trees hang limp in the sultry August mid-morn
damp from last night’s showers
and I feel like they look

"If you understand your own place and its intricacy and the possibility of affection and good care of it, then imaginatively you recognize that possibility for other places and other people, so that if you wish well to your own place, and you recognize that your own place is a part of the world, then this requires a well-wishing toward the whole world. 

In return you hope for the world’s well-wishing toward your place. 

And this is a different impulse from the impulse of nationalism. This is what I would call patriotism: the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation." (Wendell Berry)

"His mother decides that she wants a dog.  Alsations are the best--the most intelligent, the most faithful--but they cannot find an Alsatian for sale.  So they settle for a pup half doberman, half something else.  He insists on being the one to name it.  He would like to call it Borzoi because he wants it to be a Russian dog, but since it is not in fact a borzoi he calls it Cossack.  No one understands.  People think the name is kos-sak, food-bag, which they find funny.

Happy birthday, Jorge Luis Borges.

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

"Nothing has any value but the love of God and doing His will.  There is no happiness outside of Him.  The joy born from giving yourself totally to Him no man can take from you.  My only desire is to completely give myself up into the hands of God without any idea of turning back or of fear of what may happen to me."  (Jeanne Guyon, Intimacy With Christ, p. 13)

Smalltown Fastpitch ended its season last night with a victory in the league tournament championship over the Twin City Gray Sox, 10-9.  With two outs in the bottom of the seventh, our pitcher took a hard one hopper off the face. While he split blood, we looked for the tooth, but didn’t find it.  His brother came into the game to strikeout the final batter for the win.  Just before we snapped a picture, I asked B if the tooth was knocked entirely out or just broken off.  He said, “I don’t know,” proceeded to show me.

“Your tooth isn’t missing,” I said.

It was still very much there in his mouth, but there was a much larger gap than normal.  I suspect the tooth is pretty loose and may be fractured below the gum line, but no wonder we didn’t  find the tooth in the dirt around the pitcher’s mound.

In the last five days we took home a lot of hardware.  Church league tournament champs, NAFA world series A consolation bracket champs, NAFA world series AA-major 3rd place.

Final season record was 28-26.  The Gray Sox finished their season 25-2 and as the MASA D-state champions.  Not bad for their first season together to say the least.

They call this one “Jared."

800 meter run (6 laps around back yard)
40 pull-ups
70 push-ups

4 rounds

My time: 29:39

Jeanie substituted/scaled and did four rounds of 800 meters, 40 situps and 40 push-ups (on knees).  Her clock failed, but I would estimate her time to be 34 minutes.

I’ve never been to an actual Crossfit gym (or I guess its “box” not “gym”).  I’ve only ever done one workout with the Pilot Crossfit  club at my college.  And I only occasionally do “official” Crossfit workouts from thee main website.  But I think I can fairly say that I do “crossfit” (lowercase).

One of the things the Crossfit cultists rave about is the “community” aspect.  I’ve never been that fond of working out with a bunch of other people, and have always preferred to grit it out on my own.  That’s why I like P90X a lot.  You go to the basement, pop in the dvd, push play, and let er rip.  I’ve been doing these P90X workouts off an on for five years now, and they are still great.

This summer, J decided she wanted to get fit.  So we’ve been doing my own brand of “crossfit.”  The other day, for instance, we did Chelsea, which is 5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 squats, every minute on the minute.  It’s good workout.  We scaled it for J, since she still doesn’t do pullups (it’s one of her goals–be able to do actual pullups), substituting “heavy pants” (a bent over back fly with dumbells) for the pullups.  Had I given her this workout two months ago I would have heard a series of “I can’ts” come out of her mouth.  But not anymore.  She’s motivated.  Every day she asks me, “so what’s my workout today.”  I’ve enjoyed it this summer–working out in this fashion with J.  I’m proud of her.

So here’s today’s workout.

4 rounds
One lap sprint (in the backyard–roughly 130 meters)
30 squats
One lap sprint
30 sumo high pulls
One lap sprint
30 chair dips
REST one minute

She may complain, but less than she used to.  She’ll do it.  Tomorrow she’ll ask me for a new workout.  We’re going to keep right on doing these workouts we make up or rip off from the Internet (here’s a really cool website called  “WOD shop”) for as long as we are physically able. I feel great–maybe the best shape of my life.  She feels great–maybe a little sore.

Get your tickets.

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

This week was my week again to mow the grass at church.  We have an enormous property, and it typically takes five to six hours to mow it all on a very good industrial riding mower.  Of course, today and tomorrow will likely be the hottest days of the summer, which makes mowing miserable.  So rather than wait for things to warm up, I got started at 6:45 this morning. 

