Helpful: Comprehensive medical stand

Interesting: Running Accordion Count

Up to 7!

Interesting: Ice Cream!

They love it here, I swear.

Interesting: Royal Lazienki Park

A city is defined by its parks.

Jair is that you?

Helpful: Kielbasa

Helpful because it's delicious.

Interesting: The View from our Window, Warsaw

Castle Inn, Stare Miasto

European Vacation Day 1

Loving Warsaw so far!

Benson test

Will this work in Europe?

test post

just checking

Helpful: Excuse me?

Excuse me? Human? Food.

Interesting: The Dastradly Ficus

http://www.theatreinchicago.com/playdetail.php?playID=3107

Went and saw The Dastardly Ficus, a play directed by our friend, Amanda. Amazing acting, just two women, one man and a ficus. Go get some Polish food first at Podhlanka!

Runs through April 4. Go see it!

Absolutely Interesting: Soul Pancake

I have a new favorite site. Soul Pancake. Created by Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office), SoulPancake.com is a website and forum about spirituality and creativity. Actual discussion about God and faith without stupid flame wars (yet).

Soul Pancake!

Interesting: Robot Rock

"Around the World," Daft Punk

I dare you not to dance!

Interesting: What we do for family

Make face available for paper mache...

Interesting: Twitter

Between Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, there are all sorts of avenues for people to not listen to the nonsense I have to say! Yay science!

Watch this space for more photos.

Helpful: Open sign

I really liked this at my parent's church. Clever. Old church buildings like ours can be so foreboding sometimes.

Interesting: Small town auction

Spent the weekend with my folks in Kansas. We checked out an antiques auction in Douglass, KS, a small town that my high school used to whoop in football, tennis, and especially Scholar's Bowl and debate. Ha!

Lots of furniture, odds and ends, Mom was looking for potentially valuable china and other dishes.

Very interesting to see someone demonstrate a frog "gigger," as well.

Interesting: Liver

Apparently, my body is making its own fois gras.

Helpful: Small groups

Our church just started another round of small groups. I hadn't been a part of one for a long time due to the campaign work last year, so I'm excited to try it again. This group is a men's group, which should be fun. Reminds me of old days, our church when I was a kid had a men's group; all I saw them do was make pancakes and go on mission trips to Appalachia. I'm looking for more than that out of my friendships, although more pancakes would be fine.

Helpful: Resolutions for 2009

2. Run at least two races, starting with the 8K Shamrock Shuffle in March.

3. Lose __ pounds, enough to take my BMI back down to "normal."

Interesting: The times we're in

One lesson from The Wire is that we're all interconnected. Our actions, our kindness, our unkept promises, all of them can make a huge difference in someone's life. In this time of economic turmoil, more people will be living on the brink. We don't have a housing bubble to depend on to bail us out. We don't have a stock bubble to bail us out. In these times, we need to play defense. And to me, that means taking care of each other. Reducing risk. Emotional risk, physical risk. Take care of each other. Be good to each other.

Merry Christmas.
MK

Helpful: Resolutions for 2009

1. Learn the accordion.

Helpful: Write something

I looked down at my todo list just now and realized that "write blog post" was on it. Normally, this would be a project, requiring a topic, insight, or at least a picture of my cat.

Instead, I'm just posting this:

It snowed yesterday, about five inches. I needed to go to the corner store, so I waited until evening, when the snow had gotten pretty deep. I went out the back alley to take out the trash, it's amazing how even alleys can be beautiful when a few inches of powder cover everything. I walked out of the alley and down the sidewalk, sliding in the snow as shopkeepers shoveled their front walks. I looked both ways, no cars at all coming from either direction as far as I could see. I took a deep breath through my nose and crossed.

Not helpful: Rick Warren

In a nutshell--

Sean Hannity: War is in the Bible, so it's OK right?
Rick Warren: As long as the other guy is evil, you betcha!