iMagine life without iLove ... and iMusic

My office reconfigured.How many times have I said that historically I'm the next-to-last woman in the world to acquire, utilize, and fully appreciate new technology?

I don't know. Let's just go with a bunch.

Make that a whole bunch.

For example, we didn't own a microwave oven until ... I think it was 1992, but I'm not sure. At any rate, it didn't take me long to fully appreciate that particular bit of business.

Got my third and latest one last Saturday, as a matter of fact, because ours blew up that morning.

Relax! No leftovers were harmed in the incident.

Another thing I've oft been heard to remark is that my wonderful children have taught me far more than I have taught them.

For example, TG and I frequently call on the kids (the younger two are even better than the older two) to help with a computer application, or with the installation and operation of peripherals such as scanners, printers, and the occasional strobe light.

(Not only do they know considerably more than we do about these things, but their eyesight is better.)

"Mom, you've got to hear this."

On Christmas Day I learned that TG and the kids had been conspiring for weeks to buy me a new computer. An iMac.

(Sweet machine. Makes my seven-year-old slow-boat-to-nowhere Dell look like the long lost relative of a desktop PC so extinct, geriatric dinosaurs would laugh it to scorn.)

To say I was overcome when I saw the gift is the understatement of the last twelve months.

It was a moment.

But as much as I will cherish the memory of my family's faces when they saw my face when I saw my new iMac on Christmas, I will remember the night before.

On Christmas Eve we were all snug and warm at home together, eating delicious food and telling jokes and laughing and kidding one another, and marveling at the great colorful mound of gifts beneath our twinkling tree.

As usual, throughout the evening each of the kids was fiddling with one electronic gizmo or other.

If it's not an iPod it's an iTouch. If neither of those, it's a webcam or a GPS device or a fancy laptop or a tricked-out cell phone.

(The only one of the abovementioned items that I personally own is an ordinary cell phone. Forget texting; I don't even like to talk on the thing.)

Okay, okay ... I have a Nikon Coolpix L20 digital camera, also courtesy of my children.

But I digress.

On Christmas Eve, daughter Audrey approached me, proffering a set of iPod earbuds. "Mom, you've got to hear this," she told me, and hooked me up, telling me to close my eyes.

This is the song she played for me: Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni singing the aria O Soave Fanciulla from Puccini's La Boheme.

If you listen, please listen to the very end. You won't be sorry.

Breathtaking.

Of all the things I am grateful for when it comes to my children, I am so glad they have both the desire and the capacity to experience and appreciate beauty, and culture, and near-perfect music, and new technology.

Oh ... and my cooking.

Thanks, kids ... iLove you all.

And not only for the iMac.

Sno daze

Melly's Tree.When grandbabies have birthdays, you show up if at all possible.

Since Melanie lives in Lenoir, North Carolina -- less than a three-hour drive from Columbia -- and she was all set to turn five on December 21st, last weekend the family converged on daughter Stephanie's house to properly fete the little darling.

Daughter Audrey drove to Stephanie's from Knoxville on Thursday after work. Daughter Erica and I planned to set out on Friday at noon, after she worked a half day.

TG would meet us there, as he was working in Hickory. Andrew was still on duty at Offutt AFB in Omaha; his travel plans would land him in Columbia late on Saturday and sadly he wouldn't be with us this time.

But on Thursday night, everything changed.

That's when, thanks to Weather dot com, we learned that most of Western North Carolina was under a winter storm warning and expecting many inches of snow.

The snow was due to arrive on Friday at lunchtime. If Erica and I departed Columbia at noon as planned, we would drive into the teeth of the storm.

Not good.

Allissa Observes.

Instead, we sortied at nine thirty Thursday night and, after running a few errands both here and there, arrived on Stephanie's doorstep at one o'clock in the morning.

Snowflakes began their graceful descent as we were chatting over coffee seven hours later.

The snow sheeted down until nearly eleven o'clock that night. Late in the day, millions of tinkling ice crystals began pummeling the pristine landscape.

Nine inches of the sparkling white fantasy material would accumulate before it was over.

That may be a mere dusting to folks who reside above the sweet tea line, but in the Carolinas, it's a blizzard.

