I was taught that at birth I carried the sin of Adam and Eve and that I needed to practice certain rituals or pray certain prayers to be cleansed of the sin that I never committed. I needed baptism, confession and contrition to access the creator. In another version of Christianity I needed to be “born again.” I could never be good enough for the creator on my own, being human. And being human, I was condemned to be separate from the creator unless I chose the right way to accept redemption.

As you may know, most of the Quiche Moraine crew has been involved with the Minnesota Atheists’ Atheists Talk radio show. Mike hosted the show until he took over as director earlier this year. At that point, Stephanie became the regular show host. Greg has been a guest multiple times, and all three have interviewed guests for the show.

Eventually in my moving on, I got to Facebook, where I discovered that two celebrity deaths is not enough. One friend was “weirded out by the three celebrity icons that have passed away recently… Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson.” Then there was ” Wow….I know these things seem to happen in threes, but wow.” and “Hopefully Ed McMahon was recent enough to fulfill the law of threes…” and “It happens in threes. It happens in threes.”

Which brings me right up to the present. Since I mention my first girlfriend, I will also mention my last girlfriend, Amanda. There are a number of things that I’ve always liked but no one that I was “with” (as it were) also liked, or at least, such things were not important to them. For instance, I’ve always wanted to own a Subaru. No one I was “with” ever wanted a Subaru, so that never happened. Amanda strongly prefers Subarus. So now we have a couple of them. How cool is that?

I have never traveled to Iran. Iran has come to me in the form of people I have known over the years. When I see the violence committed by the current government against people who are trying to gain at least some semblance of their right to influence their government, I am affected more than I am when it happens in other countries. I can’t be dispassionate about it.

For someone with acrophobia, I spent an awful lot of time as a child a story or more off the ground in trees. We had a treehouse for a few years that was worth the climb up the rope ladder. I spent uncounted hours reading in weeping willows, having juggled a book and usually an apple in my climb. I’d ignore the discomforts of my irregular perch for the privilege of reading uninterrupted, just me and the tree. No one ever looked up.

I was sitting down with a very good friend of mine the other day for a much-needed catch-up session. He said, “My mother’s behaving better. I’m starting to think I might not have to kill her and bury her in the back yard.”

When we express some of our pain from past experiences, intermixed with excitement, look for the brush strokes that each of us uses to express ourselves in our separate posts. When Greg or Stephanie edit my posts, they don’t remove my brush strokes. In those brush strokes, I often reveal either unwittingly or purposely what I am dealing with and it is often my only way of getting certain things out, if only obliquely, because I don’t have someone close that I trust these days.

The food web is a scary place; Model sued after death for letting her looks go; Banks: Not so good for people.

… So, last night, when Ben and Stephanie and I got to Azia and were expecting Ana, but she was running late, I suggested that we order Ana’s favorite dish and wine. This way Ana would be taken care of when she arrived, and we would not have to mess around. I am so incredibly thoughtful that I can’t even believe it sometimes.

It turns out that Azia no longer serves this dish, but that did not matter. Our waiter, who was excellent, simply arranged for the dish to be made, and for a proper wine to be uncorked. The dish was significantly larger than I remembered it, several feet in diameter and teeming with what looked like the day’s catch from a medium-sized trawler (but with no turtles). We were about halfway through when Ana arrived, and I know she appreciated the fact that we had arranged the dinner in her honor, even if we had already eaten most of it….