Only Wonder Grasps Anything

last weekend and the next

so last weekend was a full one for me. friday night was john's birthday party, complete with his dad graciously paying the tab for all 17 of us after john had enjoyed his free provino's birthday meal. then about half of us went to a karaoke bar--something i hadn't done since china nine years ago. i sang u2's "mysterious ways" and had a blast listening to most of the rest of our group sing...

saturday, after being a volunteer judge at a cake bake-off at the early hour of 10am (considering we didn't get to the karaoke bar until at least 11:30pm the night before), i went for a much needed run in chickamauga battlefield. it was windy, and warm in the sun, but under the trees it stayed pretty chilly. saturday evening being st. patrick's day, i had a few friends over for a campfire, hot dogs, s'mores, and irish drinks: guiness, irish cider, wexford irish cream ale (ok, so the frankfurters and hersheys aren't irish, but they went well with the campfire).

sunday morning also came early, and i barely made it over to stelmo's early worship service to hear my friend john--who's interning there--preach on god's changing abram's name giving him the covenant of circumcision.

fast-forward to today during my lunch-break: i was able to drop by mark and amy's house with a chicago-style pan pizza, not a deep-dish, from vinny & joe's on lee hwy. good stuff.

then after work when i called to see if we needed any groceries, my mom said that she wasn't gonna be home for dinner, so dad and i were on our own, and i decided to stop and pick up a philly cheesesteak from lil' philly, a cheesesteak and hoagie joint that opened up about a month ago here in chattanooga.

they serve tastykakes and are working on getting philly soft pretzels, and they fly ther e cheesesteak and hoagie rolls in from philly. good stuff.

in the morning i fly to iowa. i'm thinkin' that a weekend with my sister lars sounds really good. so i'll go. and i'm taking some goodies to her. really good stuff.

philly, aesthetics & the geek

chattanooga now has a philly cheesesteak joint. its out on e. brainerd rd, past gunbarrel rd, and just past the bi-lo on the right. their cheesesteaks are the best i've ever had away from the philadelphia area: they fly their bread in from philly, and tastykakes. i tried one of their hoagies today, and it was a great sandwich, but there was something not quite authentic about the taste of it. but the cheesesteaks are excellent.

after work today i made my way to greyfriers, for dinner of oatmeal since my lunch was so huge, and then over to a small gallery where my friend pete delong vaughn had an opening for his "natural | supernatural" series of paintings. in these pieces he is juxtaposing scenes from everyday life with woodburnt passages from the greek new testament which speak of God's supernatural action in history (or the future). i found the idea compelling, and especially liked the lowes checkout counter with the entire book of jude woodburnt onto the side of the piece.

"babies r us" with a passage from revelation 20 and 21 set me thinking: the portrayal of a parking lot and a mall reminded me of our culture's non-stop consumerism and idolatry of materialism and the mighty dollar, but also of parent's lovingly providing for the needs of their babies, of paradise being paved over with a parking lot, and yet the remaining trees seemed a sign of restoration in the coming new earth - when Jesus returns as the revelation passage says, all thing will be made right, the evil of idolatry will be judged, and we will no longer destroy or marr the earth.

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now i'm at the stone cup coffee shop, and have been hunting around the internet for a script or program to convert a directory of html files to a single TeX or LaTeX file to make a pdf of the book Evangelical Reunion" by john frame. I compiled the source code for html2latex.c but now need to figure out how to convince my mac command line to recognize that binary file and let me format that book, and email it to a friend who can get it printed and bound for me.