What is the view of how Christians should cast their votes? Well, you may be surprised what some very well qualified Christians think.

MSNBC says 58% of SC GOP primary voters ID'd themselves as evangelicals.

So, at 3:30 this morning, I awake to hear "drip, drip, drip" in my bedroom. We'd been having a very heavy, steady rain since around 10:00 p.m. I lay there a few minutes, and thought .. this is not good (as in, I won't be able to go back to sleep with this dripping.)

Hell, I can hear the water running in the BOYS' bathroom and it would wake me up.

So, up out of bed (and it was COLD outside of the covers) and on with the lights. Now, the deficiencies of indirect lighting (required by the Homosexual Agenda) manifest themselves, as my enfeebled night vision is unable to make out from just where the water is coming. I can see that it's streaming down the brick (outside) wall from behind my new Continental travel poster.

Immediately, I prioritize - one, the dripping sound must STOP. Two, the newly framed Continental travel poster MUST not be damaged. Three, more sleep is required!

I spring into action. The Continental travel poster is removed from the wall to reveal .. nothing. No weeping picture hanger holes in the brick resembling a weeping Virgin Mary, so no new revenue opportunities have manifested themselves. The travel poster is leaned up against the armoire, and I walk to the bathroom to retrieve a bath towel from the back of the tub stall.

Not one of the lovely creme microfiber towels, of course, but a dark green one for guests.

Said towel goes into the corner, pressed up into the corner until the sound of dripping water ceases.

This has the secondary benefit of preventing water soaking into the carpet and padding.

My primary goals met, I return to bed.

The rain continues to drench the window and the courtyard above my headboard. I begin to reflect upon what must be going on above me on the flat roofed portion of the house, and that there surely is a lot of water up there pooling on the roof. Rather than reflect further on the notion of soaking wet sheet rock and ceilings falling into my bedroom sanctuary, I move into direct (albiet recumbent) action. I engage in a spiritual mind treatment to a.) have the rain come to an end, and b.) have the house be safe and secure.

Sleep returned around 4:30 this morning, right after the rain ceased.

This morning, it was sunny D - nippy, but gorgeous outside, and most of the water was already drying from the sidewalks and street. I notice, in the sun lit bedroom, that the ceiling is indeed sagging over the corner where the drip, drip, drip made one recall a television ad for a sinus medication no longer in favor.

Crap.

That's what I get for thinking again. I've been looking up at the dirty old shingles on the pitched part of the roof, and thinking .. I'd really like to replace those.

Be careful what you wish for.

After drinking some coffee, devising a clean up list for today's effort, and run over to the most hateful force for financial evil in the consumer world - Bank of America.

Trips to five banks and much teeth gnashing later, I've finally deposited the check I received Friday, and am driving home. I call my Realtor buddy, and tell her the story of bank drama, and realize she probably knows a roofer.

I had thought of calling Kevin, but that's usually only good going one way. And not me asking for assistance. She does in fact know a roofer whom she highly recommends! He'll call you in a minute!

And he does!

While MyJ and I attack the cleaning list, he's trying to find the house. He goes away, comes back with a taller ladder and goes up onto the roof to tell me ..

* the flat roof is open to the elements, and only a sheet of plastic has kept me from getting wet while I slept this last year
* the pitched roof is original to the house (38 years) and all of the flashing is either gone, or beyond repair
* the existing shingles are a color that has been discontinued and he can replace them with black or brown
* he can replace the entire roof for a very reasonable fee. Tomorrow.

Uh, okay then.

That being .. partly resolved, I begin to reflect on that I have allergy issues in my bedroom. If the flat roof (which extends the length of my bedroom) has been .. well, not very roof-y, then, isn't the underlying sheet rock and insulation kind of .. wet and moldy?

Perhaps this is my opportunity to exercise the OTHER random thought I've been holding - that I need to have the insulation in the flat roof re-done to more modern standards.

Crap.

In other household news, today, we cleaned and scrubbed and dusted. We turned the front door handle around so that the pretty part is outside and the not so pretty part isn't inside.

We cleaned out the cabinets, swamped them out where they were dirty, went to the grocery store, mopped, cleaned windows, scrubbed the entry doors on both sides, swept, basically Edgarized.

I'm thinking about color and crown molding in the front rooms and crown molding in my bedroom. Hmmm.

Six out of ten Americans now feel that the war in Iraq was a bad idea.

Do you want the Republican race to be over. or do you want it to be HILARIOUS?

This is no time to be worried about time

A universe without time?

Reposted from the Houston Chronicle Science Guy blog

If you've got a few minutes of, ahem, time, it might be worth reading a fine article on physics and time that I just stumbled across. The Discover magazine article delves into the role of time in modern theoretical physics.
dali.jpg
Salvador Dali
Was Dali right?

And, my friends, time may not exist:

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein's theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny).

About four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

"One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation," says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. "It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time — that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless."

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

Scientists already understand that time may break down at very tiny distances, specifically the Planck length. So why not at our scale, too? The question makes physicists uncomfortable. It also makes my head hurt.