En route to Cascadia, we decided to swing back to Deseret and Zarahemla, the town we lived in while we were there.

Interestingly, when we got into town both of us independently had the same sort of feeling… “It feels like coming home”.

Had you asked either of us whether we’d ever really consider Zarahemla our home (or a home), we probably would have laughed. We didn’t really dislike the area (it is one of the more palatable cities in Deseret), it was just a place that was very different where we were from and a difficult place to assimilate into for reasons religious and cultural.

What’s sad is that Santomas, Estacado, never really became a home-type place for us. I absolutely love the state of Estacado which is why I am lobbying for her to keep working to get licensure there so we can settle down there… but not so much for Santomas, a city that I figured I would love. It sort of felt like we should be honored to live in such a hip place, which made relatively squarish Clancy and I feel rather… well… square.

It’s possible that the main difference is time. We were in Zarahemla a lot longer than we were in Santomas and it’s possible had we been plucked out of Zarahemla earlier we’d feel similarly indifferent. Another factor is that though we stayed in Estacado for two years, it was supposed to be one, which likely made us less likely to really get settled in.

Out plan is to be in Cascadia for a year. It’ll be interesting to see how well we take to Soundview.

A lot of guys can tell you stories about this girl that they liked that confided in him what a jerk her boyfriend was wherein the confidee silently asked “What about meeeee? I wouldn’t treat you like that!” But no, she stays with the jerk while saying that she just wishes that she could find a guy that’s not like the jerk at all. Some believe it happens all the time and some believe it really truly happens rarely, but whatever we believe about it, we’ve heard it.

Sometimes I feel like the whiny jilted guy when it comes to religion. As most of you know, I am a member of the Episcopal Church, which has been struggling lately. There is the recent schism, of course, but it goes beyond that. Church attendance numbers aren’t very good and growth in the United States is anemic.

Yet at the same time The Episcopal Church is precisely what a lot of people say that they want. Specifically, there is a target group that TEC seems incapable of picking off: disaffected Catholics.

Now there are two kinds of disaffected Catholics: disaffected liberals and disaffected conservatives. I haven’t much advice for the conservatives that are upset about the litergical changes of Vatican II and the like or like my Webmaster are upset about the liberal political positions that the church has taken on issues such as immigration and welfare. Other than perhaps the Orthodox Churches, they really don’t have a whole lot of options.

But the liberal Catholics are a different matter. They have the church that was founded as a reaction to the rigidity of the Catholic Church: My church. I hear a lot of Catholics complain about how the church won’t open its eyes on celibate priests, women priests, homosexuality, contraception, or a host of otherwise. Or else I hear complaints that the church doesn’t respect differences in theological opinion and has such a top-down view on everything.

These are areas in which the Episcopal Church is not necessarily perfect by their reckoning, but at the very least it’s closer to what they say they want than their own church is. Yet they continue to go to Catholic Mass (or make a point of Refusing To Go) and most are dismissive of the idea of converting to Episcopalianism.

This may sound like my simply trying to boost my own church, but it really isn’t that. It isn’t about the virtue of TEC at all. Who am I to say anything? I barely go to church myself. But what I find notable is that I’m not blaming the church for my failure to attend or going despite making a big point about how dissatisfied I am with it. If I wanted more energetic sermons I could go to a Baptist or otherwise charismatic church. If I wanted more rigid doctrine I could convert to Catholicism. But what I wouldn’t do is sit here and complain about how my church has failed me as if it were my only option.

But Catholics, like Pygmalion Girls, often prefer to seek to change what they got rather than admit what they have is not necessarily right for them. Or perhaps more precisely they (and by “they” I am referring most specifically to liberal Catholics as I concede that conservative Catholics are more limited in their options) would rather be indignant than satisfied.

This is all how it seems sometimes, though on a separate level I know that it’s not quite that simple. Catholicism is as much a tradition as a specific belief. So while on one hand it seems to me that to say that the Pope is wrong is to be a 0 in the binary world of Catholicism (in which the Pope is infallible)… on the other hand I can see Catholicism as much a tradition of heritage as it is a tradition of theology. I can move as far away from the south as can be if I find New England to be more to my liking… but it doesn’t stop me from wanting the south to correct its various faults and wherever I live a part of me will always be a southerner.

