Good Plumbing Quotes

Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.

Wanderer, who are you? I watch you go on your way, without scorn, without love, with impenetrable eyes - damp and downhearted, like a plumb line that returns unsatisfied from every depth back into the light (what was it looking for down there?), with a breast that does not sigh, with lips that hide their disgust, with a hand that only grips slowly: who are you? What have you done? Take a rest here, this spot is hospitable to everyone, - relax! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What do you find relaxing? Just name it: I'll give you whatever I have! - "Relaxing? Relaxing? How inquisitive you are! What are you saying! But please, give me - -" What? What? Just say it! - "Another mask! A second mask!" ...

Don’t need no more of this world’s goods. Some folks gits plumb mesmerized when paper money is shook afore their eyes.

Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense.

I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet.

He's a good old sort. If only he weren't plumb crazy!

The morning interviews were always the hardest, hung-over, trying to get the beer down. No, I have no idea why I am a writer. No, my writing has no particular meaning that I know of. Celine? Oh sure. Why not? Do I like women? Well, I’d rather fuck most of them than live with them. What do I think is important? Good wine, good plumbing and to be able to sleep late in the mornings. Are you really disturbing me? Of course you are. Do you expect me to start lying at the age of 58? Buy me a drink.

Today most poverty-stricken Americans have a television, telephone, electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Most Africans do not. If you transferred the goods and services enjoyed by those who live in California’s version of poverty to the average Somalian living on less than a $1.25 a day, that Somalian is suddenly fabulously rich.

I've plumb forgot where I am for the instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.

People didn't like having to come up with something smart or helpful or sensitive to say, and they weren't intelligent enough to realize that all we wanted, all I wanted, was to be treated the same as I had been three months before. I wanted to be ignored because of my eccentricities, not because of my brother. And I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling. So, if you feel sorry for someone, don't pretend to be happy. Don't pretend to care only about their problems. People aren't stupid. Not all of us, anyway. If someone's little brother disappears, don't give him a free hamburger to make him feel better-- it doesn't work. It's a good burger, sure, but it means nothing. It means something only to the Mr. Burkes of the world. Offering free meals, free stays in condos in Florida, even free plumbing. And we let them. We let them because they need it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we were useful in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute. So, old ladies, make your casseroles and set them on doorsteps. And old men, grill your burgers and give them to teenagers with cynical worldviews. The world can't be satisfied, but that need to fix it all can.

Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients.[3] They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.

What do I think is important? Good wine, good plumbing and to be able to sleep late in the mornings.

Alas, sometimes clever people are too clever for our good. Some well-meaning plumbing designers have decided that consistency should be ignored in favor of their own, private brand of psychology.

Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment "seen" that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is - peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that "God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is." Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant-looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation... Out of this kind of contemplation of the created world arise in never-ending wealth all true poetry and all real art, for it is the nature of poetry and art to be paean and praise heard above all the wails of lamentation. No one who is not capable of such contemplation can grasp poetry in a poetic fashion, that is to say, in the only meaningful fashion. The indispensability, the vital function of the arts in man's life, consists above all in this: that through them contemplation of the created world is kept alive and active.

Obedience to God is what motivates me to teach my own children at home. It doesn’t make any difference to me what the public school is doing (whether good or bad), because they are not the plumb line. God’s Word is the standard.

Pa tugged him onto the grass. Pa rolled him over and he flopped where he was rolled. Pa felt his wrist and listened at his chest and then Pa lay down beside him. “He’s breathing,” Pa said. “He’ll be all right, in the air. I’m all right, Caroline. I’m plumb tuckered out, is all.” “Well!” Ma scolded. “I should think you would be! Of an the senseless performances! My goodness gracious! scaring a body to death, all for the want of a little reasonable care! My goodness! I--” She covered her face with her apron and burst out crying. That was a terrible day.

Spiritual discernment involves using God’s Word as the standard for distinguishing and separating ideas and behaviors. It distinguishes and separates truth from falsehood, darkness from light, healthy from unhealthy, sound from unsound, and good from evil, based on the Bible’s plumb line.

How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

I didn't know you were in the plumbing repair business. I'm in the good son business. I couldn't leave my mother in the house with no running water.

The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

I'm afraid they're not very well-designed creatures, dragons." Vimes listened. "They would never have survived at all except that their home swamps were isolated and short of predators. Not that a dragon made good eating, anyway-once you'd taken away the leathery skin and the enormous flight muscles, what was left must have been like biting into a badly-run chemical factory. No wonder dragons were always ill. They relied on permanent stomach trouble for supplies of fuel. Most of their brain power was taken up with controlling the complexities of then-digestion, which could distill flame-producing fuels from the most unlikely ingredients. They could even rearrange their internal plumbing overnight to deal with difficult processes. They lived on a chemical knife-edge the whole time. One misplaced hiccup and they were geography. And when it came to choosing nesting sites, the females had all the common sense and mothering instinct of a brick." Vimes wondered why people had been so worried about dragons in the olden days. If there was one in a cave near you, all you had to do was wait until it self-ignited, blew itself up, or died of acute indigestion.

DEDICATE YOURSELF this day to me, to my service, and to the service of humanity. Service is a wonderful healer, for as you forget yourself in service, you will find you will grow and expand in the most wonderful way. You will reach great heights and plumb great depths, and your love and understanding of life will begin to mean something to you. This day will afford you countless opportunities for stretching and growing. Accept each one with a heart filled with love and gratitude, and feel yourself growing in consciousness and in wisdom. Live it fully and abundantly with no restrictions, no limitations. Expect only the very best in everything and everyone, and see it come forth. Keep your heart open to one another. Look for the highest good in each other, and work from that higher level of consciousness. Encourage one another in every way possible; every soul needs encouragement. You will find as you help others, you help yourself to grow at the same time.

There's no Coastguard in France. They let the French Navy do it. They have to give them something to do. It's not good for national pride to have to disband it so they turned it into a Coastguard. I think it does a few other bits and bobs too.

By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn't give. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water.

WHAT WE WANT of course is the same old story. The trees pushing out their leaves, fluttering them, shucking them off, the water thrashing around in the oceans, the tweedling of the birds, the unfurling of the slugs, the worms vacuuming dirt. The zinnias and their pungent slow explosion. We want it all to go on and go on again, the same thing each year, monotonous and amazing, just as if we were still behaving ourselves, living in tents, raising sheep, slitting their throats for God’s benefit, refusing to invent plastics. For unbelief and bathrooms you pay a price. If apples were the Devil’s only bait we’d still be able to call our souls our own, but then the prick threw indoor plumbing into the bargain and we were doomed. Now we use up a lot of paper telling one another how to conserve paper, and the sea fills up with killer coffee cups, and we worry about the sun and its ambivalent rays.

We are defined not by what grows from our heads, but what flows from our hearts. That is our greatest testimony. Our hair may be our crown, yet a life of love and service is our real glory. So as we navigate our journey, let us graciously make space for one another. Whether you relax it or coil it, weave it or dread it, cover it with a wig or cut it plumb off, the choice is yours. Good hair is your hair—however you decide to wear it.

Poor old Nixon, even his own commissions beat on him. What the hell can he do? He can’t go into every ghetto and fix the plumbing himself. He can’t give every copped-out junkie a million dollars and a Ph.D. Nixon, who’s Nixon? He’s just a typical flatfooted Chamber of Commerce type who lucked his way into the hot seat and is so dumb he thinks it’s good luck. Let the poor bastard alone, he’s trying to bore us to death so we won’t commit suicide.

Cultural criticism always attacks the mass media. I don't think that makes sense. We should look more closely at the work of deformation that starts deeper down, especially because it involves so much demoralization. Something gets destroyed there that should not be destroyed under any circumstances - THE AWARENESS THAT KNOWLEDGE IS BORN OUT OF EUPHORIA AND THAT INTELLIGENCE IS A RELATIONSHIP OF THE HAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS WITH ITSELF. And that intelligence partly consists in the ability to find our own ways of overcoming the boredom that develops in an under-used brain. Across society as a whole, the most disturbing symptom is that people are no longer ambitious enough to plumb the limits of understanding within themselves. INTELLIGENCE IS THE LAST UTOPIAN POTENTIAL. THE ONLY TERRA INCOGNITA HUMANKIND STILL OWNS ARE THE GALAXIES OF THE BRAIN, THE MILKY WAYS OF INTELLIGENCE. And there is hardly any any convincing space travel in them. Incidentally, this internal astronautics is the only alternative to a consumerist perspective. It is the only thing that could explain to people in the future that their intelligence space is so immense that they can experiment with themselves for millennia without becoming exhausted. The really good news is that there is something breathtakingly great that is called intelligence and is uncharted. ARE YOU WILLING TO VOLUNTEER ?

And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet “the man.” They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifference, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patience; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color to the very gates of paranoia.

When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico city. I’ll always remember the way my father acted- loud and big. And my mother didn’t like the people because they were dark and didn’t wash enough. And my sister wouldn’t talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here. Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn’t have Chicago plumbing, it’s nonsense. The thought of that! Oh God, the thought of that!

One of the most common misconceptions about the world's religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in a tsunami. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after "the soul" in the singular. Every religion, however, asks after the human condition. Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon,—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron—that I know—not gold. 'Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain- battering fight! Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night, good night!

The first day Ma made cheese, Laura tasted the whey. She tasted it without saying anything to Ma, and when Ma turned around and saw her face, Ma laughed. That night while she was washing the supper dishes and Mary and Laura were wiping them, Ma told Pa that Laura had tasted the whey and didn’t like it. “You wouldn’t starve to death on Ma’s whey, like old Grimes did on his wife’s,” Pa said. Laura begged him to tell her about Old Grimes. So, though Pa was tired, he took his fiddle out of its box and played and sang for Laura: “Old Grimes is dead, that good old man, We ne’er shall see him more, He used to wear an old gray coat, All buttoned down before. “Old Grimes’s wife made skim-milk cheese, Old Grimes, he drank the whey, There came an east wind from the west, And blew Old Grimes away.” “There you have it!” said Pa. “She was a mean, tight-fisted woman. If she hadn’t skimmed all the milk, a little cream would have run off in the whey, and Old Grimes might have staggered along. “But she skimmed off every bit of cream, and poor Old Grimes got so thin the wind blew him away. Plumb starved to death.” Then Pa looked at Ma and said, “Nobody’d starve to death when you were around, Caroline.” “Well, no,” Ma said. “No, Charles, not if you were there to provide for us.” Pa was pleased.

Pa tugged him onto the grass. Pa rolled him over and he flopped where he was rolled. Pa felt his wrist and listened at his chest and then Pa lay down beside him. “He’s breathing,” Pa said. “He’ll be all right, in the air. I’m all right, Caroline. I’m plumb tuckered out, is all.” “Well!” Ma scolded. “I should think you would be! Of an the senseless performances! My goodness gracious! scaring a body to death, all for the want of a little reasonable care! My goodness! I--” She covered her face with her apron and burst out crying. That was a terrible day. “I don’t want a well,” Ma sobbed. “It isn’t worth it. I won’t have you running such risks!” Mr. Scott had breathed a kind of gas that stays deep in the ground. It stays at the bottom of wells because it is heaver than the air. It cannot be seen or smelled, but no one can breathe it very long and live. Pa had gone down into that gas to tie Mr. Scott to the rope, so that he could be pulled up out of the gas. When Mr. Scott was able, he went home. Before he went he said to Pa: “You were right about that candle business, Ingalls. I thought it was all foolishness and I would not bother with it, but I’ve found out my mistake.” “Well,” said Pa, “where a light can’t live, I know I can’t. And I like to be safe when I can be. But all’s well that ends well.

