Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since I posted a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday, or even had an update on my most favorite of subjects: The Grandsons!

Cameron has now turned three. A couple of weeks ago, while Janet was out of town visiting her mother, I went over to the son and daughter-in-law’s house for dinner. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: Cameron owns his grandfather.

And then Caden, almost one, crawling, standing and climbing, watching everything with a slightly suspicious look (“Do I know you? Are you sure?”), following Cameron and his grandfather into Cameron’s bedroom – to fix the Brio toy set, play with stuffed animals, play hide and seek, whatever Cameron can come up with (and he comes up with a lot).

Caden startled his mother the other day when she found sitting on Cameron’s trampoline. And then on the fireplace hearth. It’s called batten-down-the-hatches time.

Since mid-February, work has been intense. I should write that in all capital letters. Crisis after crisis are blending together into a rather large ongoing crisis mishmash. One day I found myself tweeting about three different crises at the same time, and I had to focus to slowly check each tweet to make sure I was tweeting the right one at any given moment.

Factoid: I’ve now read 69 books on the Amazon Kindle.

The crises at work means I’m generally reading less, but I am still reading. Currently that means the World War II suspense novel Winner Lose All by William Brown; Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge for the Tweetspeak Poetry book discussion; Not So Fast by Ann Kroeker for the High Calling book discussion; and The Grace of God by Andy Stanley for what I call the Jason-Sarah Wednesday book discussion.

Waiting patiently to be read are Lapse Americana: Poems by Benjamin Myers, which just arrived this week; Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca; and My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman.

If the weather cooperates, I hope to get on the bike this weekend. Several people have asked me about my bike ride Wildlife Reports I post on Facebook after each ride. I list the numbers and kinds of wildlife I encounter while riding, in descending evolutionary order: horses, dogs, cats, birds, roller bladders, and bikers talking on their cell phones.

Factoid: Longest bike ride I’ve ever done: 93 miles, from Boonville, Missouri, to Hermann, Missouri, on the Katy Trail. Shortest bike ride I’ve ever done: three blocks from my house (my very first ride when I started biking; it was almost physical collapse).

I’m still working with my personal trainer. That means I’m still doing exercises with exotic names like cat’n’camel, bear crawl, scorpion, and dead bug. My un-favorite is the dead bug, epically when I have to put 10-pound weights on my ankles and lift a 10-pound medicine ball from my feet to my hands. And while I’m lying on the floor. They don’t call it Dead Bug for nothing.

Photographs of Cameron and Caden Young by their mother, Stephanie Young.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since I gathered up my “notes to self” and Post-Its and what-not, and had a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

The picture above is none other than Roller (Caden) (because he likes to roll) and Cameron (Dancer) (because he likes to dance). Cameron, unbeknownst to his mother, was hiding in Caden’s pop-up bed. Mom got a real surprise, and Caden, who was supposed to have been sleeping, remained unflappable when Cameron yelled.

We had the opportunity to babysit them last Saturday. Grandpa had a ball.

I mentioned last weekend that we had seen Les Miserables, the movie. I still have the scenes and music running through my head. And I’m still amazed at the quality of the singing by actors I didn’t know could sing. A friend at work told me all of the songs were recorded live, on the set and not in a recording studio, which, if true, makes the singing all the more remarkable.

Current reading: Hurt, by Travis Thrasher, the final installment in the four-volume Solitary series. He’s managed to maintain and increase the momentum of this young-adult-but-older-adults-will-like-it-too story.

Next up on the reading list: an advanced reading copy of The Crystal Scepter by C.S. Lakin, another volume in the Gates of Heaven series. These are the books that helped convince me to read fantasy again. The book will be published Feb. 15.

And on the Can’t-Wait-to-Read List is Adam Blumer’s The Tenth Plague. Adam’s first book, Fatal Illusions, was one suspenseful read. His new one will published as an e-book next Tuesday. (Adam is the editor who slogged through both of my novels, and he did a wonderful job.)

My Novel News: My two novels have been getting some attention. Pastor Ron Edmondson of Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, called Dancing Priest one of the best descriptions of relationship evangelism he’d come across; I did a guest post for his blog on where the novel came from. And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a “Penned in St. Louis” about A Light Shining.