Nonetheless, it just remains frustrating to me that a great Sorting hasn’t taken place with the rabble-rousing angry conservative Episcopalians joining the Orthodox churches where they belong, liberal heretical Catholics joining the Episcopal Church, and so on and so on.

One minute Clancy and I are driving down the Interstate in Real-life Wyoming going somewhere between 70 and 75 in a 75mph zone.

Several minutes later, a local Sheriff’s Deputy is telling me that I was going 91mph in a 65mph zone.

In between time, I was driving down the Interstate in Real-life Wyoming and noticed that the car behind me wasn’t Clancy. I turned on my right blinker to let the car that was not Clancy’s pass. Instead, there were flashing red, white, and blue lights everywhere. I’d never seen a police car with so many lights.

Also in between cruising at 70mph in a 75 and being told that I was going 91mph in a 65, a Sheriff’s Deputy pulled out of the median. Clancy immediately saw him and saw that the speed limit just dropped to 65 and slowed down. The officer, who half-an-hour later told me that he was initially pulling out to give her a ticket for following me too closely, decided that I was the one to go after since I wasn’t slowing down and in a few seconds I was about to start going downhill.

I cannot say with any certainty how fast I was going when he pulled me over. It’s entirely possible that I was, in fact, going 91 miles an hour. I can say, however, that the entire 1,180 miles I had driven to that point I had a tremendous amout of difficulty getting my car to stay about 75mph. Even going downhill I could rarely go about 82 or 83. This is me with my foot pounding the accelerator to the floor.

So the odds that I was going above 80 (and therefore speeding) were relatively high. If my car could, under any circumstances, go 91mph, it did not let me in on this little secret. Of course, I didn’t specifically ask it to go 91mph, but I did ask it to go 80-85 on various occasions and was almost always denied and was even denied the opportunity to go 75 more than a few times.

That is almost all I will say about how fast I was actually going. I will state unequivocably, however, that Clancy was not following me too closely at any point in our drive. She’s very cautious about such things.

Back to the number 91. Actually, 91 isn’t so important as is 26. I was allegedly going 26mph over the speed limit. In many states, Real-life Wyoming included, this creates what can be termed (if we choose to censor the term) a Spitstorm Ticket, which means that you were not only speeding, but you were actively a danger to other drivers. I should point out that there were not many on a rural Real-life Wyoming freeway at two in the morning. The officer did dutily inform me that there could be some deer around for me to potentially hit in lieu of cars.

So apparently the law in Real-life Wyoming as it pertains to drivers allegedly going in excess of 25mph of the speed limit is that you have to appear in court. This would mean that I would need to fly back to Real-life Wyoming and go before a judge who could fine me in excess of $500 and even throw me in jail for 20 days for this alleged, atrocious danger I posed to deer at three in the morning on a rural freeway in Real-life Wyoming.

But wait! Says the officer. Here’s what I am going to do for you! I will put you down as being able to forfeit a bond rather than have to appear. He should not do this, he explains, but he wants to do me a favor seeing as how I am moving cross country and am such a nice person. Bond would be a mere $230 and would not require my return to Real-life Wyoming.

It’s an interesting turn of events wherein I am pulled over for going a speed that I was hereforto unaware my car was even capable of going that turns out to be one mile-per-hour over the spitstorm threshold that creates such potential for a world of trouble that paying a $230 seems like a great deal and raising a fuss could more than double my fine and, if the judge were feeling particularly cantankorous, land me in jail for a spell.

Fortunately, no deer were hurt in the fodder provided for this post.

Buddhism sees its role fading in Japan (Christian Science Monitor)

When it comes to funerals, though, the Japanese have traditionally been inflexibly Buddhist – so much so that Buddhism in Japan is often called “funeral Buddhism,” a reference to the religion’s former near-monopoly on the elaborate, and lucrative, ceremonies surrounding deaths and memorial services.

But that expression also describes a religion that, by appearing to cater more to the needs of the dead than to those of the living, is losing its standing in Japanese society.

“That’s the image of funeral Buddhism: that it doesn’t meet people’s spiritual needs,” said Ryoko Mori, the chief priest at the 700-year-old Zuikoji Temple here in northern Japan. “In Islam or Christianity, they hold sermons on spiritual matters. But in Japan nowadays, very few Buddhist priests do that.”

