Serf In Training

Yesterday I wrote about Jonathan Dickinson’s 1696 horrific trek along the beach of East Florida. Ginny gave me a reproduction of his Journal which was published in 1699.

Then, last night our daughter Eve and her husband, Mark, came over and gave me a compressed gas Space Pen from NASA’s Kennedy Space Flight Center—which now sits on a stretch of beach which Dickinson’s party passed in privation after their shipwreck.

Mark and Eve toured the NASA facility over the 4^th Of July weekend.

So, from 1696 shipwrecks to modern-day moon shots, I’m well supplied with related souvenirs.

I think that’s so cool.

Mark proved himself to be an astute listener last night. In only a few minutes of conversation, he isolated and identified a writing problem I have struggled with for a month without being able to even state my own problem. I've percolated it again and again but I've just been too close to it to see what's been wrong. He offered several practical suggestions and I’m indebted to him.

He also said that my seemingly insolvable problems may be the result of God’s gently nudging me in a different direction.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Speaking of a different direction: This morning I published two brief items, one on an incident in Jacksonville history, the other a biographical sketch of Christian mystic Madam Jeanne Guyon, in KNOL , Google’s new on-line encyclopedia which was just launched today.

No. I’m authority enough on anything to be contributing encyclopedia articles anywhere, but no one else had touched on these subjects in KNOL yet, so I exercised my vanity just for the fun of it.

Ginny and I have begun CERT training classes; CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Teams. The idea being that in a massive catastrophe (such as a hurricane, nuclear attack or major industrial accident) police, firemen, and other first responders may be overwhelmed and not be able to get into isolated neighborhoods.

Therefore, Jacksonville’s Emergency Management authority, is training civilians to put out fires, rescue victims from collapsed buildings, render emergency medical aid, and things of that sort.

One funny thing; Ginny and I are both soft-spoken people, so when we told Mark and Eve about our training to be “CERTS”, Mark, who is involved in role-playing games set in Medieval times, thought we’d said “SERFS”.

“You’re training to be serfs!???” he exclaimed.

We got a good laugh over that.

I think Mark’s training to become King.

He’d make a good one.