Wednesday, October 17, 2018

For RagingMoon1987

RagingMoon is a doll blogging friend, but there were a couple of non-doll things I wanted to show her, so I'm coming over here to post them. Long past time I put up a post here, anyway.

First one is a Pepsi can that I brought home from a college trip to Germany, since RagingMoon has an interest in soda containers.
Licensed from PepsiCo, Inc.
Soda containing caffeine. Apparently Limonade has been expanded to just mean any carbonated sweet drink.
Secondly, a really blurry shot of a group of tom turkeys taking their sweet time crossing the street. The lighting wasn't that great, since it was around dusk, and I was several cars back from the turkeys. This was taken in 2017, in Bay Village, Ohio, on the westside of Cleveland.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Lunch by the River

Last Friday, I met a friend of mine for lunch at Margaritaville in the Flats, in downtown Cleveland.
The Flats are so called because they're lower than the rest of downtown. They're the shores of the Cuyahoga River. For a long time, the Flats were mainly for the loading or unloading big cargo ships that still traverse Lake Erie and dock at the port of Cleveland. But a few decades ago, developers started putting restaurants, bars and entertainment venues in. The Nautica Queen is a pleasure boat that cruises up and down the river, and can go out on the lake when the weather is appropriate. The Dancer had her senior prom on the Nautica Queen.
Parking is convenient, and was only $4 for the lunch crowd.
Down the street from Margaritaville is the river.
On the west bank of the Flats is one of the older bars, Shooters.
I have no idea what it costs to be able to dock your boat or jet ski in the Flats. You can see the Nautica Queen side on and head on in the two pictures below.

This is the best shot I got of the Nautica concert stage, and the Powerhouse building, which now contains several restaurants and entertainment venues, plus the Cleveland aquarium.
I think I need to get Mr. BTEG to take me down to the Flats again before the bad fall weather sets in. :)

Thursday, June 07, 2018

Grass Is Green, Water Is Wet, Cleveland Gets Midges

Apparently, the yearly infestation of midges is important news this year. Is there an unusual amount of them in 2018, or something? I don't really get that from the article. I spent most of my childhood years living two blocks from Lake Erie, in the 1970s. The outdoors would be crawling with those things for a little over a week. You kept your mouth closed and dealt with it. For that matter, it's difficult to drive your car in NE Ohio during a summer evening, or ride a Cedar Point roller coaster as dusk settles in, and not encounter a few bugs, even once the midges are gone. Take your car to the car wash, and as for the roller coaster, well, it's sometimes hard to keep your mouth shut, so be prepared to pick a bug out of your teeth.

Monday, April 02, 2018

Would Catholicism Save America? Discussing the Concept of Why America Will Perish Without Rome

I picked a bad time to try to start being consistent with my blog posts. Life has gotten super chaotic here at Casa BTEG, and I've neglected blogging as a result, especially since it's hard to even get to my personal computer at the moment. However, I think we're approaching the end of the current difficulties, and also, I found something that I really want to blog about! The subject today is two videos on YouTube from the channel of Milo Yiannopoulis, concerning a new book being released by his new printing company, Dangerous Books.

I've been reading and watching Milo's content since before he left Breitbart. I've never been an enormous fan, per se, but his take on conservative life and culture in America, as a Catholic gay man from the UK, comes from a very different place than other prominent conservatives, which makes him interesting reading and listening. Also, he's a lot of fun, which is refreshing.

Since I follow his YouTube channel, I saw two interviews Milo recently did with a man named Timothy Gordon. He is publishing a new book through Dangerous Books entitled Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome, to which Milo has written a forward. I'm definitely not going to touch on everything in the interviews, as the two videos together are almost an hour long total. If you want to watch them, they can be found on YouTube here and here. But there are a few points that I wanted to make, and hopefully discuss. I'll only be covering one today.

The most important issue I took from the videos was the idea that Protestants, from Luther on, do not believe in free will. Therefore, their thinking, Gordon argues, is antithetical to a country like the American republic, which was founded on the idea of Americans using their free will to make, for the most part, their own plans about how their lives should be arranged, with as little government coercion as possible. One of the most important values of the Founders was the right to individual liberty. Protestants therefore, who deny the existence of free will, cannot co-exist with a country of individual freedoms, or so Gordon posits.

From a theological standpoint, the concept of humanity and free will has been argued for centuries before me, and will probably continue to be a point of discussion until Christ's return. For Lutherans, our concept on free will, at least from the point of view of becoming one of God's redeemed creatures, can be found in our catechism: "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength, believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and keeps me in the one true faith." So in this sense, Luther certainly does not agree that Christians become so merely by personal free will. Rejection of God is another matter, and one on which I am not as well versed. I do know that we do not follow Calvin's doctrine of people being foreordained to go to either heaven or hell. Modern day Protestantism, however, certainly does seem to follow the idea of free will, with the idea of "making a decision for Jesus." For whatever reason, Gordon seems to discuss only the early Protestant leaders like Luther and Calvin. I would like to know what he would have to say about the current views of the many Protestant denominations that do emphasize making a personal decision.

However, is the eternal different from the temporal? Is being unable to use my free will to be redeemed by God, mean that I am unable to use my free will to decide who to marry, for whom to vote, what type of government I want, or even what I will eat for breakfast? I was going to develop this idea more today, but this post has already gotten longer than I intended it to be! Hopefully I'll get some comments to draw on for my next post, and if not, I'll still keep going with the idea of secular free will, for a Thursday post. Maybe I'll be able to find some reading about Luther's views on the role of free will in our earthly lives in the meantime. There are also a few more things from the interviews that I wanted to go over, so be looking for that as well.

Friday, March 09, 2018

Friday Already?

