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Well, I got to head on up to my grandparent’s home for Christmas. They live in the mountains above Woodland Park in the foothills of Pikes Peak. In fact, their home is at about 9,500 feet elevation. And today, there was much snow falling.

I figure there was about 4-6 inches total up there. It was nice to watch it come down on Christmas. But of course the Christmas celebration was all about Stirling, my three-year-old nephew. Every present was for him of course (no matter whose name was actually on the gift), and the center of the universe revolved around him. But it was still fun.

After the gifts, we watched Elf and then some football on ESPN (turns out they were playing the “Game of the Year” which they said was between Boston College and Virginia Tech. The only thing that could make that better would be hockey.

Hey…wait a second. Hockey… I get to watch the Avs on Saturday! Once more at the Pepsi Center, seeing them live :-) One day, when I’m a famous author with lots of money, I’ll get season tickets for them and the world will have acheived perfection (especially if they win the cup again). Until then…well, the world sucks and you’ll have to get used to it.

I just got back from the Christmas Eve service my church holds. Now I know that there are lots of people who are, as my sister calls them, C&E-ers. That is, they only go to church on Christmas and Easter. But I have to ask: why should we kowtow to them? Why do we alter our services for people who only show up twice a year when, in the process, those who show up weekly starve?

But that’s not my real complaint. No, my actual complaint is that the pastor just preached for the third time in a row on Luke 2:1-14.

Now it’s bad enough that every single Christmas sermon is going to sound identical already (especially if you’ve grown up in the church), but surely he was aware that Matthew exists too, isn’t he? Maybe he didn’t want to do a lot of sermon prep or something, but seriously three sermons in a row repeating basic information that I understood back in the third grade is tedious.

I know, I know. Think about the C&E-ers. As if they are whom the Church is built upon….

Since I don’t know what my schedule for the rest of the day will bring, I figure I’ll post this now before it gets too late :-)

Merry Christmas everyone!

My brother-in-law played the Sixx:AM CD for me today after church. I’ve heard Life Is Beautiful before, since that’s the hit on the radio, but they have other cool songs, like Pray For Me too (killer riff on this song).

Good songs there. I’m gonna get the album (assuming I don’t get it for Christmas).

I just read the latest post from Jason Engwer on Triablogue. It points to this news article in the Toledo Blade which has compiled results from a Barna survey that include:

Except for atheists and agnostics, of whom just 15 percent took the virgin birth story as historically true, a majority of all other subgroups believed it to be factual.

Yes, that’s right. According to this poll, 15% of atheists and agnostics believe in a historical virgin birth.

Oh well. I do have to wonder about the sampling size, however. According to the article: “The Barna Group interviewed 1,005 adults by telephone in December, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.” I also know that folks like Michael Shermer, for instance, have said that 10% of Americans are atheists. This would mean that, if the sample group is actually purely random (and if Shermer’s claims are correct), there should have been about 100 atheists/agnostics in the study, which means that they found 15 atheists/agnostics who believe in the virgin birth of Christ.

Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that these people exist. Americans are great and throwing every possible belief together and saying they’re all equally valid. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same 15 atheists/agnostics who claimed to believe in the virgin birth also believed Jesus didn’t exist.

Oh well. Still interesting stuff, to say the least :-)

I had planned on Ghost Shadows being my next work to edit, but for some reason today I found myself editing Lisa instead. Lisa was actually my first novel. I wrote it over the course of two months back in 1996. Which only proves my writing style is: Write fast, edit slow. (Yes, I wrote a novel in two months and have thus far taken eleven and a half years to edit it. I blame Bush for this.)

In any case, I’m not sure if it’ll be the next book I publish or not, but I ordered some copies (no one else has access to order anything yet so unless I give you one, TOO BAD!) and I’ll hand them out to some of the people I do a writer’s group with to garner their opinions. Perhaps it’ll be my 2008 novel.

Then again, perhaps I’ll get back to Ghost Shadows after all. Either way, it’s nice to have options available. (I could even, theoretically, re-edit The 13th Prime, although I’d much prefer to have my old computer back first so I don’t have to redo all the edits I’ve already done for that.)

Speaking of that, when the police took it in June they said there was a 10 month backlog on forensics. That means they should be done in the beginning of April. At that point, I suppose it will depend on whether or not my computer is used in the trial of my former roommate or not (and no, I don’t know yet whether or not I’ll have to testify either). I still think the best case scenario would be if he just confesses and gets it over with. Second to that, perhaps they can use the evidence they find on my computer to get him to cop a plea. But since this would be his third convinction (not to mention third felony) he really has nothing to lose if he fights it either, so I have a feeling it’ll be another year before I get my comp back. :-(

This is the 900th post that I’ve written since converting to WordPress on November 8, 2005. 900 posts is a lot of writing. In fact, I wanted to see just how much I’d written during that time…so I figured it out!

