deluxe nap

The best part of Sunday is the nap. Not the High Priestly Nap that happens after church, martini, and noon Sunday dinner, but the early nap, the deluxe nap.

Sundays I arise at three o'clock in the morning, begin sipping the first of two mugs of freshly brewed hot and black, letting a square of dark chocolate melt on my tongue along with the coffee sips. For the next two hours, until five o'clock, I brush up on what I'll be doing at church that morning - - Sunday School lesson plan or handout, and/or finish up prep of my sermon if I'm on schedule to preach the sermon today. Every seminary homiletics class and professor is different, mine required us to prepare a complete manuscript, two copies, one to preach from, and hand one to the professor as we stepped into the pulpit. So that's my practice these forty years, and the two hour Sunday morning quiet space is mostly for contemplating, changing, and marking up my sermon.

Linda cooks breakfast for us, calls me to the table at five o'clock. Sundays are special, no toast or other carbs, but often soft-scrambled cheese eggs and a thick slice of pan-cooked tomato, still hot. As I say, five o'clock, and we're finished breakfast by ten after five. Then, unless there's sermon or Sunday School chaos of some sort, lie down for a nap until six o'clock.

This is the deluxe nap, covered up warm, and I do nearly always go to sleep, sometimes doze, sometimes deep sleep. Back up at six for shave, shower, dress for church. We try to leave 7H at quarter to seven, but it's usually more like five till. Check list at the door, which includes nine touch points in memorized order, ten checkpoints if a Sunday School handout or the sermon manuscript is included. The checklist is absolutely necessary to prevent having to return for something essential to the morning.

Takes seven to ten minutes to drive from downtown StAndrews to Holy Nativity Episcopal Church in the Cove. Linda drives. If we're easy, it's via Tarpon Dock Bridge, if we're rushed it's via 4th Street Bridge; both ways are Home and good news.

But the deluxe Sunday morning nap. I could rearrange early Sundays and rise at four o'clock instead of three o'clock, but then if there's sermon or Sunday School chaos, the morning would collapse into a nightmare. So, three o'clock. It has been so all the forty years I've been traveling through this wilderness, and it works for me.

Reading a book my old Navy buddy suggested, and from it I discovered how easy it is to do a screen shot instead of my dummy years of snapping a pic of the screen with my cell phone camera and emailing it to myself. See, I'm not as sharp a tack as you thought. I watch two osprey nests in Colorado fairly faithfully, and the screen shot is the way to go.

The most attended osprey nest, they had three eggs, one broke, so two eggs.

Last week they had a snowstorm and freezing weather, hoping the eggs were kept warm, from dying. We need a couple of chicks to watch and love.

Sunday afternoon, beautifully threatening storm clouds moving in from the Gulf of Mexico, darkening by the moment, gathering over StAndrews Bay on Sunday afternoon, hardly anything in nature is as consistently magnificent as clouds can be.

And hardly anything among the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve is as horrifying as War and the pictures of War. God help us. I thought civilized nations had laid such aside. But monsters rise and stretch and go forth to commit senseless violence and destruction and murder of innocents.

What happens at 7H? We watch water traffic passing by us. I read. I study, the Bible is a favorite, but also car stuff and history that intrigues me. I open and admire the cars on automobile emails that come every day. I watch Poirot episodes, but enough is enough, so I don't watch the other English detective stories that are available on the internet, Father Brown once in a while, but how come so many murders happen in the little village where he's the local priest?

I search for and watch films and documentaries about the German high command during the Third Reich and WW2. Japan is not nearly so captivating to me (and for studying War, and WW2, Italy is comic dunceville). Some good Soviet and other Eastern European stuff though. Saturday evening instead of doing needed sermon work, I watched an hour or so documentary discussing why the Germans did not have long range four engine bombers during WW2. I watched a couple of documentaries about meetings between various generals, and between generals and Hitler, what they discussed, the war outcomes - - why these things fascinate me to obsession, I cannot figure out, unless, having grown up with constant, intense war news of The Third Reich, it's my ongoing distress with my German ancestry.

I admire Germany and the German people for so insistently over the decades laying aside what they did during my lifetime and moving on to make sure it never happens again, seeing that it seems to be part of their national makeup to assert superiority over other peoples. I do not admire the American and other occupation forces who took up with and hired and used former Nazi officials during the reconstruction of Occupied Germany after the War.

I read books, have two going now; or is it three. I read several magazines, both online and the print editions; the online editions I can raise the print size for reading, eye comfort. The New Yorker magazine has interesting articles, absorbing fiction, a short NYC restaurant review (Tables for Two) that nearly always makes me want to move to New York; also always has interesting synopses of movies, some accessible to me for watching online on my computer screen via, eg, Amazon Prime Video, "The Cobweb", "We Own the Night". Movies I watch on my computer: except key news or violent weather, I cannot stand television, never watch - - but oh, no, local TV Channel 13 has excellent meteorologists, I do appreciate and watch them. How can Panama City encourage Ross Whitley and Kristen Kennedy to settle here permanently and never move on in due course as other weather people have done? Those two are so extravagantly competent and they keep us alerted, informed and safe. We don't deserve them, but how to trick them into staying forever ...

Today, Monday, should be a free day, the Easter church chaos is over, I expect no HNEC Staff meeting, have no appointments, no commitments, don't need to go to the grocery store or anywhere else. For breakfast, I can eat the other half of my Sunday supper sandwich if I wish, seed bread, thick glob of mayo, thick slice of red, ripe tomato bought at our Farmers Market on Saturday, slice of Irish cheddar, slice of avocado; if the bread gives me carb coma BP plunge, no problem, I'll just hit the sack for a nap.

Watching the National Hurricane Center now, it's the Season.

Naps are my favorite, and I'm feeling lazy, ancient, and gloriously uninspired this morning.

RSF&PTL

Ship: arriving Sunday evening, I think that's BBC Rheiderland 530x83, arriving to offload general cargo and then gone.

Monday morning, National Hurricane Center.