Over the Hills and Far Away

I will spend most of tomorrow in the car. I'll spend most of Tuesday in the car too. Then I'll get to see my mom. That will be good and definitely worth the two days in the car.

It's strange how time flies; at the beginning of the year the time between our visits to Grahamstown and her visits up here felt like forever. This time, it feels like she's only just left. I'm sure this is largely because I've been particularly busy these five weeks and it has only been five weeks. I think it's also because, for better or for worse, I'm starting to get used to it.

On the whole, I think it is for better. I'm definitely not so used to it that I'm sorry to be going down to visit her. I don't think I could ever get to that point. Right now, I'm positively excited (if in some ways a little nervous) to be going down. I'm old enough that I need to begin learning to be independent; I certainly don't want to spend my whole life living out of my parents' pockets!

I'm aware that when I get back from this holiday, my studies for this year will begin in earnest. The holiday marks a sort of changeover for me. I'm also looking forward to the National Arts Festival, which will be taking place in Grahamstown when we're there. I think we'll enjoy parts of the Arts Festival, though our focus will be on family time. It'll also be good to be aware of how busy I'll be when I get back: hopefully that'll remind me to enjoy my holiday.

I'm very much looking forward to this holiday. The only downside is that my internet time is going to be cut short. So I almost certainly won't post here as often a I might like, but I don't think that's an unreasonable sacrifice.

Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz

Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz

I don't think anybody grows up in what they would consider a perfectly normal family. After all, children are almost expected to be embarrassed by their parents. Even if we're not embarrassed by our parents, there are things that we do differently to our friends. Sometimes we appreciate being unique; at other times we resent being the odd one out. We're never identical.

I think that most of us, though, have it relatively easy. Consider, for instance, Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. His name sounds strange and looks strange. It's meaning in his own language is even stranger: 'quick to the plunder and swift to the spoil' or in a looser, more colloqiual translation 'lotsa loot, plenty plunder'. The outrageous names of modern celebrities' children pale in comparison.

Then of course, there's the fact that Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz's dad was simply weird. With the knowledge of Jesus' life and death, and thousands of years of study, people don't really understand everything Isaiah said. While he as saying it, I think he must have been considered fairly loony. Especially at the times when God told him to walk around prophesying naked.

Isaiah wasn't the most dramatic of the prophets, but for me that emphasises rather than downplays how strange his life must have been. Some of the prophets did things that are beyond what I can really imagine or understand, but Isaiah's actions just push at my boundaries. I'd be horrified if I had to do those things tomorrow or if I had to watch somebody else doing them, but I can see that it could be done. I can, to some extent, put myself in the shoes of the young Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.

Right now I'm grateful that God's given me a more average path to walk. When I think life is tough or that being a Christian means being a bit of a freak, I'll remember Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, whose life must have been much weirder than mine.

(This time I wrote for fifteen minutes straight and just did a tiny bit of cleaning up at the end.

Writing Discipline

On Wednesday, I decided to take up this enchanted fifteen minutes writing scheme. I duly downloaded a timer to measure my fifteen minute writing slot, which prompted me to write about how much I like Ubuntu . I didn't use my timer then, though, since I was still figuring out how it worked. Yesterday should have been my début, but yesterday I was headachey and tired, so, wisely or unwisely, I gave myself the day off. Thus, I'm beginning today.

Writing that paragraph took me thirteen minutes. I think I'm going to have to learn to write faster if I'm going to make this discipline work. Perhaps not so much to* write faster as to edit less. It only took about three minutes to write most of the first paragraph, but I spent another ten changing my mind about what should come next. I don't think it's wrong to decide what to write by writing it, but I think my habit of changing my mind about what I write does slow me down. Slowing down like that is what means that writing sometimes becomes a real mission.

I love writing, normally. When I get bogged down in trying to figure out whether Bob would say, “Jane, that's crazy,” or, “That's crazy, Jane,” it gets less fun. Forcing myself to just pick one and move on is difficult, but I think I need to learn to do it. It would mean that I could write faster, since those choices are much easier when I'm editing. It would mean I enjoy my writing more too. It still won't be easy.

I suppose that that's why writing for fifteen minutes a day is a discipline, not a game.

