Good morning, Everyone! Happy Easter! Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!

To which type of insane behavior are you most prone? Take this Personality Test and find out. I won't tell you what I am. I'll let you guess.

I have participated in two Tenebrae services this year. The first was on Maundy Thursday at my own church. For those of you who don’t know why Holy Thursday is called Maundy Thursday, I will explain. The evening of the Last Supper was memorable for a number of reasons, other than that this was when Christ instituted Holy Communion. He began the evening by washing the feet of his Disciples, who protested that they, as students of the Master, should be washing His feet. This foot-washing was a way of showing that we should all be servants of each other, and was a prelude to the Great Commandment, which Christ gave that evening. Love one another. This is the Commandment that eliminates the need for any other. The word Maundy is from a Latin root meaning “mandate”.

The Tenebrae service is a very moving and solemn service built around scripture readings and the extinguishing of lights. Tenebrae means “shadows”. After a service of Communion, the crucifixion story is read in sections. At my church, each section ended with the words “and the darkness grew deeper”, followed by the extinguishing of a candle. After the last reading, the Christ Candle is extinguished, not to be re-lit until Easter morning.

The other service was on Good Friday. I had been asked to augment a very small choir at another church in performing a short cantata based on the Seven Last Words of Christ. (Words and Music by M. Isabelle Ritter) In this case, each candle was extinguished after each section of the cantata. For those of you who are not familiar with the Seven Last Words, they are:

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Today thou shalt be with me in paradise. (Spoken to the thief who repented.)
Woman, behold thy son.
My God, why hast thou forsaken me.
I thirst.
It is finished.
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men---that is genius.

-------Ralph Waldo Emerson

I found this definition of genius at the official website for A Beautiful Mind, the Academy Award winning film which I saw last night. I don’t agree with this definition, however. Rather than genius, I feel that this belief is at the heart of the writer’s need to share his thoughts. It is also what makes him courageous enough to attempt it.

The Big Game has rolled over to a jackpot of 76 million dollars for Friday’s drawing, and a bunch of us from the office are putting in $1.00 each to buy tickets as a group. I’m not much of a gambler, but I can’t resist getting in on this one. I love having a few days to dream before the drawing.

I’ve played the game of “What Would I Do?” before, and I realized that many of the things I would do don’t require winning the Lottery. That is why I sing in a choir that has toured Europe twice; that is why I have a cleaning service at my house twice a month; that is why I have taken voice lessons and have been part of a theater group for the past seven years; that is why I am a member of The Art Institute, The Field Museum, and The Museum of Science and Industry. That is why my husband and I have a subscription to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That is also why I contribute to my church, the college I attended and several other charities.

I like to think that if I won the lottery I would just go on doing what I’ve been doing, but perhaps on a grander scale. Maybe I'd have the cleaning people in once a week and move out of the nosebleed seats at the Symphony. In any case, why wait? What would you do? What can you do now? Life is short. Don’t wait for your luck to change.

I just finished reading Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, an imaginative account of the story of the girl in Vermeer's famous painting. It amazes me that such a simple plot can be made into a most enjoyable book. If you only look at the action that occurs, not much happens. However, the story is told in the first person, so it’s like getting inside the mind of this young girl much more than another point of view would be. I imagine it must be quite difficult to write well in the first person, because the author would have to constantly be on guard to think in the character’s voice consistently. The advantage, of course, is being able to know without a doubt how the character feels about what is happening. When Griet is careful not to show any outward signs of her feelings, the reader knows every fear, every uncertainty, every joy, every moment of awakening sensuality.

It is no wonder that major clients are deserting Anderson Accounting like cockroaches scurrying for cover when the lights go on. The finger-pointing and blame-assigning for the fall of Enron will go on for months or years, and the impact will be global. The public’s faith in a company is only as good as the opinion of its outside accountants, as demonstrated in my personal experience by the rapid fall of Sabratek stock when its outside accounting firm refused to sign off on the company’s financial statement. If, however, it has been demonstrated that the accounting firm itself has allowed one of its clients to flourish due to imprudent practices, how can any company allow itself to be represented by that firm?

Publicly held companies should be held to even higher standards than are individuals. After all, these companies exist because people have, in good faith, lent them their hard-earned money in the form of stock purchases. Can you imagine the disastrous result for one’s personal finances if, month after month, that person paid his credit card bill by transferring the balance to another credit card while continuing to make credit purchases?

This “robbing Peter to pay Paul” practice is exemplified by the refusal of the company I work for to process credits for returned merchandise beyond a budgeted monthly amount. Customer credits, of course, impact sales figures. As long as the processing of those credits is delayed, the sales will look good on paper to our parent company. In the meantime, however, our customers have already taken deductions for the material they have returned, whether we have issued the credits or not. In not recognizing these deductions by processing the associated credits, reduced revenues appear to be a collection problem. Monthly meetings are held to address these “collection” problems. There is a lot of bluster, and a lot of empty words peppered by profanity on the part of certain individuals, but the problem increases each month.

Ignoring the credits waiting to be processed will not make the ever-increasing backlog disappear. Let the sales force work a little harder to make up for the returned material; let the salesmen ensure that the proper pricing is in the system before the customer orders; let the order entry department be more accurate concerning both material and pricing; let the warehouse be more accurate in shipping the material that is ordered in a timely manner and according to customer instructions; let there be better quality control in manufacturing to ensure that we have a saleable product. The backlog of credits is not a collection problem.

