Trevor DeVage, Garrison Keillor, and Man of Steel

Quotes of the Day: "Be careful not to forget the Lord" (Deuteronomy 6:12).
"We all need reminders
of what the Lord has done in our lives."
—Trevor DeVage, Christ's Church at Mason, January 5, 2014.

Another Quote of the Day:

May we not lose our marbles,
and keep up the pace.
May we face getting older
with something like grace.
—Garrison Keillor 

Frustration of the Day: Discovering that almost four hours of work during Christmas vacation created files on a flash drive that today were all polluted and inaccessible. I'll ask IT tomorrow if they can recover the files, but a) my plans to make two or three hours more progress today were thwarted, and b) it's possible I'll be starting from scratch tomorrow.

Accomplishment of the Day: We decided to attend church at 10:30 instead of 9:00, since Evelyn had a lunchtime meeting at church at noon. So we were up early, and I was able to get written a draft of my January 7 column for christianstandard.com before we left for church.

Very Grateful Today: SO-O-O-O glad I brought in the outside Christmas lights on New Year's Day when the sun was bright and the temperature was flirting with 50 degrees. Since then it's been cold and snowy and blustery and ugly. And even yesterday when the temperature topped freezing, all the bushes (those bushes that the lights had been adorning) were covered with snow. And today, on a gray afternoon, the forecast was for rain and then snow again, which leads me to my second measure of gratitude: I'm SO glad I had no plans to sit in the freezing mess at the Bengals game this afternoon.

Disappointing Memory of the Day: Man of Steel, last year's Superman prequel now available on DVD. If you like 143 minutes of computer-generated imagery (I didn't keep count, but I doubt there was any 10-minute stretch in the whole film without it), enough explosions and falling buildings for 40 9/11's, super-hero fistfights (again, tiresomely made possible by CGI and inexplicably finally won by Superman), unaffecting performances by Hollywood stars, and a plot that frankly I found confusing, then do like we did yesterday and pick up the disc at your local Redbox. The best thing about it was I had a promo code and got the experience for free.

Picture of the Day: Sorry, Mr. Kroger, but I doubt we'll have all our Christmas candy eaten in time to buy more for Valentine's Day.