One more quick personal update

I want to say a very sincere thank-you to all the well-wishers who have expressed concerns and suggestions about my health. I'm still feeling the buzz from Tuesday's dose of Benadryl, but the good news is that it rained yesterday and is raining hard this morning, and my allergy symptoms have mostly subsided.

I spent all day yesterday (Wednesday) in an orientation seminar with the illustrious Pecadillo, who enters the Police Academy this month. The hiring process for LAPD is long and arduous. For every 1,000 applicants who are considered, fewer than 50 are selected. So I'm very proud of Pecadillo for all he has gone through to get this far. He won't want me to blog much about it, because one of the cardinal rules for a recruit is not to stand out or call attention to yourself in any way. (And this rule of thumb was stressed repeatedly. They are not kidding.)

Even the normally upbeat and jovial Pecadillo sees no humor in any of this, and I don't blame him for taking it so seriously. Every one of his training supervisors intimidated me, and I'm not easily intimidated. That includes a couple of petite young women who I'm absolutely positive could beat me into a coma in a matter of seconds without raising much of a sweat, take great delight in doing so, and yet never even crack a smile in the process.

Since some of my readers are also fans of Pecadillo, I thought I'd mention that he might be putting his blog on hiatus or posting very sporadically for a while. Life for him is not going to be all that funny for the next 8 or 9 months. Nor will he have a surplus of spare time. His mornings for the next few months will be starting at 3:30 AM. That's not a lifestyle that is very compatible with writing a humor blog. I think he'll blog at least once more before officially launching his new career. After that, I predict his posts will be pretty spotty and perhaps even nonexistent—at least until he gets back into a less stressful routine.

Incidentally, when he was a little kid, Pecadillo was the least literate of all our sons. He hated every minute of school. He struggled with learning how to read. His two elder brothers loved Sesame Street and learned the alphabet and basic reading skills before entering kindergarten. Pecadillo's tastes ran to the Three Stooges, and he didn't read anything voluntarily until late Junior High, when someone gave him a biography of Curly. He was the least likely person in our family to blog. He started his blog quietly, without even mentioning it to me, while Darlene and I were out of town a few months ago. I have been amazed by his latent literary abilities. It took me completely by surprise. I honestly don't know when and where he developed his writing skills, but—wow.

I just wanted to put on the record how proud I am of him.

Finally, an iPod update: I'm still ripping CDs and will be for weeks. I own some 1,500-2,000 CDs, and I've never had them well organized or easily accessible all at once. So I absolutely love the iPod. I got one of those docking stations that plays music from the iPod through speakers, so I can program several hours of music and let it play through the night. I've always liked music in the background when I sleep, and the classical radio station is at best unpredictable. Occasionally they'll play something with a screeching soprano that's impossible to sleep to. On the other hand, CDs are too repetitive. With a 5-CD changer, I wake up to the same thing I went to sleep to. Then it's in my mind all day. Boring.

I already have 9 solid days' worth of nonstop music (no repeats) ripped to the iPod, with only a tenth of my CD collection uploaded. That's amazing.

Last night I started the process of ripping all my Bach cantatas. Bach's cantatas are without a doubt the finest anthology of sacred music ever produced by a single composer. (How did Protestants ever get from Bach to the insipid stuff we call "worship choruses" today?)

Anyway, I've just begun to appreciate all over again how much great church music Bach produced, and I'm realizing for the first time how large my collection of Kantaten had become. After ripping CDs for three hours last night, I had some 10 hours of Das Kantatenwerk in the iPod. So I put it on and fell asleep to Christ lag in Todesbanden ("Christ Lay in death's bonds") and got up this morning to the triumphant strains of Wachet Auf ("Sleepers Awake"). Is that a perfect night's sleep, or what?

Look for the next post in the "Modern Prophecy" series within 12 hours. We'll get this blog back on track ASAP.

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