*This is where my fifteen minute timer went off. I gave myself another five minutes to finish, since what I had at that stage was somewhat inadequate. Look how much I sped up!

Why My Windows Installation Disc is Lost

Or, The Joys of Ubuntu Linux

This year I began using Ubuntu Linux. I have been using it for long enough to realise that it is far from perfect. Then again, I don't think Windows is exactly perfect either. I've never used a Mac, but I'm pretty sure even they have their faults. Ubuntu is very pleasant to use, though, especially after the few days it takes to get used to a different interface. And did I mention it's free?

One of my favourite tools is the Synaptics Package Manager. Under Windows, if I wanted a new application, I had to go hunting on the web to see what I could find. Then I had to figure out which file to download (buying software is expensive and complicated). Then I had to go through the installation process.

Under Ubuntu, I say Applications>Add/Remove. I type what I'm looking for into the search box. It pops up the applications that match that description, along with descriptions and user ratings. All I have to do is pick one for it to download and install. I don't even have to click my way through license agreements, which I believe is since the products are licensed, along with Ubuntu, under the GPL.

One of my other favourites is the toolbar. It annoyed me for a couple of days, until I realised what I could do with it. It's way more customisable than the taskbar (I have one of those too). Right now there are a bunch of things I can run from the toolbar with just one click: my word processor, my feedreader, FireFox, the 'Force Quit' utility (since Ubuntu isn't perfect), a shutdown menu and an unobtrusive icon telling me that I have, er, three-hundred-and-four updates available.

I love that it's unobtrusive and automatically didn't download all those updates without asking.

I'm not too worried that I don't know exactly where my Windows disc is. Ubuntu may not be the best solution for everyone, but it's working wonderfully for me.

Fallen World

When I was eleven or twelve, it was quite the fashion to say that 'When I get to heaven I'm going to tell Eve just how stupid she was to eat that apple.' I can see a number of theological errors in the idea now, but one I remember being raised at the time was this: if Eve hadn't taken the apple, maybe it would have been you.

I'm still astonished at the number of kids who stated confidently that no-way-no-how would they have touched the forbidden fruit. I was pretty certain that I would have succumbed eventually. Today I'm not at all sure what I would do, but rereading C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (part of the Space Trilogy) and these articles on tragedy in The Lord of the Rings have made me think about living in a fallen world.

In a strange way, I'm grateful to know that it is a fallen world. The world that I live in is not the world it should be. I don't even believe that this world represents very much of the world as a whole. In the cosmic scale of things, Earth is both physically and temporally tiny. The horrendous things that we human beings do are indeed horrendous, but they are not final. There's more to life than this. Our horrors are a distorted sort of life; as Lewis's Hrossa would put it, a bent life.

There is something immensely cheering in knowing that the nobility of Middle Earth is probably closer to a cosmic, spiritual reality than our own world (although clearly Middle Earth is a work of fiction). It is uplifting to think that although our world may see innocence as impractical and naive, in a greater reality innocence is natural and right and probably obvious.

There is something inspiring in realising that tasting the forbidden fruit might not be inevitable in the world as it should be. And that although humanity has taken one wrong turn, one day, through Christ, we can be part of a world that has not fallen.

Driving Lessons

For most of my life, I've been able to learn independently. For the seven years that I was homeschooled, my studies were often my responsibility, although I had a lot of support from my parents. At school, I could self-study a section of work if I didn't like he way it had been taught. Part of my (informal) education, I think has been learning that looking it up instead of nagging for help is not only easier on the naggee, but also will often yield better results. In short, I've come to prefer learning things by myself, with my own methods.

This method of learning is in direct contrast to the necessities of driving lessons. By law, I, as a learner driver, may not drive by myself. Also, while it doesn't really matter if I mess up a trigonometry exercise, trashing the car would be slightly more worrisome. Learning to drive is not something I can attempt on my own.

Not being able to do it on my own doesn't mean I don't want to do it on my own, though. That is a cause of friction. If I think I'm just about to get the hang of changing gears, my father might point out to me that I'm on the wrong side of the road. In that case, my learning technique failed. Since the public road is not exactly a safe learning environment, experimentation should probably be kept to a minimum. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I still don't turn the way my dad told me to (sorry, Daddy), but I do succeed in getting around corners. I guess I should be thankful for quiet roads while I learned that one.

