully I’ll remember that stuff as it comes to me. Oh, and classes don’t start until 22 September so we have a bit of time before I have anything to report academically.  I’m sure there will still be plenty to do!

For a concluding picture for this post, this is where we live now, on the second floor:

Well, I think it did so now we’ve been spending the evening going through our stuff yet again.  Sorting, sorting, sorting.  I went through my books again and pulled out a huge pile that I really don’t need to take.  Anything directly related to my dissertation topic, though, is going…which is hard, though, because I guess I can justify a pretty wide net of stuff at this point.

While I was shivering with the chills today, I re-watched Once.  It’s such a gorgeous and wonderful movie.  Okay, that was random, but it’s what I did.  And then began sorting.  We’re also bringing over things like MacGyver seasons 1 & 2, LOST seasons 1 & 3, Goonies, and The Jerk DVDs just in case we need to unwind.

I’m still not feeling so hot so I should probably go to bed.

Before we leave San Diego, Tiana and I are making sure we savor a few experiences.  Last night, we went to Lucha Libre Gourmet Taco Shop.  Yes, it is a Mexican wrestling-themed taco shop.  I had a delicious “Veg Out” vegetarian burrito which was seasoned with some sort of curry.  It was awesome.

Click here to see my Flickr gallery of the few pics I took.  Holy cow this place is rad.

Thank you, Grandma, for selling me your 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera back in 2001.  It served me well for the past seven years.  Today, I had to have it towed as the transmission recently died, and it would cost far more than the car is currently worth to repair or replace it.  So, with Tiana and I moving to England for three years soon, I had to say “good-bye” today and sold it to a pick-n-pull for parts.

Good bye, Ol’ Blue.  You took me to many Santana’s for a veggie burrito and you also drove me to my wedding.  You even stayed in one piece when I put you in reverse at 70mph on the 805 freeway.  May you rest in pieces in other people’s cars as parts from here on out.

Peace & Grace,

Eric

My undergraduate degree is a B.A. in computer science.*  I’ve been a programmer for the last seven years and have been programming full-time for the last 6 years.  I just finished my M.A. in Religion (concentration: Theology) in May and in 14 13 days, my wife and I will be flying out to Nottingham as I will soon be starting a 3-year Ph.D. research programme at the University of Nottingham.  Because of the constantly changing gears between the two disciplines, and because I am only now getting into full-time theology & philosophy studies, I often feel like I am playing catch-up: there are still some essential theology texts I have yet to read, and I have never taken a Greek class — things I would have done if I were a theology/philosophy undergrad.  I don’t have regrets, but this is what I have to deal with now.

Since the latter part of highschool, I’ve been making to-do lists to keep track of homework assignments.  Nothing out of the ordinary at all.  Now in the age of electronic Post-It Notes™, I’ve been using NetVibes to make multiple lists of tasks: Fiction books I want to read, tasks for CoTP projects, an often-returned-to packing list for traveling, movies I want to watch, a general to-do list (“move to Nottingham”), and lastly, a list of theology and philosophy books to read.  That last list is a bit lengthy at the moment, but of course, this list extends into my Amazon wishlists in no particular order.  Actually, it is a bit overwhelming, of course, as any serious student probably experiences a mass rabbit hole effect where after reading scores of scholarly books every year, there are now an exponential amount of books to add to one’s relading list based on chasing footnotes and bibliographic references.  Blogs and the wonderful Librarything do not help, either.

But back to that other item** on the list, “moving to Nottingham”: in the last couple months, Tiana and I have put in many hours sorting through our stuff, figuring out what to sell, what to give away to friends, what to give to thrift stores, what to put in storage, what to take with us, etc.  We moved into our friend Stef’s house a couple months before we are going to make the bigger move in an attempt to front-load some of our stress and big moving decisions to the beginning of summer instead of having to figure out all of this stuff in the month of August.  So, after getting all of this mainly done, we are living out of boxes of all of our “essential” stuff.  The thing is, I’ve gone through my clothes again and at least a third of it I put in bags to send to the thrift store.  And actually, even some of what is left isn’t even appealing to me any more.  Rinse, repeat, and apply to other things like our DVDs and other things that we don’t actually need.***

What’s interesting (maybe “blessing” is a better word here) is that I honestly can’t say that I miss any of this stuff.  In fact, it’s quite liberating.  It’s a pain in the ass to have to keep track of so much stuff and worry about it when the reality is that I’ve forgotten about most of it anyway.

