So all I have to do this morning is a little more wall-washing, and then paint the walls.
We selected a color called "golden dream"; it complements the cabinet color and retains the character of the original color of the kitchen (a 1970s orange color) without being hideous.
It's a serious job even when you don't have to mask the woodwork; I've got two little sections of baseboard that have to be masked, but all the other trim has been removed. I only masked the ceiling because I don't have confidence in my ability to avoid slopping yellow paint on my freshly-painted ultra white ceiling while edging.
The 2" blue tape around the border of the ceiling looks kind of decorative. Heh.
Something guided me to buy only a quart of the primer, and I used exactly a quart to prime the unpainted surfaces. There was no conscious thought involved, other than, "Well, I don't need that much primer, so I'll just get this can."
It ended up being a spendy little project, though--$83 worth of materials from the first trip, and another $40-ish for the second, when we bought the color paint. It's not a project I'd like to tackle every day.
The sad part is, if the guy had ripped out the kitchen on Monday instead of Wednesday, I would have had more time to paint. As it is, I've got to finish breakfast and then get my butt in gear, because he's coming back tomorrow to replace the floor; I have to have at least the west wall finished and dry before 8 AM Saturday.
Yeah, and work tonight, too. *sigh*
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I had some articles that I was going to link to and comment upon, but I decided not to bother. While I was driving back from McDonald's, though, I re-thought my decision to avoid this wacky story which I alluded to in an earlier entry.
Like several other writers I have used the word "nephilim" for my own purposes. In the Bible (and, apparently, Apocrypha) the nephilim are the hybrid offspring of humans and angels--people with angelic might and free will, which seems like a bad combination to me--and among other things, the Flood was God's way of ridding the earth of nephilim.
(I am working on a science fantasy story based in this premise. I know others have already done it. But I'm not sure I can make it work for the story I have in mind.)
The problem I have with this stuff--besides the fact that doomsaying has been a lucrative career approximately forever--is that I don't know how you can accept two contradictory positions without serious cognitive dissonance.
Position one: God exists, Bible is gospel, angels exist, and some angels had kids with humans 2,900 years ago. If this is so, the Christian doctrine that the Bible is "God's word" would seem to apply. Therefore the Apocrypha are not gospel; they were removed because God willed it.
Position two: the Apocrypha contain valid prophesy which are as theologically valid as the rest of the Bible; and we are therefore overdue for getting stomped on by human/angel hybrids shortly before they are thrown into Hell, permanently.
If you're seriously promoting your book of doom by pointing to all the biblical scholarship you did to write it--uncritically accepting as fact that the celestial shit is about to hit the cosmic fan--how can you ignore basic tenets of the religion the book comes from? I mean, I realize that one need not read the Bible and believe everything in it literally in order to be a biblical scholar, but most of the time historical research doesn't deal with the issue of divinity or prophesy; it deals only with a) who the people were; b) how they lived; c) what led them to write these books; and d) why is the book considered sacred. Most biblical scholars don't concern themselves with interpreting prophesy, because in order to interpret the prophesy you first must abandon science and scholarship--you can't footnote a miracle.
My point is that if you're saying, "Look, the Bible predicts this and that! We're screwed!" it doesn't make sense to rely on books that God Himself has apparently stricken from the "official manual".
Besides which, this "2012 AD" business has cropped up because the Mayan calendar ends around then. WTF--some guy in the jungle got sick of figuring, and decided that 400-odd extra years of calendar would probably do for the time being--now the world's going to end? Somehow I doubt it.
The singular fact of all doomsayers has been that when they've announced the date of the end of the world, they have been wrong. There is nothing which suggests that they're about to get it right; and combining the Christian Bible with the Mayan calendar seems odd.
People in 999 AD were convinced that the world was going to end because of prophesy. It's over 1,000 years later and we're still doing that schtick; and I expect that people will still be foretelling the end of the world 1,000 years from now.
"But," you ask, "how do you reconcile that with your religion?"
While the Bible is Gospel, I believe, it's not all 100% literal truth. There's a lot of allegory in it.
As a young lad I was interested in the Book of Revelations, and I came to a few conclusions about it: presenting a vision of modern mechanized warfare to a guy in the first century AD might result in something approximating some of the things we see in the Book of Revelations. You're showing a guy who has never seen anything other than muscle power airplanes and tanks and stuff, and what the hell is he going to write about? "And I saw a field of T-38s armed with 115mm smoothbore cannons..." Hell no. He's going to describe it to the best of his ability, but not only did the words not exist; the concepts didn't exist for him, either. God gave him a vision; God did not give him the knowledge he needed to truly undertand what he was seeing...and therefore the prophesy is murky, as they always are, and the meanings won't be obvious until after the events take place.
John mentions "Wormwood", saying that "wormwood" made the waters "bitter". Only after 1986 did we learn about Chernobyl, which is Russian for "wormwood". This may or may not be what John was talking about; if it is, then it places an event in 1986 smack dab in the middle of Revelations.
But what does that mean? It means that, yeah, we've found one correlation of a modern event to one in prophesy. Find events on either side of 1986 that correspond to events on either side of the "wormwood" reference in Revelations. Or try, anyway; I've tried and failed. If Revelations is not allegory, the time scale isn't consistent and it may take centuries for the entire thing to play out.
But my own religious beliefs hold that the big and showy fireworks that God threw around in the Old Testament were confined to that era, and He no longer uses those techniques--and hasn't since the Jews reached the promised land. It violates the "proof denies faith" doctrine for God to make huge unexplainable things happen.
So will the events in Nephilim Stargate happen? Probably not. I think whatever vision Enoch was granted will come to pass, but when you're talking about an early Iron Age man trying to interpret events 3,000 years in the future, revolving around technology that is--to him--indistinquishable from magic...well.
Heck, just ask Hal Lindsey how correct Late, Great Planet Earth turned out to be.