The Peaceful Gnome

No doubt it's "not that easy" but so far I've been quite happy with my return to the grain free world of neo-paleo-pseudo-low-carbism.  :-)  Since hitting just over 200 pounds on Saturday morning I have not eaten any grains, no bread, no pasta, no chips, no rice and even no taters.  As of today the scale cheerfully informed me that my weight is now 195 pounds.  What am I eating?  Meat, vegetables and dairy with some fruit thrown in for good measure.  So, it's not really "low-carb" and it's not really "Paleo" but just eating food, whatever I want and as much as I want but s kipping those addictive grains!  The only glitch comes when someone wants to be nice and feed me pasta or pizza or something, please don't do it! On a completely unrelated note, I've been using the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer for a little while now.  I have three apps on my phone for the Office, one Lutheran called Pray Now that is based on the ...

Oh BART , how do I loathe thee? I loathe thy noisy trains, so loud I cannot think. I loathe thy overly fragrant passengers, both those who never bathe, and those who bathe in cheap perfume. I loathe thy decaying stations, I loathe thy brutal cops, I loathe thy disintegrating tracks, and thy rickety cars,  and the way they combine to cause delays, each and every day.  I loathe the crowding on cars, the criminals who lurk, I loathe the urine soaked stairwells to the streets. Yeah, I think I'll drive.   I know, it's not really poetry, but neither is riding on BART.

I was going to call this post "Moderation" but as I began to write I realized that moderation is not actually the problem I mean to address today.  I started out explaining how moderation was a good thing but that I was not good at "doing moderation."  But that's not actually true.  In some things I'm quite moderate.  I'm moderate in drinking wine for example, outside of the rare times when I may overindulge I usually have no more than two glasses in a day.  Other things I used to allow to get out of hand I've moderated.  I once was quite out of control on Facebook, checking it all through the day and feeling uncomfortable if I didn't check for a couple of hours.  After a few "fasts" from that I find it is not so difficult to moderate.  Online games, especially Civilization, were once a problem, yet now I am able to play for a while and then put it aside to do other things without the feeling of "one more turn" that used to af...

Of course the answer to the question in my title is Jesus Christ, for he is the way and the truth and the life.   Naturally we can't just leave it at that though.  No we start asking all sorts of questions and trying figure out "what does this mean?" In my last post I quoted a Lutheran pastor who was explaining that Lutherans are less tolerant of "heresy" than Anglicans, especially when it comes to those who publicly teach or preach.  As a layman I imagine I could quietly sit back and not speak out about the things I believe that are condemned in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, or even speak about them in an unofficial manner, and I wouldn't be tossed out on my ear for the heretical notions I hold :-) I stumbled across the story of Matthew Becker the other day in my reading on line as I sought to clarify my thinking on the reasons I don't really fit in with the LCMS.  Of course, as I stated before, if I didn't live so far from Messiah Danvill...

  Today is the commemoration of Mary Magdalene, who was chosen to be the first witness of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  I've heard it said that this is a good indication of the historicity of the gospels since in that day she would be the last person you would choose as a witness because women were not considered good witnesses. This commemoration is today for all three of the church bodies I "identify" with, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican :-) I've been trying for a while now to come to grips with the differences between these three bodies of Christians and understand why they seem to be so angry with each other.  I can't seem to sort it out, the differences seem to me minute and unimportant when compared to those things that are truly important, such as we are sinners and are saved by the life death and resurrection of Jesus, who is true man and true God.  There is basic agreement on baptism and the Eucharist as well, though they will p...

For a long time I've been trying to figure out a way that our entire family can worship together.  We live about 40 miles from Messiah Lutheran Church in Danville where we've been members for a long time. This is a very long ride with small children and surly teens and it takes two cars to get us all there.  Mostly Lora is broke and doesn't have enough gas to make the trip anyway and the kids are pretty resistant to getting out of bed early enough to make the 45 minute trip to church.  One of the big reasons I loved the Catholic Church was the fact they seem to be pretty much everywhere within a short drive no matter where we lived.  We tried St. Paul's LCMS in Tracy - barf.  We also tried Good Shepherd LCMS in Livermore, a bit better but still a weak liturgy and it's still a big drive over the hill.  Mom went with me to St. Bernard's Catholic Church here in Tracy last week, but she really doesn't ...

So much horrible news is out in the world these days, mostly caused by "my" government, which makes it just that much worse in my mind.  The worst is the absolute glee with which total evil is greeted by so many people.  It seems to me that the more perverted and disgusting a practice is the more it is celebrated.  From same-sex so-called "marriage" and abortion on the left to endless wars and torture and murder of innocents for the greater glory of corporate America on the right, it's all evil.  How has this come about? I don't have an answer to that, any I might give would be speculation.  But you know, it should not be a shock.  Mankind was created good, but we have fallen. That said, I don't suppose I really need to even pay all that much attention to the course of America, after all, as The Dissident Dad points out, my family is my country .   I follow those laws of America that I'm forced to follow by immediate threat and also those that mak...

