Rash Vows and Beautiful Grandchildren: April 2008

Monday, April 14, 2008

Rash Vow - the Diet - Update

I have been stuck at a loss of 10 lbs which I know is great but I am just about half way and wasn't ready to give up. However, I was getting really hungry again and thinking about junk food (and just MORE food) all of the time and was getting a little bored - okay a lot bored! But - somehow I got remotivated this past week and am back on the losing path :-)) Bill has been really helpful and encouraging. We have started walking (with a little break for the FINAL - you hear me weather - freak snow storm of the season!!) and now have walked for two nice sunny days in a row. I had my annual physical and my already low blood pressure is now down to 100 over 60 (a drop of 10 points each). My doctor/friend said that even 10 pounds lost can give such a good result. Talk about an incentive!!! So now onward and down!! I will be sorely tested starting on Friday - I will be a Christian and Kate's for a long birthday weekend, then 5 hour drive to MN (I like to nibble in the car out of boredom but have been breaking that habit), 4 days of work, and then flying to Abby and Greg's (time sitting in airports smelling and seeing LOTS of good food and lattes!) and then a week at Abby's. I will let my faithful reader(s?) know how I do. I feel so much better and a little bit more in control of my eating. It also helps that Margie and John are also on the same diet (and were stuck at - 10 bls too.) Marcia has also been a real help and inspiration to me.

Rash Vow - The Compact - Update - Birthdays

Okay - the latest issue. I got through Grandchild Birthday #1 by going in with Abby to redo Josh's bed. I sent some UW Badger fabric I already had :-) and sent money which Abby and Greg used to buy a used bed frame and make a bulletin board-type head board. Perfect! Now it is Aidan's turn - Grandchild Birthday #2. Since Aidan can't read yet (he is a brilliant almost 4 year old but come on it's okay to not be reading Grammie's blog yet!) - I am putting my idea for his birthday this next week on my blog. I am getting him his very own gift certificate to the Milwaukee Brewers!! If his parents are really nice to him, they can go to a baseball game with him. The Brewers are awesome this year - and unfortunately are in the same Division with the St. Louis Cardinals. So this will be a fun (I hope) year of competing with Warren and Marcia's favorite team! Anyway - I also have a bag of candy to take as well - since I can buy "food." And as a Grammie - I am defining "food" rather liberally. Happy Birthday Aidan. Also - remind me to sing Happy Birthday backwards as Bill's Mom did this week at a Birthday Party with her friends in Hot Springs Village!

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Politics, Movies and God

Bill and I watched a disturbing and powerful movie last night - Rendition. Without giving away the plot, the basic story line is an Egyptian citizen who is married to an American and who has lived in the US for 20+ years. He is suspected of being a terroist and with the approval of the US CIA, is tortured in Egypt. The bottom line for us - is that there is evil everywhere in the world. It does not really matter which country you are a part of. The only hope the world has is to know God through Jesus Christ. Even the best (and of course the worst) country will disappoint - but only God will never disappoint.

I haven't posted since the bruhaha about Obama's pastor. I, for one, am happy that at least the concept of whites not really understanding racism and what it is like to be black in the US is finally being discussed in the context of a Presidential Election. While I don't agree with all his pastor said, at least we are talking about these things in the open. That is progress. One other point that both Greg made on his blog and an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal also stated is that pastors (especially apparently in the black church) have a duty to speak forth for God and it may not always be pleasant to hear. Perhaps Obama's Pastor was being faithful to a call. Think about it.

Rash Vows - Update

Rash Vow #2 - I have now lost 10 lbs. I am obviously very happy! Have been stuck at -10 lbs. for a couple of weeks - so am very motivated to get into the teens! I am enjoying eating healthy food - still feel the draw to sugar. Probably always will. More later.

Rash Vow #1 - Am now in my 4th month of not buying anything new. I am still amazed at how easy this has been. I find choices to make. Christian and Kate even honored my vow and found some great books for Bill's birthday at a second-hand book store. (Bill was heard to say - "It is not my vow!!") Anyway - now that spring clothes are in the stores and in the many catalogs that come in the daily mail, I will admit I was very tempted (especially the pretty shoes!) But once I decided I was not going to break the vow to buy more clothes - I was okay. This trip to MN, I am going to a large Good Will in St. Paul and looking for a few casual spring tops. During my last trip to this Good Will, I was amazed at the quality of items and the low prices!!

"Spring" in the North

This post is for my sister in Missouri who is fully into spring!! Here in the North Woods we are now into the strange season called "When is spring ever going to come!" Then we go right into Summer which we will match with anyone's Summer. :-) Anyway - today some of the brown earth was visible on the hill in my south-facing garden and a soft spot started in the snow on the lake. The "good news" from such a long and snowy winter - is that we are all hoping our lakes will rebound! I will post some pictures when the snow is almost gone!!

The Inspiration for the title of my Blog - What is a RASH VOW!

A Defence of Rash Vows by G.K. Chesterton An abridged version of a chapter in Chesterton's book The Defendant.
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization -- by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be hanged.
'For he that lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.' And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scare us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us -- this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief of love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum aere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow.
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words -- 'free-love' -- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.
It is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterlizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practically say, 'Let us have the pleasure of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.' Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: 'Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.' Thus in love the free-lovers say: 'Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.'
Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the aesthetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.
©1997, The American Chesterton Society

Rash Vows and Beautiful Grandchildren

Rotating pictures of Beautiful Grandchildren

Monday, April 14, 2008

Rash Vow - the Diet - Update

Rash Vow - The Compact - Update - Birthdays

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Politics, Movies and God

Rash Vows - Update

"Spring" in the North

Thought for the Year (Thanks Best Friend Dee Dee!)

Thought for the Day. Periodic postings

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About Me

The Inspiration for the title of my Blog - What is a RASH VOW!

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