Arrival of the Home Gnomes

A couple of weeks ago, we put a lava lamp in Firstborn's room. He doesn't like going to sleep in the dark, and I was hoping it would give the boys something to stare at while they fell asleep. Both the Beautiful Wife and I have disavowed all knowledge of where it came from, and the grandparents are (naturally) completely baffled.

So I've explained about the Home Gnomes, and that we probably have some in our house.

Home Gnomes, you see, move into your home. They're only about six inches high, so they're easy to miss. And sometimes they bring furniture with them from other people's houses, so there's no telling where that lamp might have come from originally.

Now, you might expect that Firstborn, at nine years old, would be a bit suspicious of this explanation. You wouldn't be wrong, either.

...Which is why, two weeks later, we "discovered" a tiny little door at the back of one of our cabinets. Clearly, it is where the Home Gnomes live. Clearly, Home Gnomes are real. And clearly, they are responsible for bringing the lava lamp to Firstborn's room.

(He still doesn't believe us.)

Ready for NaNoWriMo? Go!

National Novel Writing Month (which gets shortened to NaNoWriMo, for reasons I find utterly incomprehensible) has been moved to April this year. That means it's time to get started. Check the NaNoWriMo site for help, advice, and tools to track your progress -- or, if you're the sort of person who prefers to do things on their own, just started writing! Can you finish your novel in a month?

Ready... set... go!

New housing plan

We've been trying to clean up the house and look at moving into something larger. In addition to the boys needing more room, my parents are getting older and it's entirely possible that we'll need to have one or both of them move in with us with the next few years. Our current house, much as we love it, just isn't up to that. So, we need to find something else... and that means getting this house ready to sell.

Getting ready for this is a big job, and it's going to be nearly impossible to show the house while we're living here with the boys: it won't stay clean for more than five minutes at a stretch. Plus, there's some general work that needs to be done: paint, tile in the bathrooms, and like that. Maybe the foundation, too, but hopefully not. So, yeah: there's a lot to be done.

Fortunately, I think I've found a solution. It's a reasonably inexpensive houseboat at a dock on the Trinity River, not too far from downtown Dallas. The bank is willing to give us a loan, too - apparently they can process this faster than they could a house, or something. I don't understand banks. Anyway, rather than trying to find a new place that's large enough for all of us and all our stuff, the new plan is to throw away (almost) all our stuff and move everybody into the houseboat.

I figure we won't need things like television, DVDs, and video games: fixing up the boat will keep us busy enough. (It needs work on the roof and some of the fixtures. Oh, and the wiring - we'll need to replace that completely. And either fix or replace the engine, but that won't matter unless want to move the thing.) The boys can play on the dock, or go swimming in the river if they need more exercise - when they're not helping out, of course. It'll be a longer commute, of course, but I think it'll be worth it. And when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, we can just cast off and float away, safely out of their reach.

So that's the plan: houseboat. Happy holiday, everyone.

A Quick History of Easter

As most of you know, Easter is fast approaching. It falls on April 24th this year, and today is the beginning of April. That being the case, I thought I'd talk a little about the holiday, maybe fill in some things that you may not know about it.

In the Christian Liturgical calendar, of course, Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. As with many Christian holidays, its place in the calendar is not based on the timing of actual events, but instead corresponds to a pre-existing pagan holy day - in this case, Ēastre (or Ēostre), which is where we get the modern word Easter. Historically, Christian imagery and celebrations of Easter drew heavily from the Jewish festival of Passover (which begins on April 19, this year), and the earliest Christians in all likelihood observed Jewish holy days rather than specifically Christian ones.

Most of that is pretty well known. Where the story gets really interesting is when you start trying to trace the history of the pagan symbolism - a surprising amount of which is still retained in our modern Easter celebrations. (Actually, it may not be all that surprising. Modern Christianity can be a lot more... purist... about meanings and symbols than historical Christianity was.)

The earliest elements of the Easter holiday can be traced to the Assyrian nation in the Fertile Crescent, starting around 2200 B.C. The collapse of the Akkadian empire had left Assyria and Babylonia as the two major powers in the region, and as a result there were both military conflicts and a lot of migrations. During this time, the Gonim Fac Tern (literally, Priests of the Sacred Hare) gained prominence in the Assyrian priesthood. They claimed through their rites to be able to increase fertility, which was very important to an expansionistic nation, and to command the "sacred madness" that hares experienced in the Spring. (This "madness" is actually the mating behavior, which involves a lot of seemingly-random darting back and forth as the males try to impress the females; it's also where we get the phrase "mad as a March Hare.")

By the time Assyria ceased to exist (it was defeated by a coalition of other nations in 608 B.C. but remained a distinct territory under the Persions, Greeks, Romans, and others), these rites and practices had spread throughout Mesopotamia. They had also become conflated with traditions from another group, the Worshippers of the Sacred Egg (Herim Tornt Mardik Sim), who occupied a similar role in Babylonian worship starting around 1,000 B.C.

The practice of actually dying eggs doesn't appear until around 700-800 A.D., and seems to originate with the worship of the goddess Ostara in northern Germany. It may have been introduced as a way to associate the older practices with the blooming flowers which indicate the arrival of the goddess in the Spring. The connection seems fairly natural, as Ostara was also associated with birds (again, returning in the Spring) and their eggs. This is probably also where we get the idea of an "Easter Nest" (which has become a basket in modern practice) where the holy hares can lay their sacred colored eggs.

So there you go: a little bit of history to mark the beginning of April. And now you know the secret origin of the Easter holiday: it all started with a cult of Assyrian bunny-worshippers four thousand years ago.

(Happy April Fool's Day!)