Driving lessons - especially the earliest ones - can thus be fairly stressful. I want to do this my way! I don't want to have to wait for someone to drive with me! If I have to drive with you, you should be the perfect teacher! I do have a rational side as well, but I think that's suppressed by the 'Oh my goodness, is that a car over there?' and 'This is the fifth time I've stalled in as many minutes' stresses.

Having (more-or-less) mastered (most of) the basics, driving lessons have become less stressful. It's partly because I'm pretty sure that I won't squash any stray pedestrians, but also because I know enough that I can begin to direct my own learning. I choose to practise making three-point-turns or not. Practising steering is not really optional.

I'm not sure that this is really the ideal resolution, though. Sure the problem's gone, but I didn't solve it. It went away almost by itself. Next time I am compelled to give up control of my learning, I'll probably freak out just as much. I'm not sure if there's anything I can do other than to push through, but the perfectionist in me thinks I should find a way to overcome my issues. I guess I'll be chewing on it for a while.

No mind has conceived

Reading my bible and reading a novel are two very different exercises. Reading my bible and reading some other work of non-fiction are less different, but still quite significantly different. After all, no other book can have the profound impact on my life that the bible does. No other book will bear hundreds of rereadings without growing old. The bible seems to have more impact, not less, as time goes on.

Sometimes, though, I think I miss things because I approach the bible with the attitude I do. Eventually God breaks through my preconceptions and it's like a sudden burst of light. In the last few days, in my reading of Isaiah, one of those bursts of light occurred.

The bible is beautifully written.

That's something I've been on the verge of noticing before, but I've steered myself away from. My bible study time isn't when I should be thinking about prose, I told myself. Besides, if the prose is well written, it's probably due to the translators. I should concentrate on the content, not on the style.

Finally it clicked. I don't like the word for word style of the bible particularly, so I can't credit the translators. And if the Isaiah is written in a semi-poetic style, as the line breaks suggest, it was probably written that way purposely. In which case it probably wouldn't hurt to pay some attention to it.

In doing that, something becomes evident: the writing reflects the nature of its original author. I've never been great at seeing God's beauty and majesty in the sunset, but seeing God's beauty and majesty in the writing of the bible, I can do. It reminds me all over again of just how wonderful and amazing He is.

The ways God shows himself to us are, I think more than we can ever imagine. "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him." (1 Corinthians 2:9) That's pretty awesome.

Richard of Loxley

This is my solution to the Richard of Loxley riddle at Question of the Day. It's a bit long as a comment and I thought that since I spent most of my evening solving the riddle, the solution is a pretty accurate reflection of what I've been thinking about. I'm leaving a bit of space so that if anyone doesn't want to see my solution they can look away now.

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The riddle describes a game of Texas Hold'em Poker – the penultimate verse references Houston, the capital of Texas and then contains the words “hold them”. The riddle asks the solver to name the community cards, or board, in the last line.

The first verse refers to “Richard of Loxley” Loxley is the birthplace of Roin Hood, so this Richard is King Richard the Lionheart. “Robbed of his name [Richard] and his beast [the lion]” he becomes King Heart, or the King of Hearts. His wife is the Queen of Hearts. These are the hole dealt to the reader.

The second verse refers to the betting.*

The third verse is about the flop. The “image concealed in a flame” is the card that is burned. Then the Nine of Clubs “half dozen clovers and half more” is turned up, followed by the Ace and the Two of Hearts – the only two cards that will have three of the same emblem and give the reader a straight (A-K-Q of hearts) as mentioned at the beginning of the fourth verse.

Another card is burned, then the Jack of Diamonds (Jack Daniels whisky and diamond jewellery) is turned up. He “stands with his two twins”: the two Jacks in the speaker's hole. This gives the speaker three of a kind – not the best hand, but “if luck can be pressed” they may become a full house.

Another card is burned and the river is turned up: “a shovel of uppermost rank”, or the Ace of Spades. This gives the speaker a full house (Jacks full of Aces) (the “once-empty house” in the penultimate verse). The speaker “chip[s] in” or raises.