TG blew in just after lunch, as main arteries transformed into anxious parking lots and secondary routes became heartstopping public luges.

There was happy news: Andrew was even then in the air, bound for Atlanta, where he would catch a flight to Charlotte in hopes of joining us. Having finished up at Offutt early on Friday, avuncular devotion -- and a fondness for birthday cake -- had motivated last-minute changes in his travel plans.

Snowbound Sisters.

Except, even before he landed in Atlanta, his connecting flight to Charlotte was canceled.

He was aggravated and disappointed until his girlfriend, Nicole -- at home with her parents in Hoschton, Georgia -- offered to fetch him. She and her mother braved a mad snarl of rain-stormy Christmas Friday traffic to save Andrew from spending the night on a bench (or the floor) at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Meanwhile, in Lenoir, we watched Christmas movies on television when we weren't watching our own white Christmas beyond the windowpanes. We baked a birthday cake, and enjoyed the grandbabies, and took lots of pictures, and were grateful for heat and light and plenty of delicious food.

TG Sweepstakes.

Son-in-law Joel, pastor of the Temple Baptist Church in Lenoir, made a visit that morning to the home of a man who had none of those things. He treated the unfortunate gentleman to a hot meal at a restaurant just before the icy, snowy roads turned treacherous.

Not everyone will spend Christmas in a warm, fragrant house, surrounded by loving family members and twinkling lights and gifts and music and laughter and feasting.

Not everyone will spend Christmas privileged with the full knowledge of its meaning, and with the security of knowing the Savior of Whom all the carols sing.

Birthday Girl.

Some families -- maybe even ours -- will spend Christmas Day huddled in silent anguish around hospital beds, or in desperate grief beside coffins.

Some people will despair of life during this beautiful season.

God help us to see them, and to pray for them, and to help them when we can.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17)

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up freely for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

Merry Christmas!

A new standard for poor

Old iron.At my wedding in 1979 I gained a husband ... and an awareness of golf.

During the first winter of our marriage, I was a newly expectant mother. On arctic Midwestern Sunday afternoons, following church and dinner, TG would snooze on the couch while I sat in the big rocker, struggling to stay awake as the cultured voice-over stage-whispered live action at a televised PGA tournament.

I was mesmerized by the conspiratorial tones of the announcers as much as by images of balmy-breezed manicured fairways in parts of the world where the temperature never gets below fifty, much less below zero.

TG rarely gets a chance to play anymore, but he dearly loves the game of golf. He watches the tour ardently, and I've seen tears mist his eyes when he hears the poignant Masters music each April.

During the '80s, when we still lived in the metropolitan Chicago area, TG treated me to the Western Open in Oak Brook, Illinois.

All I remember about that day is that my outfit was cute, and we followed Morris Hatalsky around Butler National. I picked Morris because I liked his outfit (the pants were purple), and we couldn't get close to the bona fide "greats" like Tom Kite, Watson, and Weiskopf.

He may be worth a billion dollars, but Tiger Woods is an impoverished man.

Oh -- and I remember that it rained so hard, they stopped play and we had to stand under a tent with about 200 other drowned rats, with water up to our ankles. My sandals were ruined, not to mention my hair, and let's not even talk about my mood.

But I do love to livery a golf cart on a beautiful course on a day when it's neither raining, humid, nor over 80 degrees, and watch my man hit one into the trees onto the green.

The estimable Tiger Woods having brought golf painfully to the fore (I'm not sorry) in recent days, I've been thinking.

Nike, one of his mega-million-dollar sponsors, has declared it wouldn't even consider backing away from the besmirched Tiger -- calling his "infidelities" nothing but a blip on the radar.

Gross immorality, chronic adultery, and all-around degeneracy a blip on the radar?

Now, before anyone goes all righteous on me and wags "He who is without sin, cast the first stone," let me say that I am not judging Tiger.

Sin is sin is sin, and we all sin, and we all need to repent, and we all need forgiveness.

But what if, instead of cheating on his wife times a number known only to the Almighty and generally being several food-chain links below pond scum, the news had broken that Tiger Woods keeps a starving mommy dog and her two bony puppies chained in the dark bowels of his mansion, and that just for fun every night he goes down there and blisters their paw pads with the tip of a great big cigar?