I remind you, we’ve not had much rain, and no one irrigates the lawn at church, so it’s pretty much a parched wasteland of dead brown grass with enormous green weeds every so often.  It looked to me like last week someone didn’t mow an acre or so behind the pond and another acre in the back of the property–my clue was not that the grass was long, but that those parts had been overwhelmed by deep purple clover.  So I mowed them, in the process awakening a zillion tiny bugs from their peaceful slumber to swarm my face, mouth, eyes, ears, and hair. 

Normally, I very much enjoy mowing. But today’s experience was an exercise in frustration.  Between the ever increasing heat, the swarms of deer flies, those stupid shoot like weeds that were the only thing I was actually cutting–and even so, only about one in three of them actually cuts when you ride over them with the mower–I gave up after a couple hours and called it good enough.

We need some stinking rain.

This fall I will begin my 14th year of teaching English at Bethel.  I don’t know where the time goes other than to say that the present has a way of becoming the past very quickly.That will be fourteen years worth of essays I’ve read.  Sometimes I wish I would have kept some stats.  Here are some estimates.

Essays read/graded: 25,000
Portfolios graded: 1400
times reading the Odyssey: 25
add/drop forms filled: 120
student drop in office visits: 4200
committee meetings attended: 260
lunch time basketball games played: 4680
photocopies made: enough to wipe out a forest
number of times I’ve worn a tie: 0
number of times I’ve taught Lolita: 2
number of  Speech (COMM 171) sections I taught in 1999-2000: 5
number of sections of COMM 171 I’ve taught since 2004: 0
Office moves: 1
Office rearranges: 16
times I’ve wanted to quit and become a peach farmer who writes nature poetry:13
plagiarism cases I reported: 30
plagiarism cases I dealt with myself: 200
Bethel softball games attended: 45
chapel speeches: 7
faculty retreat presentations: 5
dissertations completed: 1
number of visits Morgan has made to my office: 23
humanities major graduates: 6
humanities major graduates prior to 2010: 0
days of class missed due to sickness: 13
snow days: 3

“For when she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used.  For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.”

-Wendell Berry, “A Consent”

I was fitted for contact lenses last Thursday and have been wearing them a bit each day since then as prescribed.  I have two complaints.

First, my eyes are a little gummy.  I don’t want to say dry, even though I’m sure that is how they will want me to describe it when I have my follow up visit this Thursday.  Dry is what the lawns in my neighborhood are.  Dry is dusty.  My eyes feel more like mud and less like dust.  It isn’t intolerable, and I’m sure the right kind of eye drops would make this minor complaing ever more minor in time.  If this were the only complaint, I don’t think I’d be complaining.

Second, they don’t help me see any better.  As a matter of fact, for things like reading, I see considerably worse than without them.  I don’t have particularly bad eyes.  Slight astigmatism and a bit of near-sightedness.  Things at a distance aren’t as sharp as they might be.  When I put on my glasses, I can see the individual grass blades at a distance or the leaves in the tree tops much more sharply.  I wanted contacts because I didn’t want to wear glasses to play basketball or softball.  But now I’m thinking my eyesight is not that bad afterall, especially considering that it is obviously worse with the contacts. I will be telling the doctor this on Thursday.

There may well be something wrong with me. Yesterday I was one of roughly 75 people watching a men’s fastpitch softball game between the Argentina national team and the Hill United Chiefs of Kitchener, Ontario streamed live online. And all the while wishing I was playing. I suspect at least a few of the others watching were wishing they were playing as well.

Next weekend.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAH2XWkhEc&w=560&h=315]

This morning we did a “family workout”–Sydney, Jeanie, and me.  Here’s what it consisted of.

I’ve been to so many chapel services at Bethel over the years and heard so many speakers that they all start to sound the same.  Occasionally someone says something that stays with me for a long time.  What tends not to stay with me is who said it.  So, somebody sometime at some Bethel Chapel service in the last fifteen years or so said this:

“We don’t read the Bible to finish; we read the Bible to change."

I always liked that.  Even though I’m kind of fond of the “read the Bible in 90 days” or “a year” or other Bible reading plans, the problem with them is this: I don’t want to get to day ninety and say, “DONE! Yay me.  Now I can get on with life now that I’ve read the Bible in 90 days."

Occasionally I tweet about some “P90X” workout I’ve done.  I like this workout program, even though I have never really committed myself to strictly following the program for 90 days.  I’ve been doing the workouts semi-regularly for almost five years now, and they’re terrific.  I didn’t want to get to the end of 90 days and say, “DONE! Yay me.  Now I can get on with life after P90X."

Which is why I like crossfit. It just sort of goes on forever and ever with constant variety with no end in sight.  But I’ve sort of used the Tony Horton workouts that way anyhow, so I was predisposed to liking crossfit before I even knew what it was or tried one of the workouts.  What I also like about the crossfit workouts is the insanely high level of intensity they typically ask of you and how short they are.  Most workouts are 15-20 minutes, but some incredibly great workouts take less than ten. 