Not much to add here, other than that I found the article interesting:

En route to Cascadia, we realized that we were going to have to stop in Cimarron to get some food and refill our gas tanks. Clancy wanted to go to Flingers, a chain restaurant, but the first couple towns we looked in didn’t have one. We were about 50 miles from the next large town, which we were pretty sure would have one, so we soldiered on until I realized that my gas gauge was hovering on the wrong side of Empty. Fortunately, a little strip of gas stations and whatnot presented itself and we pulled over.

So we refilled my gas tank and then discussed whether we wanted to stop again 50 miles down the road or just grab a bite to eat in that strip. The convenience store we were at sold pizza slices and whatnot. I saw that there was a truck stop diner next door and went over to investigate if they might have more selection. Their whiteboards mentioned various sorts of BBQ being the specials of the day, but the guy working there handed me a menu which was six pages long and had all sorts of things that Clancy might enjoy. So we decided to do that instead.

Unfortunately, in my little scouting adventure I neglected to notice that the restaurant allowed smoking and so the whole place smelled like smoke. We’ll call that Item #1.

The next thing that happened was that we ordered water to drink. She came out with two relatively small glasses. She said that she would get some more water in a pitcher for us. When it eventually came out, she only filled the pitcher 1/2 the way up. Item #2.

So we ordered. I ordered the enchiladas. Oh, wait, they didn’t have the ingredients for the Mexican food menu that day. Okay, then, I ordered chicken-fried steak… strike two. I was almost begged to ask what actually was available, but I figured that they would naturally have hamburgers. And they did!

“Would you like everything on the hamburger?”

“No tomatoes.”

“Oh, well we don’t have tomatoes anyway. What kind of fries would you like?”

{Look at menu, see options for regular or curly} “I’ll take curly”

“We don’t have any curly fries.”

“Okay, regular then.”

“We can put the seasoning on regular fries.”

I agreed and it was Clancy’s turn to order. She ordered the grilled chicken and lo and behold they had it.

“What side did you want with that?”

“Mashed potatoes.”

“We don’t have mashed potatoes.” {for brevity I will just skip to the part where she pretty much had to get the same seasoned straight-fries that I got. And she got a salad.} Item #3.

She was going out to the car to get something when her salad came. If you can call it a salad. It was half-brown and was about as appetizing as… well as something less appetizing than a salad. I was getting hungry, so I decided to munch on her crackers, which were six months past being too stale to eat. Clancy ate half a cracker and one bite of her salad and put it off to the side never to touch it again. Item #4.

Our main courses came out. Clancy’s grilled chicken was strongly reminiscent of Subway’s roasted chicken except not as fresh and flavorful. She dumped enough salt on it to get it down, though. Item #5.

My burger actually wasn’t that bad on the merits. It was kind of small, though I have to point out that the lettuce at least simulated freshness in ways that her salad did not. No brown, no anything. The meat and cheese were acceptable. The fries were actually kind of sort of tasty.

The problem was that by the time I got my food I had been in the place too long. You know how some restaurants allegedly spray an aroma to make you think you’re hungry? This place did the opposite. It was its own appetite suppressant. The overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke and fried. The flies that were everywhere. The half-brown salad that was still sitting on the edge of our table. The taste of stale crackers lingering in my mouth. I was starving when we got into the restaurant but by the time my burger came out eating was the last thing that I wanted to do. Item #6.

For dinner we got to eat at Flingers at the largish town of Colorado Falls. She ordered the exact same plate there that she had ordered (or tried to order) at the truck stop diner earlier in the day. Everything in the Flingers in Colorado Falls tasted exactly like the Flingers in Colosse, Mocum, and Almeida-Santomas. And it was beautiful.

Because we’re about to move and because my queue had gone down to nill, I decide to go ahead and cancel my Netflix account. When we get to Cascadia, I’m going to start up a subscription with GreenCine, RentAnime, or perhaps {shudder} Blockbuster in order to pick up the stuff that Netflix doesn’t have. So two weeks ago I cancelled my subscription. and early last week I sent in my DVDs.

They haven’t arrived yet.