The next verse reminds the reader of that by folding (s)he will never know whether or not (s)he would have won, but goes on to gloat about how the full house will beat the straight at the showdown. The last two lines clarify the type of poker (I'm not sure about the doggies, though, unless they're meant to be dogies).

The final line asks for the board, which is Nine of Clubs, Two of Hearts, Ace of Hearts, Jack of Diamonds, Ace of Spades. (I think the Ace of Hearts would come after the Two, since the straight is only discovered after the flop is completed.)

*It does go into more detail, but I've never played Poker, which I think is why I don't follow it. “The moon garbed in John's angry shade” must be a red(?) chip. “Switched red ball for green” must be making change. Maybe putting $20 into the pot, in effect. I don't know how or what the speaker appends to his hole.

Brain Stretching

For the past twelve years I've been at school. Sometimes homeschool and sometimes 'regular' school, but still at school. Being at school provided challenges: geometry riders, science pracs, literature essays or even just trying to balance all my extramural activities. Those challenges were good for me, even though I didn't always appreciate them at the time. I think I largely avoided a hatred of geometry through sheer willpower, for example.

Lately, though, I've found myself searching out geometry questions and posing puzzles for myself. The sort of computer game that used to frustrate me has newfound appeal. Anything that makes me think analytically seems like a good thing. My brain, it appears, is not a fan of sitting around doing nothing. Maybe that's not surprising, since the rest of me isn't either.

Writing, beta-reading/editing and arty reviews stretch my brain in one direction, but I don't think it's enough. I crave logic puzzles - like the ones I found at Question of the Day. Like geometry riders. Like tangrams. My brain needs to work analytically as well as artistically. I think I've always read enough to satisfy my need for artistic stimulation. When I do a lot of writing or reviewing, I find that my need to read decreases. I've never struggled to find analytical stimulation, because school provided me with everything I needed. Now that school is absent, if only for a year, my need for that stimulation is evident.

I guess that's the point of a gap year: to learn more about myself. It's good to figure out more and more of how my brain works. For now, though, I'm off to play Tetravex.

Mocha Cookies

Today I made cookies instead of blogging. Then I thought I could make cookies and still blog, if I blogged about cookies. Thus I present the great profundity of my cookie recipe.

• Preheat oven to 200°C.


• Cream 125ml baking margarine. (I microwave it for 30 seconds first.)


• Stir in 250ml sugar.


• Beat two eggs and add to mixture.


• Sift in 500ml flour, 150ml cocoa and 5ml baking powder.


• Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and add half a cup of strong black coffee. (I used 5 spoons of chicory blend coffee in mine, but the coffee taste isn't very strong.)


• Stir


• Either roll the dough out and cut with a cookie cutter or mould it into little mounds and place on a greased baking tray.


• Bake for about ten minutes in the top of the oven.


• I sandwiched mine with icing-sugar-and-water icing (with a bit of cocoa added), but they work fine as individual biscuits too.

A Spirit Like the Wind

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
(John 3:8 NKJV)

“that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
(John 3:6b NKJV)

I'm reading Foster's Celebration of Discipline at the moment. The first discipline he discusses is meditation. One of the things I particularly liked about the chapter is that he makes a distinction between meditating on scripture and studying scripture.

I've never seen the distinction before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. If I'm studying a bible passage, I should use notes or a study guide, because I know those often help me to understand a passage better. What I don't like about doing that is that it removes a lot of the spontaneity from my bible reading.

Meditation, on the other hand seems much more spontaneous. I don't mean that it isn't a discipline that needs to be planned and practised, but that it's less prescribed and guided. Yesterday I spent a long time (for me) contemplating John 3:8. If I'd tried to study it, I doubt I'd have lasted two minutes. There's only so much one can analyse in a single sentence. Instead, I used Foster's method of imagination, which was fairly awesome.

If I see God as a great wind blowing through the world, I am a tiny breath of air. I can choose to blow where God sends me and align myself with Him, if I want to. I choose that. Like the verse says, I don't know where I've come from, and other people know even less. Sure, I know a lot about how I grew up, and I appreciate it, but I don't know what it all really means. I can't know myself perfectly.

I don't know where I'm going. That's something that I've had to deal with in a very tangible way this year. I don't know where my mom will be posted to next year. I can look at the possibilities and the likelihoods, but ultimately I have to trust that God will send me the right way. Somehow, though, it's hard not to trust when I feel the wind in my mind. God will make what is best happen, even if I can't see what that will be.

