the unlikely orange

if you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that one of my passions is sports, particularly baseball and football. now football, for me, is a physical endeavor. it is body against body, in violent athletic beauty. there is grace in football, to be sure, but in my mind, football is a wintry, bone-crushing, testosterone-fueled, sport of physicality. it is all blood and mud and sweat. baseball, though, is the spirituality to football's physicality. that way i see it, baseball is as much spirit as body. it is played in the summer, during warm nights when the whole world seems wide awake. it is less about quickly crushing the other team and more about slowly journeying toward victory (even in the fact that it has 162 regular season games compared to football's 16). the spiritual aspects of baseball are hinted at even in our media, where we have made movies like "angels in the outfield," and talk about things like "mystique" that help teams win. you ...

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shiver me timbers. this is a chattering teeth skull head that my son got in his mcdonald's happy meal last night. and, as with all mcdonald's happy meal toys, the craftmanship is remarkable. remarkably awful. and so it broke. last night. approximately 2 hours after he ripped it from its plasticy womb. when it broke his mom offered to fix it. he told her no, and brought it to me instead. this is interesting given that i try not to introduce any kind of gender roles that would make him think this way, particularly since i have trouble fixing anything. still, he brought it to me, so i fixed it. he seemed really amazed (my daddy can do anything) so i told him to go tell his mom that i have amazing skills. he did. ha ha. it was funny. the saga continues. this morning at church he broke it again (why you would bring a chattering teeth skull to church is something i hadn't yet considered). his mom offered to fix it but he told her (and i quote), "no, daddy has...

friends, i won't have access to the internets for a couple of days, so i'll be out of pocket . i should be posting again by saturday or sunday. greg.

it is pitiful how a hospital bracelet looks on such a tiny arm. it is exactly this kind of image that had me really sweating about the decision to have caedmon go through the surgery to get tubes in his ears. this kind of an image just immediately puts in my mind thoughts of knives and scalpels and drugs and large machines that beep and measure things you can't pronounce and gowns that inevitably reveal your butt crack and so forth. i'm not a big fan of hospitals and imagining my little helpless one there with something sharp being shoved into his ear just didn't work for me. but it happened. and he's fine. in fact, i would say he already seems to feel better. he can obviously hear better. the doctor said there was quite a bit of fluid and "gunk" behind his ear drums and so his hearing is immediately improved. he hasn't seemed to be in much pain at all, and he has really been content and happy. he did wake up in the night last night which he hasn...

this is me on a youth group trip in 1989. i was all of 13 years old. i was just looking through some old scrapbooks and came across this gem and thought i would share it with the world. this was taken somewhere in the middle of oklahoma, i think, on the way to dallas. the girl is beth kriesch, who was several years older than me, and who was also the (i think unknowing) recipient of a huge crush. i can't believe i was ever that skinny. greg.

cuteness before church if you look closely they have dinosaurs on their neckties after church mommy and daddy the easter bunny came! (while we were at church) we had an easter egg hunt. some of the eggs were dino heads. this delighted jack. he had so much fun during the easter egg hunt. just look at this face. one hot momma the traditional butter lamb. (it should be added here that shannon made the most delicious easter dinner for all of us). certainly part of the joy of easter for us today was our family. after church, before we looked for our baskets, i asked jack why we celebrate easter. much to my surprise it was nothing about the easter bunny or chocolate dinosaurs or anything of the like that came out of his mouth. what he said was this: Jesus is alive. amen, little boy. jesus is alive. and so we can be, too. grace and peace, greg.