Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

This year I missed singing "Ring Out, Wild Bells" at church. It's one of those songs that you've really only got one shot to sing each year, so you might as well do it. If you miss it once, you've got to wait a whole year longer. (Related sadness: there is but one week a year where we sing Easter hymns at church, and the hymnal has 3. "He is Risen" and "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" always get picked over "That Easter Morn" which I appreciate because it is musically unique in the hymnal.)

So, I went to look up the song to fill that void in my life. The lyrics were written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and it turns out there are another 4 stanzas that are excluded from the hymn in the book. A few of them probably wouldn't fit as well into the song, but that doesn't mean they should be forgotten entirely. So, I present the entire piece for your consideration:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

The Blogs are dying in the night

Looking through the list of blogs that I follow, I see that about half of them haven't been updated in recent memory. I haven't blogged as much as I did a year or two ago, but some people seem to have stopped entirely. I suppose Facebook is partly to blame for this, as it allows people to similarly update the world on their lives, but it's a poor replacement in my opinion. I'm not anti-Facebook or anything. If you want to tell the world that you made cookies today, I suppose it's an excellent method for doing so. (side note: I find it interesting that apparently we all believe that every single one of our friends (and by "friends" I mean anyone we've ever met) are interested in every little thing we say or do. "I'm waiting in line at the library." or "I'm facebooking from my phone." (yes, a "friend" of mine felt the need to tells us all that he was enjoying facebooking from his phone.))

Anyway, I don't see people using facebook to convey substantive ideas about things. No paragraph long stories, explanations, or anything. Text messaging taught us that anything worth saying should be able to fit into 160 characters. Twitter says we should be able to do it in 140. Facebook gives you about 250 characters before it truncates your status, essentially telling you "we all want to hear about your every thought, provided you thought can fit in this little tiny box." Up to this point, this blog post is already over 1400 characters long. That's 10 full length tweets, or almost 6 facebook status updates. So, it's a new year, add a resolution to your list to not only exercize your body, but also your brain. Don't let the brevity police restrict you any longer and go blog something.

Away

Neither Shannon nor I have blogged for a while. Clearly you've all been wondering why. Well, any extended absence on our part is usually indicative of one of a few events: vacation, holidays or sickness. In this case, all three.

Vacation/Holiday: It was Christmas! And a New Year! We spent about 10 days in SLC skipping all over the valley. It can be a bit annoying as everyone lives close enough that we can see everyone, but far enough that we still spend a lot of time driving. It's about 30 minutes from her parents to my parents. But we had a good Christmas. Julia started missing home, as she only spent about 10 days in the month of December at home. But we're back now. We also got a Wii for Christmas, but then left the controllers in SLC. So, if anyone wants to look at a Wii, come on over. The controllers will be making the trip down here in another 10 days or so. It's not like we have any extra time for recreation anyway . . . .

Sickness: Yeah, Shannon is still sick. But it seems to be getting better, and it's not as bad as last time. So far she's only had 2 IVs. Here's the chart: