Giving Thanks for our Home

Ralph has been begging me to write a blog, so here goes!

If you look back an entry, you will see a few pictures of our new place. As the day started, I was reminded of all the reasons I am so thankful to the LORD for it!

*Getting up this morning at 5:40, looking out the window into the dawn of a new day, I could see the glimpse of an inactive volcano in the distance!

*As I exited the front gate, I noticed our faithful street guard, in his little casita, only a hundred yards away.

*By the time I got back from my daily walk, the house was flooded with light. Oh how beautiful is the morning sun through spacious windows in every room.

*There are three full baths here, less crowding as we all prepare for the day!

*Each of our kids finally has his/her own real bedroom!

*Our work and the kids' school is a five-minute walk!

*I could hang the laundry right out the back door from the utility room, and watch it flutter in the wind as I did the dishes.

*As I write this at a laptop, there is room at this desk for another laptop and 2 oldies for word processing. Thanks to my dear husband and boys who constructed a long narrow desk so there's plenty of room for all the kids to be doing homework at once!

*The indoor garden helps keep the air clean from the pollution of the busy street a block away.

*Ralph finally has a quiet study to call his own. A refuge as he does homework for his masters level class and room for his vast collection of books!

Now I must move on to the “adventure” of grocery shopping. Perhaps I can return another day and fill you in on more reasons I am Thankful! -Kathy

A Very, Very, Very, Fine House

Eleven Lighted Churches on a 10K Run

This was a really fun evening run.

I took it slowly; most of the photos didn´t blur.

I hope these photos capture the festive, party feel of this 10k run through our historic city.

Members of a mountaineering club trotted the distance in full gear (one weilding an ice pick)
with their helmet headlamps on and roped together.

I ducked into a doorway quickly, asked about AA batteries, and Amelia quickly sold me a packet (she even had correct change.)

I always feel a magnetic pull to a band. I can't get past without watching awhile or snapping a picture. (Once I shot photos at a high school dance and most of the pictures were of the band, which didn't set too well with the yearbook editors.)

On Amazonas Avenue, the cheering crowds thin. But a drum corps compensated. Rhythmic energy emanated from the stage. I asked a bystander, "Tomback?" and she said "Si, es Tomback." I've included here a concert appearance they did a few years in France. 

White - Black - Gray

Likely tomorrow, a new frenzy of media chatter on Michael Jackson. He was born on August 29, 1958.

At Jackson’s death in June, Kathy and I - both pop music fans- placed a long play record (LP) on the turntable and listened to "ABC" and "I'll Be There."

More recently however, an old copy of the book, "Black Like Me" has turned our attention: the world obsesses on one whose skin was lightened; we are reading of one whose skin was darkened.

I first read it 40 years ago. In the year 1959, J. Howard Griffin used medications intended for sufferers (as Michael Jackson later became) of vitiligo. It is a splotchy loss of skin pigmentation. Griffin also spent time under a sun lamp. He shaved his head and shaved the hair off of his hands. His skin turned temporarily black.

Then he travelled about in the Deep South of the United States as an African American and was treated as a second class citizen.

Black Like Me excelled as first-person journalism, holding up a mirror to show a society its own “Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Sometimes we would rather look away . . . and markets-driven media know it. In June, Jackson’s death prompted a media stampede, revealing our diminishing news judgment and the declining scope of news coverage. Journalists still do the heroic, but the herd mentality can be both contagious and dangerous.

Fortunately social networkers in Iran used Twitter and blogs to keep before us an ongoing story of international import. Fortunately journalists were willing to risk those wayward steps into North Korea. Fortunately we have technologies to use in right and proper ways.

A Virtual --And Virtuous? -- Community

Does social networking create community? Does it promote healthy relations with other people?

With God?

Yes and no.

Using Twitter, you may now send a short prayer request to Israel. A young economist, Alon Nir, and his team will print it and stuff your prayer into the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Community, I suppose.

A California teen, Alan Wright, has devised “A Note to God”, by which people would be able to pray using their I-phone.

Community, if you consider “other-oriented” or selfless behavior as a necessary element.

