Mike Ball

Finally some reports that indicate that I’m right. Check out The Peace Epidemic from a recent blog entry. It quotes from a piece in the Washington Post

I’m trying something rather different with pictures this post. Instead of embedding large images, with possibly slow loading, I’m including small images. you can see the large image by clicking on the smaller one. It should appear in a pop-up box by itself. See how this works for you and let me know which solution you like better.

Christmas has come and mostly gone, leaving behind the usual clutter and smiles. The “children” still like to play the stocking game, I think as an exercise in nostalgia, and they still seem to like getting socks and underware along with silly stuff. Flo and I mostly got books, and Andy got mostly music stuff. Almost anything that makes a sound interests him. You can see the Slide Show if you like.

After the opening, it was a very quiet day. We all seem to live such hectic lives that a day of doing essentially nothing was positively delightful. The cat couldn’t decide which lap looked best, so made the rounds all day.

Christmas is fast approaching, and the clan is gathering. Andy came home Monday night, after striking the set for the madrigal supper, and Kevin and Tali came in last night. The cat has been in seventh heaven with all of her attention sources in one place. I kind of like it myself.

Tuesday, we went Christmas Caroling on Mt Helix, a local park. It was fun. The best part of it was the kids who treated the whole event with enormous enthusiasm. The top of Mt. Helix at night has a glorious 360 degree vista over all of San Diego.

It’s hard to believe just how close Christmas is. The temperatures have been in the 70’s, and are liable to go into the low 80’s today. This is unusual even for San Diego. Some of the hummingbirds are still around. This fall we had well over a dozen making their home in our tree, and eating at our feeders. Now we are down to a couple of diehards. It’s really about time for them to get on with their trip, but I think the warm weather has them fooled.

Flo and I just got back from a Madrigal dinner at UC Irvine. The various choirs put on a dinner (with entertainment) set in the court of Henry VIII. The dinner was distinctly unimpressive, but the music and shows were great

We had planned to go with our next-door neighbors, but a sudden illness changed those plans, so we had two extra tickets. Andy found a couple of friends from his apartment who would like to see it, so we had the company of a drama student and a music student. They were a bit shy, but still good company. The drama student was one of those who built the sets, but he had never seen the show.

Andy played the Steward and was, of course, very good at it. It was interesting to note that he was acting the whole time, using his hands and his face as though he were in a musical comedy. Most of the singers just pretty much stood there and sang. Somewhere in his heritage, he seems to have picked up a bit of ham.

As an interesting side note, Gregory Benford, a very good science fiction author, was made a Knight of Christmas at the dinner. I hadn’t even known that he was a professor at UCI.

My ex-father-in-law died last week, and I just went to his memorial service. If this seems a bit odd, let’s just say that I admired and liked him, and I had a bit of mourning to do. The service was the usual sort, with a minister who never knew him, and talked about how he was happy in a better land. Oh come on! No matter what your religious beliefs, do you think that someone who just lost everyone and everything isn’t going to be doing some mourning himself? There were some touching stories, including a tribute from Diana, and those helped. Then we all went and had some food and talked.

The whole thing was actually good, if exhausting. I remember having the same feeling after my father’s funeral, and started wondering why. It’s pretty obvious that others feel the say way, since we keep having funerals. It’s not, as some young people like to say, a morbid exercise in grief. It gives us the chance to realize that the person is actually gone, no matter how much we want to deny it. It lets us say all of those things we wanted to say when he was alive, and have someone hear them, even if he can’t. Mostly, it lets us put our relationship with the person in perspective, as something that had a start, and now has ended. We can let go, grieve, and go on with life. As at no other time, we can let go of all of the bad times and other cruft that may have covered our love, and realize that all the love that was ever there has never gone away. When all is done, nothing else matters.

The meeting over food afterward is important too. Often, our connections with others are through another individual. If the connection was through the deceased, the wake afterwards lets us connect directly and hold the community together despite the loss.

Maybe this is blazingly obvious to most people, and I’m the only one who had to figure it out, but I hadn’t put it together before.

Actually, welcome to a part of it. I have a separate blog for professional matters and will soon be adding both personal and professional web pages. No doubt when these all become available I’ll edit this to pretend that they have been there forever.

I decided to start this blog because I’ve been away from home so much recently that I’ve been feeling cut off from family and friends. I don’t expect it to be a web-wide hit

I’m still getting my feet wet in this game, and will be trying out various tools to see how they work. Don’t be surprised if things occasionally get a bit weird.