20230227 & counting

 Saturday we went to Aldi's for the first Time. My Navy friend has been suggesting it for decent wines at reasonable prices, but it was the new store out in Calloway, open just a couple of days, and the empty wine racks said Coming Soon. I shopped anyway, buying products labeled Deutsche Küche, German cooking, German cuisine. Sunday dinner we had their pork schnitzel, which is a pulverized patty or cutlet, it was okay, but their red cabbage is superlative.

Read too late last night, until 12:19, which I seldom and never do, but it's "Dresden, Tuesday, February 13, 1945" part of my Lenten discipline. So the coventrieren of Dresden: ja oder nein? I'm only halfway through my reading commitment, but anyone who says "There were good people on both sides" when some demonstrators were carrying the flag of the Third Reich down an American street is himself either a consummately evil narcissist, or an alphabet moron as SecDef reckoned, or All The Above. But there really were good people in Dresden who were caught up in the firebombing: not so much Dresdeners themselves, possibly the largest proportion of enthusiastic Nazis of any German city but Berlin, but the last few Jews who were still alive (who had just that day received notice to report for transport), and the POWs and other slave laborers who were working in the extensive industrial sites throughout Dresden that were devoted to military production. 

The more I read the more certain I am that "Dresden" was most appropriately a top priority military target as opposed to the later protests that are still being waged. Maybe it's a continuing lingering, festering sore spot after having combatted my Ethics professor at the University of Michigan the spring of 1963? I mean, Lent starts out in opposition to sheer evil, doesn't it, Jesus in the wilderness with Satan, so my reading and discernment discipline is on target. Do not suffer fools gladly.

This is jumping around, see: last Saturday, out on Tyndall Parkway anyway, we stopped at Oyster Shack for noon dinner. Again, okay, and my recommendation, said after having eaten fried seafood both there and recently at Dat Cajun Place, is if you want seafood, come to one of our restaurants in StAndrews. Alice's or Uncle Ernie's or Captain's Table or Hunt's. 

Breakfast of Deutsche Küche brand braunschweiger on saltines, two smeared with German mustard, so I guess Braunschweiger mit deutsche Senf? and two smeared with Duke's mayo. Not sure whether I prefer with mayo or mit Senf, but I'm finding out that for me it's a tossup between Duke's and Hellmann's. Mug of perfect coffee, hot & black, from my coffee club - - it comes about the tenth of each month, a big event in the life of Old Father Tom.

POD for Monday: finish up this blogpost and press the orange "Publish" button, staff meeting via Zoom at 9:30, do my daily inside walk that is my New Year's resolution (why inside? because I can think of all kinds of legitimate reasons not to walk outside, but so far I haven't been able to come up with a rational excuse for avoiding this inside walk as my daily exercise); sermonize an hour or so, there's lots of work to do on it; continue reading and possibly finish "Dresden" before picking up the next book. 

One thing my daily Lenten examen is revealing to me is that I am far more opinionated than I realized. It could really bother me if my opinions were incorrect.

RSF&PTL