First, all it’s over 2.5 megabytes when saved as a text file. According to Microsoft Word’s counting mechanism, (not counting this post) I’ve written 424,907 words on my blog. That’s only 473 words per post (424,907/899 since this is the 900th post and not included in the totals). That actually seems reasonable. I do have a lot of short posts, but I also have extremely long posts (such as The Case Against Touchstone–9,067 words long–Equivelancy–8,540 words long–and Stenger’s Fail[ed] Hypothesis–7,823 words long).

Pasting it all into Word, it’s 1,580 pages long (although it was still using the same dimensions as my blog, so those are not accurate pages). It took me 774 days to get to my 900th post, which means I post an average of 1.16 posts per day.

Because of how massive the text file is, when I try to do frequency calculations on it, it slows my computer way down. Then again, I’m stuck with a 833 mHz machine at the moment. In any case, the frequency stats can be quite revealing too, so it was worth the wait. According to the Textanz software, I used 19,533 unique words (no word on how many of those were spelling errors). My average sentence was 17.02 words long (btw, I don’t think this is accurate (then again, I add enough parentheticals from time to time to really bloat the length of a sentence (case in point))). The average word I used had 4.29 characters.

Of course it’s not completely accurate. For instance, it thinks my longest word is “coughcoughRichardDawkinscoughcough” which is only a word because I didn’t put spaces in there…

Oh, the longest sentence is: “There is just something wrong with someone who would write this sentence: ‘If it had not been for Germany being a great contributor to progress in science, philosophy, literature, arts and politics; if it had not been for a more important and positive influence of Germany in international relations and promotion of peace; moreover, if it had not been for the persistence of a strong will by certain global powers and special groups to constantly portray Germany as defeated and indebted country of World War II in order to continue their extortions; and if it had not been for the presence of Your Excellency at the top of the executive branch of your country as an experienced stateswoman with bitter and sweet experiences in two dissimilar societies with different political systems and traditions, and at the same time, if it had not been for the advantages that are limited to women, such as stronger human sentiments and certain manifestations of the divine compassion and kindness, specially in the position of a mother and being at the service of the people, and the common responsibility of all people with faith in God to defend human dignity and worth and to prevent violations of their rights and their humiliation, and proceeding from this conviction that we are all created by the Almighty and He has bestowed upon us all dignity and no one has any special privileges over the other, and under no circumstances could a society be deprived of its rights, barred from pursuit of progress and perfection or be controlled or humiliated; finally, if it had not been for the oppression, however different, of our nations, our shared responsibility to promote justice as the most basic foundation for promotion of peace and human equality, I would not have found the motive to write this letter.’” (BTW, Ahmadinejad, current dictator of Iran, wrote the sentence I quoted.)

On the automated readability, my blog scored a 7.28. This means that most of my blog should be understood by 7th graders. (Of course, this doesn’t take into consideration how pathetic publik edjukashun in America is…) So, what does it tell us about folks like T-Stone who cannot comprehend even a 7.28 automated readability blog??? :-P

I’m getting ready to head off to bed right now, but the wind outside the window is gusting quite nicely at the moment. It reminded me of my walk home after I got off the bus (I live about a quarter mile from the closest bus stop).

First, however, I should point out that I was offered a ride home when I was still at work, due to the weather. But sometimes it’s nice to just go out in the cold and snow. It definitely provides a feeling of isolation so you can clear your mind (which is especially useful after a hectic week of work). Since I wanted to do some thinking, I declined the offer of the ride and simply walked to the bus station. It actually wasn’t so bad then, but that’s because when you’re downtown the buildings help to shield a lot of the wind.

But my stop is in a fairly open place. There are some houses around, but that’s not the same thing as having multi-story buildings blocking the wind. So walking from the bus stop to my house was actually kinda brutal since I had gotten used to the warmth on the bus. It was one of those bone-chilling winds too, the kind that cut right through everything you’re wearing. Case in point: I was wearing my heavy coat, a flannel shirt, and a t-shirt underneath that, and when I got ready to jump in the shower after I got home, my skin was cold to the touch anyway. It was that kind of wind.

It was so cold, in fact, that as I shivered I shook so hard I almost threw up. We’re talking about massive global warming going on here, in other words.

Oh well. That’s not really the point of why I’m writing this now. Instead, it harkens back to my “soul searching” that I got to do while I walked. I’ve mentioned a few times how these past weeks have been odd lately. Nothing too major or anything, it’s sort of like looking at the world with a slightly crossed eye or something. It just looks a bit wrong, but nothing in particular jumps out at you.