By now Ferris had come to the grudging conclusion that his client was “a plumb good sort.” Garrulous in the cabin, Roosevelt on the trail was quiet, purposeful, and tough. “He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks, and he was always cheerful.” The guide was intrigued by his habit of pulling out a book in flyblown campsites and immersing himself in it, as if he were ensconced in the luxury of the Astor Library. Most of all, perhaps, he was impressed by a casual remark Roosevelt made one night while blowing up a rubber pillow. “His doctors back East had told him that he did not have much longer to live, and that violent exercise would be immediately fatal.”64

Wanderer, who are you? I watch you go on your way, without scorn, without love, with impenetrable eyes--damp and downhearted, like a plumb limb that returns unsatisfied from every depth back into the light (what was it looking for down there?), with a breast that does not sigh, with lips that hide their disgust, with a hand that only grips slowly: who are you? What have you done? Take a rest here, this spot is hospitable to everyone, - relax! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What do you find relaxing? Just name it: I'll give you whatever I have! - "Relaxing? Relaxing? How inquisitive you are! What are you saying! But please, give me - -" "What? What? Just say it!" - "Another mask! A second mask!...

When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I’ll always remember the way my father acted—loud and big. And my mother didn’t like the people because they were dark and didn’t wash enough. And my sister wouldn’t talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here. “Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn’t have Chicago plumbing, it’s nonsense. The thought of that! Oh God, the thought of that! And then—the war. You heard the congressional speeches before we left. If things work out they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished; all this wonderful stuff gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on the White House floor?

The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out. I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun— slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron—that I know—not gold. 'Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight! Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.) 'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad— Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! CHAPTER

I wrote that the sails are our desires that must be perfectly pure and clean, since the port we seek is the knowledge of God, which none can attain save the pure in heart.[291] Hence it is written of the ship of Tyre:  “Fine broidered linen . . . was woven for your sail.” [292]  The mast is the love of God, which the same prophet declares was made of cedar and incorruptible, as the soul should never fail in the practice of any exercise; the cedar must come from Libanus, which means ‘beatitude’, for infused charity is perfect love. To this mast must be fastened the ropes of peace and harmony with God, ourselves, and our neighbor, which in Holy Scripture are called ‘the bands of love.’ [293]  The mariner's compass is faith, by which the rudder must be directed, and the helm is prudence. The compass points to the North, for faith must rule us and raise us to contemplation between the two is discretion, which is very necessary. The pilot is good counsel: he must be guided by the mariner's chart, that is, the Holy Scriptures, if he wishes to avoid mistakes. The sounding-line is prudence, by which we must measure what is to be done if we wish to succeed: the pilot, or sage counsel, must plumb the water over which we sail, that is, our restless life.

Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre. „Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable. In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra! Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!

If we possessed the facility to fully plumb the depths of the Creator’s thoughts, He would not be God, because God’s thoughts are beyond the range of human understanding—unimaginably far beyond anything we could ever imagine.

George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.

Most charities already target the poorest people in our communities: the homeless, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled, those living well below the poverty line. I think that's important and necessary. My philosophy as Good Sam is this. It's not only those who've hit rock bottom who deserve help. Corporate mergers, globalization, recessions, tax cuts for the super wealthy - these all the effect of punishing all Americans. What about those who appear to be getting by on their own? The man who works two jobs to put a roof over his family's head, who pays his taxes, yet still fights to makes ends meet?He doesn't qualify for food stamps or low-cost housing or handouts from charities. He's laboring longer, earning less, and has fewer job protections than he did twenty-five years ago. Yet few government programs or charities address his needs.... I gave to people in a wide variety of professions and financial circumstances. But most of the money went to the people who keep the factories and stores running, who fix our cars and our plumbing, who bake our bread and serve our coffee, who teach our children in school. They are the soldiers in our everyday lives, and they cannot and should not be forgotten.

The logic of hell is nothing other than the logic of human free will, in so far as this is identical with freedom of choice. The theological argument runs as follows: “God, whose being is love, preserves our human freedom, for freedom is the condition of love. Although God’s love goes, and has gone, to the uttermost, plumbing the depth of hell, the possibility remains for each human being of a final rejection of God, and so of eternal life.” Let us gather some arguments against this logic of hell. The first conclusion, it seems to me, is that it is inhumane, for there are not many people who can enjoy free will where their eternal fate in heaven or hell is concerned. Anyone who faces men and women with the choice of heaven or hell, does not merely expect too much of them. It leaves them in a state of uncertainty, because we cannot base the assurance of our salvation on the shaky ground of our own decision. Is the presupposition of this logic of hell perhaps an illusion—the presupposition that it all depends on the human beings’ free will? The logic of hell seems to me not merely inhumane but also extremely atheistic: here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven—or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect. If I decide for heaven, God must put me there; if I decide for hell, he has to leave me there. If God has to abide by our free decision, then we can do with him what we like. Is that “the love of God?” Free human beings forge their own happiness and are their own executioners. They do not just dispose over their lives here; they decide on their eternal destinies as well. So they have no need of any God at all. After God has perhaps created us free as we are, he leaves us to our fate. Carried to this ultimate conclusion, the logic of hell is secular humanism, as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche already perceived a long time ago. The Christian doctrine of hell is to be found in the gospel of Christ’s descent into hell. In the crucified Christ we see what hell is, because through him it has been overcome. Judgment is not God’s last word. Judgment established in the world the divine righteousness on which the new creation is to be built. But God’s last word is “Behold I make all things new” (Rev 21: 5). From this no one is excluded. Love is God’s compassion with the lost. Transforming grace is God’s punishment for sinners. It is not the right to choose that defines the reality of human freedom. It is the doing of the good.

