i'm knackered — and i guess even mr r who's been the other half of the "furniture sudoku team" is. from about 17:15 until 21:15 we've been assembling a new sideboard i got delivered from germany this morning: its manufacturer is trend naturmöbel and they have taken flat pack furniture to the next-plus-one level: ikea? kiddie stuff! this is the real stuff: massive wood not treated with poisonuous stuff, solid fittings, designed to last your lifetime (in fact, that furniture will probably survive me…hmm), in short: this is the flat pack furniture for real man: unfortunately, we are not (yet): it takes us an hour just to sort out which way is up on the side panels, and how those drawer thing-a-majigs work and are supposed to be fitted — finally we've got it figured out, have drawn up a strategy and get cracking. a little while later (about 3 hours to be honest) we are done…the end result is rather pleasing and as i envisioned when i designed and ordered it

all in all, really a bit like furniture sudoku: you know it will fit properly, you have just a few clues to go one and there's only one solution. 

…and i'm extremely glad for mr r's very generous help! would have been screwing in, well, screws, until the sun would have come back to have another look…we finish with a rather good pizza picante from our neighbouring pizza take away (the best pizza in adliswil), a cool beer and chatting about god and the world (literally).

knackered.

according to the charlotte observer the US southern baptist convention, not really noted for its liberal views, has passed a resolution

…that urges that no one who imbibes be elected to serve as a trustee or member of any southern baptist convention body. the call would apply to those nominated to serve on southern baptist seminaries, missions and other convention-wide boards.

and they are quite thorough: 

…the resolution, … also opposes manufacturing, advertising, distributing and consuming alcoholic beverages, …

according to the article it seems that a number of SBC churches have adopted this resolution for their local churches as well. interesting (well, a bit over board, IMHO), that effectively bans jesus from being elected to any SBC body — and a couple of SBC churches won't have him either. why? well, if you read john 2:1–11, you'll find that jesus turned water into wine: pure manufacturing that. not to mention the last supper, where they drank wine.

i guess it would have been wiser to follow paul's advice to timothy in 1 timothy 3:8  — "…not indulging in much wine…" (coming to think of it: the southern baptist convention has probably banned paul as well, he advises timothy to "…stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses…(1 timothy 5:23) " — advertising, clear and simple; there goes paul).

i guess the intention of the southern baptist convention is definitely heading in the right direction: reduce alcohol abuse. it's a bit overboard, however, to ban anyone who "imbibes" from being elected into any "office" — not everyone who is "imbibing" has an alcohol problem. and not everyone who is not imbibing a better christian just because of it. it's always easier to have a clear cut rule to judge people by instead of looking at your fellow human being through christ's eyes (ask me about it: i have failed and continue to fail living the latter part). sometimes i wish we'd refrain from reverting to black and white lifes: it's a colorful world!

shaking my head....

while it's fairly common and nothing to write home about for people in other countries to fly the national flag, germany has had a rather difficult relationship with its flag — and understandably so, given our rather horrendous record under adolf the horrible, 60 years ago. and, as marc young puts it so aptly in his article for spiegel online, "sometimes it would be easier to just be Swedish. aside from getting uncontrollably drunk on baltic sea ferries, the swedes haven't really annoyed anyone for over a century." 

this summer though it seems like german flags are coming back. what's fairly normal in england, cars flying the st george cross flag from the car windows, would have been unseen (and unthinkable) here in germany — until this summer, that is (although, german police seems to draw the line at 3m tall flag poles attached to cars ). we seem to be inching our way back to a more normal attitude towards patriotism. a phenomenon also observed and described by thomas matussek in his recent book wir deutschen — warum uns die anderen gern haben können.

just back from lenovo's repair center: speedybear is now touching ground all around, no more wobbling around. nice. and quite fast turnaround!

happy.

my new X60s thinkpad ("speedybear," as it's almost fast as greased lightning with its dual core) had a problem right from the beginning: when placed on a level surface its right hand front corner was striving for higher spheres — it would not touch the surface, rendering speedybear a bit wobbly. that in itself was not really a problem until i tried docking it in the ultrabase X6: it would lock alright, but the X60s would not connect electrically. so, considering that even with the discount of the IBM employee purchase program applied it still is quite a heafty chunk of money that i had to part with, i called the support center, described my problem and got a trouble ticket number to send the X60s in — or bring it in.

so, booked a car from mobility (the car sharing coop i'm a member of) and brought speedybear to the repair center in wädenswil: 3–4 days probably until i can pick it up again. sigh. let's see what happens and how long speedybear will be in "hospital", so to speak…

sad.

got my membership certificate and pin for the cloud appreciation society today in the post! so, i'm now the 3916th member of the cloud appreciation society

to celebrate: one of my recent cloud pictures:

excited.

after an interesting birthday celebration (my mother-in-law) we went to café restaurant muskat in erlangen for dinner. it's located on the hauptstrasse just after the schlossplatz. we frequently go there as they only use organically grown stuff (but it's not just vegetarian they also have rather exciting meat and fish dishes). as erlangen is currently having its "fifth season", the bergkirchweih, most of the cafés are rather quiet in the evening (a steady stream of people was passing by, all on their way to the berg) and we enjoyed a quiet night out  … dinner was excellent! beer was quite good as well

in my opinion one of the best café restaurants in erlangen. 

being back in erlangen after our vacation it was a baptist worship service this morning — as today is pentecost and as our church is a tad on the charismatic side of things whereas i'm not really, i was a bit wary of things to come and expected to be treated to a hovercraft worship service (the one where all float out a couple of centimeters in the air afterwards). it turned out to be a very good service, celebrating the coming of the holy spirit into our lives. some points i took with me:

• if we would be able to understand god, what kind of a god would that be? he would be no greater than us
• it's not a question of do you have the holy spirit? but rather one of does the holy spirit have you?
  
• while 1 corinthians 6:19 declares our body to be the temple of the holy spirit, and we should thus take good care of it, it's also OK to enlarge the temple from time to time…

a good service.