Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Besides the loose parakeet I've been tailing, we've been watching a pair of house wrens that made a nest in a cardboard box on top of a large tool chest my dad has on our back porch. Not the safest place, but they're doing well; the eggs hatched recently and the parents have been hopping back and forth from the nest, hunting for grasshoppers and other bugs to feed to the three or four chicks my dad spotted, deep inside the ball of leaves and twigs and grass the two little darlings built. They're fun to see perched on the porch railings, or on the tip of a car molding that's sticking out from under the box; they seem to think it's a perfect wren roost!

They're the cutest little things; at first glance, they look like sparrows, but they hold their tails almost straight up and down, which gives them this perky, pert look. Plus they've got that white stripe across their heads, which my dad says, "Makes them look like some kind of a chipmunk-bird." And they've got these cute, feisty personalities: I'll be passing through, on my way to the mailbox or to work, and they'll hop up into the trees and scold at me, making this cute little "Ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee! Err-err-err-err-err-err-err!" noise that I've learned to mimic, to their annoyance. I just scold back at them, which ticks them off royally.

Mind you, this is the most recent of three or four generations of wren families we've had build a nest on our porch. Usually, they take up residence in a hanging plant, but my dad was a bit late getting a plant for the porch, so the newest renters seem to have done the resourceful thing and found the next best subsitute they could find. I like to think that a now-grown bird from the previous clutch comes back every year and tells their mate about this lovely sheltered nook that's just right to build a nest, how their parents built their nest at that spot, and about that crazy human with the shiny things over her eyes, who'd always be chattering back at Mom and Dad when they'd squawk at her for getting too close to the nest.

Ahhhh... nothing like a day off after a looong shift the day before... I finished tinkering with the translation of the "A.I." fanfic in Portuguese and just posted that to the fanfic group. I also wrote the turning-point scene in "A Little Child Shall Lead Him": the Merv attempts to enter the Source... with some unsettling results....

I picked up my paycheck: and I bought the little stuffed toy wolf that had been watching me from on top of the register all Monday afternoon with this "Take me home..." look in his yellow eyes.

And Merry the parakeet chewed through his wooden swing. For the fourth time. My dad replaced it tonight, but he also got a little bit of payback: he took Merry out of the cage, in his hand, and got Merry to sit on his finger! We tried getting the little guy to sit on my finger, but he decided he'd had enough and went to see what Oskar the cockatiel was up to: and promptly annoyed the heck out of Oz!

My mom and I also had one of our semi-weekly (bi-weekly? tri-weekly??) Bible study sessions, just reading from the Gospels and talking about it, no major exegetical ramblings... We're reading the Gospel According to Luke right now, specifically the infancy of Christ; which caused me to have classical Christmas music playing in my head, specifically "There Were Shepherds Abiding in the Fields" from Handel's "Messiah" and 'The Shepherds' Farewell" from Berlioz's "L'Enfance du Christ"... And of course, my "Matrix" obsession kicked in as well. Earlier today, I was reading the article "Finding God in the 'Matrix'" in "Taking the Red Pill", and part of that article found paralells, not just between Christ and Neo, or Judas Iscariot and Cypher (the most obvious) but other Biblical paralells with some of the "Matrix" characters: Morpheus is similar to John the Baptizer, the herald of the Messiah; Trinity is similar to Mary Magdalen, the woman who loved Christ; Tank is similar to St. Peter ("Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Most High" = "He's the ONE!!"). I thought of another one: Councillor Hammann, in "Reloaded" is somewhat similar to Simeon, the old man who had asked God to let him live to see the face of the Messiah. So... and some people might consider this blasphemous, but it really isn't: the Wachowskis borrowed a line from Isaiah and used it in the script, Morpheus's "I dreamed a dream, and now that dream is taken from me". ... I'm taking Simeon's "Now Thou canst dismiss Thy servant..." speech in the second chapter of Luke and adapting it into a very short "Matrix" fic, Hammann's thoughts when the war with the machines is resolved... I think it's quite clever!