Category: Personal

I am in Turkey right now, about 44 hours before I return home. I’ve been gone for two weeks, and I’m quite ready to see my family again. Hopefully, after I get back, I’ll blog regularly, or at least more than once every nine or ten days.

I’m in London on business with the Nameless Entity. I just finished with the British Shakespeare Association conference in Newcastle, where I led a seminar discussing online versions of Shakespeare. That was just a diversion — no tax dollars were used to fund my trip, in case you were wondering — but the whole experience was fascinating and gratifying.
Before that, I was in San Diego for a conference on behalf of the Entity. After London, I will go to another country, and won’t get back until next week. Needless to say, I’m missing my family very much, but at least I’m doing intersting things.
I feel totally disconnected from America in a way that I have never felt, because when I left, New Orleans still existed. Blogging about that seems rather solipsistic, since it really has nothing to do with me, but I know this is obviously a tremendously important event in the life of our country, and it’s odd to watch it from across an ocean.
Has any First World country ever lost an entire city since the end of World War II? The way some people talk, you would think it’s a routine occurence. I watched two BBC anchors who were perplexed that “the richest and most advanced country in the world” couldn’t do something as simple and straightforward as remove several hundred thousand people on short notice, even in a city where the government is notoriously corrupt, inefficient, and slow.
It’s hard to explain our federal system to regular, everyday British subjects. Not that they’re incapable of understanding it, but the U.K. is so much more geograpically compact, and their government is so much more centralized, that they have difficulty conceiving that the president can’t just swoop in with thousands of troops and federal workers. Even today, CNN reported that the governor of Louisiana is resisting President Bush’s plan to federalize the whole mess.
Isn’t it time to revisit the concept of “acts of God”?

It’s the fifth anniversary of Fr. Sibley’s ordination, and although he’s not on the web much at present, he’s doing the good work where it counts!

This is the newest member of the Johnson family, Molly Colleen, who was 4 hours old when her picture was taken. She was born today at 10:32 a.m., and her mother is doing just fine. The kids can’t wait to meet their new baby sister.
Molly weighs slightly under 8 pounds and she is 19 inches long. She is very good at crying already, and came into the world hungry, so I’m sure she’ll be fine. Mother and child will probably be back home on Monday, barring any complications.

Where’s Kathy Shaidle when you need her? I spent five hours in the emergency waiting room (having been refered there after a previous hour-and-a-half wait at a walk-in clinic. I was at the walk-in clinic because a year later my family still cannot find a family physician, even though we are living in the Canadian city that is the least affected by slow healthcare delivery) with my youngest daughter before we saw a physician! The medical staff were great, so I’m not blaming them for the wait. Nevertheless, that’s what happens when you live with a socialized medical system that is understaffed and underfunded.
While there, we hung around with the parents of this eight-year old boy. They are very nice people who have been all over the press after the boy was reportedly and intentionally run down in his own driveway by a cab driver. What the media is not reporting is the ethinic origin of the cab driver, which reportedly appears to to be the same as that area of the world that produced “air rage” on 9-11-01.