My Not-Novel News: It’s early in the process, but I’ve signed a contract with another publisher for a non-fiction book. I’m being deliberately vague; we’ve agreed on the idea and I’m working on a very extended outline, which will have to be accepted and then turned into a draft. If all goes well, it will be published late in 2013.

Finally, a picture of Roller (Caden) that I absolutely love. Taken by my daughter-in-law, it shows him peering around the corner of the sofa. Did I mention that I love having grandchildren?

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s a pleasantly disturbed Friday. Duane Scott is on vacation somewhere or I’d give him credit for inventing this type of blog post.

In addition to The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges (Thursdays) and The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer (Wednesdays), I’m reading a book I can barely stand to put down – Dragonmarch by Ian Curtis. It’s the second volume in his Canticles of Andurun fantasy series, and it is one great story. It is also one big story, big as in epic, and it has dragons and goblins, an array of strange creatures, and humans who fighting the dragons, fighting each other, fighting the goblins. It is a rocking good story, and my review will be up next week.

Two other books I’m working on reviews (and an interview) on are Ursula LaGuin’s new book of poems, Finding My Elegy, and Emily Wierenga’s Chasing Silhouettes.

I had two blog posts this – on various chapters in The Discipline of Grace and The Pursuit of God – that I expected to be easy to write but turned out not to be. Sometimes you have to reach down inside and admit something, or do something, or decide something. Those posts were like that. Of course, those books – both classics – are like that, too.

I’m editing away on the manuscript of A Light Shining, the sequel to Dancing Priest. It’s coming, but the hard part lies ahead. The rewriting part. I did a small preview of the rewriting part – my attempt to try to make sense of all the comments I have to make sense of. The story is going to change, and that character in the preview – who came out of nowhere – is, I think, going to be the instrument to change the story.

Writing is a nutty line of work.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and went to see the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. She was keen to see it, I was more nonchalant, and I ended up liking it more than she did. It was filmed in Louisiana, way down there in Terrebonne Parish, not too far from where I grew up in suburban New Orleans. As my wife said, “It’s as weird as everything else in southern Louisiana.” I did not feel insulted. Much. And it is an odd movie, the kind that movie critics usually rave about and the rest of the world scratches its head and says, “What?”

I received the news today that one of the sites I write for occasionally will be closing down. More on that after the official announcement next week. It’s the way of the online world, I suppose, sites can come and go, but it still leaves me with a quiet, sad feeling. The contributors are also trying to figure out what to do with the archives.

In September, I’m going to change up the weekly Saturday Good Reads for two or three weeks, just to try something different. More on that later, too.

I'm scheduled to have lunch today with my daughter-in-law and grandsons. they're back from a triumphant tour of Little Rock (their maternal grandmother) and Shreveport (their paternal great-grandmother and assorted aunts, uncles and cousins). In Shreveport, Cameron discovered the wonder of flashlights.

The nice thing about Pleasantly Disturbed Friday is that you don’t have to think about how to end the post with something insightful or memorable.

You can just end it.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s time for another edition of random musings, idle thoughts, unrelated occurrences – in other words, it’s Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

I’m currently reading Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World by Boris Johnson, and it’s delightful. Johnson, the mayor of London, provides (relatively) short vignettes on 17 people (and one hotel) who had a major impact directly on London and more broadly on the world. You’ve heard of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, but what about John Wilkes, Robert Hooke and W.T. Stead? The book is history and biography and it’s full of insights on the city and its people. And yes, the title is a take-off of Boswell’s Life of (Samuel) Johnson – and Johnson is one of the 17 profiled. Review is coming Monday.

Yesterday, I had a telephone conversation with a good friend about the publishing business. We talked about publishers, genres, marketing of books, lack of marketing of books, expectations publishers have of authors and expectations authors have of publishers. We both agreed it was one crazy industry. But if you’re a writer and are published or want to publish, it’s what you have to work with.

Magazines sitting on my desk waiting to be read: two issues of Poetry (I’m behind); American Poet; Englewood Review; Oxford American; Writer’s Digest; Ravi Zacharias’s Just Thinking; and the 2012 fall planting guide from Dutch Gardens (summer hasn’t officially started and I’m already having to consider bulbs for the fall).