It's one of the most incredible things I've experienced. Trust for me has always been, at best, a conscious decision. 'I should stop stressing about this because I need to trust God.' There is an awesome peace in trusting implicitly and automatically. I guess all I need to do now is say 'Thank you, Jesus'.

Blogging

Did you know that some people type up their blog posts in a word processor? Probably you did. After all, it is quite sensible, since it gives one the opportunity to save (much more nicely than just by saving a draft on Blogger), to edit, to see pretty stats, like word count and to generally write in a superior fashion.

I think it may have crossed my mind, briefly, once to do that. The strangest part of it is that on most of the sites I write at, I wouldn't even think of not using a word processor. Writing beautiful prose with an online tool (like, say, the Blogger posting interface) seems antithetical. Yet I continue to use this interface. I think it's because blogging's a particularly informal way of writing.

Bloggers who can't spell may be annoying, but are to be forgiven, especially if there writing is generally nice. Authors of fiction, essays and articles should learn to spell. I will probably boycott them if they don't. (Well, I might. It depends on the rest of their prose and how badly I want to hear what they have to say.)

If I were to write blog posts in my word processor, I think I'd try to enforce beautiful prose standards upon myself. I'd quite possibly want someone to edit my post, to check that I haven't used the word 'as' too many times in one paragraph. Blogging isn't like that, though (who would beta read a blog?). I think it's best if I don't try to perfect my posts.

It might be fun to occasionally write a particularly thought-out piece. I suppose I might not type a piece like that up while I'm online. I'll have to wait until I come across a deep enough idea, though. For now, it's fun just to write and to watch the words filling up the screen without doing too much editing. I think that might be what NaNoWriMo is meant to be like, but I don't seem capable of doing it with fiction.

I might even have to change my template. I like the one I have now, but if I write a decently long post, it seems to stretch eternally down the page. The narrow column is great for making a bit of mumbling look like it might be meaningful (from a distance at least), but I seem to be over the really-short-posts stage.

If I change my template, I might change the name and maybe even the URL as well. I like the name Arwen, but I don't get called that in real life or on the 'net any more. That's mostly because in the world of Lord of the Rings fanfic, calling oneself Arwen seems fairly unoriginal to me, so I don't do it. This blog isn't very pillow book-like any more anyway. I think I've changed, and maybe my blog needs to change to match.

Holiday, maybe.

On the twenty-third of June I can register for second semester courses at UNISA. That's technically only ten days away, but ten days is more than a week. That's a very long time.

Well, ten days isn't really that long, but I would never have taken ten days off school (at least, not during term time), so spending that long without any specific work to do while everyone else is busy feels wrong. And then, I'm not sure I'll actually have work to do on the twenty-third. Besides, on the twenty-ninth we leave on holiday, and six days (including a weekend) is not enough to build a routine. Part of me says I should just lump it all together and make it sixteen days. That's half a month!

I think I need to convince myself that I'm on holiday early, because another sixteen days without anything I have to do might drive me insane otherwise. I don't mean a 'laze around and do nothing' kind of holiday, but an 'it's okay not to be up at six for school' kind of holiday. Not that I'm up at six now, but it feels like sleeping late. If seven is late, why not sleep 'til ten or twelve or three? (I'm not that bad, I promise, but I've definitely been sleeping past seven.)

I think if I can classify the time as 'holiday' I'll do things because I want to, rather than feeling duty-bound, but procrastinating. I don't like sleeping desperately late, often, because it takes a bite out of my day. I've been doing it over and over lately.

So, from Monday I'm on an extended holiday. I'll claim it as vaguely justified since I worked so hard for matric last year. Then I can have holiday-ish goals. Maybe I'll even finish reading The Odyssey, but if I don't, it's no big deal. Maybe I'll play with my newly installed feedreader. I could read the Picoult novel a friend lent me too. Who knows? I'm on holiday!

Poetry

I like poetry. I can't appreciate very much of it at once, but lots of good things are like that. I don't appreciate very much salt at once either, but in small doses I like it very much. I like the significance of each word in a poem. I think maybe life is like that: put together, people have a meaning as a whole, but each person has a particular significance of their own. Outside of community, nobody means very much, but that doesn't mean that our only meaning is in community.

