Prayers, good wishes and happy thoughts are requested for the following two:

1. My brother is finding the server life to be extremely challenging, and, uh, let's just say he no longer lives where he'd been living, and is currently crashing with coworkers. His internship dried up with no job offers, and he's not sure what to do next. If anyone in Nashville needs a nice, hardworking and funny guy for a job, he's available.

2. A friend (the one who got me to start cleaning) recently married and is expecting a baby. She's also having to move and deal with her job. So, she's in a wee bit of transition!

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I went home for Mother's Day, and it was good. One interesting event was Sunday School; I sat in on the mostly-elderly class my Dad attends (he's one of the youngest folks in the class). The subject was a passage in Revelation about in which it talks about persevering through trials and torments. Talking about trials and torments turned into a discussion of WWII anecdotes. It was great. Everything I know about the War comes from books and movies; I don't think I'd ever heard anyone who'd lived through it tell anything about it. Plus my Dad told a Vietnam anecdote which I found inspiring: they captured a Viet Cong, took his stuff. Amongst the belongings was a photo of his wife and kids. The young North Vietnamese soldier held out his hand, and they gave him back his photo. It's good to see that young men could reach some kind of reasonable compromise, even across the boundaries. One of the hardest things about war for me is that people who might be friends under better circumstances are sent by The Men Who Love War to kill each other.

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I bought some Twinings Irish Breakfast tea this morning: I'd been buying Taylors of Harrowgate, but I decided to take a chance on another brand. I opened it up when I got to work, and found it's not in tea bags. I'll have to buy some tealover's implements for this. So I'm drinking Lapsang Souchong again. I sip it very gingerly. I'm afraid of this tea.