I biked Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis Wednesday after work. It was a beautiful evening. I’ve been gradually building up distance and speed (making sure my ruptured disk stays healed), and I’ve ridden the same 20-mile roundtrip a dozen times or more so far. The trail crosses two or three major streets, a couple of parks, Grant’s Farm (the Clydesdales!), several wooded areas and suburban subdivisions. It can make for an interesting ride – locally sponsored group rides where everyone is afraid of being left behind and so they run the rest of us off the trail; the professionals practicing for races who ignore red lights and trail etiquette; what look like small sticks or branches suddenly wiggling across the paved trail; beavers; suicidal rabbits; families of wild turkeys; and swarms of gnats at certain times of the day.

I forgot to mention that I love biking Grant’s Trail.

On Tuesday I was in downtown St. Louis at the London Tea Room (actually, outside the Team Room on the sidewalk) for our local observance of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. There was a raffle to raise funds for a children's disease research association, and one of the raffle items was that fine novel Dancing Priest.

Last week was a significant birthday for my wife; she turned at least 21 (that’s all I’m allowed to say on the subject). Good friends from New Orleans flew in and stayed with us for a few days, and we did a restaurant atop an old, former warehouse with a good view of the Arch and downtown St. Louis, the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens (and it was COLD), the St. Louis Art Museum, an art fair, an art gallery or two (including Brother Mel’s); and a stroll around downtown Kirkwood, our little St. Louis suburb, during which two of us had an ice cream cone from Jeremiah’s Custard Stand (names withheld to protect the guilty) (but the vanilla was delicious) (from what I understand, of course). We had a great time.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been awhile since I had a pleasantly disturbed Friday, although I’ve had a number of disturbed Fridays without the pleasantly.

Yes, that is my grandson Cameron in the photo above, taken by his grandmother on Wednesday in a small park behind the city hall of the little suburb where we live. They had had lunch, discovered a fountain, and then wandered over to the park. He wasn’t too sure about what was going on, until he saw the slide. And then he knew. He also discovered the swing.

Cameron has a little brother due at any moment now, but if he holds off today, I’ll be having lunch with Cameron and my daughter-in-law. If he doesn’t, I may be having lunch just with Cameron.

We’re on the verge of having two of these characters. It’s wonderful.

I’ve been reading the Collected Poems of R.S. Thomas 1945-1990. Thomas was an Anglican priest whose parish was in Wales. He was also a prolific poet, and if I’m reading him correctly, he really didn’t think too highly of his parishioners at the beginning. But the poems do change and soften.

Coming up on the “finished reading/books to review” list are Tripp York’s The Devil Wears Nada (I love the title) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake: Poems by Anna Moschovakis (I like that title, too). Coming up on the “to read” list are Travis Thrasher’s novel Temptation, Dale Cramer’s novel The Captive Heart, Shawn Smucker’s Building a Life Out of Words, Joel Jacobson’s Water the Mud and C.S. Lakin’s The Unraveling of Wentwater.

Last Saturday, I met a gardening consultant at the local plant nursery, and burned through some plastic. We got plants for the back garden, which is shady; plant for the east garden, which is sunny and shady, and plants for the west garden, which gets the noon sun with a couple of hours on either side. She picked out some cool stuff. I picked out things that looked cool but which we mostly didn’t buy.

We’ve been watching the flowers in the front of our house with some sense of awe. Last fall, we had winter non-hardy pansies planted about a small maple tree. The winter was extraordinarily mild, and the non-hardy pansies survived and have been doing quite well, thank you. It’s been a strange spring overall – an unusually warm March when everything bloomed early, roses in April instead of May, a lot of the bulbs coming up on schedule but confusing everybody.

I got another bike ride in on Wednesday night – my third this year. I’m riding my hybrid instead of the road bike – you lean forward less on a hybrid – but the therapist has said I can start easing into the road bike when I’m ready. I have to smile to think that 20 miles on the bike used to be a typical first half or first third of my ride; and then I remember last August, when the only comfortable position for my back was flat on the floor, and the pain was excruciating. Yeah, I’m not where I used to be, but I am vastly better than I was last summer.

I’ve talked about my writing on other posts, and there’s nothing new to add. I did have a young colleague from another team at work come into my office yesterday and say he’d finished reading Dancing Priest, and that he thoroughly enjoyed it. He asked all kinds of questions about how long it took to write, about the characters, about the sequel – he was truly interested. For some reason, it always surprises me when people show this kind of interest.

Of course, I’m always glad to talk about it.