It’s time to admit that our budgeted figures do not accurately reflect reality. The day of reckoning is approaching when the master of the house, in the form of our outside auditors, will return and expect a true accounting.

I read an article in the Arts section of the Sunday Trib that deals with making art out of chaos. Essentially, it states that many of the classics were built around the idea that a person’s fate is inevitable based on the fact that we are all flawed in some way. Those flaws will make our stories unfold in some predetermined way. However, the trend in modern literature is to try to make sense out of random events.

In the tradition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, the tragedies of September 11, 2001 are generating works of literature that try to impose some sort of order or pattern on occurrences that are beyond the scope of normal reasoning. What brought those particular people together at that place and time on the bridge that collapsed? Why were some in the Twin Towers saved and others not?

Why is it that is the higher-ups in this organization are held to a lower standard of language usage than the worker-bees? Maybe they think that if they pepper their speech with curses it will hide the fact that they really don't know what they're talking about. I wonder how long I would be working here if I made a habit of speaking the same way as the men at the meeting I just attended.

"I've got $170, do I hear $175? $175? Going once, going twice SOLD to number 39 for $170.00!" My daughter beamed as she became the proud owner of an antique dresser to replace a much more modern one that was falling apart. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.

Yesterday was the Boy Scout Auction at my church. No, we don't auction off Boy Scouts, but rather donated items to help raise money for summer camp and other Scout activities throughout the year. My church has sponsored the troop for more than 50 years. Russ, the Troop Leader and resident curmudgeon, has lead the troop for most of that time. He has been nationally recognized for his contribution to Scouting. On Scout Sunday, a few weeks ago, four boys received their Eagle Rank, bringing the total Eagles attained under Russ' leadership to 125, I think.

The auction is lots of fun, and usually raises enough money to pay half the boys' summer camp fees, and allows the troop to give a generous donation back to the church as its sponsoring institution.

One of the highlights of the auction every year, and something of a mystery to the "serious" bidders, is the puma auction. Every year someone donates a ceramic puma, black, chartreuse, white. Something that might be worth about $3.00 in a second hand store. This year, it may have had a bit more intrisinc value, as it was black onyx. The Scout Alumni from the troop get together and make donations to the "puma fund". When the puma comes up for bid, the fun begins. The bidding is fast and furious, and goes higher and higher until it reaches the agreed limit, with a pre-determined person making the last bid. This year, the puma brought in $415.00. The pumas are presented to Russ, who has quite a collection, I understand.

Just for fun, some members of the church got together and did a puma-type auction of their own. The object selected was a small straw hat trimmed with golf tees and artificial grass. The successful bidder paid $150.00 for it and wore it for the rest of the afternoon.

I just went to the most creative art exhibit at the Garfield Park Conservatory. It was a display of creations in colored glass by an artist named Chihuly. In among all the palms and cacti and other plants were these exquisite, whimsical colored glass creations. The largest piece in the exhibit was the first one to be seen on walking in. It was a ten foot tall tower of blue tentacles reaching out in all directions. Some of the pieces in the exhibit could be easily missed, they look so much like some sort of exotic flower.


The Conservatory was also having its Spring Flower Show featuring mounds of azaleas amid murmering waterfalls. I hope this will inspire me to be more attentive to my gardening this year. It was much easier to get to by public transportation than I would have thought. Simply transfer to the Green Line at Clark/Lake and take it back north to the Conservatory stop, walk down the stairs and you can see the Conservatory from there.

The day after the water heater installation, I went to lunch at Barbara's Kitchen and took the picture I printed on my computer. I had gotten the "three forks" logo from the Trib and framed it with the logos. Barbara gave me a free piece of flan for doing it. Here's my first attempt at putting a picture on my weblog.

I must vent about this water heater situation. Finally, after two weeks of Chuck having to light the pilot every time we needed hot water, we got a Sears repairman to come and look at it. Chuck had already replaced the thermocouple, to no avail. The repair call would cost $65.00, and I had to take a half day of PTO to be home when the guy came. He came about noon, fiddled with it awhile, and said I probably needed a new valve, but it’s $80.00 just for the part and I may as well get a new water heater. So I went to Sears and found a comparable one to what we had for $239.00. Not bad. But installation was $214.00!!!! By the time I got the maintenance contract for 5 years, and paid for the $40.00 City of Chicago license and another $9.99 for some doohickey the City requires, and the cost to haul the old one away, the damn thing cost $633.00. And I had to take another full day off of work because they couldn’t tell me when the installer would be here. What a major pain! And it cost yet another $60.00 to bring the installation up to code! Apparently, the plastic pipe on the outside is no longer code, and copper is required; also, it needed something called a drip leg on the gas pipe.

Since the installer didn’t arrive till 4:00 p.m., I didn’t do much all day long other than finish up writing some meeting minutes and scan a picture I found in the Trib of my favorite little hole-in-the wall restaurant that got reviewed by the big city paper. And I guess a lot of junk got knocked loose in the pipes, because now there’s just a bare trickle of hot water in the kitchen sink.

This all doesn't sound very literary, but at least it's writing. Well, more like ranting right now.

"If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything."