I'm back!

I have the internet again! You'd think I'd have a great many posts saved up in Microsoft Word, and would now be posting them. I don't, although there have been things I've wanted to write about. I will mention one of those things, however, no matter how long after the fact this is--

Susan Boyle, what a voice! I just heard her for the first time on YouTube, and I'm amazed! There are many, many videos of her on YouTube, but this is the absolutely best one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OcQ9A-5noM&feature=related

Sorry I can't imbed it. Watch it in high quality.

Steve Hayner, the former president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, while speaking at Urbana 2000 talked to us about Heaven. We can't comprehend it fully in this life, but we get glimpses of it, sometimes through a lovely smell (lilacs come to mind), a moving bit of art, a great musical masterpiece, and sometimes simply by a humble, church-attending woman near London just doing something she enjoys.

No internet after all!

The cable company never showed up, and they didn't call to say they wouldn't be at my house, either.

Their lack of good customer service has lost them my business.

My internet activity will continue to be spotty still.

One more thing before I take my nap...

Book Meme! Book Meme!

Nobody ever tags me with these things, so I tag myself.

HT to JJ of Christian, Gay, and Confused (whose blog I read occassionally, but have never commented on).

The rules are as follows:
Look at the list of books and bold those we have read.
Italicize those we intend to read.
Underline the books we LOVE. (I don't know how to underline with blogger, so I'm changing the color to blue.)
Put an asterisk (*) next to those that you hated.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (I was at Barnes and Noble and almost bought this!)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
36 A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle (origianlly # 36 was listed as The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis, but since the whole Chronicles are listed at # 34, I took the liberty of changin this one)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I have a crush on Dicken!)
74 Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (I plan to buy and read this around the third Sunday of Advent)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells (originally Hamlet - William Shakespeare was listed here, but since the Complete Works of Shakespeare are listed as # 14, I took the liberty of changing it).
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Wow! I've only read 20 out of these 100 books, although I do own 10 of the other titles on this list, as well as over 1,000 others. And since March of 2004 I've read 354 books and am in the middle of reading 12 others.

I think I might read the ones I didn't italicize, too.

(As you can see, my nap is working out very well!)

A Game Father Jim Tucker used to play...

...at his now defunct blog, Dappled Things.

Random iPod Playlist.

1. (We Like the) Cars that Go Boom - Old School Players
2. I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - The Proclaimers
3. Wannabe - Spice Girls
4. Animaniacs Main Theme Title
5. God Is In Control - Twila Paris
6. One Man Gets Around - Charlie Peacock
7. The Marriage of Figaro Overture - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
8. Star Trek: Voyager Main Theme
9. O For a Thousand Tongues - Urbana '96 Worship Team
10. Short Skirt/Long Jacket - Cake

The rules, for bloggers who want to play:

Get your iPod or media-player of choice, select your whole music collection, set the thing to shuffle (i.e., randomized playback), then post the first ten songs that come out. No cheating, no matter how stupid it makes you feel!

Also, as a courtesy, you may want to provide links to a place where the songs can be downloaded. The Urbana '96 CD is no longer available from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship :-(

Some of my Favorite Links...

...None of which are in the side bar.

I thought you might enjoy a little excursion into the weirdness of my web-browsing habits. These are web sites I visit occasionally for fun, information, etc.

Brickfilms - Movies made with LEGOs! Highly recommended: The Gauntlet and The Barber of Seville.

Reasons to Believe - an Old Earth Creationist web site. Much more intelligent, trustworthy, and informative than Young Earth Creationists. (I mistrust Young Earth Creation "scientists" because most of them seem to be Fundamental Baptists, and, having been raised as a Fundamental Baptist, I know how many lies and how much mis-information is spread in such circles.)

Johannesen Printing and Publishing - If you know anything about C.S. Lewis, you know who George MacDonald is, and you can purchase e-books or leather bound editions of all MacDonald's books here. (I've yet to do so, although I've had this site bookmarked for years!)

Project Gutenberg - Free e-books. Thousands of them, all in the public domain and downloadable to your computer.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church online!

Frederica Mathewes-Green - My favorite Orthodox author and journalist. I highly recommend her essay "From Agnostic to Christian".

Father James V. Schall of Georgetown University - Called by some "the modern day Chesterton". See also this link.

The Official Peter Kreeft web site - 'nuff said, I think.

A Hypertext Book of Hours - Catholic Devotions from the Middle Ages.

The Cyberhymnal - Protestant hymns complete with lyrics and MIDI files.

The Pontificate of John Paul II - a great tribute to John Paul II at the Hol See's web site.

Starship Exeter - A fan version of Star Trek. It takes them for ever to get new episodes out, but they're worth the wait. These are people who created this series for fun. Their special effects are pretty cool. As you watch Act Two of the episode The Tressaurian Intersection, pay attention to the beam-out/beam-in. Her shadow dissolves and reappears with her!

How Many Countries can You Name in Five Minutes?

Rooibos tea from South Africa - I once made the acquaintance of an au pair from South Africa working here in the U.S. She told me Americans don't know what real tea is, and she made me a cup of Rooibos. It is quite delicious!

LaserMonks - an order of Cistercian Monks that sells computer equipment and accessories, as well as more traditional items, for the support of their abbey and other charities. Great deals, great deeds!

Jimmy Akin on Genesis chapter One - good insight, I think.

Avery Cardinal Dulles on the Population of Hell - something we modern Catholics need to seriously consider.

N.T. Wright's home page!

Cool Websites, Software, and Internet tips.

That's all for now, folks.

Enjoy!

Another new blog...

Today, I'm adding another new blog to the blogroll. Adoro te Devote. I meant to do this months ago! It's a good blog, and most of you probably already visit it.

Tips for your blog.

I have learned there are two things you should mention on your blog if you want to get a lot of people to look at it--

One: Hallelujah Chorus Nuns

Two: Numa Numa

And link to a few Doctor Who pictures.

You would not believe how many Google searches have found my blog based on those posts!

I remember where I was going with last night's post!

Life without a computer:

I used to tell people I can live without a TV, which is very true, but I can't live without the internet. Turns out, I can live without the internet very easily! My life was much more productive in the last few weeks offline. I missed my blog and e-mail, but spent more time reading regular books and the Bible, praying, thinking, journaling, etc. If my work schedule was other than it is, I'd have spent more time with real, live people. Indeed, if my work schedule was other than it is, I'd be spending more time with people anyway. It gets rather lonely getting off anywhere between 10:30pm and 7am in the morning. And while I meet many people as I make my deliveries, that's not the same as hanging out with friends. Most nurses are too busy to chat with after the delivery is made. There is one nurse at a particular hospital (in fact, the hot nurse named Anthony mentioned in this post) that chats with me. I like the fact that he'll sit and talk with me. For one, it's a nice bit of socializing. And second, since I have a crush on him, getting to know him as a person is helping me to break the crush. He's married and has three boys. Sometimes I pray for his family. It also helps to remember he's a married man!

Hallelujah Chorus Nuns

I just found this video on YouTube. It's quite funny. I hope you enjoy. (Jeron, I'm sorry you can't watch all the silly videos on my site.)