Places I've been published

Hi all,

I wrote a review of an imaginary book, "Dumped But Dispassionate," and it got published on the Onion Dome. The Onion Dome is a news site with parody and lampoon-style articles poking fun at Orthodox Christians who take themselves too seriously.

Also, I've published some stories recently on Booksie, a cool site where authors can post prose. I've put non-fiction about my time in Ukraine on there, as well as three short fictional stories. I would love to have your comments on any of them.

Your friend,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Two of my favorite photos

Recently I developed two rolls of film, and got two wonderful pictures. Here's one of Miri in Lowell's Restaurant at the Pike Place Market, which I call "Contemplatively Chocolating." For more of these, click here.

This other one is of me at Spray Falls in Mt. Rainier National Park. For more of this album, click here.

Fundamental walls

I keep wishing I could write a good book about religion with broad appeal, especially to those without a religion, but I think there are some fundamental walls I will run into no matter what:

• a. Most people are set in their habits.
• b. Most of those people who are willing to change their habits aren't that interested in theology.
• c. Given the focus on this-worldly justice that most non-religious people have, I think they'd make better Jews than Christians.

I keep thinking that if we could only find the right appeal to the unchurched, we could start an "Awakening" with the fullness of our sacramental life. We could be more than these chatty parishes of 100 or so people, one or two per city. I imagine myself as some kind of bridge between the world of unaffiliated ethical reasonableness and sacramental Christianity, but really, I'm just part of a small group that wanted to make this kind of change, and did.

And then, we Orthodox find other people who have come in this way, and we think we're witnessing a trend. It's a significant portion of those joining the church, but an insignificant portion of America.

In summary, this book is going to take a lot longer to write than I thought it would.

Winter update

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Maple Valley!

Recently, I developed some film and put it up on my photo blog, so I have these lovely pictures that are a little bit dated, but that's how film works, remember? Reminiscing is supposed to include an element of surprise at the stuff you forgot was there. I took pictures of the Fourth of July fireworks show we had in the street, all of which looks really cool with extended exposures. The hovering white blob in the third picture is Jeffrey wearing a headlamp lighting something.

 

 

 Also, back in August, Miri and I got to go on a bike ride around Washington state. It was a 200-person supported ride, and Jeffrey, Patrick, Mom and Dad were there, too. It was six days, 400 miles and lots of lovely scenery. We started in LaConner, Wash., and ended in Kettle Falls, Wash. This ride was gorgeous and challenging, involving crossing Washington Pass in the North Cascades on Day 2. This was Miri's first mountain riding experience, and she did great. Patrick, as usual, went too fast, but did stop long enough to take this picture:

 

We then camped in the Methow River Valley in a small town called Twisp, which, along with nearby Winthrop, seemed like a wonderful place to go relax in a cabin or something. And, there were no huge resort hotels or anything. Interestingly, a major skiing resort company years back had wanted to build a huge downhill resort, and the town said thanks but no thanks, and the company decided to build in Whistler instead, and now we have a laid-back tourist town rather than a crazy one in Washington. I'd love to go visit again.

As we were riding from Twisp to the Grand Coulee Dam, we rode on a high plateau with gorgeous views, and there were these hovering white insects that sounded like rotating sprinkler heads. That was kind of cool.

Shortly after the bike ride was over, we went on a hike in Mt. Rainier National Park with our friends the Powells. We started out at Mowich Lake and hiked up to Spray Park. The weather was gorgeous, and I was so glad to get all these pictures. And, thankfully, the bugs were too small to be photographed. Father Barnabas Powell, and his wife Lela, have two children, Mila and Sava, aged 3 1/2 and 1 1/2.

 Miri and I have been making a little bit of progress with our careers, although it's been kind of fragmentary progress. We are both eagerly awaiting Real Jobs that pay the rent and pay benefits. Miri still has her temp job at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, working with the animals in the Asia exhibit, and she recently got an unpaid internship at the Seattle Aquarium to work with the birds and mammals there. She's left her PetSmart job, which makes her happy.

I have a part-time temporary job at REI right now answering phones in the call center and placing orders for the customers. It is kind of a fun place to work, and we ring a bell whenever a membership is sold, and then everybody applauds. It's also nice when a customer calls in to ask about an item I actually own, and then you can hear their voice really light up. One mother was calling to order a sleeping bag for her daughter going a mission trip to Russia, and was going for major overkill with the bag and accessories, and I was able to reassure her: Yes, the buildings have walls over there. Moms can be so funny.

It's also fun working for a for-profit co-op. I've worked for lots of non-profits in my day, and they've all had meaningful missions, but they've been slow to respond to changes in the communities they serve, and they tend to like to do what the staff wants to do rather than what the communities need. REI has a more definite measure of effectiveness: Is it selling?

This job ends in a few days. I found another bit of short term work recently, doing business and administration work for a news web site, the Seattle Post-Globe, which opened last year. It's staffed by former Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalists who got laid off when the newspaper closed in the spring. Right now it's a non-profit, but thinking about becoming a for-profit co-op, which I think would be really cool.

I am also taking a class in Geographic Information Systems at the University of Washington. I am with a group of five students who are trying to map avalanche paths in the Cascades in hopes of using the maps for prediction and education. It's kind of a fun project, although the software involved with GIS is challenging.