Because I know everyone cares deeply about the random fluctuations that shoot through the neurons of my brain I write again... I'm working today, on a Sunday.  This caused me much anxiety as I tried to figure out how I was going to manage to make it mass and still get to work on time. I could have driven my car into The City and gone to the 7:30 mass at Sts. Peter and Paul , which is a lovely church, but the mass at that hour there is pretty weak in my experience, plus I've developed an aversion to driving in San Francisco again.  I don't know what caused that, a month ago I thought driving to The City was wonderful, I actually LIKED it.  Now I can't imagine a worse fate. I could have tried to go to 11:00 mass at the Shrine of St. Francis in The City, which is where I go to daily mass on my work days, but that would have used up my whole lunch and more since a Sunday mass is longer than a daily mass, it didn't feel like the right way to do things. I didn...

I had an interesting commute this morning.  I checked the status of the trains and I checked the traffic before I left the house at 4:35am.  At 4:39am a BART train caught on fire, resulting in the closure of 5 east bay stations and cutting off Dublin from San Francisco.  I didn't know that until I got to the BART station though, so I wasted time walking into the station, only to find "you can't get there from here" being broadcast.  I only had enough gas to do a round trip from Dublin to Tracy, not to SF, so I had to get gas, then I got caught up in extra heavy traffic at the Bay Bridge as thousands of my fellow BART riders tried to get across the Bay. In times past I know I would have been all upset and angry and bent out of shape, muttering and cursing BART and the rotten drivers on the road.  Today it was pretty minimal, for me :-)  The most annoying thing is that it's costing me an extra $10 to be at work today between bridge toll and parking.  T...

I love the 5th of July, because it's not the 4th of July.  I am very glad that the 4th is behind us now, with the constant barrage of fireworks for several days accompanied by over the top hyper-patriotism expressed virtually everywhere.  In my eyes there is very little to celebrate on the 4th of July.  What really happened? A revolt by rich slave owners against their rightful ruler in plain violation of Romans 13 , resulting, as do most all violent revolts, in an even more oppressive government ruling the land. What were the actual results of the revolution? Very quickly after the end of the war the rich held a secret conclave to replace the government that had fought the revolution with a centralized state, without bothering to ask the people who had actually fought if they even wanted it. Slavery was enshrined in that constitution as a permanent institution protected by the might of the Federal government. Genocide was carried out against the native peop...

At times the Lord does little things to let me know He's still in charge of everything. Today the rent was due and I was a bit short on the full amount.  I was waiting on my daughter Lora and son-in-law J.D. to pay their portion but he had not been paid by his boss so he did not have the money to give to me.  So when I got up in the morning today I prayed "Lord, I don't know how you are going to do it but you told us to pray for our daily bread.  It would really be great if you could manage to get me the rent money today."  Then I wrote out the rent check, put it by the front door for the landlord and got ready to come into work.  On my way out the door I looked down at a pile of sandals that was in front of the shelf placed by the door to hold them. Slightly annoyed by the fact they were on the floor and not on the shelf I poked at the pile of sandals with my foot, trying to shove them into the bottom shelf and off of the floor.  As I did that I noticed a ...

Today is the Feast of St. Thomas, known to us mostly as "Doubting Thomas."  I've always admired Thomas, he demanded proof for his belief.  He wasn't going to take the word of others for something as strange as someone coming back from the dead!  I think Thomas must be the patron saint of skeptics.  Since I'm a hopeless skeptic, he's my guy :-)  But he really gets a bad rap because the other apostles didn't believe until they had seen either.

If I was still on Facebook I would have posted a half dozen or so times today.  I saw a news story about the unemployment rate dropping, which is a lie of course, it's all smoke and mirrors as anyone who pays attention to the way they come up with these numbers knows.  Then I saw a story about a San Francisco park that was totally trashed during the "Pride" celebration last week.  I would have commented about that too, something about the sort of people who celebrate that sort of thing not caring much about anything but their own immediate pleasure or something.  Then I'd have made a point of mentioning that is was really hot this morning when I got up in Tracy at 4am today, 85 degrees and it even rained a little, not enough to make things actually wet but enough to turn dust into mud on the windows of my car. But I'm not on Facebook so I didn't post about all of that stuff in the heat of the moment, but I mention it all now because I realized, when I though...

Sometimes as I walk past the homeless sitting on the street in San Francisco, I do see the Lord... not often enough, but sometimes... just stopping and talking for a moment can be important I think, letting them know they are seen and that I care.