12 November 2003 Sara and I built our own very fun version of the board game Settlers of Catan, to replace the poor copy which was removed from us some months ago. We played it for the first time today, and I won, using the blue colour. It was quite fun to play, even though Sara made cards very quickly that were the bare minimum for playing: the commodity/resource cards were just little slips of white paper with the words of the resources they that represented written upon them. But the board is quite beautiful and even has the slightly fantastic quality that the official American board has. We ordered some replacement cards in the mail that we should recieve soon. I also recieved a copy of Anouilh's 'Antigone' to replace my former copy. It is an excellent edition, an old book, dating back to 1948, and it has an interesting introduction and interpretation of the book. My French class read through 'Le Petit Prince' together, and I'd like to read this book with them as well, as it is very interesting. When we attended church two weeks ago I finally performed 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' It was a bit of a dixieland version, except that it has straight eighth notes. I learned this perhaps on the second rehearsal when the director told me to play them straight (as opposed to swinging them, as I had been doing). It was a very fun part, and the church even said that I could play clarinet in all the services from now on. The only problem is that I would have to attend rehearsals on Saturday mornings, and since Saturday is generally the only day on which I can sleep in, I'll probably opt to play every other Sunday, thus attending only every other rehearsal. I wish that they would just use simple hymnbooks, then I could transpose the parts easily, but instead they use modern worship songs. But there is an advantage to this: that they tend to have less frequent chord changes, so once I know the key that a song is in and the basic chord structure, they are easy to improvise to. But I also think that they aren't particularly well written. Well, neither are normal hymns, at least according to CS Lewis, but at least they're a Bit more poetic and musical. And at any rate they are all (hopefully) made for praising God. (although with the current state of the recording industry, who knows...; first it was art for beauty's state, then art for art's sake, now it's art for [insert political agenda here]'s sake (at least according to postmodernism). Does the soul exist? Here is a fascinating article which reponds very well to the question. Actually, the site christian-thinktank.com itself holds various interesting topics. It explains possible explanations and reasons to believe in the soul as a metaphysical (or perhaps transcendent of matter) entity (as opposed to its being an 'emergent system' which manifests after a certain level of biological complexity), and its relationship to quantum physics. I also installed Mozilla as my web browser, and I feel a bit nostalgic using it as it reminds me of the time when I first began using the internet in 1994, using... probably, Mozilla (perhaps Mosaic before this). Then Netscape, then Netscape Navigator, until about version 5). Then MSIE.