Well, it was a short summer.

(That’s a Minnesota joke. We like to use it in spring, when an early mild spell is followed by a return of cold weather and snow. Which is what happened today. It snowed on us, although the stuff melted when it hit ground. I expect the snow predicted for tonight will be waiting for us in the morning though.)

Just to bring you up to date on my personal life, which I know is why you come to this blog, I actually had a guy over to look at my room to rent on Sunday. What amazed me was that I’d made a special prayer that morning for the Lord to send me a renter. Then I got a call of inquiry before I left for church.

What spoils the story somewhat is that I suspect the guy won’t take the room. If I’m any judge of people (and I’m not), I don’t think he was much interested in what’s on offer here. But we’ll see.

Today counts as a good day, all in all. I banked my tax refund (smaller than I’d hoped, but welcome) and the Spectator ran my piece. I feel almost like a person today.

I close with the following quotation, which I found in a devotional book this morning. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I like this one a lot:

What an amazing, what a blessed disproportion between the evil we do, and the evil we are capable of doing, and now seem sometimes on the very verge of doing! If my soul has grown tares, when it was full of the seeds of nightshade, how happy ought I to be! And that the tares have not wholly strangled the wheat, what a wonder it is! We ought to thank God daily for the sins we have not committed.

(Frederick W. Faber, 1815-1863)

Alibris.com, a great network of used and rare bookstores, takes reader reviews now, and they are holding a contest to encourage customers to write their opinions.

Moka.com is launching mBooks, “inspiration, innovation, and education via SMS text-Messages or email.” This appears to be similar to the daily emails I get from delanceyplace.com, an excerpt of the day service.

This is a good week to ask this question. Are you comfortable at rest? Do you feel you have too much to do to stop for several minutes to be quiet, watch the grass grow, listen to the rain?

This “horror story” looks to be both an answer to prayer and call for intercession. May God save Mexico, her children, and Ms. Ribeiro.

It only got up to about fifty today, with cloudy skies, and tonight it’ll rain. It might turn to snow.

See, I told you. The stab isn’t coming in March as I predicted, I grant you, but Madame March just handed the shiv off to Lady April. Lady April is just as villainous as Madame March, and the more dangerous because we trust her more.

In case you were wondering what happened with the police cordon I reported on Friday, it was indeed a serious business. And it ended in tragedy. Though not as awful a tragedy as it might have been.

According to news reports, a man named David Dahlen, previously incarcerated for bank robbery in California, walked into the Four Seasons Mall US Bank in Plymouth, Minnesota (which is next door to my dentist’s office, as it happens) with a gun. It’s unclear whether he left with the money he wanted or not, but he fled the bank and entered a house in the neighborhood. He forced the woman who lived there to leave at gunpoint. She called the police, and they sealed off the area. And waited.

While they waited, trying to contact him, he called his family. Then he put the gun to his chest and shot himself. After some hours the police entered the house and found the body.

It’s a sign of the depravity of our times that a story like that seems almost sweet. Here was a guy with a gun, on the run. The standard procedure for someone in that situation, in recent years, has been to take hostages or just shoot down innocent bystanders.

Robbing a bank is a bad thing. Pointing a gun at innocent people is a bad thing. I don’t want to be misunderstood on that. And I consider suicide a mortal sin.

But this guy had the chance to end his life like a Tarantino movie, and instead he chose to go out like someone in a Bret Harte story. In my book, that wins him a few sympathy points.

How many times have I heard of a hostage or sniper situation in the last few years and thought, “If you want to kill yourself, just kill yourself—don’t murder people who want to live”?

May the Lord have mercy on David Dahlen.