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The greeting card holidays such as Mother's Day, Father's Day, and even Valentine's Day pass with little hoohah in this household. Only the wording of the morning salutation changes. Instead we reserve our energies for the biggies, Christmas, Fourth of July, and of course, the kids' birthdays. My own father (along with Mom) is out of range of easy phone contact somewhere in Buda or Pest this week, so I will observe the holiday for a few minutes this afternoon with eyes closed and body supine on the sofa -- not a full-drool snooze, mind you, just a quick peek at the abyss.

Well, that was the plan. The bylaws committee met at the fellowship building this morning. I trusted that the meeting would last for just the hour promised by the committee chair. Knowing that this would be our last meeting before some of our members scatter to the cooler North for the summer, I added an extra thirty minutes. Unless they are bounded by some other event that we'd all like to see, such as a meal, a Sunday program, or a chance to don comfortable shoes and hand out leaflets for a worthy cause, these meetings go on forever. Pick a number between one and gazillion. Add the year of your birth. Subtract your age. Multiply by the IQ of your insurance agent (okay, ours is a nice guy, so use the number of your kids' baby teeth you have stored somewhere, and if you have fewer than three kids, the number should be about the same anyway). Divide by your ideal weight. Today that number equaled three. Three. Hours.

We spent two full hours discussing and debating the issue of absentee ballots in annual meetings and other congregational meetings. In this two hours we finally agreed to add a provision to the bylaws to permit absentee ballots. The procedures to implement the ballots will take many more hours to craft, and when presented to the fellowship for a vote, the measure will fail, I believe, because the folks who will believe their powers of argument are diminished if the audience is reduced will outnumber the folks who believe that they or others have been empowered by absentee balloting. The names of Rousseau, Mill, Locke and Emerson will be bandied about, and by the end of the meeting many of us will understand why Henry David left the village to dine on woodchuck by the pond.

Did I mention that there are only three folks on this committee? I cannot guess at the number of minutes or syllables that we will expend debating this before the entire fellowship.

But enough of that! Believing that most desperation should be suffered quietly, and recognizing that lately I've been coming away from these meetings signalling that I'm not enjoying myself at them, I'll move unceremoniously away from the darker recesses of this rant to a few quick notes on the salubrious weather we've enjoyed this weekend. We've had cool temperatures -- never above 80 F -- and if rain has fallen, it has fallen gently overnight. The hue of the blue sky has ranged from bright to pale but never to gray. And like most college towns in the hinterland, ours remains tranquil during the summer session.

Finally, after writing this handful of maudlin paragraphs, I am sufficiently decompressed to finish the day grading student compositions that are promised for tomorrow. Good night.

On Friday the pop-up ad appeared at the Tripod site. I'll eliminate the ad square on the Geocities pages this week.

The opportunity to spend 177⁹ for a gallon of gas slipped past me on Friday. Instead, overnight from Thursday to Friday every gas station in town was offering a chance to buy at 185⁹, every last one. Nope, no price-fixing here, according to the opinion of a past Kansas attorney general.

Reading:
The manual for the 45 mpg Metro, a car that is looking ever better these days, even though I must punch the A/C off to keep up with bicyclists when going up hill.

Wondering:
Would a $50 fill-up bother someone who has a $500/month guzzler payment? Or is the cost to them chump-change and the kvetching a boast?