I think a large portion of what I’m going through has to do with my finishing of Public Transit. The only other book that I’d published before was The Outlaw, and I tried to re-read that the other day and I was like, I can’t believe I actually left this cheesy line in there. I think my friend Travis paid me the highest compliment (since he’s read both) when he said, “I can tell you’ve grown in Public Tranist because it’s so much better.”

I do think Public Transit is the best work I’ve ever written. Not that that’s saying much right now. But it’s a difficult book for two reasons. The primary reason is that it’s literally impossible to talk about Public Transit with anyone else unless they’ve read the whole book, because to go into the details that make it good you have to give away the ending. I’d give an example of what I mean…but that would give away the ending.

But the second reason relates back to my own history. Faithful readers of this blog know about my past fight with depression. Well, I wrote the first draft of Public Transit in just over two weeks in February of 2005. June of that year is when I was diagnosed with major depression (although later I found out that this was somewhat of a misdiagnosis, since I really had sleep apnea which caused sleep deprivation, which was what caused my depression). In any case, I wrote Public Transit when I was on the brink. I was just about to plunge into depression, but hadn’t yet done it. Public Transit was, in some ways, my creative effort to try to stall the impending doom.

While Public Transit has changed greatly since that first draft (I’ve had about six different endings, and I’m finally happy with the one I’ve got), I suppose it still is a little bit of a reminder of what happened to me then. Couple it with the overtime we’d been doing at work leaving me exhausted, and I wonder if some of the reason why the weeks have felt so surreal is because a part of me might be reminded too much of what happened three winters ago. I don’t think that’s all that it is, nor even necessarily a big chunk of it; but I think it is contributing.

Although to be honest, now that I’ve written about it it doesn’t feel like it matters as much either. And in reality, it might just be that because of how bad the memories of depression are and it’s coming up on the shortest days of the year I’m just afraid that there might be some relapse when in reality there is nothing at all.

But there’s something else with it too. I’m a writer; writing is what I do. Language is my playground, but it’s also my paint kit. And maybe my problem is that I need to convey this story to others. Maybe I’m tasting just this little glimpse of weirdness to remind me of the past so that I can help others through it the way I’ve come through it.

I don’t know if that’s the case or not. In many ways, my “soul searching” didn’t end when I got home. Perhaps the reason why I’m writing this now has nothing to do with the wind blowing outside my window after all.

Yup, it’s almost Christmas time and it’s snowing outside like it’s supposed to be.

Stupid Global Warming!!!!

And for something completely different: Happy Holidays! (from the Association of Nihilistic Atheist Liberals).

Got back from the zoo about an hour ago. It turns out that it wasn’t free after all (I guess it was Seven Falls I got into free last year or something, although I thought it was the zoo). Oh well, it was still fun.

I got to chill with my brother-in-law, my sister, my little nephew, my sister’s mother-in-law, my mom, my dad, and several hungry giraffes. It was a surprisingly popular place, though. The line of cars went down several miles from the zoo entrance. But it didn’t feel crowded once we were inside.

In any case, Stirling (my three-year-old nephew) couldn’t care less about the fact that he could have met Santa there at the zoo. He wanted to see the hippopotamuses. (Frankly, as much trouble as it is for me to spell the stupid word (no guarantee this is correct), I’m surprised at how well he could pronounce it.) Alas, the hippos were sleeping, although one woke up while we were there before it collapsed back down in a heap.

Anyway, all told it was rather nice. But two major important things did occur during this zoo visit.

First, I have to go into the Witness Relocation Program now. See, I sorta accidentally…well, um, got a snowball, you see. And, well, I was just minding my own business but sorta had this nice snowball and…well, my brother-in-law John just happened to be walking right in front of me. So….I stuffed it down the back of his shirt.

But that’s not important! What’s important is that at some point, retalliation will occur. As a result, I am doomed (perhaps from the womb–those in the know will get this; if you didn’t get it, it’s longer for me to write this parenthetical than it would be for me to explain it but I’m not going to explain it anyway so take that).

The second thing is that I think my mom now thinks I don’t care about Christmas lights. This is because I don’t care about Christmas lights. Not that I don’t think they’re pretty, or that I’m a Scrooge or anything, but basically I’m a Scrooge and I don’t get into the Christmas decorations etc. It’s not my thing.

I like utilitarian concepts. I decorate based on what I need, not on what looks good. This is why I had a duct tape wallet for several years. This is also probably why I’m still single. Anyway, I rode with my parents to the zoo, so when we all got back to my house, my mom looked at the house and said, “You don’t have any Christmas lights. Why?”

As if such a thing needed explaining!