The Scriptures tell us that right and wrong do exist. Our duty is to do what is right, and it is not too difficult to discern. For example, look at the issue of transgendered people and using bathrooms. Just because someone is confused, doesn’t mean we give up our common sense. Many who have had sex-change surgery want to change back. They have big regrets. They may change their looks on the outside, but their chromosomes stay the same on the inside. Figuring out which bathroom to use should be a pretty simple matter, if you think about it. God has given each of us a certain kind of plumbing. Guys go to one bathroom and ladies go to another. You see, bathrooms are supposed to be biological and not social. But, of course, there is much more to this agenda than meets the eye. This is the breakdown of the family. This is an assault on what God says is right and wrong. God says man and woman in marriage, and the world says any combination of genders in marriage is fine. The Bible says to have kids within a heterosexual family, and the world says to have kids within any kind of family structure you want. On a recent plane flight, a guy named John was sitting next to me. He loved logic. Everything had to be logical for him. When I asked him, “If you could have any job on planet Earth and money wasn’t an issue, what would you want to do?” He didn’t hesitate. He said, “Philosophy professor at a university!” I already knew this was going to be a good conversation, but his reply was icing on the cake! Then out of nowhere he asked me, “What do you think about gay marriage?” This seems to be the only question on people’s minds these days! Some people are interested in your answer; others just want to label you a bigot. Whether or not they want to categorize you doesn’t matter; our job is to tell people the truth. So I asked him, “When people get married, how many people get married?” He responded that he didn’t understand my question. So I said, “When you go to a marriage ceremony in India, China, Russia, Canada, or the United States, how many people are in that ceremony?” He replied, “Two.” I then continued, “Where did the number come from?” You should have seen the look on his face. He didn’t have a clue. I let him know it came from the oldest writing ever on the subject of marriage. It came from the Jewish Torah, and in the book of Genesis, it says: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Genesis 2:24 The interesting thing was that John knew the verse! When I said it out loud, he finished it by saying, “one flesh.” Someone had taught him that verse at some point through the years. Then I said, “Whoever gets to tell you how many people can get married can also tell you who gets to be in that number.” He loved the logic. But, of course, God is logical. That is why it is logical to believe in Him. I also read somewhere: Whoever designs marriage gets to define marriage! That is a good statement, and I have been using it as I talk with people about this subject.

What did you say?” Henry grated. “I said shut up, Henry.” Rachel’s voice was still soft, but the glint in her eyes was fighting mean. “I’ve put up with your cussedness for nigh on nine years. No more. You apologize to Loretta Jane this instant.” “Or you’ll do what?” Rachel lifted a challenging brow. “Well, I reckon you’re too big for me to grab you by the heels and bash your brains. Guess I’ll have to blow them out. Now apologize. I won’t have that kind of talk in my house.” “Your house?” “That’s right.” Henry did an admirable job of trying to appear amused. Placing his hands on his hips, he bent one knee and eyed the rifle. “Rachel, darlin’, you have a gun right now. Here shortly, you’re gonna have to put it down and cook. And when you do, I’m gonna beat the sass plumb out of you. Now I suggest you be the one to apologize. If you do it convincin’ enough, maybe I’ll forgit this ever happened.” Loretta figured the bluff would probably work. Aunt Rachel had never been long on guts, and Loretta didn’t see her getting a goodly supply in the space of ten minutes. Rachel surprised her, though. Instead of apologizing, she set her jaw and raised her chin. “Henry, if you touch me when I’m cookin’, I’ll rip you from stem to bow with my butcher knife. I’ve had it up to my gullet with you.” “Give me that gun!” Henry stomped toward her. Rachel took quick aim. The explosion of noise nearly scared Loretta out of her skin. Henry jumped straight up, clearing the floor by several inches. “Holy Mother, you near shot my foot off, you damned fool woman!” “Next time, I won’t miss.” Henry sputtered, so mad he looked fit to bust. “Rachel, I swear, I’ll give you the hidin’ of your life for this.” “Touch her, Uncle Henry, and I’ll knock you senseless with a chunk of firewood,” Loretta inserted. “And if she don’t do a good job of it, I’ll finish it for her!” Amy yelled from the loft ladder. “Good for you, Ma! Give the old wart toad what for!” Rachel returned the Spencer to the rack. “Well, Henry? It sounds like three to one. You gonna apologize to Loretta Jane or not?

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision. The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff. Tull’s wagon stands beside the spring, hitched to the rail, the reins wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon bed are two chairs. Jewel stops at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks. I pass him and mount the path, beginning to hear Cash’s saw. When I reach the top he has quit sawing. Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the                                     Chuck.   Chuck.   Chuck.of the adze.