To be fair, I had a really bad day yesterday, and I never even remembered my resolve to blog on Thursdays. But just keeping at the blogging is important, even if I do mess up, so here I am. I'm so glad that spring is on the way, even if winter decided to remind us that it's not quite gone yet yesterday. Anyone else have Seasonal Affective Disorder and have a rough winter this year? Of course, I didn't use my light box as reliably as I could have, so it's partially on me. My psychiatrist gave me an article recently about a light box being more useful to bipolar people if it is used around noon, so I might try that as March slowly winds away.

Monday, March 05, 2018

Where Have All the Lutherans Gone?

Talking with Scottius led me to blog today about something that I think about a lot, which is why there doesn't seem to be a strong conservative Lutheran community. The church Mr. BTEG and I currently belong to is a good distance away from our home, to begin with. While I suppose it would be asking too much to have a solid church actually in my community, it'd be nice to have one closer by. I don't feel any sort of connection to anyone at my current church. In addition, there's not really much of a strong Lutheran presence online anymore. Not only are bloggers gone, but people that I used to see on Google Plus aren't there, and Facebook is dying all on its own. When you don't have a church family, and you don't have an online church family, you can start feeling pretty detached from your church.

Thursday, March 01, 2018

Working at It

I've been doing a lot of thinking about blogging, ever since one of my fellow doll bloggers made a post about the benefits of it. I enjoy the doll blogging, but most of the regular bloggers from when I first got started on this blog aren't around any more, and the Lutheran blogging world is pretty much non-existent. However, not only do I still enjoy blogging, it still seems to be the best platform for me. Besides which, as my doll friend's post pointed out, blogging can make you a better communicator and writer. That's always a good thing, so even if I never had a huge following here, it will help me provide a better doll blog too! Don't worry, I won't be blogging about dolls here, but doll collecting truly is where a lot of my time, blogging and money goes, now that my daughters are starting to make their own way into the world.

Both of my daughters and I each have several YouTube vloggers that we like to watch, although I'm waiting for some of my favorites to be shut down any day now. However, what the most successful vloggers seem to do is provide regular content. Even if it's crap content, they get something new up one or two days a week. So for now, I'm going to try Mondays and Thursdays as my days to blog here. Even if I have nothing that seems exciting to say, I'm going to try to put up a new post every week on those days.

For this post, let me tell you about what Mr. BTEG and I were able to do with some of the "crumbs" we received in our tax refund this year. For starters, this past Saturday we drove down to the IKEA in Columbus, Ohio, and picked up a cart full of items that we've been needing for quite some time, like a mattress, a set of dishes (most of our old plates got broken or chipped during the child-rearing years,) and a bookcase with glass doors for my doll collection! The IKEA warehouse makes a Costco or Sam's Club look like a little mom-and-pop operation.
The BTEG family has not taken a vacation in many years, partially due to commitments like school, but largely due to finances. Mr. BTEG and I both suffer from seasonal depression, which seemed especially bad this year. So this past Sunday, Mr. BTEG and I were able to spend the night at one of my favorite places, Great Wolf Lodge indoor waterpark in Sandusky, Ohio. I'm not a strong swimmer and not really up for large water slides, but there are enough water attractions at GWL to keep me happy, and it's got a very nice restaurant and a few other in-hotel food options handy, so Mr. BTEG and I were able to wind down and relax. Plus, I got some swimming in Sunday afternoon and evening, and Monday morning.

The first time we took a vacation at Great Wolf Lodge was all the way back in 2004. Mr. BTEG was working a contracting job in Chicago during that time, which meant that the girls and I didn't see him as much as of course we were used to. Fortunately, we were already homeschooling, so there were a couple of weeks the girls and I drove out to Chicago and stayed at his apartment there with him. It was even educational, since we visited a lot of the family attractions Chicago has to offer. But we wanted to spend some serious family time at Christmas, and on a contractor's salary, Mr. BTEG was able to afford a couple of nights stay at what I believe at the time was Great Bear Lodge.

Honestly, it was probably one of the best times we had as a family. The girls were young enough that somehow "Santa" managed to sneak all the Christmas presents past them, so that they were truly surprised when they woke up on Christmas morning.
Our eldest had brought some "reindeer food" that she'd made with her Brownie troop. We put that on the balcony the night before, and I scuffed the snow around after they went to bed, to look like the reindeer had come by and snacked on it.

We had a Kids' Cabin room, where the girls had their own little cabin with a bunk bed, a twin-sized bed, and their own game console and TV (the two pictures below are from another Christmas that we spent there.)

Most importantly, we got to spend that Christmas holiday together without worrying about dealing with annoying family, making food, washing dishes, or even going out in the very inclement weather that we were having at the time.
It's one of those times that as a mom of two adults, I still look back on with fondness, and they do too. (They *still* don't know how we managed to sneak all their presents past them.)

So yes, Great Wolf Lodge has wonderful memories for me, but Mr. BTEG and I still found it a very relaxing place to recharge this past weekend, so we can hold on until spring weather gets here to Northeast Ohio (Spring Training notwithstanding, Scottius!)

And I'm going to do my absolute best to put content up here every Monday and Thursday! It might be crap content ;), but it won't be doll-related. And no, my doll stuff is not crap, thankyouverymuch! :)

Thursday, January 04, 2018

Happy New Year!

I've meaning to put up a blog post for a while, because I have some big news, but I never did. I'm out of the habit, not sure anyone reads this thing anymore, etc. But then Scottius Maximus re-emerged from his own blogging hiatus, which gave me the impetus I needed to revisit my own blog. However, this post isn't going to be about 2018, but the last big family event of 2017. Our eldest daughter got married!
As you can guess, the wedding had a Halloween theme. Overall, it was very nice. I'm hoping I won't have to deal with any big events in 2018, however, at least not in my immediate family!