It was exactly like this.
I never go to church anymore, not even at Xmas. Instead, this year I’ve replaced it with the roars of a murderous freight train circling around and around my house all through the night, letting me know it would kill me if I stepped out into the blizzard. It’s still out there. There’s a weird haze outside my window caused by all the shards of ice whipping through the air.
It’s all preferable to church, though.
I stopped going to church not long after my confirmation at about the time I was in junior high. I did attend weekly evening Episcopal church youth group meetings up until I was 18. Those weren’t anything like the comic. Fun times!
There’s a disconnect when thinking of Santa and the tree versus having to attend a church service. My parents stopped going to Presbyterian church for some reason sometime when I was in elementary school. Our church then was a different denomination than the church where I was confirmed. My dad was good friends with the preacher at the previous church and we hung out often at his house. He was a pretty cool guy in my vague recollection. But church was still weird and boring for a kid like me.
I went to a Catholic school for around 3 months. That was a hellscape compared to the Episcopalian school I attended the previous year.
And over to Hemi for weather:
It is a very nice 70 °F now but will drop to 30 °F overnight. Wow! Flurries in Florida?
Looks like the anticipated horror show weather has mostly missed us at least at my place here on southern Vancouver Island. The snow hasn’t melted but very little if any fell overnight. There is no sign here of the forecast freezing rain, and that’s predicted to end this morning anyway. The good news is a forecast for 9 degrees tomorrow and Sunday, and rain to melt the snow.
Still not going to church, though. My last visit to one was at my Mom’s funeral in 2003, and at least that was a cathedral with a decent pipe organ. I haven’t gone to one to worship the invisible sky god since the 1960’s.
It still disconcerts me to look in a mirror and see my grandfather staring back at me.
Here I’ve got straight line howling wind, horizontal snow, no power, and I moved my truck away from the trees in case one blows over. It is extreme enshitment out there but it gets me out of driving to the family rendez-vous.
The last time I was in a church was when I was photographing a wedding (the bride: “we cant afford a real photographer…”) and joked “well, I didn’t burst into flames!” when I stepped over the hearth. People nearby recoiled. Aaah, baptists.
I went to church exactly once – wife’s cousin’s wedding. Never felt more out of place in my life. Didn’t burst into flames either.
Last time I was in church ar Christmas was thanks to grandma, who needed someone to drive her and claimed that, as long as I was there anyway, I might as well stay. Grandpa had died that year and her being over 80, I didn’t know how long I would have her around, so I did her the favour.
When I saw the smug look on her face sitting next to me, I regretted my decision somewhat. I loved her and will never forget how she cared for me when I was a kid, but her faith sometimes brought out a nasty side in her.
Outside of funerals I had not been to a church in a long time, it was still as boring as I remembered though I did not feel guilty for being bored anymore. And now the priest telling stories about the loving, caring god reminded me about the other type of stories in his holy book.
Oh, and a friend of mine made the joke about me not bursting into flame when I told him out visiting the church later.
Polly Toynbee, has a good column in The Guardian today expressing a similar sentiment:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/23/christmas-religious-christian-humanist?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Translating
“It is a very nice 70 °F now but will drop to 30 °F overnight. Wow! Flurries in Florida?”
It is a very nice 21 °C now but will drop to 1 °C overnight. Wow! Flurries in Florida?
Okay. Not quite literally freezing but durn close. Now I get it.
Also, yes, Global Overheating can have some strange and paradoxical local results when weather systems get badly disrupted.
The above @ 2. hemidactylus natch.
Meanwhile here its a very pleasant 12 ° C or 53 Fahrenheit at, erm,, after 3 am* local time based on :
https://www.metric-conversions.org/temperature/celsius-to-fahrenheit.htm
again.
OTOH, forecast (See : http://www.bom.gov.au/sa/forecasts/adelaide.shtml ) for Boxing Day is 37 ° C or 98 °F & for the day after the start of eponymous (cricket) Test match its 40 °C or 140 °F
Whilst after the eastern states got flooded our (SA’s!) Murray river is now flooding worse tahn eevr on record pretty much :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-23/emergency-warning-issued-for-sa-river-murray-flooding/101806836
Wiping out people’s homes and businesses and wildlife and doing a lot more downstream damage and, yeah, (cartoon dog sitting in burning house drinking cup of presumed coffee maybe tea maybe something much stronger) “This is fine.”