Tomorrow my sister writes an English exam on poetry, amongst other things.

"I am not a poetry person," she declared. She has to write the exam anyway, though, so I said I'd help her study. By the time we finished she'd changed her mind. Yay! One more won to the poetry minority.

I don't think the way I helped her was particularly amazing, though. Poetry as taught at school is possibly quite un-amazing though. After all, you never (or at best rarely and under pressure) get to read a poem out loud. A poem never leads into a discussion about whether or not primitive people were more at harmony with nature than we are today, because the teacher will always steer the topic back to English, even if the poet was trying to provoke thought about the primitive people. I can't blame the teacher, because she doesn't have time to teach an entire syllabus and let discussion go off topic.

Pippa's a visual learner and for her, drawing the poems helped her make sense of some of them. They don't teach that at school and, to be honest, if anyone had asked me to draw a poem it wouldn't have helped me. I'm not sure it's possible to teach a group of twenty or forty kids to understand poetry. Maybe half of them are interested enough to learn, and that half wouldn't ge enough individual attention as they need, even without the other half fooling around.

I think the biggest problem with poetry at school is that it is rarely played out to its full extent. A poem may raise up a beautiful image for a student, but unless that's particularly powerful they won't be won over without repetition of the experience. Most of the time, school focuses on the technical aspects of a poem. Admittedly, those are the ones that everyone will understand. Not everyone will see the power in every poem. I don't 'get' every poem I read. The problem is that nobody sees the power in any of the poems.

When we've pushed at the meaning of a poem, we can begin to understand the words. I think it's sad that more people can't see the meaning in poetry.

Pan narrans?

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen suggest that Homo sapiens is misclassification. In its place, they suggest Pan narrans, the third chimpanzee; literally, 'the storytelling ape'. They do admit, though, that while we have 98% of our DNA in common with chimpanzees, we also have more than 40% of it in common with cabbages. Perhaps, they say, DNA doesn't mean all that much then. They still seem happy to classify us as the third chimpanzee, though. The Science of Discworld II: The Globe presents many interesting ideas, but as a whole I didn't find it's logic desperately convincing. I sill learned a lot from it.

If you've been paying attention, you might be saying 'Hang on, if you're talking about a Discworld book, Terry Pratchett should come into it somewhere.' (You might not, but it's easier to write this post if I imagine you are, so just play along, please?) Indeed, Terry Prachett is the biggest name emblazoned on the front cover and he's certainly endorsing the science in it, but I don't think he wrote more than half the book. I'm sure he wrote the part about the faculty of Unseen University. I'm not so sure about the non-fiction part. Prose that reads like this(!) seems out of character for a man who makes beautiful comments about the relationship between insanity and multiple exclamation mark usage, or who wrote 'he could think in italics'. So I'm ascribing those thoughts, along with the prose to Cohen and Stewart.

It's not awful prose (in fact it's mostly quite good), but it's not very Pratchettian. Since I"m comfortable criticising their prose, it leads me to criticise their logic. I don't think they've really shown anything about Pan narrans. There are some fascinating ideas but not very much in the way of plot. So I think I'll be sticking with Homo sapiens for now.

What to do with five litres of milk

Because our family is quite shrunk, and because two of us were too sick to be drinking much milk for a couple of days, we now have about five litres of milk that will go sour tomorrow.

So far I've made a litre of custard with it, but I'm going to have to think of more to do with it if I want to use it all up. Hmm: baking, milkshakes, puddings. I think there might be enough to do to use it all up, if I don't get tired of cooking!

Prayer

Today in church, when we did prayers of intercession, the preacher (who happened to be my dad, though that's not really relevant) asked people to name whoever they wanted to pray for after he opened. That prayer felt very powerful to me.

It seemed like a toy hovercraft: there are many little holes letting out air. None of them on their own can hold the vehicle up, but together they can. Everyone in the church was like one of those holes, pushing people up to God. There was a real sense of unity, especially with the speaking out loud.

I wanted to share that moment and that feeling, so I thought I'd put it here. Besides, it's good to start blogging again.