wherein Liz reports the progress of her mad holiday trip and rails against outdated browsers

I just had a long post, but AOL is weird and ate it.

Anyway, we got Grandma Doris to Des Moines, admired Uncle Bill and Aunt Carol's new kittens, and drove north to the Twin Cities where we had our second Christmas dinner of the week with Ardis. This one was based around pot roast, whereas the one in Chicago was based around roast chicken. They both included bean casserole, though, because all our holiday meals include bean casserole. It's a Rule. :-)

Today Dad, Mom, and Ardis visited a traveling exhibition of 19th and 20th century Russian art, with a side-section on religious icons from earlier periods. Mom and Vicky also did some shopping. Meanwhile, I stayed home and read God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, by Jim Wallis, which is interesting. I don't always agree with him, but I have yet to feel the nearly uncontrollable desire to hurl the book across the room, which I was definitely feeling while reading Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. That book started out seeming promising, but it quickly veered into weird French intellectual dead-ends and interminable discussions of Freud and Levi-Strauss. I kept wanting to shake the man and ask him if he'd ever heard of behaviorism, since I think it would work better with his theories than Freud does. But apparently the French in the 1970s did not acknowledge the existence of any schools of psychological thought other than Freudianism. *shakes head* It's an interesting experience to realize how totally culture can affect people's modes of thought, and how thick their 'blinders' can be.

Tomorrow we'll have breakfast at Perkins and hit the road at 10 or 11am, which should get us to New Jersey at 7 to 9am on Wednesday morning, depending on traffic and weather conditions. I'm almost ashamed to admit that what I'm looking forward to most is the ability to finally read my email. Ardis's browser, you see, is like Aunt Cara's in that it will taunt me by letting me open Hotmail and see that I have messages, but it then categorically refuses to recognize javascript links and won't let me do anything about the messages. *beats head on desk* Why must technology be so seductive and addictive, and then not let me actually use it???

wherein Liz reports the progress of her mad holiday trip and rails against outdated browsers

I just had a long post, but AOL is weird and ate it.

Anyway, we got Grandma Doris to Des Moines, admired Uncle Bill and Aunt Carol's new kittens, and drove north to the Twin Cities where we had our second Christmas dinner of the week with Ardis. This one was based around pot roast, whereas the one in Chicago was based around roast chicken. They both included bean casserole, though, because all our holiday meals include bean casserole. It's a Rule. :-)

Today Dad, Mom, and Ardis visited a traveling exhibition of 19th and 20th century Russian art, with a side-section on religious icons from earlier periods. Mom and Vicky also did some shopping. Meanwhile, I stayed home and read God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, by Jim Wallis, which is interesting. I don't always agree with him, but I have yet to feel the nearly uncontrollable desire to hurl the book across the room, which I was definitely feeling while reading Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. That book started out seeming promising, but it quickly veered into weird French intellectual dead-ends and interminable discussions of Freud and Levi-Strauss. I kept wanting to shake the man and ask him if he'd ever heard of behaviorism, since I think it would work better with his theories than Freud does. But apparently the French in the 1970s did not acknowledge the existence of any schools of psychological thought other than Freudianism. *shakes head* It's an interesting experience to realize how totally culture can affect people's modes of thought, and how thick their 'blinders' can be.

Tomorrow we'll have breakfast at Perkins and hit the road at 10 or 11am, which should get us to New Jersey at 7 to 9am on Wednesday morning, depending on traffic and weather conditions. I'm almost ashamed to admit that what I'm looking forward to most is the ability to finally read my email. Ardis's browser, you see, is like Aunt Cara's in that it will taunt me by letting me open Hotmail and see that I have messages, but it then categorically refuses to recognize javascript links and won't let me do anything about the messages. *beats head on desk* Why must technology be so seductive and addictive, and then not let me actually use it???