Morgan Freeman voice / It isn’t fine. Not at all. And she’s NOT right mate. /Aussie vernacular. yeah, its an odd mix.
.* Yes, I should be asleep right now. No, obvs I’m not being here. Yeah, this pretty much sucks except nice dark skies outside.
The weather is frightful in most places right now. But, there are more frightful and vital things to discuss.
We were brought up indoctrinated in the ‘carefully selected’ teachings of the xtian churches. As we matured intellectually, we questioned, researched and slowly came to the factual realization that the basis of the xtian religions was a gruesome, obscene, self-contradictory book of fiction. We are all revcovering now and hope to be more honest and caring having discarded the cult-like indoctrination of xtianity. We hope more people will objectively analyze the entirety of that gruesome self-contradictory book of fiction and discard it and it’s cults as intellectually and morally disgusting. We respect, as people, all those who try to morally and ethically honest lives regardless of their fanciful religious beliefs.
@9- StevoR
30 °F translates to negative 1.11 ° C.
On a show River Monsters Jeremy Wade had investigated the possibility a bull shark bit a horse’s arse in an Australian river (Brisbane) system upstream from a dam. The sharks could have gotten past the dam due to previous flooding IIRC. I came to think of Wade as a horse’s arse and stopped watching the show. He’s no Steve Irwin.
In brighter news we USians have an F1 driver: Logan Sargeant. I’ll still be cheering on North American Checo Perez.
It was 35F when I woke up. Now it’s 6F and the power has failed. As is practice in this neighborhood everyone is asking everyone else if their generators are working OK. Guy up the street keeps 6 in his garage and doles them out in emergencies. I’m charging my phone from a car battery I keep in the basement, with an inverter hooked on that, and an iphone charger in the inverter. This is Minnesota-level weather, very unusual for around here.
-22°C here, and looking out the window, I still see dense swirls of snow everywhere, and the roaring noise is ongoing.
I’m staying in the house.
I’ll be looking at 19F in about 4 hours. It’s now about 48F but windy . Don’t care. I’m going home and getting some hot chocolate. Tomorrow is going to be my bad day ! Not looking forward to that
-1F / -18C and breezy to windy means nobody is out there walking on the snowy sidewalk. I’m not going to shovel it off again until the weather warms enough that the snow doesn’t squeak.
My memories of church in general involve enduring excruciating boredom while wearing uncomfortable clothes that I hoped none of my schoolmates would ever see me in. The only specific memories I have left are embarrassment at being the only one to begin the second verse of “Jesus Loves Me” (my lovely alto belting out JEEEE before realizing, to my horror, that I was the only one singing); making a joke in sunday school (we called it “junior church,” which makes me throw up in my nose a little) about Noah being an architect; and having another kid say I was a bad person, not nice, because my Bible had someone else’s name on it (it was my brother’s, and thanks for the uninformed judgement, you little shit).
My family stopped attending church when I was 10. My mother thought our fellow congregants looked down on us because we were kind of poor. Also, Dad liked football.
Here in the Willamette valley, it’s currently 35°F and cloudy, with some ice on the roads that I hope is gone before tomorrow morning, when I need to ride my bike to the store. I’ve always been pretty good on the ice, never crashing, but I also used to be younger and braver and maybe a little crazier.
As Johnny Cash once wrote, “Sometimes, late at night, when I hear the wind blow, I wish I was crazy again.”
It’s hovering right at the freezing mark. I walked outside briefly in t-shirt and shorts. No precipitation though 😟
No Christmas snow for me.
@17 feralboy12, we spent a decade in Corvallis, liked the forest, dreaded the icy roads. But, now we’re all skating on thin ice. I don’t think they make chains for bike tires, so Stay Safe. And, I fondly remember this twist on a country xtian song: ‘I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as i got my plastic cheeses, riding on the dashboard of my car.’ I almost feel guilty living here in Scarizona: tomorrow it will reach 65 degrees Fahrenheit. But, I feel somewhat redeemed since I must go out and do battle with a yard 1 foot deep in leaves.