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I admired Bolden’s abilities. I’ve long thought that a good prosecutor is a well-trained union carpenter building a sturdy house with shiny tools and freshly hewn wood. She follows blueprints to the letter, makes sure the framing is in plumb, lines up the two-by-fours, and hammers the nails straight. The best courtroom carpenters are Renaissance men and women. They double as bricklayers, installers, tapers, finishers, electricians, and even plumbers. They can build the whole damn house, and it’s a thing of beauty that will pass the toughest inspection by city inspectors . . . or juries. Until the defense lawyers come along. We’re the stealthy vandals wielding crowbars and spray paint. We tear down door frames, break windows, and spray graffiti on the walls. Our job is to destroy what the carpenters have built and feed it into the woodchipper.

How can you be faithful to following Jesus when the depths of what it means to follow Jesus are never plumbed?

America built roads, schools, and factories. Electrification of those factories and modern assembly-line methods created a boom in manufacturing production. Capital became plentiful as banks loosened the reins on credit to keep up with the growth. The stock market shot up. New money in the marketplace, coupled with a white-hot economy, spurred innovation and consumer spending. Wages of working Americans grew, and the onset of installment buying allowed them to purchase more for their families. The 1920s marked a consumer goods revolution—electric toasters, irons, phonographs, radios, plumbing fixtures, and automobiles.

Did you know that if you’re a middle-aged woman, you have only a small window of opportunity between the beginning of perimenopause and the start of menopause to start estrogen replacement therapy to protect not only your brain but also your bones and cardiovascular system? I did not, until I dug into the science, because as a woman who was diagnosed with a stage 0 breast lump, I was scared off like so many of us from the results of the Women’s Health Initiative, which got blasted out all over the news and initially showed a link between estrogen replacement therapy and breast cancer, but guess what? That study had so many flaws, its findings are little more than useless and possibly harmful. Worse, women like me without uteri show a decrease in breast cancer with estrogen replacement therapy. But this information never made it either into the headlines or into our gynecologists’ offices. I had to find it in scientific publications such as The Lancet online. In fact, get this: Our medical system barely trains gynecologists in menopausal medicine. A recent study found that only 20 percent of ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. provide any menopause training. Yes, any. Which means that 80 percent of all gynecological residents in school today are getting no training whatsoever in post-reproductive women’s health. These are people whose job it is to know everything going on in our ladyparts, but they have not been taught the basic tenets of how to care for either us or our plumbing after we stop menstruating. And by “us” I mean 30 percent of all women alive on earth at any given moment. Half of my middle-aged female friends deal with chronic urinary tract infections. Oh, well, we think, throwing up our hands in defeat and consuming far too many antibiotics than are rational or safe or even good for the future safety of humanity. It took Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist in Washington, D.C., reaching out to me over Twitter to explain that UTIs in menopausal women do not have to be recurrent. They can be mitigated with, yes, vaginal estrogen. Not once was I ever

I have laughed more than most folks and I have cried just as much. I have lived hard at times, not so hard at others, and even let some days plumb get away from me. But who has not done the same? I have give and I have took. I have had a good run. The smell of lilacs, cold spring water in my mouth on a hot summer day, the colors of fall, the sound of falling snow. And what of the greatest of all? What of Love? Oh, I have knowed love. . .

Across the economy, incomes doubled from 1945 to 1970. The era was characterized by affluence: single-family homes with cars, good public education, steady jobs, electricity, plumbing, toys, television, health care, and a secure old age. Meanwhile, a strongly progressive tax code spread the costs of repaying the wartime debt and funding the new social services evenly. The top marginal tax rate during Eisenhower’s administration was 91 percent, and the effective tax rate for the highest incomes was 70 percent. The corporate tax rate peaked at 52.8 percent in the late 1960s.[7]

phone whistled. That was the sound she used for texts from Aunt Cathy. Like a cuckoo bird, which seemed fitting. Momma used to say Aunt Cathy was plumb crazy. Her momma would always follow it up with—“but the good kind.” Was there really a good kind of crazy?

station. I had a sinking feeling that our future lay somewhere inside one of these dark, gaping mouths. “Oh, I hope we don’t have to go mucking about in there,” said Olive. “Of course we do,” Enoch said. “It isn’t a proper holiday until we’ve plumbed every available sewer.” The pigeon bopped rightward. We started down the tracks. I hopscotched around an oily puddle and a legion of rats scurried away from my feet, sending Olive into Bronwyn’s arms with a shriek. The tunnel yawned before us, black and menacing. It occurred to me that this would be a very bad place to meet a hollowgast. Here there’d be no walls to climb, no houses to shelter in, no tomb lids to close behind us. It was long and straight and lit only by a few red bulbs, glinting feebly at scattered intervals. I walked faster. The darkness closed around us. When I was a kid, I used to play hide-and-seek with my dad. I was always the hider and he the seeker. I was really good at it, primarily because I, unlike most kids of four or five, had the then-peculiar ability to be extremely quiet for

reason gives us tools to control nature. But it cannot indicate which uses of nature are good or humane. Reason shows us how to achieve our goals. But it cannot determine which goals are right to pursue in the first place. It ascertains what we can do, but not what we should do. What works, but not what is good. Facts, but not values. As a result, many people concluded that the only way to plumb the Big Questions was to “escape from reason” (the title of one of Schaeffer’s books). That is, to leave reason behind and take a leap of faith from the lower story to the upper story.