The most difficult things to sort are my books.  As my good friend Rusty reminds me from time to time, our books are now our “tools of the trade” like a craftsman and his/her own, uh, tools.  Moreover, we often write in them, scribble our notes all over them, re-read them and re-read our notes to see what new things jump out at us in our expanding hermeneutical horizons and such.  Couple this with a bad habit that I (and many other people) have where I’ll buy books knowing I’ll need to read it soon as a part of my core research or because it is basically part of the accepted canon of quintessential theology or philosophy.  (I’ve been much better about this in the last year having written an M.A. thesis now and honed my interlibrary-loan skills quite well.)

This is where my lists come back in to the picture.  In short, they’re pretty overwhelming at times because I know I have a decent amount of catch up to do (I haven’t even mentioned academic journals yet!), and there is a lot of satisfaction in crossing out a book on a list that I know I have read closely and slowly… which only opens more avenues of further reading.  And so on.

There’s a lot of issues here, really, and it’s a bit of a tangled web.  On the one hand, this is what I do now.  On the other, is there–should there be–a limit to this where I’m now basically just consuming information?  For one, I’m pretty sure I’m not very good at taking a day of rest.  Because I’ve had to juggle working full-time and getting an M.A. for the past two and a half years, I’ve had to make the most of every available chunk of time; I’m always usually doing something productive because of the many hats I wear.  On the flip side of this, though, I have been learning the skills of saying “no, thanks” to friends who ask me to work on projects–even paying projects.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this post, but it began from the idea that I experienced great joy when I actually deleted a book off my list of books to read.  It occurred to me that I didn’t have to read it at all, or any time soon.  I just thought that it would be good to read it to make my breadth of reading more “complete”, but really, that’s not even interesting and probably not a good use of my time unless I am writing a dissertation on that topic where being a completist suddenly becomes a good thing.  Then, I deleted another item off the list that wasn’t super important.

Clearly, the tools of a craftsperson are not just there to be consumed and put on the rack for display, but are meant to be used and in my case, the varied writings participate in various traditions that are supposed to call me out of my life of slumber.  I’m not sure when I’ll feel like I don’t have to play catch up anymore.  Plus, there’s that whole Socratic thing of figuring out that the more I learn, the less I actually know at all.

** Haha, I’m not that anal and micro-managing.  This is just an example for effect.

***   One of my New Testament professors in the MA program at PLNU recently told me that when we come back from the 3 years of PhD work we will have changed and we will most likely find that much of the stuff we have put in storage–aside from kitchen utensils–won’t be worth keeping anymore.

Visiting: Merced - the Lee's

Visiting: Concord - the Reinhardt's

Sweet Summer Shingdig in Santa Rosa, CA

One last day in Concord

Oh, and did I mention?  Tiana just started blogging!  Her sister Shalina designed it for her.  Rad, eh?

Meanwhile, a bunch of things have gotten in order for our plans to move to Nottingham.  Cue the bulleted list:

• Secured an apartment in Nottingham
• Moved all of our stuff that we are keeping in storage to my parents’ garage
• Got our UK visas in the mail a couple of weeks ago
• Fly out August 18th and arrive the morning of the 19th

This weekend we are going to get some of our stuff more securely boxed up and ready for shipping.  Although, tonight’s agenda includes going to see Eddie Izzard in downtown San Diego at Spreckels.  I’ve been a huge fan of his since my friend Dave-O introduced me to his Dress to Kill performance.  And then tomorrow is Tiana’s birthday!

Lots going on.  More to come.

John Wright was my adviser, and my two readers were Dr. Rob Thompson and Chris Simpson (my ‘external’ reader at LCCS). The defense went rather well, and it was oddly a lot of fun. My committee asked some great critical questions, and they tell me I handled them well. Turns out they are passing the thesis “with distinction,” which I’m extremely humbled about, as apparently I didn’t think this was even an option.

I know many have already asked to read the thesis, but I may have forgotten a few names. If you’re still interested, please leave me a comment below and I’ll e-mail it your direction (just put your e-mail address in the e-mail box, no need to put it in the comment itself–I’ll see it). The thesis is around 110 pages double-spaced, ~41,000 words. I’d love to hear your thoughts, further questions and criticism.

