benjamin's father is yellow.

well, it's not exactly yellow, it's more of an olive-ish goldenrod, but for all intents and purposes, "yellow" will suffice.

he was diagnosed on wednesday with stage four pancreatic cancer (non-treatable). we all got as many people praying as humanly possible, and on friday the doctors decided it looked more like tuberculosis. maybe. christian (benjamin's father) was moved to a different hospital, and is currently in the middle of lots and lots of testing. he's in enormous amounts of pain, and his visitors have to wear masks (in case the tuberculosis is airborne).

we went down on friday, to get benjamin to his family and help in any way possible. benjamin's rallying well, as is his eleven-year-old sister. the whole thing was so sudden, i've a suspicion everyone's still in shock. i am, at least. christian's not even 50--jeez, not only does this happen to "other people", it happens to "older people". not christian, not this family that's already been through the ringer several times.

we spent most of the weekend with marie, while barb stayed with christian at the hospital. it's a university facility, and the whole experience has been chaotic for them. and dehumanizing. no one seems to be in charge, no one knows where the right reports are, no one knows why these tests are being run. and no one's been taking the time to find out, so these people can have some grasp of their own situation and retain their flipping dignity instead of being shuffled around mindlessly like so much cattle.

jeez.

on a brighter note, the church family has formed an incredible line of support. people are making meals so barb doesn't have to cook, taking marie for a few hours here and there so barb can be in syracuse, organizing yard work crews to get the house ready for winter without christian, praying nonstop. and through them, god is present, comforting and healing.

had an impromptu chat with marie this morning:

marie

i hope daddy has tuberculosis instead of cancer, because then he won't die.

gemma (completely out of her league)

well, there's always hope either way. god's the one who makes those kinds of decisions--who'll live and how long, who'll die and when. no matter what the doctors say, he's in charge.

marie

i think he makes the wrong decision sometimes.

what do you say to that? how do you tell an eleven-year-old, "no, sweetie, if god wants to take your dad away from you, it's the right thing to do"?

i can't imagine that christian's illness would end in his death. (it took me a couple tries just to type that sentence.) he has one of the strongest presences i've ever known, for all his meekness and quiet nature. the idea that he could suddenly cease to be--well, the words make sense on the page, but my gut just rejects them out of hand. and i'm just the daughter-in-law. pray, folks. please pray.

i'd like to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank justice scalia for understanding the purpose and limitations of the u.s. constitution:

Deeply controversial issues such as abortion and suicide rights have nothing to do with the Constitution, and unelected judges too often choose to find new rights at the expense of the democratic process, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia, during a panel Saturday on the judiciary sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation, dismissed the idea of judicial independence as an absolute virtue. He noted that dozens of states, since the mid-1800s, have chosen to let citizens elect their judges.

"You talk about independence as though it is unquestionably and unqualifiably a good thing," Scalia said. "It may not be. It depends on what your courts are doing."

He added, "The more your courts become policymakers, the less sense it makes to have them entirely independent."

Scalia, a leading conservative voice after 20 years on the court, said people naturally get upset with the growing number of cases in which a federal court intrudes on social issues better handled by the political process.

"Take the abortion issue," he said. "Whichever side wins, in the courts, the other side feels cheated. I mean, you know, there's something to be said for both sides."

"The court could have said, 'No, thank you.' The court could have said, you know, 'There is nothing in the Constitution on the abortion issue for either side,' " Scalia said. "It could have said the same thing about suicide, it could have said the same thing about . . . all the social issues the courts are now taking."

Scalia said that in the past, courts did not decide social issues. "It is part of the new philosophy of the Constitution," he said. "And when you push the courts into that, and when they leap into it, they make themselves politically controversial. And that's what places their independence at risk."

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the newest member of the Supreme Court, agreed that "the same thing exists, but to a lesser degree, with the lower courts."

[source]

(emphasis added)

thank you, sir.

apparently, the preacher on sunday discussed predestination.

i wasn't there, but those of you who know me know that's one of my things. (going back ten-ish years or so, when my family started attending a reformed church.) and since the small group benjamin and i attend takes sunday's sermon as its topic, we discussed predestination tonight.

i was dreading the experience, to be honest. i've spent a lot of time with predestination--thinking and discussing and debating. i once wrote an enormous paper dissecting predestination and arminianism. followed to their respective logical conclusions, both (opposing) viewpoints end in very uncomfortable places, and i always end up crawling desperately back to romans 9:

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honored use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory....

anyway, the discussion concluded far less painfully than i'd anticipated (with the exception of one episode involving a gentleman who completely misunderstood one of my comments and now thinks i'm wallowing in disbelief and doubt), coming to the only conclusion you can really have: we can't fully understand. period. we can theorize and extrapolate and stress, but we won't find a definitive answer. salvation is a mystery; we have to accept the mystery, believe the gospel, and get on with the work of the kingdom.

