If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that

Originally posted Monday, August 11, 2008 at 9:30pm

So, I hopped on a few airplanes on Saturday, and it turns out that when I was finished, I was back in New Hampshire. My family tells me it rained almost every day while I was gone. We also had a tornado a few weeks ago, which is kind of like having hurricanes in Kansas. Or possibly earthquakes.
I didn’t have a lot of good books to read on my flights, so I read a couple of in-flight magazines instead. There were a lot of University of Alberta students who came to Guadalajara from Edmonton to study Spanish, and interestingly enough, one of the magazines had an article about all the fun things there are to do in Alberta. Apparently the province has a lot of ridiculously large statues of things like Ukrainian sausages, oil lamps, and pinto beans dressed up as cowboys. There’s also a small town called Vulcan, Alberta, which has finally yielded to the inevitable and become a Star Trek tourist trap.

Living in Guadalajara has forced me to become acquainted with our friends the cockroaches. My housemate Josh and I decided that once cockroaches reach waist height, and you have to start killing them with axes and handguns, the size-versus-disgustingness graph flattens out, although the size-versus-terrifyingness graph keeps going up.
Occasionally in Mexico I would see policemen carrying rifles, once outside a 7-11, and once outside a bank. I can only assume that the rifles are for killing very large cockroaches.
Now, I’m no Mexican action hero, dear reader, but if I were, my next big film would be “The Cockroach that Ate Guadalajara," and all the little boys and girls would see it. Then their parents would sue me for corrupting the youth.
In reality, the cockroaches were much smaller than the ones on TV, and I don’t actually know anything about the culinary preferences of cockroaches, but I’m pretty sure that if cockroaches were 10 stories tall they would eat cities.

Speaking of movies, I went to the mall again last week and watched “The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” and I must say, this movie had the exact same storyline as “Hellboy II.” An ancient army lies dormant underground, and some evil dude is trying to magically awaken them. If the army is awakened, then the world as we know it is doomed. A small band of heroes tries to prevent this, and a female insider tries to help out our heroes and becomes romantically involved with one of them.
As you can see, both movies have the same plot. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that “Dragon Emperor” and “Hellboy II” are literally the same movie. Numerically identical, even. The only difference is that “Hellboy II” is a lot more entertaining.
Some things in Mexico are really cheap and others are really expensive. If you want, you can go to the mall and watch an IMAX movie for only 70 pesos, but it cost me more than that to do a load of laundry.
My old shoes were pretty worn out, and the señora was starting to complain about the smell, so I left them in Guadalajara and bought a nice new pair of sneakers for only 198 pesos at the Great Satan. I thought that was a pretty good deal, but my sister thinks I could have gotten them for the same price at the Great Satans in America.

James 3:1-2
1 Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. 2 We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check.