So here you go, exercise lovers.  Try one of the P90X workouts “crossfit” style.  I recommend the legs and back workout.  Instead of following the video (which you don’t need once you’ve done the routine a few times; you can remember–and if you can’t, it takes a whole two minutes to write the names of the exercises down on a little piece of paper), set your stop watch, say 3-2-1 go, and crank out the workout for time.  Here’s how I do it.  Each pull-up set is 12 reps (96 pullups total for the workout).  Each leg exercise is 25 reps.  You do the wall sits for the time Tony prescribes.  And you complete the “sneaky lunge” sequence at a reasonable pace.  And when you finish the workout, you record your time.  Next week you try to beat the time.  It’s fun and it reduces the workout to–well, lets say if you’re in decent shape you can crank it out in less than 25 minutes.  It would be nearly impossible to do it in less than 20, but some stud might surprise me here.  When I do it this way I use 20# dumbells–and if that’s too much for any of the exercises, I only use one of them instead of both.  Saves the trouble of figuring out how much weight is just right for the workout, since the goal here is not merely building strength but cranking your heartrate way the heck up.

You can do the same thing with the chest and back workout or the shoulders and arms workout.  Suddenly they become both strength and cardio workouts–in other words, more like crossfit.

I’ve also found that doing PlyoX “tabata” style (20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest; this will leave you in oxygen debt very quickly) while it shortens the workout–really increases the intensity.

I keep looking at the P90X2 videos on youtube and I’m tempted, but it’s expensive for all those medicine balls and other crap you gotta buy.  The beauty of P90X was how minimalist it was in terms of equipment.  Pull-up bar and dumbells.  While the stability and core strength you’d get from this kind of training looks impressive to me–it looks like the kind of training professional athletes (NBA players, even) would do–I’m cheap.  What can I say.

So here’s to one of the best things about summer vacation for a college professor: exercising.

Tomorrow, tune in  for my rant on the relationship between exercise and remaining semi-productive as a “scholar” (gosh, I hate that word).

p.s.  Today’s workouts were P90X chest and back; ab ripper x. 

Rhetorical question (which means I have a pretty definite answer in mind):

Is there something seriously wrong if on Sunday, May 27, 2012, everyone in your congretation knew that Monday (May 28, 2012) was Memorial Day and felt somehow that it was a Christian duty to celebrate America’s military might, but in the mean time, no mention was made that it was Pentecost Sunday?

For some reason, most men’s fastpitch leagues and tournaments refuse to use those easy to see neon yellow softballs they use in the women’s games I’m watching hour after hour on television this weekend.  When they make me president of the world of men’s fastpitch, I will declare that forever more these easier to see balls will be used. 

Having played in a few tournaments where these balls are used, I can say that major difference comes during the twilight hours in the field when it can be very difficult to see a batted ball.  And that’s where the game is most potentially dangerous with third basemen and pitchers exposed to rocketed line drives. 

When I write my book about men’s fastpitch softball, there will be a chapter dedicated to the ball itself, its evolution, its varieties, its color.  It will be a substantive chapter.  I’m serious.

Sydney is six now.  Yesterday was her “Fancy Nancy” birthday bash with friends.  Let’s consider the sugary things they ate.

1.  Fancy rainbow jello
2.  Fancy frosted sugar c ookies
3.  Fancy pink pearl chocolates
4.  Fancy chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting
5.  Fancy pink lemonade
6.  Fancy dippin dots ice cream

Needless to say there was not shortage of energy, which the little girls expended in the kiddie pool, the bouncy jump house, dressing up fancy, and painting their very own ceramic tea sets.

Tomorrow is opening night for the Smalltown Fastpitch season.  We play in Bremen.  I look forward to seeing you all out at the ballpark supporting us this season.  Additionally, I look forward to monkeys flying out of my rear end, the day when Bethel College has a 5 billion dollar endowment, and a world where no one on the Fox News network ever says anything bombastic and asinine.

We’ll have fun playing whether you show up or not.  I’ve been taking batting practice in my backyard since mid-March, and I got new batting gloves.

p.s. Morgan responded well to the 24" chicken wire and has lived to chase wiffle balls another day.

When your dog can no longer jump at all (aged hips and arthritis in the hind legs) and when your real concern is not really with the rabbits or deer that might destroy your garden, the chicken wire need not be more than 24" tall.  You do not want your marigolds, watermelons, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, beans, scallions, cantaloupe, or cucumbers destroyed, nor do you want to have to send your beloved almost 11 year old dog to an early grave, so you spend a few extra dollars on chicken wire and stakes to prevent unnecessary deaths. As an expense, it seems well worth it to you.