"I bought a cactus. A week later it died. And I got depressed, because I thought, @#%$. I am less nurturing than a desert. -Demitri Martin

The local news anchor did a tease for tonight’s show about a blind guy who plays golf, runs half marathons and sky dives. I’m suitably impressed, but I don’t get the sky diving part. Why bother? Why pay the money? Wouldn’t it do the same thing but easier and cheaper if he stood in front of a really strong fan?

The Egypt thing is fascinating on so many levels, and we don’t get to see most of them. Imagine the conversations taking place in State Dept. offices in several countries. Has Israel put their military on alert? Our govt. says we’re not doing anything yet but we’ve got plans for evacuating Americans if it becomes necessary. Israel’s airline, El Al, broke policy and ran flights today, the Sabbath, to get Israeli citizens out of Egypt. What’s going on inside Egypt’s govt.? And can we assume ours knows exactly what’s being said and done there because we have moles inside Cairo’s offices? This is the stuff of a Tom Clancy novel.

Ever since we replaced the carpet in our living area with laminate flooring we’ve planned to do the same in our bedroom. Carpet just doesn’t make sense here because of the fine desert dust that blows into a house even with the windows closed. I got a great deal - less than half price - last summer on an 8mm laminate that was a close out at Lumber Liquidators, so we stopped in yesterday when we were out running errands in hopes that just maybe they’d have enough left for our relatively small master bedroom. Yay! They had a whole pallet of it out in front of the store in a last ditch effort to get rid of it, and the price was 77 cents a square foot. That’s even less than I paid last summer and would allow us to do the room for about $140. So I went back this morning to get enough for the job only to find out somebody bought the entire pallet. Arghhh!
“Hang on. I might have enough odds and ends in the back for you to get it done.”
They did, and he sold it to me for 49 cents a square foot! SCORE!! Less than $100 to do the room.

It dawned on me last night that our local NBC news station doesn’t have a sports segment during their evening newscast. The weatherman gets five minutes to tell us the sun is going to shine again, just like it does for 360 days of every year here, but no sports report. This in a town with professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey. OK, the hockey part is irrelevant, but the others matter, even if our teams do suck right now.

I watched the replay of the women’s final of the Aussie Open this morning on ESPN2. To watch it live would have meant getting up at 2 a.m. and I’m not that motivated. I was glad to see Kim Clijsters win, especially after watching the way Li Na behaved. Clijsters lost the first set 4-6 and then won the last two, 6-3, 6-3. They asked her what she did differently to get it on track. The specifics of her answer aren’t important but she changed her tactics significantly to more effectively deal with Na’s game in that match.

That response was very similar to what I heard in interviews with winners earlier in the week. Federer changed to a racket with different tension after losing several games and went on to win the match. Another player, can’t remember who, talked about changing strategies because what he was doing just wasn’t working.

It reminded me of the addage, “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.”

For a few months my preaching has felt like Kim Clijster’s first set. So three weeks ago I changed tactics. I’ve now started studying Monday instead of Wednesday, and writing my sermon on Tuesday instead of Thursday. My goal is to have it on paper by the end of the day Wednesday instead of Friday noon. So far I like the change; things feel like they’re going better on Sundays, although there may be no connection with real outcomes. I feel like I have better command of what I want to say and how I want to say it.

Which is weird. Why, after doing this for almost 35 years do I fall off my game now? But the answer is, who cares? It doesn’t matter. What matters is to change to a different racket or use more slice backhands or put more pace on the ball...just do something different until things get better. And if tomorrow I bomb I’ll just have to try another solution. Preaching is an unction too weighty to do with anything less than best effort.

I bought new bath towels today at Costco. Beige. The tag says they “bloom after washing.” So what color will they be then?