remember

December 2: in which I attempt to comfort my poor neglected son by breaking down and buying him a "real" Advent calendar (for some reason the online one suggested by his teacher, in which the kids get to solve a math problem every day, did not count...can you imagine?) but find that there are no more Advent calendars available for purchase - because we are in Switzerland, of course, and Advent started two days ago, why would someone be shopping for one now??

Related: Caroline learned in her home economics class today how to clean and disinfect the kitchen to Swiss standards with the appropriate type and color of cleaning cloths. I asked her if she wanted to clean ours and she replied, "well, you can't do it unless the counters are bare..." So.

The song for today is Remember, O Thou Man. I was super into this song and particularly this recording when I first discovered it (through Greg and the compline choir of course); somehow this year it's not ringing as true. Possibly because my theology classes this semester are "Dogma II - Jesus Christ" and "New Testament II - Everything after the Gospels," and I'm struggling to come up with my own story of who Jesus was and what it means to identify as Christian.

The On Being newsletter this week linked to this Poetry Unbound podcast which linked to the poem "I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party" which had me thinking about remembering as a creative act, which is somehow related to all of this. One thing that is cool about Christianity is the fact that we have, right there in our Holy Book, the same story told four different ways by four different writers. How exactly you get from there to an absolute, fundamentalist understanding of biblical truth...is one of the things I'm struggling with.

Photos are super thin on the ground these days - I'm going to have to make a conscious effort to go for a walk every day just so my blog posts can have a thumbnail. These are the crescent rolls I made tonight using an American dinner roll recipe my new friend sent me. We ate them with "pulled pork" (some pork bits dumped into the slow cooker with half a bottle of barbecue sauce and half a cup of water, ignored all day, and mushed up with a fork before serving) and coleslaw (My First Coleslaw!). It was yummy, if I do say so myself.