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What is an operating system, really? What did Cutler’s team wish to create? Picture a wealthy English household in the early 1900s. Think of a computer—the hardware—as a big house, the family’s residence. The house consists of plumbing and lighting, bricks and mortar, windows and doors—all manner of physical things and processes. Next, imagine computer software as the people in the house. The household staff, living downstairs, provide a whole range of services at once. The butler stands by the door, the driver washes the car, the housekeeper presses the linen, the cook provides meals and bakes cakes, the gardener rakes the leaves from the lawn. And this activity, which seemingly happens of its own accord, is coordinated by the head of the household staff. Such is the life of the downstairs dwellers, who in a certain sense exist in the background. Then consider the people upstairs. They are the whole reason for the toil of the people downstairs. The husband desires a driver not simply for peace of mind but because he wishes to travel. The wife employs a cook, so her family can eat well. The children benefit from the work of the gardener, who clears the yard of debris, enabling them to play outdoors safely. The picture of the family upstairs and their faithful downstairs servants neatly illustrates the great divide in the world of software. The people upstairs are the applications: the word-processing, electronic ledger, database, publishing and numerous other programs that satisfy human needs and wants. The people downstairs collectively perform the functions of an operating system. Theirs is a realm of services, some automatic, some requiring a special request. These services lay the basis for the good stuff of life. Cutler

Oh, sorry. I’m actually still married,” I said, glad that my marriage had finally been good for something.

Then again, I was never any good at plumbing the depths of a woman's heart.

FEBRUARY 12 UNGODLY COVENANTS MADE BY YOUR ANCESTORS ARE BROKEN IF YOU VIOLATE My covenant, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, My anger will burn against you, and you will quickly perish from the good land I have given you. But if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers forever and ever. I have laid a sure foundation, and if you rely on My precious cornerstone and make My justice your measuring line and righteousness your plumb line, then I will disannul all ungodly covenants your ancestors made with idols, demons, false religious, or ungodly organizations in the name of My Son, Jesus. I will take hold of your hand and will keep you and make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for unbelievers. EXODUS 23:31–33; MATTHEW 5:33; ISAIAH 42:6 Prayer Declaration I break and disannul all ungodly covenants, oaths, and pledges I have made with my lips in the name of Jesus. I break and disannul all covenants with death and hell made by my ancestors in the name of Jesus. I command all demons that claim any legal right to my life through covenants to come out in the name of Jesus.

You’re plumb addled, stealin’ off like this from a Comanche husband. Don’t you got an inklin’ of what he’ll do when he catches you?” “Beat me senseless, I reckon, which is why I’m not planning to get caught.” “He’ll beat you all right, in front of the whole village. Your leavin’ is a dishonor to him. Why, he’s liable to be so mad he’ll hack your nose off! It ain’t like he’s white folk, Loretta Jane. You don’t go leavin’ a Comanche! Hunter’ll be so mad, he’ll chew rawhide clean in two.” “Shut up, Amelia Rose, before I paddle your hiney good.” “You ain’t big enough by half!” “Wanna bet?” Loretta challenged in a shaky voice. Amy gasped. “You’re scared, ain’t you?” “Spitless.” “Then why leave him?” “Because I have to, I have to. Now get walkin’. I’m the oldest. I know better than you what’s best.” Amy did as she was told, albeit reluctantly, describing with every step the dire fate that was in store for Loretta when Hunter caught her. “He won’t cut off my nose!” “Will so!” “Will not!” Loretta leaped across the wash and turned to help her cousin. “Now stop with trying to scare me.” “You’d best be scared. He’s a Comanche, Loretta! When a Comanche woman shames her man, there’s certain things he’s expected to do. He has to, to save face.” “Praise the Lord I’m not a Comanche woman, then, hm?” Loretta nudged Amy into a walk, falling in behind her. “Loretta Jane, we ain’t fixin’ to steal their horses, are we?” “You wanna walk?” “Hunter’s gonna flay us alive.

So going back to our example, a good plumber is not necessarily the best person to run a plumbing business. This is a vitally important distinction to note and is a key reason that most small businesses fail. The owner of the business may have excellent technical skills but it’s his lack of business skills that causes his business to fail. This

Beware the terror of not producing. Beware the urge to justify your decision. Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and the painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too. Beware feeling you're not good enough to deserve it. Beware feeling you're too good to need it. Beware all the hatred you've stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do. Most contributors will be motivated to ladder up to the top-line OKRs—assuming they know where to set the ladder. As our team got larger and more layered, we confronted new issues. One product manager was working on Premium, the enhanced subscription version of our app. Another focused on our API platform, to enable third parties like Fitbit to connect to MyFitnessPal and write data to it or applications on top of it. The third addressed our core login experience. All three had individual OKRs for what they hoped to accomplish—so far, so good. The problem was our shared engineering team, which got caught in the middle. The engineers weren’t aligned with the product managers’ objectives. They had their own infrastructure OKRs, to keep the plumbing going and the lights on. We assumed they could do it all—a big mistake. They got confused about what they should be working on, which could change without notice. (Sometimes it boiled down to which product manager yelled loudest.) As the engineers switched between projects from week to week, their efficiency dragged.

Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it . . .

Bark is a waterproof skin of dead cells that protects a tree's interior plumbing. The furrows in bark are essentially stretch marks that appear as the tree expands. On some trees, like the giant sequoia, bark can be 12 or more inches thick--good insulation from wildfire. Other species, like birch and aspen, have skins just 1/4 inch thick. In the famously exquisite bark of paper birch, cells are laminated on top of one another in layers, so the bark can stretch without furrowing. Microscopic air spaces riddle the outer layers, reflecting light in all directions and making the bark appear white. Should the inner, re4ddish brown bark be exposed, a black scar develops.