The evening after the defense, we had a small, casual graduation reception. The purpose of this particular reception was to allow our parents to meet the professors in the department. I introduced my parents to all the professors and it was a really pleasant time, enjoying finger foods and the like. As time was getting short with my parents needing to help my sister Jenna move out of her dorm, we had just enough time to introduce my parents to one remaining prof, Dr. Rob Thompson — one of my thesis readers. With apologies to Dr. Rob Thompson, Hegel, Schelling, and most of all my parents, the conversation ended with something that very much sounded like this:

My Dad: I have to commute a total of 3 hours every work day. It really puts a strain on my back. Of course Janet here only –

My Mom (Janet): Yeah, I only have to commute about 6 miles to work!

Dr. Thompson: When I was in Nampa, Idaho [at NNU] I would get annoyed if it took me longer than 5 minutes to get to work.

Me: Wow, yeah, it takes me 25-30 minutes to get to work in the mornings.

Dr. Thompson: The delays were almost always caused by a cow in the road. There’s another cow in the road this time–it was always a cow.

Dad: That happens a lot where we live too, and it gets incredibly dangerous. Not too long ago a whole heard of Blank Angus got out and were on the road — and you couldn’t see them!

Me: Whoa! That’s like the “black ice” of cows!

Them: [laughter]

Me again: Even better, it’s like “the night in which all cows are black!!!”

Them: [crickets]

Graduation the day after the defense was really cool. Apparently, graduating makes people forget awful philosophy jokes. To tell you the truth, I didn’t really think much about graduation until I was actually there. I was so focused on just getting the thesis done, and then trying to not focus on much at all in the week and a half of relaxation before the defense, that I kind of forgot that graduation is a big deal. That, and the PLNU campus turns into a crazy zoo. They have split the graduation up in to one graduate graduation and two undergraduate graduations, so it smooths things over a bit regarding the zoo factor. I must admit that it was nice to feel young at graduation: most of the people were slightly older than me, if not twice my age who were graduating. Aside from a friend of mine who is 65 years old in the MA theology program (and he has the energy and heart of a 20-year-old!), most of the students in our program are about 3 years younger than me, at least.

After graduation, Tiana threw a graduation party for me at our good friend Ester’s house. It was a totally awesome time of relaxation and conversation with good friends and family. In addition to my parents and sister, Tiana’s mom, sister Shalina, brother Stephen, and sister-in-law Shannon where all there as well. I was really thankful for being surrounded with good, loving people.

Okay, now rewind a couple days to Thursday morning, the day before my thesis defense. It was already a roller coaster of a week. I wake up, check my e-mail and decide to check out this page (I’d been hitting the refresh button on it all week). My name is printed on that page on the bottom, which means… It’s official: I GOT THE OVERSEAS RESEARCH SCHOLARSHIP!!! This means that the funding for my PhD tuition is basically paid in full! (technically it’s for a year of funding but it ‘renews’ each year upon ‘satisfactory progress’ or something like that). I was pretty emotional and immediately called Tiana who was still on her way to work to let her know the good news. She was super happy and relieved — we were not planning on taking out more loans on top of the undergraduate loans that we are still paying off. And then I called John Wright, who was also incredibly stoked. So, the next day I went into my thesis defense with the semester-long weight of worrying about the ORS lifted off my shoulders.

Tiana and I decided to wait until our parents arrived in San Diego before telling them. Now that they know and are super excited for us, they are all incredibly eager to visit us in Robin Hood country. So now, what remains is trying to figure out all the details on how exactly we can get over there so that they have somebody to visit. We’ve already received some extremely helpful tips from a couple of students already in the program (thanks Anthony and Aaron!). And, Tiana also found this incredible resource which, although that guy attends Durham University, should still apply pretty well to the UK in general.

By September 22, I will begin my PhD studies in theology at the University of Nottingham to study under Conor Cunningham. We hope to move to Nottingham a month ahead of that time to find a place to live and do some job hunting for Tiana. There will not be any employment restrictions placed upon on her from my student visa–the only restrictions will be on me. I will most likely continue doing work for The Centre of Theology and Philosophy, and perhaps some assorted side projects for some extra scratch, but my full-time computer programmer days are coming to an end. There’s a bunch of other details of the move to work out, of course, but this post has gone on long enough, and I’m sure we’ll figure those things out in due time.

Thanks to everybody for all the encouragement and conversations along the way. Special thanks to my wife Tiana for her encouragement, laughter, for reminding me what is really important, and most of all her love. She’s a keeper.