This isn’t the first time that DVDs have been lost. One time some neighborhood scumbucket swiped them out of my mailbox. Another time one just never made it back to them. When this happens, though, Netflix has been great about it. They just send me new copies. Done deal. What’s a few DVDs between company and customer?

Of course, this generosity only extends insofar as you are a customer. I am no longer a customer, meaning that have no reason not to charge me the ridiculous $20 fee. Further, because I am no longer a customer it means that I can’t just go out and buy the DVDs and send them in, which would be cheaper.

Of all the send-ins to get lost, this is really a worst-case scenario. $160 gone and not much I can really do about it.

Judging by our internet history, Clancy has visited a site called deadiversion.usdoj.gov. I spent a good three minutes trying to figure out what the heck Dead Iversion was and why Clancy would be visiting a usdoj.gov before it occurred to me that the site was almost certain DEA Diversion and is thus probably linked to her efforts to get full licensure in a handful of states which includes the ability to prescribe heavy-duty narcotics which is handled in part by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the DOJ.

That makes sense… though I got to say that Dead Iversion does sound pretty cool.

As you may have noticed, posting and commenting has been lax lately. I took a trip to Delosa, Clancy and I went to a water park for a couple of days, and now we’re packing for our big trek to the Pacific Northwest. I have a lot of post ideas waiting in the wings and relatively little time to post them. There will be a steady stream of output (thanks in part to my webmaster), but things wouldn’t be shooting at full blast for a few weeks.

Clancy and I took another two day trip to the Oasis on the Hill, which is a water park in Estacado. In addition to all the water rides, one of the things that we do is sit at this particular vantage point and look down at and on everybody while making snide comments about the tattoos they’re sporting and the bathing suits that they’re wearing, among other things. I’ve come to call this little perch the Judgment Point.

One of the observations that Clancy made this time around is girls wearing bikinis that are way too young to be wearing bikinis. I don’t meant early pubescent girls who, right or wrong, at least have something to demonstrate, but rather the pre-pubescent girls. The ones whose breasts are less substantial than their baby fat. I don’t mean fat girls, just girls that that haven’t grown into at least their pubescent figures (lest anyone think to bring it up, this post is not about AOC laws or teenage sex).

I can’t disagree with what she is saying, though I found a tangential thing that she brought up interesting because it was something that I hadn’t thought about.

I’ve always considered the one-piece bathing suit to be the standard and a bikini to deviate from that standard for the point of showing off. That’s one of the things that fueled my previous comments about how poorly some women perceive their bodies and think that bikinis are the optimal bathing suit even when they’re not. But bikinis it would seem offer more than just the ability to show off. Clancy pointed out that it’s much easier to use the restroom with a two-piece than a one-piece and that this could be important for younger girls that haven’t mastered control of their excretory systems yet. Logistically that’s so obviously true I can’t believe that I never considered it before.

Of course, she also pointed out that there are some types of bathing suits for younger girls that allow for the easy restroom usage without showing off the tummy. So I guess my earlier points still stand. It would seem to me that there are so many different ways that women can dress their bodies up in bathing suits. It remains such a tragedy that so many of them hover around one or two types whether it accentuates their positives or their negatives.

Then again, it’s worth pointing out that all of this is yet more demonstration of the pressure that women are under when it comes to presenting themselves. For most guys that really don’t care so much, it’s really nice only having a couple options.

While at the Oasis on the Hill water park, Clancy and I were talking about the bathroom habits of men versus women. She supposed that women are more paranoid about being unclothed around one another because they’re so much more self-conscious about bodies. {insert quasi-sexist joke about male fantasies of females running around in one another’s company without clothes being squashed here.} She’s right about that second part, though not so much about the first.

Or she may be right about the first, but I’m not willing to posit a guess. What that did get me thinking about is now whether men or women are more private about their bodies in the company of their own gender, but rather that the motives are slightly different. Women sometimes worry that if they undress in front of other women they will be found lacking. Men, on the other hand, are worried about excessive approval or alternately being accused of excessively approving of other unclothed men.

So while women worry that someone will say or think “Look at the fatty hips and stomach on that girl” men are worried that some dude is going to say “Dude, quit oogling at my love handles and pot belly you fag.”