Rainy Sunday

It's a rainy Sunday, but that's okay.

We went to church this morning 'as a family', as my wife likes to say. Normally, its just me and the offspring, but today my mother wasn't up to going out, so we three went together. I wonder sometimes why my mother even thinks about going to church -- she's gone for so many years, I'd expect that she should have a lifetime achievement pass from the Vatican -- and, of course, she watches a lot of masses on television -- two or three a day, I think. All Church, All The Time, I like to call it. She's probably seen or attended more masses than most practicing priests. Of course, its true that my own view of what church attendance ought to be like isn't quite mainstream -- for one, I think that seriously popular ones, like Easter and Christmas, ought to be attendable -- is that a word? -- via the web (Click here to put money in the collection plate). Come to think of it, I remember reading a few years ago about a church that started taking credit cards, and would take recurring donations that way. That makes a lot of sense to me. But as yet the pope hasn't seen fit to incorporate any of this into the liturgy, or the way that religion is practiced, so we still do it The Old Way.

After church, we had waffles a la daughter, which is to say, we had waffles the way that they were written up in the American Girl magazine she just got. I don't think that pudding on waffles, with slices of banana, will be on my menu very often, but she seemed to like it. Her enthusiasms for things like that are intense, and intensely transitory. Halfway through eating, she seemed to hit a 'okay, thats enough' point, and left the rest of it.

I was dialed into work last night, and this morning, the work laptop was still out, but I resisted the urge to dial in again and poke around. I've been giving recurring thought to leaving this company come the end of the year, right about when I'll be vested in their retirement plan. I like working there, but the work itself is not to my liking. Still many reasons to stay -- more than to go -- but if I can't leave just because I want to, when it might be the last full time job I ever hold, when can I?

I am still reading the book on terrorism. Its a small book, but it is painful to read, and I find that I can only read two or three pages at a time before a feeling of dread comes over me, and I just don't want to think about it any more. I suppose that means that I am intellectually lazy, and maybe I am. But I am getting out of it what I wanted. I've learned that the concept of terrorism has been around a long time, and that it started with the assumption that specific actions aimed at specific people would engage the state in a futile attempt to stop the terrorist, so that the general populace, seeing the inability of the state to stop what was, objectively, a very small threat, would conclude that the state was inept and worthless, and therefore get rid of it. When that consistently didn't happen, the terrorists began to conclude that it must mean that the people needed more direct involvement, and then began the practice of general purpose terrorism -- still aimed at specific people, but with less regard to whether the population as a whole was affected directly. Even that proved ineffectual in engaging the supportive sympathies of the public (usually-sometimes it did), so the concept of terrorism as a general act, without a specific target, began to come into practice. (There's a line in one of Tom Clancy's books where a terrorist, who has a 'day job' working for the power company, is ruminating over his knowledge of how to shut down the power grid; he thinks that once people see that the government can't even keep the lights on, they'll conclude that the government is corrupt and inept. Sound familiar?) And thats as far as I've gotten.

I feel like for whatever reason,my reading has stalled, lately, and I don't like that. I have a book on architecture that I want to read, and a collection of short stories. And theres that book about the origins of the British navy, I do want to get back to that. Some decent science fiction would be nice, too.

Maybe a run to the bookstore is in order.