Papa Pat Tiny Devotionals

Dear sisters and family in Macon: We aren't going to be able to make it to the pre-Thanksgiving get-together tomorrow. I'm sorry, but things just didn't work out, and it's mostly the fault of architecture. Our house was built in a time when architecture favored lots of roof lines. I don't know why; maybe it was to confuse the lightning. At any rate, it has made for MULTIPLE leaks since I've been here (November of 92) and there is extensive evidence of repair prior to that, which is a truly bad record for a house built in 1977. At any rate, we've had a lot of rain last week, and thought we were going to have MORE roof repaid done. However, a neighbor, and a gentleman who Knows Such Things, said that most of my problem was because my gutters were packed full of pine straw.He pointed out how the mounds of pine straw on the roof accumulated blah blah blah I lapsed into a coma at this point. See, EVIDENTLY, those gutters have to be cleaned out. I have no objectio...

This blog entry is inspired in part by the excellent column written by my dear brother Peter Grant. Read it. When the Twin Towers fell, my first-born son was a freshman in college. On Thursday of that week, President Bush gave a speech in which he stated that the war ahead was going to be a long one. He was correct. In 2013, my son, just turned 30, married,  and with a new son of his own, went to Afghanistan with his National Guard unit. He was medevac'ed home two months later after being wounded in a rocket attack. Today is my youngest (adopted) son's 11th birthday. I bought him a used video game system, and he and his buddy Jacob are in the next room playing Halo 3. How do I break the news to him? Son, there is a war going on, and it will still be going on when you are a grown man. Your father, your uncles, your grandfathers, and your great grandfather all wore the uniform. Because of that tradition, the odds are good that you will be in uniform.  Here's the ...

A couple of years ago, I bought a great little printer, HP F4440. After using up the ink supplied with the printer, I bought re-cycled cartridges from eBay. Worked great for a very small amount of money, compared to the new HP cartridges. But THEN!~ I upgraded to Windows 10. And had to get new printer drivers. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that the new printer software INSISTS on genuine HP ink. It wouldn't print for me. At all. No REAL problem; I rarely print anything anyway, other than my tax forms. And since I usually don't file my taxes until they put a lien on my bank account, that really isn't an every year thing. Maybe every five years. (I'm not a tax rebel, I have ADD.) But last night a friend asked me to arrange and print some song lyrics for a performance he is going to lead, so I knew I would need to get some genuine HP ink today. I agreed to print out what he needed, then meet him at his house for lunch and proof reading by 12:30. No problem. I had...

I reviewed an advance copy of Scout's Duty here on my blog on March 3. Henry has just added this third volume of the trilogy (Scout's Oath & Scout's Honor) and I hope he sells a million. Yesterday was the day Doc Brown and Marty McFly picked as a destination in the Back to the Future franchise. That was a good opportunity for the family to binge-watch all three movies, so we did. (By the way, I hate watching movies with the family. I'm a grinch.) The watching family, in case you care, consists of my gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant, foxy, praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA; 10 year old Kenneth; 9 year old Alicia; adult daughter Elizabeth; son-in-law Vincent; and intermittently, the fat black Manx cat SugarBelly. And me. We have a big TV; it's ridiculously huge, something like six feet across or thereabouts. I don't know fer shure, I just paid for it, I don't watch it. Anyway, one SPOILER ALERT scene where George ...

This is a story I made up to amuse myself last week, in a mildly expanded form. The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" recently appeared on Netflix. I never saw it when it appeared in theaters, and ignored all the media hype about it, with one exception: I did read the MAD magazine spoof, called '201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy.' That might seem to you to be a particularly ignorant decision regarding a ground-breaking sci-fi epic, but I have an excuse: I actually worked on the film. My name doesn't appear anywhere in the credits, which is a demand I made when I stormed into the Shepperton Studio offices after my last day on set. They were disturbingly untroubled by my little tantrum, which I recognize now as being due to the fact that under no circumstances would my name have appeared anyway, since I was just an unpaid production intern. In my defense, I had just turned 23 in 1966, and I suppose I had that old I-am-the-center-of-the-universe thing going. It took years to...

I had completed 10 years as a middle school counselor. That fall of my 11th year, as a matter of good mental health, I knew that if I were to have the proper attitude at work, I was going to have to choose that attitude and have it in place before I parked my truck in front of the school. It wasn't going to come easy. On the home front, my much loved first-born son was gone away for college. I was just coming off a spiritual high, from leading a team of well over  one hundred men in an intense weekend of spiritual self-examination in a Christian renewal retreat. As often happens, when you come off the mountain top, aggravations present themselves; My first piece of mail upon my return home was a notification that my check had bounced at my son's college book store. But the point that I was clear on was this: if I allowed the joys and frustrations of working with 1100 young men and women  in the 7th and 8th grade, their parents and their teachers, to determine my attitude, I wa...

So, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis is in jail for refusing to issue a marriage license for a gay marriage. She says it is against her religion to do so. In her absence (she's been in jail for a day) the marriage licenses were issued by a deputy clerk. From jail, she proclaimed that those licenses weren't worth the paper they ere printed on, because she is the only one who has a right to issue the licenses, and she's not going to do it. The question it raises for me is not whether a person can choose not to comply with a law they find to be inappropriate, but whether a person in a position which provides a public service can choose to gum up the works. I took a QUICK look at the concept of civil disobedience. I discovered that one of the earliest written expressions of the concept is in Sophocles' play Antigone , written around 441 BC. In the play, the woman Antigone chooses to flagrantly disobey King Creon's order to leave her dead brother unburied, even if it costs h...