My family is holding the memorial service and spreading of ashes for my father at the end of next month. I spoke with Michael and we decided it’d be less tiring and cheaper all around if we just fly up and rent a car.

The first thing I did was to check out orbitz.com for the cost of a round trip plane flight from Philadelphia to Manchester, NH. I was surprised to learn that the ticket only cost $83! Apparently they’re trying to promote the Manchester airport. In fact, it’s now cheaper to fly into Manchester than it is to Boston ($133 to fly into Boston). That’s crazy. But good, since my family lives very close to the Manchester airport.

Then my family started telling me their plans. we’d arrive on the evening of Wednesday the 27th, spent the night at my Aunt’s. On Thursday or Friday they’d hold the memorial service, visit the storage facility, sometime I’d visit with family.

Now, both the memorial service and the storage facility are in Maine, which is about a 1.5 hour drive from where we are staying with family. I figure we’ll spend wed-fri with family and then friday we’ll just stay up in Maine.

I spoke with our friend Morgana, who we visited with last time we were in Maine, and worked out that we’d stay at her place Friday and Saturday night, sweet!

I looked into plane flights out of Portland, Maine, since I thought it might be better flying out of there on Sunday morning than driving back to Manchester. I was surprised with the results:

First off, even the cheapest rental car from Enterprise offers unlimited mileage within New England, no need to worry about putting too many miles on the car.

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s crazy expensive to fly out of Portland! The only non-stop flight costs $530, one way. The cheapest flight is $192, and goes from Portland, ME to New York, NY to Raleigh, NC to Philadelphia, and it takes 8 and a half hours! That’s nearly as long as it takes to drive!

So it looks like we’ll be flying in and out of Manchester, renting a car there at the airport. I’ll be making the reservations this weekend.

I’m engaged! *glee* Sorry, I’m still excited.

I came into work this morning and got to show everyone the ring and try to actually get work done instead of sitting around smiling at the ring all day %)

I spent a lot of time yesterday telling people, I guess I know more people than I thought. And of course most of them asked the same questions:

So, when’s the big day?

Not sure yet.

Right now we’re focusing on finding someone to do the ceremony. Since we want a traditional ceremony and neither of us are particularly religious we need to find someone who is flexible, understanding, and who we’re comfortable with to do it. A friend suggested speaking with a Quaker minister because they are flexible in such situations. But we’ll see, pretty much all our other plans depend on this (what sort of place he will preform ceremonies in, if he’s willing to drive a bit to marry us…).

I’m an ordained minister in $strange_church, can I marry you two?

No %P

Am I invited?

Probably not. We’re thinking of having a very small ceremony, quite possibly confined to us, the minister, and two witnesses (best man and maid of honor).

Will you have a reception for everyone who wants to come?

I highly doubt it.

Pictures then?

Absolutely. We’ll have a professional photographer at the wedding. The pictures will be all over my website and we’ll have lots of hard copies for ourselves, family and close friends.

Have you stopped smiling yet?

No! *grinning*

I had the day off today, so I spent a lot of time going through all our vacation pictures and putting together a little site:

Our weekend in Maryland and West Virginia and our engagement!

Of course there is a whole page devoted to just the proposal itself.

This morning Michael took me down the the Jewelers to get the ring resized (it was a little too big) we’re picking it up this evening.

Yay!

Yesterday afternoon at Audra State Park Michael proposed to me! I said yes! We’re now engaged! Barry took pictures of us.

white gold (my favorite!) and an emerald cut diamond

*so excited*

I have a whole write-up of the trip, and tons of pictures, but it’ll take some time for me to get them all together.

3.5 hours until my 4 day weekend.

The morning went by quickly, but this afternoon is shaping up to be very dull.

Tonight Michael’s mother is coming over and I’ll be making some spinach lasagne. She’ll be taking Caligula home with her so he won’t be left alone for the couple days we’re gone. There is also laundry and packing to do this evening, yeesh.

I expect I’ll even be staying up to watch the pilot episode of the Americanized “The Office” (which will probably be horrible, we speak the same language for godssake! Why do we need to translate and ruin good things?).

Tomorrow morning we’ll be getting up early to get ready to leave. We’ll be meeting Barry and Rae around 9 to get on the road to Maryland, planning on eating a late breakfast/early lunch on our way out there. We don’t have solid plans for once we get to Maryland, we’ll have to see how the weather is. Check-in at the B&B is 3pm. We have dinner reservations at a nice restaurant.

I’m so excited! This is going to be such a great weekend %D

I haven’t been in the mood to do computer stuff this week. Instead I did some reading, and finished Who Needs God by Harold Kushner.

