Sand is Still Everywhere

I woke up too early this morning.  I first woke up at 6:30am!  In the past week I've been waking up about 10min before my alarm.  But not at 6:30!  I struggled, but I was finally able to get back to sleep.  I still woke up again at 9:30, which is just unacceptable for a Saturday!  ;-)

Actually, it was quite nice to have so much morning.  I spent the time reading through the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs.  (www.foreignaffairs.org)  My mentor suggested I read this journal, and so I have been.  I really enjoy the essays, but it's often difficult to find the time to read them with the attention they deserve.  He also suggested I check out the Council on Foreign Relations website.  So far I've only skimmed it.  

At one I met up with Keith and we biked to the beach at Katwijk.  We rode through the dunes, which are GORGEOUS, and sat on the beach and ate sandwiches.  There was some sort of coast guard training session, so we got to watch the boats, and planes and helicopters float and fly about.  Quite exciting.  The plane and helicopter did really cool climbs and dives and turned in impossible circles.  Sometimes I thought they were going to land on my head!  Either way, the day was amazing.  Keith said that all in all we probably biked about 30km (18.5 miles!) today!  

I came home and it started raining.  So I watched Zeitgeist, the movie.  Talk about intense!  If you know nothing about it, Wikipedia it.  It's very interesting.  It starts out talking about religion, then moves to conspiracy theories about 9/11, and then on to the Federal Reserve Bank.  Heavy duty stuff.  I very much enjoyed watching.  It gives you a LOT to think about.  

I was glad that it started with religion, truthfully.  It seeks to prove that Jesus was just another in a long line of sun-deities with similar birth, death and resurrection cycles.  It then goes on to try to prove that the Romans invented Jesus to aid in world domination....  Either way, since I studied the Ancient Near East, I was well aware of most of the deities to whom Jesus was being compared.  And a lot of what the guy had to say came out of NOWHERE.  Mostly about the Egyptian god, Horus.  The narrator cited some pretty strange stuff about that guy.  I actually think that most of it was based either on Roman-era Egypt, or on medieval Egypt.  Either way, I was glad to see so clearly how the arguments were structured, because later on, when it got into the really intense images and clips from 9/11 it was very easy to get caught up in the argument based solely on emotion.  

Anyway, definitely an interesting film that really makes you think.  Just, please, do think when you watch it.

Afterwards, I talked with my Aunt Jeannie, Uncle Chuck, 8-year old cousin James, and his Todd on Skype.  They all live in Indiana, so we had a nice long distance discussion about corn.  It's the height of corn season, so Uncle Chuck has been in the fields all day.  I actually worked one summer in the fields myself, so I remember well the extreme heat and the dangers of corn leaves.  Those things can scar you bad.

Lolpod:  A grown man, maybe in his 30s, and his two young children start running toward the ocean.  The man sprints, leaving his children struggling with the boogie boards.  He runs full speed into the water, splashing and lifting his legs up like a 5 year old and then leaps into the air and belly flops!  :-D