One: This deserves to lead the quick-takes pack. Praise God - that's all I have to say about it.
Two: To some personal business: as I've certainly mentioned off-blog, I developed last week what the urgent-care doctor who saw me on Wednesday night diagnosed as acute gastritis (even though I seem not to have gotten it via any of the more obvious ways, which tend to involve food, drink, or substances that I don't consume on a regular basis). What's that like, untreated? Basically, a lot of severe abdominal pain, sometimes with nausea, et cetera...even when all I was trying to do was drink water. It didn't start out as bad as that, but that's basically where it ended up. I've been taking proton-pump-inhibiting medication (that is, stuff that shuts my stomach-acid pumps down to some extent, although apparently not to such an extent that I can't digest things) and a fair amount of liquid store-brand antacid. (Question: if mints are supposed to aggravate gastritis, why do they use it to flavor antacid? Unless, I suppose, it's just artificial flavoring.) Also, for the record, a low-acid diet is way harder than it looks. Thank the Lord above for bananas, in-season watermelon, saltines, and chicken broth. If not for them, eating almost wouldn't be worth it at all.
Three: Things I would like to be eating again soon: spaghetti and sauce (tomatoes are too acidic), pizza (tomatoes, plus I'm still a little iffy about milk/cheese/etc.), anything involving chocolate (prohibited because of potential acid production), cereal with milk (milk and I apparently haven't made up yet), and basically anything containing more than nine grams of fat (not because it's precisely prohibited, but again, just because my digestion's been all funny).
Four: Speaking of food, today I definitely saw a maintenance record (one not of my own making) that read, "Show[ed] building to burgers." At first I thought it'd been a typo for "burglars," but fairly quickly realized that that definitely couldn't have been it, either. Upon further consideration, I think Cal must have written, "Show building to buyers" - the building in question being for sale, if I'm not mistaken - and the person making the electronic version, D. or J., must have misread his handwriting, which isn't always the clearest.
Five: So 2012 won't go down in history as the year in which I watched as much of the Olympics as I would have liked, but I have caught some. Congratulations to Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings! I hadn't followed their Olympic stuff before, but I'm so glad they got their three-peat.
Six: I've been reading a lot of Dorothy L. Sayers's letters (I'll probably finish the volumes of her letters before I finish those of C.S. Lewis, even though I started Lewis's a couple of years ago and only have one volume - albeit a very long one - left), and if I could just quote some of them in full on this site, or any other, I might. However, since I can't, I'll say that a lot of problems in thought and rhetoric, and probably education, that I thought were fairly new (only since my parents' generation, say) have actually been in full force for a few decades longer at least. So that's a little troubling. I'll also say, a little less depressingly, that she takes the idea of work very seriously, and has some ideas about what work one should or shouldn't be asked to do in the service of Christianity that differ from, say, C.S. Lewis's opinions. It was interesting to see the two of them argue it out in letters (well, mostly her, since his reponses are only given in excerpts), especially as I wonder if they aren't both partly right. Rather than try to summarize the whole debate here, you can ask me if you're interested.
Seven: It's my brother's birthday, so I'm off to text him. I'm also going to give him a birthday present when I see him next weekend, but what it will be, I do not now have an idea. Wish me the best on that one!