Sometimes I Amaze Even Myself

I simply could not buckle down and write/finish my Plural Marriage paper last night. So instead I typed the pertinent quotations and citations into a Word doc, sent it and the fragmentary draft to my work email, and ended up doing 85% of the writing at the office, printing out the final draft at 3:20pm, just before I was scheduled to leave.

And the scary thing is that it's a pretty good paper. Not as good as it could have been had I actually spent a couple of evenings hammering at it, but entirely respectable.

The assignment restricted us to 6-8 pages, not including endnotes (our slop/cheat space). I came in just short of 8, plus just over two pages of endnotes. Of course there was no way to cover the a substantive topic in that space, so we were expected to define one or two narrow issues and address them in order to demonstrate our ability to apply ethical methodology to a controversy. I focused on "the descriptive task" - covering what marriage is and what plural marriage is, and then doing a brief discussion about what "scriptural authority" has to offer on the matter.

If anyone is interested in reading what a Swedenborgian Christo-Pagan has to say about plural marriage in a Christian ethical context, I can email it to you in a Word attachment. You can post your email in the Comments section, or email me at janetsabrina at yahoo dot com

For now, I'm going to sink into my new novel The Treasure of Montsegur, work some more on my own novel, spend Saturday afternoon working on a character for a Pax Draconis game, and then catch a late showing of Harry Potter. In other words, I'm going to relax for a few days, then start in on the paper I owe my Swedenborgian exegesis prof in order to remove my Incomplete.

And In Practical Ethics

Many thanks to amqu for digging back into my archives and sharing this link about the documented instances of United States servicemen and women doing the right thing while working with Iraqi prisoners.

It provides an alternative perspective on the "we were being pressured from above" defense being offered by those now on trial.

Moral agency is still alive and well in some parts of our armed forces.

Not Good!!

No, that's not a moral judgement, it's an expression of alarm on the part of a homeowner.

My taps were pouring forth reddish-brown water a little while ago while making ominous clanking sounds. It's back to normal now but - yikes! They are not supposed to do that! What makes it even more unsettling is that the upstairs taps were functioning normally.

My water gremlins clearly do not consider themselves propitiated yet.

Update: It's the next morning. Something is clearly wrong with the water pipe coming into my bathroom sink. The water is mostly clear, but there's rattling and thrumming in the pipe. Must call in the experts: plumbers first, then, perhaps the exorcists or the gremlin mediators.