All things considered, today was an improvement. I feel marginally better than yesterday. The Cold From… well, I’ll say Sniffleheim, which is a pun on the name of a bad place in Norse mythology that you probably wouldn’t recognize, seems to be retreating at last. And I stopped at a body shop after work to get an estimate on my bumper. They offered to let one of the technicians reattach it with a couple screws as a “side job,” and I got away for twenty bucks, which the girl who did the damage has promised to send me.

Ed Veith, over at Cranach, makes the sad announcement that the Luther At the Movies blog has been put to bed forever. However, Dr. Luther’s “miserable, execrable assistant,” Anthony Sacramone, has joined the blogging stable at First Things, so that’s some consolation.

He does a gorgeous takedown of The Golden Compass here.

America waits in hushed anticipation, one question on its trembling lips: “Does Walker feel better?”

Walker replies (in an impressive, deep voice), “I’m not actually sure.”

Saturday I woke up hopefully (I always feel sort of fair when I first get up), thinking “I can probably manage going to church to set up today…” (as I’ve mentioned, my church meets in a gymnasium, and my team is called on to set up the stage and chairs once every five weeks) “…and then do some Christmas shopping, and get a couple things at the grocery store.”

After an hour or two (spent mostly on the couch) I thought, “I’ll have to call in AWOL on the set-up, but I can probably do some shopping and go to the grocery store. I don’t have much left to buy.”

A couple hours later I said, “I guess I can still get some groceries. That’s not far to drive.”

And then I gave up on the groceries too.

Sunday I spent reading books, in a prone position.

Today I went in to work, and put in my time. I was not a human dynamo, but I was there and I did what a man’s gotta do.

I’m still coughing, though, and still don’t have much of a voice. If it doesn’t clear up soon I suppose I’ll have to see the doctor and inquire delicately about bronchitis.

I stopped at the drug store tonight, and while I was inside a young woman clipped the corner of Mrs. Hermanson, my Tracker, and tore her front bumper off. She had me paged in the store, and gave me her name and phone number (the young woman, that is. Not Mrs. Hermanson). She said she was driving her father’s car, and didn’t have any ID or insurance information on her. She wants to handle it outside insurance.

I’m not delighted about this, and I figure there’s a good chance she’ll just change her phone number once I give her the estimate, but I don’t know what else I could do under the circumstances.

Then again, I suppose if she were out to rip me off, she could have just driven away.



For Pete’s sake, girl, if you wanted to give me your phone number, you could have just introduced yourself!

How long do you think it’ll be before some expert announces that the smell of fresh-cut pine boughs causes cancer?

Yeah, I’m feeling a little better. Compared to the last couple days. Compared to waterboarding. Compared to sitting through a re-run of Family Affair. I put in another full day at work, but I have all the energy and zest for life of… well, of a middle-aged, depressive Norwegian. Normal, in other words. Normal with a deep desire for sleep, a bad cough, and a voice south of James Earl Jones’.

I like the deep voice. One of the many dreams life has denied me, like the dream of being six feet tall, was the dream of singing bass. I got as far down as baritone, but people usually assume I’m a tenor. I don’t want to be thought of as a tenor. I want to be thought of as a bass—a sea-bottom bass with an extra Y chromosome.

The pleasure is reduced by the fact that only about half of my words actually get out. I alternate between no voice of all and a bass rumble: “(Croak) name is (croak) Walker.”



Now I shall crawl away to the sofa.

My cold (I’m pretty sure by now it’s a cold) is still with me. The sore throat is better, but I’m more stuffed up today. And yet I went in to work, good soldier that I am. Now I’m home and I plan to lie down a bit after I’ve posted this, and before I get to some more Christmas cards.



There are a couple Minnesota connections to that Colorado shootings story. One is that one of the dead at the YWAM facility was a Minnesota native, Tiffany Johnson. Another Minnesotan, Charles Blanch, was wounded in the leg. And of course you’ve heard about Jeanne Assam, the volunteer security guard who shot and stopped the shooter (who will not be dignified by the use of his name in this post), although apparently he took his own life at the end.

According to this report, Assam was fired from the Minneapolis police force in 1997. This information caught my attention right off, since I can think of many possible reasons why a Christian might be fired in the politically correct climate of Minneapolis city politics today. But apparently she was fired for lying about an incident on a bus where she swore at a driver. Sounds more like a pre-conversion incident, though one never knows.

What is certainly true is that right now, on top of the trauma of having been involved in a fatal fire fight, and survivor’s guilt, she is facing public scrutiny directed at a past she may have hoped to have put behind her. So a prayer for her, as well as for the wounded and the families of the victims, would not be out of order.