So, that's what's up right now. We hope you are well.

In Christ,

Thomas Eric Ruthford

A lovely day out

Miri and I went to Sequim, Wash., yesterday, and got to see some cool stuff. First, at the Dungeness River Festival, there was an exhibition of driftwood sculptures:

This one is a dreamcatcher inside of a piece of wood. I thought it was really pretty.

And then this one is the column of fire from the Book of Exodus that guided the Hebrews at night through the wilderness. (The wood, not the flower bouquet.)

After the River Festival, we went to the Dungeness Spit National Wildlife Refuge, a 5-mile barrier island that extends out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It's one of the few long beaches walks in Washington state that doesn't make you climb a mountain in the middle of it.

We found a really big piece of driftwood there, and tried to take some artsy pictures with it, but I was using a digital pocket camera that doesn't have a manual mode, so it kept setting its aperture so as to get a good picture of the bright stuff, not the dimmer stuff. Here's Miri sitting behind the driftwood, and my shadow in the middle of it.

Eventually, I made my wife squint so that I could actually get her image exposed correctly.

And, finally, my favorite of the bunch of pictures, in which I was able to keep my elbow-shadow out of it.

So that was our Sunday.

Recently, I have had a few interesting things happen. I got another article published on that news Web site, the SeattlePostGlobe. It's about the Seattle City Council considering a change in its single-family housing zoning laws to allow homeowners to build backyard cottages on their lots.

Also, I had two job interviews last Thursday. One job seemed like it would be quite an adventure, and would be a real career-builder. The other seemed like a pretty good job that might pay the rent. I'm hopeful that one of them comes through.

If you're a PLU alumni, I'll be at homecoming this Saturday, Oct. 3. Come find me and say hi!

That's the news from Ruthfordville. We hope you are well!

I'm a news reporter again!

Here is a link to a news story that I wrote. It's about Mary's Place, a women's day shelter in Seattle in danger of closing.

I am a volunteer reporter with the Seattle PostGlobe, an on-line news Web site consisting of former news reporters from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Weekly. It's a non-profit organization, with a big emphasis on the NON right now -- not even the boss gets paid. So if you want to promote a great news site that increases the number of journalistic voices in Seattle, please visit the donation page.

How to survive a recession

The way that you survive a financial panic is by the stuff you don't do in the two or three years leading up to the recession. There really isn't that much you can do to prepare for a recession unless you're an expert at making short sales several times a day.

I have been unemployed for the past nine months, having quit my job the same week Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. That part may not have been the best-timed decision, but now that I have plenty of time to ponder such things, I can remember a couple of moments when I blew some people off for their outlandish suggestions.

The first was at the beginning of 2005, when I became friends with a mortgage broker.

After he told me what he did, I said, "Sounds cool, but I have no money, just debt. It'll be a long time before I can buy something."

"You could borrow money from family," he said, "and then rent the house to people to pay the mortgage. You can make money off the rent from the increase of the house's value."

And I laughed. My new friend didn't know me that well yet; he was obviously assuming I had some resources I didn't have.

A couple of months later, I opened a bank account at Washington Mutual Bank in San Francisco. I had a personal liking for this bank because they gave my great-grandmother a home mortgage during the Great Depression on the house where my family lived when I was a baby. My initial deposit was less than $1,000. At the end of the initial meeting, the woman in the collared WaMu shirt gave me a certificate saying that I had been pre-approved for a home loan of $250,000. I snorted, quietly. I knew that offer wouldn't hold after I filled out all the forms and put on a tie and came in and tried to explain to a suit-wearing mortgage officer I could pay for a house or condo in San Francisco with my $30,000 salary.

Obviously, these people were talking about someone else. I blew them off. It wasn't a temptation I was resisting, as much as a joke that I thought was mildly funny. I forgot all about it.

As it turns out, they weren't joking. A month ago, I read this first person account by an economics reporter at The New York Times who really wanted to buy a house but was paying two-thirds of his salary to his ex-wife in child support. He found a mortgage broker who told him that wasn't a problem and started descending the credibility scale for types of mortgages available until he found one that would not require that aspect of his background to be put on a loan application. He told the broker he felt guilty asking with such bad history, and the broker told him that the broker's job was to make things possible for the customer, not to judge them. He bought the house and a year later, he had a hard time making payments, and called up the same broker to refinance. "No problem," he said. Calling the broker felt like calling a drug dealer. Eventually, he started missing payments and the mortgage was underwater, but the bank was too busy to foreclose. At the time he wrote the article, eight months after he stopped paying, he still had not heard back from the bank.

Reading this article made me reconnect the dots of some forgotten memories. I was angry over the fact I had been unemployed for eight months and living with my parents, but I hadn't understood that I had been very close to this bad mortgage nonsense without even knowing it. Washington Mutual, a leader in subprime mortgages, probably would've given me a home loan in 2005. Now they're gone, but my checkings account got bailed out by the FDIC. My friend the mortgage broker is still my friend, but isn't working now, either, trying to find a new job outside of real estate.

Now I have just finished a temp job. I have a moderate amount of debt (that isn't growing) and a room at my parents' house where my wife and I sleep. We're doing all right, mainly because of all that stuff we never did.

Thinking in negative terms -- benefits of things not done -- is so counter-intuitive, but now I know what economics professors mean when they tell us about opportunity cost.