I honestly have no idea how we ended up in this position to be able to move to Nottingham for PhD work, but we are really very thankful for everything.

[Cross-posted to tianaanderic.com]

For those that actually hop over to my blog to read (and not just RSS), I’ve updated a few things.  I had to tweak the current theme to put the ‘pages’ back into the header (about me, papers, thesis reading books, etc.).  I also added a few feeds in the sidebar: one to my dorky Facebook status updates, and one to my Tumblr blog of things I’ve been reading/watching lately.

Music-wise, I’ve been dipping back into my CD collection and listening to things that I haven’t listened to in quite some time to help keep me stimulated during the writing process:

• Squarepusher – Big Loada
• Alice in Chains – Unplugged (probably one of my favorite albums of all time, actually.  where were you?!)
• VNV Nation – Matter + Form (hands-down my favorite VNVN album but for some reason it fell out of my usual rotation.)
• Mayfairgrin – Equine Noir: The Ambient Selections (probably my favorite moody ambient album ever.  you can hop over to my last.fm page and see how many times I’ve listened to this gem in the past few years.)
• 30 Seconds to Mars – A Beautiful Lie (now, I understand why a lot of people don’t like this band as it is one of the quintessential emo rock bands, but I absolutely love this album and really think Jared Leto’s voice is awesome.  I usually play this on repeat after 11pm when things start to drag for me during paper writing.)
• Nirvana – Nevermind and In Utero (just classic 90′s fun)
• Apoptygma Berzerk – Welcome to Earth and Harmonizer (still not a fan of their stuff post-Harmonizer though… )

Of all the April Fool’s gags I saw online, this one was probably my favorite: World of Warcraft: Molten Core.

I recently got new glasses.  The last time I got a pair of  corrective lenses was my freshman year of highschool.  I had contacts for a while after that and used them for a while but got lazy.  I can now see road signs!

Minimal update: I fixed a grip of typos in this post… I was up till 4am last night so I am a bit out of it.

In the meantime I have also applied to Marquette University just in case things at Nottingham don’t pan out.  Unfortunately, my GRE scores weren’t the greatest (did even worse the second time I took it–standardized tests seriously f- with my brain), so I have absolutely no idea if they will accept me or not.  We will see.  They are supposed to inform me sometime around the Ides of March.

Meanwhile I have been working on my Master’s Thesis.  I began the writing process this past week and from here on out it is full steam ahead.   At this point I am not going to say too much what it is about (e-mail me if you want, but it’s probably not super interesting to most) but as I think I have mentioned before, here is a list of my thesis reading books if you care to browse.

We’ve had some visitors lately and will have some more soon this next weekend.  Last week my brother and his family were in town on their first family vacation since LaRae had Phaedra in June.  See here for some extremely cute pics of their daughter Phaedra.  And this past weekend Tiana’s friend Jaclyn was in town with her boyfriend and we went out to The Mission for some delicious brunch.  And this weekend our friends Johnny & Alyssa and David Overholt will be in town.

Now it is lunchtime for me!

Tiana and I spent some quality time in our respective homes in Concord and Merced, California during out holiday break. In Concord, we mostly stayed at Tiana’s mom’s house, where we were very welcome. It was extremely awesome to really just chill and hang out after a stressful semester. We caught a few movies at home and in the theatre (P.S. I Love you, The Nativity Story, Letters from Iwo Jima, Ratatouille, About Schmidt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Inland Empire), we did some shopping, and I even worked on some crafty stuff. Tiana did some clothes shopping in her sister’s closet and I found some great book buys at Half-Priced Books in Concord: I scored steals on a hardback edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination/Judge For Yourselves.

Highlights, of course, were seeing family and friends. Our niece Katie continues to get ridiculously cute. While our trip was broken up a bit, we did get to see and hangout with everybody, enjoying wonderful Ethiopian and Indian food (both of which have excellent veggie options). We attempted to not stuff ourselves too much but I don’t think we did very well with that goal.

In Merced, things slowed down a bit, but the times of rest and cuteness did not stop as we got to delight in the non-stop smiles of our 6-month-old niece Phaedra. So it was very cool that our nieces got to finally meet each other! Shalina (with mom and daughter in tow) drove down to Merced and graciously took some family pictures for us Lee’s. My dad had spinal surgery last month, so we generally took it easy with him and kicked back on my parents’ comfy sofa’s. It was nice to relax, watch some TV and movies and be with family in my hometown. We even managed to get in a game of 4-player Settlers! LaRae, probably unsurprisingly, won that time.