Kushner is a Rabbi who has written a few popular books, but I hadn’t heard of him until I saw this in the library and decided to check it out. The book is written for the people who have drifted away from religion and the agnostics and atheists that this Rabbi encounters. He works to create a case for religion in our lives. It definitely made me think, and I think it’s something that just about anyone on the verge of turning away from religion would benefit from.

Kushner is definitely an intelligent, liberal theologist. It made the book interesting for me to read, and I found myself agreeing with much of his assessment of humanity. Keep that in mind as I write this, as it’s always hard to write a review of a book like this because I end up simplifying everything and it comes out sounding like just another God-book. He really did have some very good points.

In this book he focuses on some of the reasons for religion: loneliness, moral confusion, pointlessness of life, need for forgiveness, fear of death. And he explains why God in your life can sort these things out, whether you believe in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam (some other religions are mentioned in passing, but he focused on these three). Most of it was what I’ve heard before, people go to church to be a part of a community, people pray to God for forgiveness because no one else can grant it, people turn to God in times of hardship to give meaning to it all.

To me it still felt like weakness. Kushner mentions this feeling I have, and says it’s not weakness, but wisdom that leads people to God. He also contends that it’s foolish to believe that we can live our life without the help of God, passing up the offer of help when you severely need it. I can understand where he is coming from, but I don’t agree. Although “weakness” might be the wrong word.

I’ve also been reading The Road Less Traveled, which struck me as being freakishly similar. I guess I’d never looked at religion and the study of mental health as being deeply linked. On one side you have God offering a cure-all solution for life’s hardships, and on the other is a modern belief that we can work at perfecting ourselves so we can cope with the “loneliness, moral confusion, pointlessness of life, need for forgiveness, fear of death” ourselves.

So who is right? I think it’s both.

While I have the time and dedication to spend on cultivating my spiritual path and looking inward for answers and spiritual health, not everyone does. Organized religion and God offer an alternative that you can get very passionate about, but the steps are already in place and it’s easier to fit into your normal life to fit your needs.

There is nothing wrong with that. I completely respect that people choose to spend their time on other things, they still need to satisfy these spiritual needs somehow.

It’s just not for me.

Like many intelligent Christians I have spoken with, Kushner focuses on things that won’t change my mind. While I can accept that some of the stories in the Bible are just stories used for teaching, I don’t believe that Jesus is the son of God. I don’t believe that people actually have communicated with Angels. And at the end of the day I don’t believe in God.

They want to focus on overall mental well-being. Filling up that “empty” feeling that we have (“why do we feel this way if this space isn’t supposed to be filled with God?”).

I’m still stuck at “Hey, if God is real why doesn’t he make it obvious which religion is true? At least give some signals so that completely opposite viewpoints don’t all seem valid.”

Hrm, I was only going to write a paragraph or two. And now my lunch break is over and I don’t have time to refine this. I’ll need to do some meditating on it tonight. Maybe even start pulling together a second part to my As requested… why
I don’t believe in God post.

Bah, Mondays. I’m exhausted today. I shouldn’t be, I’ve been getting plenty of sleep.

I came into work and was mostly zombie for the first half of the morning. Then they gave me some spreadsheets to work on that I really do need to use my brain for. After mixing up the numbers a half dozen times and confusing myself I finally gave in and got a Mountain Dew from the soda machine (I don’t drink coffee anymore, and it’s been months since I touched a Mountain Dew).

It seems to be working, I don’t feel like my brain is a useless mass of mush anymore.

Ah, at least it’s only a 4 day week, after which I get to go on a nice little trip to Maryland with friends. Refreshing hiking, delicious food, the most comfortable bed on the planet! I can’t wait.

About a week ago I read Sam’s post about the best pancake ever. Yum blueberry! I love blueberries, but they’re not in season right now, so even if I could find them fresh they’d be very expensive. The solution? Frozen blueberries! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? The last time we were at the grocery store we picked up some.

Last night I took some of the blueberries out of the freezer to thaw, and this morning they were ready to be made into pancakes. I prepared it by the directions, and 80 minutes later (the batter needs to sit for 60 minutes before cooking) I had a 8 delicious pancakes to enjoy for breakfast. Yum! They were good pancakes, but in my opinion not really knock-your-socks-off good.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time huddled with my my CSS book (The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks). I decided that the new Xelium site would be done with a huge pile of CSS, divs rather than tables, and validated XHTML 1.0. Quite a task, since I’ve only dabbled in these places somewhat unsuccessfully. Yesterday, however, was a very successful day. I have a beautiful two-column layout page made with divs and CSS that looks good in Mozilla and IE without any special tinkering, AND it all validates! Closing img and br tags with /> takes some getting used to, but in all the site is doing very well. But I can’t show it here because it’s not officially released yet (if you’re really interested I can give you a peek, but I don’t want to publish a live URL here, it’s based on this design).

I’m so proud of myself. Someday I will completely understand div positioning!