Photograph: Cameron Young by his grandmother, Janet Young, April 25, 2012.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since a “Pleasantly Disturbed Friday” made an appearance. And even though they’ve been somewhat filed in the archives by their originator (one Duane Scott at Scribing the Journey), I thought it might be time for a reappearance. (There’s no official definition, but a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday is a blog post of random thoughts, events and observations, usually because you don’t have a specific theme or idea for that day’s blog post.) (This contribution fits that definition perfectly.)

Last week, we visited the St. Louis Art Museum to see the Monet Water Lilies Exhibit. Because it was the final shopping week before Christmas, the crowds at the museum were non-existent. There was no waiting in line, no fighting to see a painting or poster illustration, no massive throngs to maneuver through. Yesterday, we returned to the art museum, to see an exhibit of American paintings 1900-1945 and a few other small exhibits.

The museum sits within Forest Park, as does the Missouri History Museum, the St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Science Center. The weather was partly cloudy and high 50s. The park was packed. So was the museum. So was the Monet exhibit. I congratulated my wife on selecting last week as the time to see the Monet paintings.

One of the paintings we saw was the one at the top of this post – “View of St. Louis” by Joe Jones. The museum had an entire exhibit of his paintings a year ago.

As we were leaving, we walked through the temporary 16^th-17^th century paintings area (just about everything at the museum is in temporary quarters these days because of a major expansion program going on). And I saw this painting, one of my favorites in the museum – El Greco’s “St. Paul.” It was painted between 1598 and 1600, and it simply does not look like it’s 400 years old. It looks almost like a contemporary painting to me. Perhaps it’s because the colors, or the expression on Paul’s face, but I always find it amazing.

I’ve been reading a lot in the last two weeks (I’ve been on vacation time). I read A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and wrote a post about it for The Master’s Artist. I read Alan Shapiro’s Night of the Republic: Poems and my review will be posted in January at TweetSpeak Poetry. I also read Dave Malone’s Under the Sycamore: Poems and Tania Runyan’s A Thousand Vessels: Poems and will be posting reviews of both, also at TweetSpeak.

Other reading has included Work Matters by Tom Nelson and Amongst My Enemies by William Brown.

I also finished a novel that I didn’t think I would finish. It had been recommended by a friend, who knows the author. It’s a kind of Generation Y novel, or at least the characters are Gen Y. I struggled with reading it and almost stopped at several points. One character kept me engaged – which, I suppose, demonstrates the power of characterization. But the novel needed an editor; it needed better plot development, for one thing. I suspect the original ending was cut off for length purposes – you never find out what happens to the villain.

We saw the George Clooney movie, “The Descendants,” on Wednesday and “The Muppet Movie” last night. I really like “The Descendants,” but all of the characters, including the children, were required to drop the f-bomb at least five times each (scriptwriters should be able to do better than that). “The Muppet Movie” was nostalgic fun. We were young marrieds when “The Muppet Show” started its television run, and we loved both Muppet movies in the 1980s. This one had basically the same script as the others, and even a reprise of the song “The Rainbow Connection,” but it was still fun.

We still hope to see "The War Horse" and the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Have you seen any good movies during the holidays?

Another Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

I posted a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday post last week, and I was pleasantly disturbed enough that I was out of sync. It was supposed to have been today. So I was pleasantly disturbed enough, and I pleasantly disturbed my friend Duane Scott (host for PDF) enough, so I thought I would get back into sync. So here I am. But I'm not sure if I'm in sync or not. Or something. (Yes, even I can tell that I’m pleasantly disturbed.)

The Kindle is going to be my downfall. You can get a lot of books free, or really cheap (like 99 cents and $2.99, prices I haven’t seen attached to books for a very long time).

I’ve been reading Words Made Fresh: Essays on Literature and Culture by Larry Woiwode. This one is the physical book, not the Kindle version. He lives on a farm in North Dakota, is the state’s poet laureate, and he “writes good.”

One of the books sitting on my Kindle right now is Laura Barkat’s Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing. In addition to the Kindle version, it’s also available in paperback. Once I finish the Woiwode book, I’m jumping into this one.

Two books waiting to read (I’m reviewing both of them): Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies by Joshua Waldman (publishes Sept. 6) and God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New & Later Collected Poems by Stanley Moss (publishes Oct. 4).

