a sad way to learn marital truth

I get The Week, every week. Great little gem, if you're into the news. There is a section called "Gossip" its three little blurbs about various gossip items. One caught my attention today.

"Ashley Dupre, the call girl whose trysts with Eliot Spitzer lead to the New York governor's resignation, returned to the tabloids this week, this time as a sex columnist for the New York Post. In her debut column, Dupre, 24, dishes advice on how to spot signs that your husband is cheating. "Guys are easy to please and I don't mean just sexually," she tells a worried wife. "Ask your self, when was the last time you did something to make your husband feel loved, special, and appreciated...and if you can't remember, then that's your sign right there."

First off, what great advice! It seems that so often we get married or enter into long-term committed relationships and forget to be loving and respectful to each other. Several months ago, my husband and I read "Love and Respect" with some friends, and while overall the book didn't thrill me, it did generat some great conversations between us. I remember one night in particular where my husband said that it meant so much to him when I remember the little things, that he doesn't like certain foods, or when I keep his preferences in mind. Its so easy to be me focused and not remember to think of him and make sure he feels "loved, special, and appreciated."

So Thanks Ashley, for the good advice! (Although I do find it sad that it takes a call girl to remind us all of the simple truth of loving our husbands.)

Snow in DC!!!

I can't believe it, the weather reports keep getting more and more ominous as the day goes on. The DCist is now reporting that the National Weather Service estimates that between 10 and 20 inches of snow could accumulate between midnight tonight and 6 a.m. on Sunday. Woah! This could be awesome!!

Christmas at the Cayless' - the decorations

Christmas at the Cayless' - the food

Is it ok we don't have a Christmas Tree?

I have been feeling a lot of social pressure recently. I guess it all centers around the holiday. This will be our first Christmas as "us." And my friends are busy making "its our first christmas" ornaments and decorating their homes, and well I'm not. I don't really care that its our first christmas, and we don't have a tree (although I would like one). Truth is, we're not home very much this month, gone 2 out of 4 weekends.

Overall, I just don't know what to do with the social pressure to be a certain kind of wife, who cooks and cleans and nests in her home. I just don't do that, and my husband doesn't exactly encourage me to do that, he would rather us do it together. Which, in all honesty, ROCKS but it does make us something of a social anomaly.

Life......

God's omnipresence - quote from Greg Boyd's book, God of the Possible

Doesn't Einstein's theory of relativity prove that time is ultimately unreal, thus disproving the idea that God experiences a past or a future?

"...Einstein's theory is concerned only with the transference of information at the speed of light between finite observers. But God is not one finite observer among others. He is an observer who is contemporaneous with every finite observer. This changes everything (though we shouldn't fault Einstein for not incorporating this into his theory).

"It means that God's experience of others is not dependent on (relative to) the speed of light. He doesn't need to "wait" for information to arrive to him via the speed of light. He is "there" when the information originates"

Thanksgiving Quote

"...and it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff—no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people—one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments . . . for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.” —Philip Roth