I’ve always found that everything in life is a lesson. I truly believe that. I think that everything that happens bad to us is also a blessing, and that wrapped in every bad experience is a valuable blessing. A gift, if we’re willing to receive that gift. Sometimes you gotta dig through some muck to find that gift, but it is there. . .I wanted to write about a time and a place where going without electricity, going without indoor plumbing was no big deal. Everybody did it. And, you survived! Of course, you survived! You know, people have survived throughout most of history without indoor plumbing. It’s only within the last couple of years that we’ve gotten such luxuries. As I said, everything in life is both a blessing and a curse, and those luxuries are blessings, but they can also be a curse if you start thinking you need them to survive. Because you don’t. And one of the great things about going through hardships is that you come to know the differences between wanting things and needing things. And we all need a lot less than we think that we do. And I think that was something that Lily had to learn time and time again, that you know you can fall on your behind and you just gotta get back up. Anybody can ride during the good times, but it’s knowing how to fall, that was a lesson she learned early in life. Knowing how to fall takes great talent. You get up, you dust off your behind, get back on the saddle and you start riding again. And that’s a good thing to know. Don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself.

Households supply their labour and capital in return for wages and profits, and then spend that income buying goods and services from firms. It is this interdependence of production and consumption that creates income’s circular flow. And that flow would be uninterrupted if it were not for three outer loops—involving commercial banks, government and trade—that divert some income for other uses. The model shows banks siphoning off income as savings and then returning it as investment. Government extracts income as taxes but re-injects it as public spending. Overseas traders need to be paid for the nation’s imports but in turn pay out for its exports. All three of these diversions create leakages from and injections into the market’s circular flow but, taken as a whole, the system is closed and complete—not unlike a circular set of plumbed pipes with water

One of the arguments often made in response to weak public understanding of technology is a call to increase technological education - in its simplest formulation, to learn to code. Such a call is made frequently by politicians, technologists, pundits and business leaders, and it is often advanced in nakedly functional and pro-market terms: the information economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future. This is a good start, but learning to code is not enough, just as learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, aging infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society. A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?

Sasha, who referred to the drug as his “low-calorie martini,” shared it with a friend, Leo Zeff, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and psychotherapist who was so impressed with the drug’s potential that he came out of retirement to proselytize about MDMA’s therapeutic possibilities. Zeff trained hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of therapists around the country in how to use MDMA as a tool in their practices. Ann Shulgin, Sasha’s wife, who accompanied him when he lectured to my class, told us that she herself had used MDMA, and also administered it to couples. She said that in her couples counseling practice she could accomplish more in a single six-hour session with MDMA than in six years of traditional therapy. Her patients could plumb their most vulnerable depths, safely and even joyfully, with the kind of trust that even years of therapy couldn’t engender.

We show faith in ourselves by setting clear goals. It is imperative that we acknowledge our successes and give credit where credit is due. More importantly, we must put failure into perspective. Faith in oneself and perceived failure are intimately connected. For many of us, when we think that we have failed, we lose faith in our abilities. The way I see it, failure is merely a tool by which we learn life’s lessons all too well. When the concept of failure is put into perspective, we are better able to acknowledge the wounds incurred in life. With positive attention, wounds heal and scars soften. Only then are we able to look through the pain and have faith in the good that resides within our hearts.

Anything else I should know about you, O’ Devir?” The Irishman’s eyes opened. “Lots.” He gave Andrew a level stare. Here, too, he did not back down or look away. “You interested in hearin’?” Andrew rubbed his jaw and thought about that for a long moment. “No,” he said finally. “No, I am not.” Still that steady gaze. “I’ve done terrible things.” “What you’ve done in the past does not concern me as much as what you’ll do in the future—and how you treat my little sister. I won’t plumb your secrets, especially as you seem quite willing to confess them.” “I killed a man.” O’ Devir was regarding him with flat challenge, daring him to take up this gauntlet. “I know all about it.” And at the Irishman’s raised brow, he added, “Lucien had you investigated.” “And he’d still see me wed to yer sister?” “I consider myself a damned good judge of character, O’ Devir, and I can sense enough about yours that the particulars of Mr. Brown’s unfortunate death are of little interest to me.” “I love your sister. And she might not be lovin’ me back if I were to tell her the particulars that ye’re not so eager to hear.” “You haven’t told her?” “Not yet. Things happened rather quicker than I expected, they did. I’ll tell her in good time.” He looked up at Andrew with eyes that were resolute. “I’d give my life for her, ye know, and consider it an honor doin’ it.” “I don’t doubt that.” “I won’t break her heart like that other ball of shite did.” “If you do, my brothers and I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you.

There are certain inequities, iniquities, and injustices in this world that no amount of historicizing, contextualizing, or theologizing will satisfy. Some are so devastating that they challenge our faith in humanity and sometimes our faith in the church and even in God. As we ponder on certain controversies and conundrums, sometimes we are simply left without a good answer, either for ourselves or for those we love. These are the moments that test our hope. In our pain and disorientation, we are forced to plumb the depths of our faith, our hope, and our love—the very foundations of our Christian discipleship. At times the church itself may be both the source and the site of our struggles. More will be said in chapters 8 and 9 about how and why the church can be the place where we

