Journal mcgrew's Journal: More Stormy weather 9
I got home from work the week before last to find two Amerin trucks outside my house. One of the guys in one of them said they'd shut off the neighborhood's gas, since a backhoe had ruptured the line when they were installing a new sidewalk down the street. It was back on in half an hour, and one of them lit my water heater's pilot.
Amy dropped by before I left for work the next day and asked if she could use the phone in the morning to call some social service agencies. I said "sure". When I got back for lunch, she said "Leila called, she sounded like she was crying. I think it was Leila." Regular readers know that Futurama spelled my oldest daughter's name wrong. In fact, that's not all they got wrong -- her sister Patty is the mutant, not Leila. An it isn't one eye, it's one kidney.
Their mother has recently converted to the cult of Mormon. That really upset Patty, because when her mother remarried she couldn't attend the wedding, as you have to be Mormon to enter a Mormon church.
Mormons aren't Christians no matter what they say. Patty had called me once, worried because her mother told her you can't get in heaven unless you're baptized. Coincidentally, there's a TV preacher that answers bible questions written in by viewers, and one asked him the very same thing. He pointed out that Jesus told the repentant but unbaptized thief who was on the next cross, "on this day you will be with me in paradise."
That damned woman left ten years ago and she's still causing trouble.
Patty called back that evening, cursing me because Amy had answered the phone. Then she showed up at the door the following Sunday, shortly after I got home from church and had popped open a beer to listen to the blues show on WQNA that an old friend DJs. She cursed me for an hour before getting her sister to visit my mother. Cursing me for drinking, for the house being messy, for having an auto accident a month ago, everything. When she got back in town with her sister she continued the beration.
It wasn't fun, and I had a hard time holding my tongue. I felt like slapping the brat. She's been having a hard time making it on her own, but it's no excuse to take it out on me.
The next morning at work the phone rang. It was leila, in tears, crying so hard I could barely understand what she was trying to say. She'd broken her headphones and her sister had gone off on her about the headphones, when she should have been sympathetic. "And she was out until 4:00 AM drinking," Leila said. That after berating ME for drinking!
She went back to Cincinnati and I took Leila to get a new pair of headphones.
That weekend Amy dropped by again, crying. Jesus, what is it with these teary eyed women and their drama, anyway? Her new husband Tim had told her to meet him halfway to where he said he was, and he wasn't even there. Amy has clinical depression and hadn't been taking her meds, and I wound up taking her to the hospital to keep her from committing suicide. If you're on an SSRI, don't stop taking them or the result may be suicide. If you're not on them, don't start unless you're already suicidal -- the only time in my life I ever contemplated doing myself in was when the doctor took me off Paxil while my house was being foreclosed. Nasty stuff!
That night tornados hit Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, and a few other states as well. They were very close to the GameStop Patty works at in Kentucky. The tornados seemed to calm Patty right down, and we've had pleasant email exchanges since.
She's worried about her customers, many of whom surely have lost everything, if they're even still alive. We both went through the twin tornados that hit here in March 2006 so she knows what they're like and what they can do. Pray you are never in one. Being inside a tornado is like being inside a giant blender.
Today I got an email from her saying that God is indeed watching over her. Since her car broke down irreparably, she's been taking the bus to work. Yesterday she overslept, so called a friend for a ride.
The bus stop blew up right where she would have been standing right when she would have been standing there. She didn't say what caused the explosion, my guess is a broken gas line.
Maybe someone wants to keep her on her toes...
Mormons (Score:2)
Non-Mormons can't get into the Temple, which is different from the meeting halls/churches where Sunday services are held. Anyone is welcome there.
Many Mormons can't get into the Temples. You need a valid "Temple recommend" from your Bishop saying you're in good standing. Not really hard to get, but still.
Most Mormons I know that have had Temple marriages are either from a fairly all-Mormon family/community or have a "normal" ceremony and later a Temple ceremony.
Converts, however, make the worst type of fana
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That says it all.
Introduce them to pastafarianism - the food's better, you're *supposed* to drink with it, and you get to sleep in on weekends.
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Christians are supposed to drink with their bread also (far from FSM followers), an fact it's a religious rite where you commune with Christ and fellow Christians.
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It's strange how many fundie sects try to make it that "no, it wasn't alcoholic wine" when the evidence is clear that it was - and the archaeological evidence shows that there was a good trade in wine - including the equivalent of todays' stock market - and that you could invest in 100-year-old wines (how many wines today would last 100 years before going bad, despite more modern techniques?).
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how many wines today would last 100 years before going bad, despite more modern techniques?
I'd be willing to bet that any hundred year old anything would tase like utter crap, but if you spent a fortune on a bottle of wine it would be human nature to think it tasted good no matter how bad it really did taste.
Most churches do use grape juice rather than wine for communion, but when I ask why the pastor (whatever the church) always says it's for the benefit of recovering alcoholics. Which I can understand, ha
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A convenient lie. the original ban was under pressure from the Women's Christian Temperance Union, back when taverns were "men and hookers only" places. Before that, wine was fine. So, if it's "for the benefit of recovering alcoholics", ask them if they drink it at home ... and watch the fun as they try to find a way to rationalize that :-)
Meh. (Score:2)
Mormons are crazy. But they worship Christ and read the Bible - that makes them Christians. The "not a real Christian" stuff got old before Henry VIII bought the farm 460 years ago.
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But they worship Christ and read the Bible
But do they worship Christ? It seems to me that they follow Joe Smith rather than Christ. They have their own extention to the bible, "the book of mormon." Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to the Jewish religion; as Bhuddists are to the Hindu religion.
The mormons add things that are forbidden, like alcohol. This despite the fact that Jesus was a drinker (Luke 7:33) "For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a de
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Sounds no different from my evangelical in-laws arguing that Catholics spend more time worshiping Jesus's mother than Jesus himself. It's all the same "No True Scottsman" crap.
And Catholics add things that are forbidden, like contraceptives and priests marrying. No True Scottsman.
Mormons, like JW's, are insane. My favorite bit about Mormons, though, is how they