So much of it however, centers on self. “Like many of you, I reluctantly entered into the world of virtual social networking, primarily swayed by the argument that it would be a good way to stay in touch with friends and family,” writes David Sills on http://davidsills.blogspot.com/2009/08/tweet-tweet.html. “However, reading the Facebook updates and Twitter tweets that inundate the web through the day makes me suspect that their primary purpose is self promotion.”

Where is the virtual community taking the younger generation?

I watch our sons minimize the homework screen, pop up an online chat (multiple conversations, no less), then check on the status of a video that's loading, then go to homework. Can normally mono-tasking males be transformed by this media to multi-taskers who do everything all at once?

If -- and I have NO proof but just am wondering -- there is biological change in brain circuitry occurring, can the mental and spiritual remain exempt? Can media, which changed the way we look at candidates and national events with the advent of television, also modify the way we look at ourselves and how we posture ourselves before others?

Awhile back, a newspaper reporter and I were using e-mail to discuss the use of Twitter in journalism. Don also observed a "self-obsessed twist in the nature of Facebook updates . . . and Twitter that, over time, is unhealthy for society." I tucked it away, only to find the same observation amplified recently by Dr. Sills.

Our start point may be “I can ride my bike with no handlebars.”Will our claims about ourselves then morph into "I can destroy the planet in a holocaust."? No, because we do not become megalomaniacs overnight.

A likelier scenario: a much subtler, smoother slide to "hey, hey look at me!" And collateral damage in that slide: a loss of the fine art of listening, the discipline of meditation, the give and take of true friendship. Replaced by white noise of "everybody's talking at me; I can't hear a word they're sayin'" as Harry Nillson sang in a simpler day than ours.

We may also lose discernment, for it's awfully tough -even for multitaskers- to evaluate as we're pecking out our next Tweet.

You Done Broke My Heart . . . Uh Guitar

Guitars and communications – a couple of my favorite topics.

While I've held Taylor guitars in high regard I've only ever held one Taylor in my hands. And until today, I'd never heard of Dave Carroll.

After today, I hold both Taylors AND Carroll in high regard.

A songwriter, he tried for a year to get an airline to cough up for his Taylor guitar damaged on a Chicago-Nebraska flight.

After penning a country song “United Breaks Guitars”, the troubador and his bandmates hammed up a corny video*, already viewed nearly two and a half million times on Youtube.

Carroll also used his own website and Twitter effectively, as demonstrated by an Aussie, Lance Scoular.

In his staid deliver, Scoular chronicles the phenomena (I hestitate to call it a formula. Carroll did some things very right, but wannabes could now do - and and likely WILL do- the very same and get just 15 views.) Congrats go to Dave (a David of sorts), who brought the giant to heel, with faith in new media capabilities and letting go with a couple of stones.

The little guy can be heard against a giant, whether its United or the manufacturer of malfunctioning voting machines (another episode of new media, viral story travel and crowdsourced journalistic work).

But it is still not a replacement for newsrooms and professional journalists. There is too much injustice for that.

*a little warning that the Lord's name is used in vain early in the song.

Twenty-thousand Feet at 2,820 Meters

(Deep radio male voice, close mic position) TWENTY-THOUSAND FEET!

(Excess studio reverb) 10,000 RUNNERS!

THOUSANDS OF CHEERING FANS!

(Race noises up, then under) And a 15 kilometer race on cobblestone and on pavement, with the FINISH in the Atahualpa soccer stadium!!!

That’s the way it was likely promoted – the annual Ultimas Noticias run. The way it began was much more low key.

We and other runners rode in silence on the trolley. At the end of the line we walked in small groups, most of them talking among themselves.

We stretched and waited for the starting gun. Then after the race officially began . . . we waited even more. Ten-thousand people don´t cross the start line all at once.

The stories are important to me. A day earlier, I talked with Luisa and Gustavo while in line to get our singlets and shoelace time chips for the race. A year earlier, Gustavo had come up from Riobamba to run the race, so Luisa took him way down south for the race start.

“Well, we´ll see how I get home,” Gustavo casually mentioned. “I´ll go with you for awhile,” Luisa replied.

A ways down the 15k route, she decided to go further with him, then on a bit further.

And on and on . . . until they jogged right into the stadium in the north part of town. That was 2008.

Saturday June 6, 2009 they were picking up their race supplies for the Sunday race.

Gustavo is 83 years old.