a small handful of things that didn’t seem to warrant full, individual posts…

i really like facebook, and use it all the time. and i have a pretty good amount of “friends”, mostly due to my job. in fact, since latin america seems to have caught on to facebook, and i travel to our ys conventions in argentina and guatemala most years, i have a bunch of spanish-speaking fb “friends” with whom i cannot even communicate, other than the occasional “hola!” on a normal day, i get 2 – 5 friend requests. but tuesday, i was at my writing spot, and noticed that a TON of friend requests were coming in. i’d seen a virus-y kind of thing on facebook recently, where a comment told me my picture was on some other site (and it was clearly not from the person who theoretically sent it). so i started to think i might be getting slammed with some kind of virus thing. when it got to 45 friend requests, i twittered about my concern. when it got to 95 requests (in less than two hours), i was really starting to freak out. by the time i got to the office, there were 150 friend requests waiting for my approval. i wasn’t sure what to do with them. then, i noticed in one of them, that the person had tipped me off to the fact that a ys online survey told him to do this. i saw our internet peeps had sent out a survey about our weekly emails. so i clicked through the survey, and there at the end, was a little “joke”; something like, “click here and add marko as a friend on facebook. shh! don’t tell him, and this will be our little secret.” well, there you have it. over the last few days i’ve had a steady stream of friend requests — about 300 or 400 now, i’d say. crazy. i might have to fire someone.

my awesome son max had a few words, as kids are prone to do, that he pronounced wrong when he was little. one by one, these fell by the wayside. jeannie and i loved each one of them, and were always sad to see them go. the last hold-on was that he has always said “callerpitter” when he means “caterpillar”. the other day, caterpillar was on his weekly spelling list. jeannie and i groaned, and were so sad to see the veil removed for him once and for all. he likes being a kid, and insists he’s going to keep saying it callerpitter, and even says he’s going to spell it that way on the spelling quiz.

saw an amazing movie on the plane to nashville. it’s called henry poole is here, and stars luke wilson. it’s the story of a terminally ill guy who buys a surburban home down the street from his childhood home to basically sit alone and die. but his neighbors won’t leave him alone, especially when one is convinced she sees the face of christ in a badly done stucco job on his back wall. it’s wonderfully slow paced, and a beautiful story of mystery and healing. i teared up multiple times.

i’m reading anne rice’s spiritual autobiography right now (anne rice is the massively popular author of a bunch of vampire books, and also the brilliant newer series, christ the lord). in a bit i read yesterday, she revealed that her given name, which she used until she was in elementary school and decided to start using the out-of-thin-air name “anne”, was… howard. seriously.