Birthday!!

This year once again the 4th of June came around at exactly the same time of year it always has, so we were not taken by surprise. Water has gone under the bridge in the past year. Several developments stand out in their significance. In October the Red Sox celebrated their 2nd World Series victory of the 21st century, beating the Colorado Rockies in 4 games. Terry Francona is now 8-0 in the World Series, the only manager ever to achieve that. Our odds this year look to be about as good as anybody's.

There is a presidential election going on in the U.S., but no one has been able to figure out why. For a few months Dr. Ron Paul came out in a fist of fury, generating excitement and hope among the disillusioned, confusion and incomprehension among the sheep, and a vague sense of unease, possibly even the first tinges of panic, among the professional liars and thieves in Washington and their Establishment cronies.

We celebrated our 2nd anniversary this year, meaning we can no longer consider ourselves newlyweds. We went to Carraba's for dinner in accordance with an ancient tradition. Mom & Pa visited for two weeks, and it was a great time while they were here. We shot the monthly silhouette match and the Arizona State Championship. We won nothing by skill, but a surprising among by luck, including the grand door prize of a .22 hornet barrel for a T/C contender(Pa), a pair of binoculars (BC), and a knife (Pa).

Research picked up a little, with a new project on quasicrystal QW structures, news of Josh's graduation, vague allusions to my graduation, a paper submitted to and rejected by Nature, Nature Photonics and Nature Materials. We are hoping to settle for an Optics Express.

There was ordination into the office of Deacon, a high honor and responsibility. We oversaw the three main goals of the year for our missions committee: mission trip to Brazil, short-term trip handbook, and missions conference.

We started Jiu-jitsu again, and hope to be able to continue in that endeavor. By this time next year, we better have a blue belt.

The housing bubble burst in dramatic fashion, shaking our economy to its roots. The politicians repeatedly promise us more of the same intervention, mismanagement, higher taxes, forcible wealth redistribution, regulation, subsidization and reward of failure, oppression of success, and incompetence that we have come to be able to depend upon from our elected officials.

Of our reading, the Best Book Award was a tie between Bavinck's Philosophy of Revelation and Schlossberg's Idols for Destruction. They had a lot in common. The latter got me interested in economics, the last but one subject of which I had never had the slightest interest (the other being biology). So much to learn, so little time.

Besides that, life marches on. Who can tell where we will be a year from now? The biggest questions that will possibly be answered in that time concern children, career, and economy, roughly in that order. Soli Deo Gloria!

Kuyper concurs

Interestingly, I just came across this from Kuyper one day after I wrote the previous post:

"In fact, the study of the Juridical faculty will always be governed by the principles professed with reference to authority. If authority is considered to have its rise from the State, and the State is looked on as the highest natural form of life in the organism of humanity, the tendency cannot fail to spring up to deepen the significance of the State continuously, and even to extend the lines of authoritative interference, which Plato pushed so far that even pedagogy and morals were almost entirely included in the sphere of the State. Indeed, more than one sociologist in the Juridical faculty is bent upon having his light shine more and more across the entire psychical life of man, in the religious, ethical, aesthetical, and hygienic sense. If sooner or later the chairs of this faculty are arranged and filled by a social-democratic government, this tendency will undoubtedly be developed. If, on the other hand, it is conceded that authority over man can rest nowhere originally but in God, and is only imposed by Him upon men with regard to a particular sphere, this impulse to continuous extension is curbed at once, and everything that does not belong to this particular sphere falls outside of the Juridical faculty." - Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, p. 203