Our weather here in St. Louis set a record on Wednesday – 103 and continued dry. We broke 100 yesterday and still no sign of rain. The people who know about these things say the weather has been good for a bumper apple crop – but nothing else. Our yard looks rather deadish in places. We’re supposed to see some easing of temperatures by Sunday.

Our youngest has left the Midwest and moved from Kansas City to Florida. He thinks beaches, and his mother thinks hurricanes. I reminded her that I lived in Florida when I was younger. I get a stare. “Yes, when you were a year old.” My youngest didn’t know whether I was kidding or not when I told him we’d come and visit during the winter for two or three weeks. He still doesn’t know.

Speaking of family (I’m shameless about these transitions), we had a little visitor last night for a couple of hours. His dad was at a ball game and his mom had a dinner with people from work, so we had – Cameron! He’s approaching 18 months, and he moves at the speed of light. We had a delicious dinner of peach, sweet potatoes (from the jar), carrot wheels, cheerios, and Teddy Grahams, then we hit the Legos, blocks, various and sundry stuffed animals, a toy radio that plays “Picnic Time for Teddy Bears” (his father’s and uncle’s), and old remote controls for the television no longer in use. He aims them at the TV and presses a button. If nothing happens, he frowns – and may throw the remote in the direction of the television set. Just like his father does.

His grandmother took a  picture with her phone. That face has more than a little mischief in it.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

Image Design by Duane Scott

Some time back, my friend Duane Scott started a feature called Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday, and invited us to be pleasantly disturbed with him. It was a random kind of blog post, talking about what you were up to, interesting or dull things going on in your life, the kinds of things that create a pleasant disturbance. It went on for quite a while, and then trickled off.

I was actually encouraged to see that Duane was reviving it as Pleasantly Disturbed Friday, and I think the first one was last week. The next one is Sept. 2. I’m pleasantly disturbed enough to go out of cycle, being a week late or a week early. Or both.

I’m going to be doing one of those Teaching Company courses, this one on “Classics of British Literature.” It’s 48 lectures, by a professor who teaches at CalTech and the University of London. You could buy the CDs or the DVDs, and I opted for the CDs, to listen while I drive to and from work.

Several years ago, I got really hooked on these courses. When I was doing my independent consulting thing, I had one client about 40 miles south of St. Louis, and another one about a four-hour drive away, up in north central Missouri almost on the Iowa border. So going to and from these clients, I would listen to lectures on the history of Rome, the history of Greece and all kinds of other history and literature courses.

Sitting on my nightstand right now: Longing for Home by Frederick Buechner; the Book of Common Prayer; the new issue Poetry Magazine; Poiema: Poems by D.S. Martin; and my Kindle. What will likely be opened and read before I go to sleep tonight: the Buechner book and the Book of Common Prayer.

I’ve actually finished reading Poiema, but I’m going back and rereading some of the poems. They are good. It’s poetry with a strong religious or spiritual theme.

Last magazine I read: the new issue of Writer’s Digest.

Next magazine I’ll read: Poets & Writers.

I’m enjoying my Kindle. I’ve now read six books on it – a couple of suspense mysteries, two poetry collections, and two books on writing (one of which was Luci Shaw’s Breath for the Bones.) I like the Kindle – I like it a lot.

I just finished a big book. No, a humongous book – 650 pages. It’s called The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg. It was published two years ago in Sweden and became a surprise best-seller. And it’s nothing like those Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books. It’s about the Holocaust and based on real people in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland during World War II. The author did a phenomenal amount of research, and the depth of the story shows it. My review will be posted next Tuesday.

Our youngest son spent the night with us Tuesday, on his way south. He’s transferring from Kansas City to Florida, and he’s all excited about it. And yes, we’re going through all the usual things parents go through when their adult children move away. I keep reminding myself that our oldest moved to Phoenix for a few years, got married, and came back to St. Louis in time to provide our first grandchild.

And speaking of Cameron (notice the clever transition), he’s getting big. He likes to dance with his grandmother, build Legos with his grandfather (and his grandfather loves Legos), and eat peaches and bananas. When the youngest was here Tuesday, we all went out to dinner, so I got a Cameron fix. Here’s a recent photo.

Photograph of Cameron Young by Stephanie Young, used because Cameron said I could.

Photograph of Pleasantly Disturbed swiped from Duane Scott’s blog, Scribing the Journey.