We visited my Grandma (87 and still goin’!) who is in a nursing home in Merced, and she seems to be doing pretty good. Her wits are about her, but she says there are a lot of crazy people who yell a lot in that place. She’s been recovering from a fall some months ago, and in the meantime, my parents have been remodeling parts of her house so that it is ready for her to move back into it. My Aunt Carol (my grandma’s firstborn) is moving in with her to keep her company. It’s a cool house with a huge backyard that I grew up playing in. We’re looking forward to her moving back in her home.

In the time since we returned to San Diego, Tiana and I finished watching the 3rd season of LOST on DVD (awesome!!!) and have generally been taking it easy before this last semester of MA work for me begins (which began last Monday on the 7th). Meanwhile, we’ve also seen Juno and Once, two highly recommended movies. We’ve been trying to cook more in our little apartment to save money, be creative, and stay healthy. I even found a cajun soup recipe–that I will probably post later on this very blog–that seems to have been a big hit both in our house and amongst friends who have tried it.

Since last Monday, I have been cranking on reading for my MA Thesis. I definitely have my work cut out for me, but it should be fun. (If anybody is interested, I’ve compiled a list of a bunch of the texts I’ll be reading or resourcing.) I’ll be all done by May! More news on that to come.

Yep, that’s my niece Phaedra.

Check out my niece’s first Halloween!

• SignOnSanDiego’s Homepage
• SignOnSanDiego’s Firemap

So, as I am continuing to read Augustine (I finished the Confessions last week and have continued in De Trinitate) and read secondary material, I found the following blog post by Peter Leithart helpful:

In Defense of Augustine

Such efforts continue to be important, especially considering that in the last month in the Radical Orthodoxy group on Facebook, somebody posed a question prefaced with the following statement: “From what I have read about radical orthodoxy, Milbank and others want the church to go back to the neo-platonism of St. Augustine.” There are so many assumptions in this question that need to be addressed, but the first of which is what, exactly, is the kind of ‘neo-platonism’ held by Augustine? I know Michael Hanby’s book tackles this (I haven’t read it, but will in the next couple weeks), but Leithart’s post is also a good place to start in beginning to answer this question.

Classes at the Point Loma campus and Mission Valley regional center will be canceled beginning at 4 p.m. Monday and all day Tuesday. Food services, Ryan Library, the Wellness Center, Nicholson Commons, and residence halls will remain open.

All supervisors and essential personnel are asked to report to the Point Loma campus on Tuesday, 10/23. All other faculty, staff, and commuter students are asked to stay at home in order to reduce traffic on the roadways.

At this time we have nearly 90 Point Loma faculty and staff members potentially affected by the evacuation notice. Additionally, we know of many students whose families are also being evacuated, and some who have lost their homes already. Please join me in praying for all of those in our community and across the San Diego community who are being affected by this tragic situation.

Please keep checking the website for updates at www.pointloma.edu/fire

President Brower

For those who may remember the crazy fires four years ago in San Diego, all reports are saying this is soon going to be worse. Please pray for those who are losing their homes in this fire, and also for all those within all of the San Diego area, as the smoke in the air makes it hard to breathe for most, and even harder for those who already have asthma or related breathing issues. Many have already lost their homes and much of east county is filled with ranches, so people are also evacuating their horses, cattle, etc., and sheltering them at the Del Mar fairground. Last I heard, over 250,000 have evacuated their homes.

I spent all day yesterday laying in bed sick with the flu.  My wife Tiana also had the same thing.  I have never been so wiped out for so long.  Today we are feeling worlds better and back at work.  San Diego also seems to be colling off a bit; it has been intolerably hot and humid.

But here is a brief thought: I just sent a professor of mine a list of three books for consideration, and I included Amazon.com links for each one.  Is it completely lame and indicative of my capitalist-shaped body that I was tempted to format the links with my Amazon Associate tag so that I could possibly get a small kick-back if this professor of mine were to follow through to those links and make a purchase?  This slightly worries me.

No, I didn’t do this.

Like most newborns, the first couple of pics above were more representative of the majority of the time I was there: sleeping. When she was awake, she managed a few smiles and smirks, which she also did while she was asleep! We’re very thankful for her.

There is also a Flickr gallery of more pics from last weekend here.  We tried teaching Phaedra how to play Settlers of Catan, but she just wanted to eat and sleep.