(i also remembered something really cool about limited atonement, but that's a discussion ill-suited to a blog.)

i like the gimp.

i admit it, i do. a lot of people don't. they find the interface clunky. (translation: they want photoshop.) i like the interface. i can move things around and tear off menus and arrange things. it's great.

but that's neither here nor there. i noticed a photoshop tutorial yesterday and decided, since it was a slow work day, to figure it out in the gimp. to the right is my result. pretty, eh? (benjamin thinks it looks like the planets in spore. *grin grin*)

i'm home this evening, waiting for benjamin to get home so we can watch an episode of star trek (that i acquired through PURELY LEGITIMATE means, REALLY). i was playing with the ol' blog earlier, so thought i'd take another look and see if anything could be improved.

ladies and gentlemen, my links are horrendously out of date.

so i picked one (dan h) and discovered bexx has a blog! i wasn't even sure she was still in the same hemisphere! she could have been married with triplets by now! i would never have known! heavens, thunk i, who else could be out there?!

that's right, my gentle readers. i spent the evening channeling my inner stalker.

some people i already knew about, in the back of my head: brian d, brett greene, msafiri kate (who has the most words in her full name of anyone i know) and her husband paul, mark, dan w, and dan p, for example. but i FOUND people like africanstealth, who's launching his musical career, and jolene, who's in the adirondacks teaching music to kids (i think).

and because i'm a geek, the exciting part wasn't that they're all blogging. no, i was excited that, well, they (almost) all have rss feeds, and i can syndicate them in my reader.

that's all. one of these days i'll have something interesting to say, i swear.

ladies and gentlemen, i give you the first snow of the season, courtesy of my cameraphone! that was the early morning of october 13, same date as the buffalo snowstorm. since we only got a centimeter or so, hurrah! snow! bring on the ski season!

i finally fixed something on this site that's been bugging me for a while. when i transferred the site to its new home, i set up an 'oldblog' directory for it, fully intending to set up my homegrown, non-blogger system in short order.

obviously, that hasn't happened yet, and the hackish redirects i used (so ramblinations.com/blog/ woudn't be lost for eternity) are...well, hackish. so today i fixed it! thanks to the magic of apache's mod_rewrite, 'oldblog' has been replaced, in all instances, with 'blog'! and the beauty of it is, when i finally do set up my blogging system, 'blog' can point that instead! hurrah! life is good!

in other news, i used flickr for that image. nifty, and it doesn't use up my bandwidth. (i could use picasa as well, but they're not as well set up for random, individual images. here's hoping they move in that direction!)

as some of you may know, i was named after a character on a british sitcom that my parents loved in the early eighties, when they lived in england. they found the series on vhs somewhere, and a nameless kind soul put the entire thing on dvd for them. hence, when i went to ithaca this past weekend, i met gemma palmer, my namesake. (or am i her namesake? *looks up "namesake"* well, i'll use the princeton definition and say we are namesakes of each other...)

favorite scene: gemma, in the process of remaking herself after her long-term boyfriend proves himself a complete imbecile, walks into a library and confronts the librarian, who once exhibited a lack of understanding toward gemma and a girlfriend. after setting said librarian straight about the state of her face ("crumpled newspaper"), gemma smiles sweetly, pulls a bicycle horn from her bag, and saunters from the library as a one-man band.

my father's comment: "did we name you well, or what?"

i've been accepted to the schulich school (say that a couple times, it's fun) of music at mcgill university for winter 2007.

you remember mcgill. i was accepted for fall 2005 and didn't go because there was this wedding i had to do, and then i was waitlisted this spring because my audition was mendelssohn-from-hell. thus thunk i, spectacular: benjamin can do his thing, i'll play in community orchestras and do local gigs, and the M.Mus. will wait until 2008. i'd planned to only take a year off, not three, but this could work.

then i got a call last week from a schulich admissions clerk: "hi gemma, you can come here in january if you want. you can even defer if january's not good. where should i send your acceptance package?"

i feel a little frozen--i'm being pulled, hard, in two opposing directions, and it's rendering me motionless. benjamin hasn't finished his degree yet; it wouldn't be fair to make him pull out to accomodate my obsession with a graduate degree that i may or may not put to good use. i have a fabulous job. getting into quebec to study is absurdly expensive. i'm not sure if benjamin would be allowed to work. i don't speak french.

on the other hand, it's mcgill. it's montreal. i love the city, i love the school, i love the practice rooms, i love the program (orchestral training), i love the campus. i'm not practicing hours a day; who knows if i'd even be able to get in again?

so at this point, if it occurs to you to pray, please do so. i don't know what god's telling us with this big present he dropped in our laps, and i don't know where he's taking us. trust is all well and good; what do you do when god points at you and says, "do something!"?

(interestingly, what frightens me isn't how benjamin and i will live once we've decided on whatever it is we're going to do. i know god cares for his people, etc. i'm frightened at what could happen to us, to our relationship--which is actually equally ridiculous, because *ahem* god cares for his people.)

in other news, i joined facebook, because i discovered almost everyone i know, including most of my family, is signed up. i'm lame that way.