BilikFamily.com

Holiday movies - The holiday movies are already starting. Tonight we watched Eloise at Christmastime. We also recorded the original Santa Clause with Tim Allen. We plan on watching the DVD of the sequel over Thanksgiving holiday. Tonight we are also recording the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It's that time of year when there are plenty of holiday shows. Our TiVo will be busy for the next several weeks. Michelle also took advantage of the unseasonable warm weather to get a jump start on decorating the outside of the house with Christmas lights and decorations.

Mario Party 5 - On my way back from Mass this morning I stopped by Kaybee toys to pick up Mario Party 5. We plan on surprising the kids with it on Thanksgiving. Claire has Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off from school for the holiday. I'm sure by Thursday she'll be saying "what are we going to do now?" It'll be hard for me to wait until then. *grin* It'll be even harder to wait for Mario Kart.

Misc. News - On the whole it's been a pretty uneventful weekend. The Milford Spartans won the state football title. I took the older four kids down by the brook to watch, listen, and throw rocks in it -- they're kids after all. Now that it's autumn it's flowing briskly again. Claire said she never really appreciated how lucky we are to have something so pretty right on our lot. Claire spent this afternoon at a classmate's. The two of them went bowling and out for Burger King. Michael has finally figured out how to pedal -- at least on the tricycle. Daniel seems to have gotten the knack of dribbling a basketball. I have to see if I can use my camera to make a small movie of it. I went to a parent meeting for children who will receive First Confession this March. I have to start preparing Claire for it. It was a bit sad to hear how little some of the parents have been catechized regarding Confession. I've been practicing Bach's Prelude - Wohltemperierte Klavier I in C major - on the piano. I also want to try my hand at Beethoven's Mondschein. [Oops! Those links won't work because the host site doesn't allow "deep linking". Sorry...] They're both slow and a little repetitive, which is good for getting back to the piano. They're also quite beautiful. I'm hoping to hear from Suzy on how mom and dad's visit went. I also hope to hear from Lyss on their trip up to the lake.

Chestnuts - On my drive into work on Friday, I learned an interesting tidbit about our heritage. It seems that at the beginning of the 20th century, 1 in 4 trees in the eastern US was an American chestnut tree. These trees were huge! They could reach 100 feet and be 5 feet in diameter. Alas, the chestnuts you eat at the holidays are usually Chinese chestnuts because around 1904 a blight spread across the US that quickly wiped out the American chestnut trees. Chinese chestnuts are immune to the blight. Through successive cross breeding, researchers have recently developed a strain that is 97% American chestnut but still immune to the blight. When these seedlings become available to the general public, I'd love to plant some in our conservation land. It would add some diversity to the monstrous pines we have back there. If TJ or Cassidy would like to do a school report (down the road) on this, read more at NH public radio or the American Chestnut Foundation.

TiVo - Several months back Adelphia added a bunch of channels at the high end (62 through 77) to our regular lineup and rearranged a few channels at the low end. Unfortunately TiVo's scheduling service was unaware of Adelphia's changes. After our TiVo did a recent synchronization, it finally reported this lineup change. I'm happy because there were several good shows on those new channels that I wasn't able to schedule for recording on TiVo, so we didn't tend to watch them. Once you own one, it changes your mindset. You don't tend to let television scheduling dictate your life. You don't tend to watch "what's on now" but rather "what's played in the last couple of days".

Marriage - Certainly the Massachusetts recent ruling in favor of same sex couples being allowed marriage licenses is pretty big news up here. One of the top arguments I often hear is "how will this hurt you if we get recognized as being married?" It's an interesting question but a precedent that we probably don't want to start. This "how would it hurt you if I call myself x" line of argumentation can be a big problem. Imagine if tomorrow I decided to practice law or medicine, how would this hurt real doctors and lawyers? There are a lot of spheres in this world where we define something as meeting certain requirements. In marriage we outlaw bigamy, polygamy, and polyandry. We don't allow you to marry children or within one's own family. Using the language of the homosexual lobby, one might argue that those arrangements could theoretically be committed, loving relationships. We don't define them as marriage. They are trying to re-write a standard that has held for a long time. I've read some better op-eds endorsing same sex marriage, but I think the "how would it hurt you" defense is a weak approach. I think that in some respects it's similar to "how does it hurt you if I choose to have an abortion".

Worse yet, like so many other things of recent change, it's not happening through the elected legislature and executive branch. It's law declared via the judiciary. When you can't get your way via normal democratic methods, use the judiciary as a back door. The same groups that worry about undo power of corporations via political lobbying seem to have no problem writing laws via the courts. I think that in both cases they circumvent representative rule by the people.

If you want one Catholic perspective on why same sex unions are not the same, read the recent US Catholic bishops' statement. It hits the highlights in a pretty readable format without sounding like ranting political pundits.

Quote - I'll part with a good quote for Thanksgiving:

"If you haven’t got all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don’t have that you don’t want."