Michael took me out for Indian food last night, which was amazing. I ordered Tandoori Prawn (shrimp), yum! We hadn’t planned on going out, but all the rest of our plans for the day had fallen through and I was a bit bummed out.

Today will mostly be a relaxing day. It’s rainy out and Michael has started a fire in the fireplace.

This evening we’re hoping to meet up with Barry and Rae to make some plans for next weekend. They’ve decided to come with us to Maryland! We all have Friday off (Good Friday), so we’ll be leaving in the morning/early afternoon to drive out there. Michael pulled together a bunch of information about parks and things to do while we’re out there, and while we don’t want to make any solid plans, we want to know what our options are. I’m very excited that they decided to come down with us.

After work on Friday we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some sodas for movie night. On our way in they had a whole bunch of flowers for sale, and then I realized: Wow, spring starts in a few days! We’ve had a snowy March (in fact, there is a tiny bit of snow still on our lawn), so the realization that it was time for flowers was surprising.

This afternoon I was outside today talking with Michael about our plans for the house I noticed that my perennials had started to come up, oh my! I haven’t even cleaned the leaves out of the flower beds yet!

So that’s what I spent about an hour doing. It’s in the 50s out, so nice for garden work. I started going through the plots with my gloved hands and some small garden tools, but for the bigger beds I took a normal lawn rake and got most of the junk out. The perennials are pretty tough, so being raked over doesn’t hurt them as long as I don’t get crazy about it.

After I had gotten those cleaned out I went to the side yard and started cleaning up there, but I was hot and thirsty, so I packed up my gardening tools for the day.

I have made a couple decisions about my garden this year.

First off, the vegetable garden that I spend so many weeks on last year is being scrapped. I don’t have nearly enough time for it anymore, and the yield for most of the veggies was pitiful.

Second, I still want to grow green beans. I think I’ll be growing them in one or two of the white, concrete flower beds.

Third, I want to make an attempt at filling out the rest of the flower beds with some flowers that I have to plant, not just bulbs. Since I let the whole thing run it’s course on it’s own last year I’m pretty familiar with what beds have bulbs and when.

Still, I think it’s a bit overwhelming. I bet one of the previous owners of the house did gardening for a hobby. 11 big flower beds near the driveway, a sea of hostas on the side of our house, and a whole enclosed garden plot lining the side of the house facing the street. Oh, and the huge veggie garden that I shrunk 80% to make my veggie garden for last year. We’ll see how it all goes.

It was great to get outside and work in the yard again, and it’s a great way to work off the pounds I always put on over winter.

Last night I made steak. Yeah, I said I was going to cut it out of my diet again but apparently that isn’t going so well. As usual I made up a mustard sauce for the steaks (1/4 c. mustard, usually dijon, 2 teaspoons rosemary, 1 teaspoon pepper, 2 cloves garlic) but this time I used the newly discovered Sierra Nevada Pale Ale & Honey Spice Mustard. Yep, they make a mustard! And it contains their pale ale.

It’s a bit sweet as far as mustards go, even for honey mustard, but it was delicious on the steak last night. During and after dinner we watched some more of the MST3K that we got from . It was a nice, quiet, computerless evening and we went to bed early.

Shouldn’t have gone to bed early, I slept horribly and woke up at 4 am, 4:30, then 5:15, then finally got out of bed around 5:30. This gave me some time to play around with rss2email. You obviously need to run it on a computer that has a mailserver that can talk to the outside world, no problem for me. I set it up per the instructions, it was pretty simple, and pointed it at my gmail account (since that’s the one I can access from work). I opened up rss2email.py and edited the subject line so that it includes [rss2email] in every mail to make filtering easy. I set up gmail to filter everything with [rss2email] in the subject line and drop it in it’s own folder. I then set the script to run at midnight and noon every day.

I was so excited when I started my lunch break at 1pm this afternoon and had new mail in my gmail rss2email box %)

This is a pretty cool solution, but I’ll still be poking around at my other options. Planet looks cool if I want to spend the time to set it up, and I really haven’t explored bloglines enough to say if I like it or not. In any event, this will help me keep up with all these RSS feeds, I’m afraid I’ve been terrible with everything outside of livejournal lately (sorry everyone!).

Reading… I picked up a few books while at the library last week. The book version of islam-guide.com, which was interesting to read. Also got Breaking The DaVinci Code: Answers To The Questions Everyone’s Asking, which would have been much more interesting if summarized as “In reality Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute, and women did have more power in the Christian church than in most parts of life back then, and that evidence is still in the Bible, but everything else Brown wrote was silly.” I picked up Who Needs God by Harold Kushner, which interested me because I’m fascinated by smart people who follow organized religion, I started reading it this morning and it’s great so far. We’ll have to see where it goes.

But right now I have to go back to work.