Or if he'd been caught on tape driving his Nike SasQuatch 460 into the bewildered pea-sized brain of a pesky groundhog on his palatial estate?

I bet in that eventuality Nike would have dropped Tiger faster than Obama dropped Reverend Wright.

In a sponsor's eyes, it's "barely a blip" when a celebrity emotionally abuses his wife and children -- provided that his name attached to a product or sport catapults that product or sport into the economic stratosphere.

But by denying them his devotion and fidelity (and only God knows what else), Tiger has deprived his wife and kids of nourishment as surely as if he'd padlocked the pantry in his 3,000-square-foot kitchen.

And if Mrs. Woods is a normal woman (no comment), I believe she would prefer the occasional cigar burn to the pain she has felt in her marriage.

As long as the cigar burns did not mar her beautiful ex-model face.

He may be worth a billion dollars, but Tiger Woods is an impoverished man. I don't feel sorry for him or Elin (well, maybe a little bit for Elin) -- they willingly made their choices -- but my heart aches for Samantha and Charlie.

They will always be rich but they will never have a whole and happy family.

They never had a dad who loved their mom enough to be faithful to the vows he took.

That old saying, that the greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother?

It's true.

Hey Buddy! Where's Bobo?

Petsmart has moved on to new commercial ads, but this one will always be my favorite. Love it when they scan him.

68106

Andrew. Photo Jennifer Weber 2008Our son, Andrew, is flying to Nebraska on December 14th. For a week he will be the guest of Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, in connection with his duties in the Tennessee Air National Guard.

He's been home for a few days on Christmas break from Bible college, and we've been having a good time.

On Thursday evening he treated us to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants.

This morning he sang Zion's Hill in church, and our pastor asked him to preach for the evening service.

The title of his message was Five Things God Cannot Do.*

It was good.

Tonight as he was making last-minute preparations to catch his flight in the morning, he came to me with a dilemma.

Since he serves in a church while he's in Omaha (he spent six weeks there last summer), he needs a suit because that's what he wears to church. But a suit involves an overcoat, and he also wanted to pack his heavy Carhartt work coat for off hours spent in mufti, and he's required to wear Air Force-issued outerwear when in uniform.

He'll be wearing one coat and packing two more.

I counted three bulky coats, and so did he, and he didn't like that number -- even though, being a member of the military, the airlines' per-bag charge for luggage does not apply to him. In other words, there's no particular need to pack light.

His solution: reduce the number by leaving his dress overcoat at home, packing the other two coats, and flying into Omaha tomorrow afternoon wearing only a thin suit.

(He wants to travel in the suit -- with an open-collared dress shirt -- so that it won't get unduly wrinkled in his suitcase.)

"And I'll just be walking outside, like, to my car," he rationalized.

"Andrew. It's very cold in Omaha right now," I said. "What if you break down or something?

Andrew looked at me as though tutu-clad lobsters were executing perfect pirouettes on top of my head.

I forgot. The young never encounter unplanned emergencies; flat tires and broken water hoses -- not to mention fender benders or wipeouts on black ice -- only happen to old fogies.

TG spoke up. "Why don't you go look at the weather forecast on the Internet," he suggested.

Andrew and I trooped into the office to do just that.

High in Omaha for Monday: fourteen. Low: minus four.

Andrew paled. "I think I'll buy me some thermal underwear as soon as I get there," he thought out loud.

He'll be wearing one coat and packing two more.

God bless our troops! And keep them warm (or cool, as the case may be), and safe. Above all, safe.

* Lie; fail; remember our forgiven sin; bless disobedience; accept any other way of salvation besides His Son, Jesus Christ.

Update on Monday, December 14, 2009 at 05:28PM by Jennifer

NOTE: Andrew arrived safely in Omaha this afternoon, just slightly behind schedule due to airport delays. The high temperature today was actually ten degrees; tonight's expected low is five below zero.  With the help of the sun it may reach fourteen degrees tomorrow. 

Andrew said he was glad to have packed so many coats.