A friend of mine has been encouraging me to take up home brewing, and this story might just be inspirational enough to get me started. (Thanks to my brother for the link.)

In my devotional reading I've finished Proverbs and started Ecclesiastes. The motto for all bloggers: "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity."

Sunday I went to church at St. Christopher's in Lubbock for the second time. Too bad the interior of the church is so drab. The front wall, being the visual backdrop for the altar and the sacred mystery that goes on there, should present some intimations of the divine, but at this church the wall is paneled in 1970s faux-oak and only bears a simple cross, sans corpus, and some abstract rectangular molding. The stained glass windows along the side walls are mere slits. There are, however, some nice little mosaics of biblical figures placed along the wall at regular intervals; at first I took them to be the Stations of the Cross.

After the service I attended the young adult group that is just getting started. There were four of us, plus two middle-aged women leading the discussion. I felt somewhat out of place since the other three students were all Texas Tech undergraduates much younger than myself. (I suspect that this sense of dislocation is, at this point in the game, a permanent feature of my life.) The one other male of the group, a young Army vet and Sports Physiology major with a buzz cut, Texas drawl and muscled physique, seemed very enthusiastic about making the group a social outlet as well as a spiritual community, and showed touching concern about me being alone in a new place. He's the son of a Baptist preacher but found that church too stifling. Two female students showed up as well, one extremely attractive in a German racial-purity sort of way, and very open and personable as well, the other not as pretty but more intelligent, with a somewhat edgy personality, speaking loudly, quickly, and articulately, and wearing a beatnik dress and kerchief. I'm predicting that this group will be too small and heterogenous to maintain long-term stability, but we'll see.

Nothing much new happening in the library biz. A prof in the political science department asked if he could keep videos we purchased with his department's library budget! Some people can seem like members of another species.