The Black Clouds He had trudged through tangles and trailed in steeps for two days scratching his face and extremities into blood. The sun was near to setting and he was not able to overcome the plumb rocks. He had hunger collywobles in his stomach. “Tomorrow I will easily reach the troops…” – he entered a familiar cave with these thoughts and emptying the pockets full of mushrooms picked on the road burnt a flame. He took from the internal pocket a flat bottle of moonshine and swallowed – it removed the fatigue and helped him to rid himself of remorse. He felt stick in his mouth – “As is, I have drunk of bile and smell like lathery horse…» His tousled beard hid all light lines on his face making him more terrible. His large shoulders and brawny arms proved him as a strong person. He almost had no neck – as though, his head was stuck into shoulders. His old and narrow dress fitted close to his body – under it he had military officer’s shirt. Although he avoided twists and turns of war, he was accustomed to the smell of blood and death – he was bright, fearless and volitional like a real fighter. “I could become a good fighter,” – he was sure in it and sometimes expressed this thought loudly watching the fighting troops. Besides everything, the war is ugly also because of the fact that pillagers not wasting the time pillage the dead fighters. When the fights get calm, the Sun illuminates the naked corpses – it is qiute common phenomenon. The most of people think that this action is done by the winner figthers. But they are wrong because the day-time heroes cannot turn into night hyenas. This action is done by pillagers wearing military dress and hang around the attacking troops and, some of them do it with entire family in horse carts. He also was fed by the war – he also wandered following the troops like dark shadow and emtied the dead fighters’ pockets. He often sold the robbed things to fighters. His accomplices robbed in dream even own fellow travellers. But he was more compassionate and never robbed the wounded fighters thinking that it would moderate his sins. He never took the dead figthers’ dress but emptied only their pockets. But the pillagers following him stripped the dead fighters naked. “Thy say that there is a lame necrophiliac pillager among them raping the dead people.” Once, checking the laying fighter’s pockets he saw that the fighter is alive but his leg is torn off and suspended on the skin. Sitting close he started to frankly speak to the fighter consoling him. The fighter asked him to cut his leg off and bury it. He implicitly fulfilled the fighter’s request; coming to consciousness in the evening the fighter cheerfully said that his leg called him to the beyond. At that moment he tried to think about the world above but immediately shook his hand thinking «That’s load of rubbish!» The fighter died in the night and, taking the fighters ring off his finger, he put into sack. The fighters didn’t think about them in the heat of the battle. However, if the fighter caught any of them they unreservedly killed them. Once he always was near to death – however, he could save his life saying that he was carrying the army’s battle to the troops and furthermore, tearfully implored a little reward from officer. Coming back, he emptied his killed accomplices’ pockets ad collected a lot of money and valuables. He hated retreating troops. “Troops should either self-destruct or destroy the enemies!" Rivers of blood, ditches full of human corpses, mothers’ tears – all of these notions were nonsensical rot in his comprehension. Both the victory and defeat also were considered by him as nonsense – he was interested only in trophies. The days when he succeeded to collect rich trophies he could neither sleep in nights nor eat for sake of protecting the robbed values from pillagers but it didn’t weaken him. He willingly studied information about bloody wars and was mostly amazed by the fight of Waterloo: «It

Lastly the corporate office design Gauteng will also require to be planned with particular furniture and tools requirements in mind. It is also important to consideration on sufficient working spaces. Interior office design has turned a little more complex as compare than interior design for residential assignments. This article is all about corporate interiors and project management Gauteng. Interior Office design Floor plans The interior floor plan for an office is first task for space planning. It require skill as well as good creativity for problem solving ability but also special facts of building sets as well as information of the company's needs who will dwell there, normally known as the client as well as tenant. Here the floor plan layout requires to meet all the companies obligations such as how many offices, meeting rooms and storage areas among others and also forces with the applicable regulations as well as standards. The floor plan will also include office designs for different technical and engineering services which include: • Electrical plans for lighting and power • Services designs for Emergency such as exit signs, emergency lighting and mass departure warning methods • Designs related to communications services including phones and computers • Designs related to Fire sprinklers of fire recognition systems and also flames hose reels • Air conditioning Designs • Plumbing services Designs • Designs for safety and entry control systems The corporate interiors and project management needs to be planned with keeping in mind not only all the standards necessary but also the needs of the client's requirements. Office re fit is a general good design perform for work flow and helpful working environments. • Finding the amount of offices, conference rooms and release plan workstations obligatory by the client. • Finding sufficient normal facilities which include storage areas, filing areas, printing areas, and staff facilities including kitchens and toilet facilities. • Office layout for right sitting of offices and workstation work areas to take full advantage of entry to natural light. • Concern of main workflow spaces and flow corridors. • Site of public areas including the reception as well as meeting rooms to keep away from disturbance to the common office work areas. • Area of heavy load luggage compartment systems to make sure structural uprightness of the floor. • Right area for break out as well as staff relaxation areas. • Correct furniture and tools planning

AT cash-strapped NYCHA, it’s good be be a plumber. Take Housing Authority plumbing supervisor Robert Procida. In fiscal year 2014, Procida earned $232,459 — more than NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye ($210,000) and even more than Mayor de Blasio ($225,000). Procida got $88,288 in base pay, but added another $142,425 in overtime. That accounts for 1,481 hours of OT — the equivalent of an extra 37 workweeks. He did not return calls seeking comment. Procida and four other plumbers made it to the top of NYCHA’s OT list, a list that cost the authority an amazing $106 million in fiscal year 2014. For an agency that’s facing a $77 million deficit, that amount of overtime is a serious problem.

Fred T-H uses some well done plumbing pictures to explain why Queues Don’t Fix Overload: So when I rant about/against queues, it’s because queues will often be (but not always) applied in ways that totally mess up end-to-end principles for no good reason. It’s because of bad system engineering, where people are trying to make an 18-wheeler go through a straw and wondering why the hell things go bad. In the end the queue just makes things worse.

It wasn’t until nearly 400 years later [since capitalist privatizations at home in Britain, i.e. the Enclosures starting in 1500s] that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise. […] It happened slightly later in the rest of Europe, while in the colonised world longevity didn’t begin to improve until the early 1900s [decolonization]. So if [capitalist economic] growth itself does not have an automatic relationship with life expectancy and human welfare, what could possibly explain this trend? Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention […]: [public] sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property [note: the Enclosures required state violence to privatize land], and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done. The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century.