Productivity Mania

How strange it seems that after fifteen years of retirement I am still obsessed with productivity. Obsessed may be too severe a judgment. Just the same, I do feel some pressure to be maintain a steady flow of creative work, be it keeping up with the supply of scripture introductions sent to David Keating for his website, www.seemslikegod.org, sending scripture introductions and Bible study previews to Rick Sands for the Glen Abbey United Church website, or sending regular e-mail messages and the scripture introductions to Arnie Pittao in Lloydminster, SK. Then there is this personal blog. After four days, I feel somewhat behind the times in referring to my political interests.

It isn't that I haven't been busy. Much of my time has been taken up with the regular Tuesday morning Bible study at GAUC and the once a month Probus meeting on Thursday.
Between those events, I have read numerous political commentaries on the American primary election on Tuesday as well as more of the fascinating study of the Nativity, "The Birth of the Messiah," by Raymond E. Brown. Each of those activities had plenty of interesting insights on which to comment.

The most surprising, of course, were the results of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. Both the Democratic and Republican contests made the pollsters and the pundits look very bad. Contrary to all expectations, Hillary Clinton and John McCain ended up winning quite handily, thereby sending the so-called experts in the several campaigns back to their strategy sessions to find ways to recover lost ground. With several more primaries looming in the near future - Michigan, South Carolina, Florida
within ten days followed by 22 more on February 5th - the candidacy of all but the leading pair in each party is very much in doubt. Already all but three of the Democratic candidates have withdrawn. The Republican hopefuls seem more persistent.

At the Probus meeting yesterday we heard a presentation on the imminent threat of a global pandemic similar to the Spanish influenza or 1919. Normally there are three such pandemics in a century and we are long overdue for another. The main threat now is from the H5N1 virus known as bird flu. The speaker, Dr. Kirstie Duncan, led a research team to Spitzbergen in 1991 looking for samples of people who had died in that pandemic. She told of her unpleasant experience in the politics of scientific research in response to a question I asked about that expedition. It seems that the British tried to steal the results of the DNA tests that followed the expedition's recovery of soft tissue samples from seven victims. She was finally able to get the credit for their modest success for the team she had led. The results could not be replicated in Canada, however. In the meantime, the Americans, who had dropped out of the expedition, succeeded in reconstituting the genetic code of the disease from samples they had retained from 1919.

This morning I have caught up with posting scripture introductions and Bible study notes to the two websites referred above. Now I have only a note to Arnie Pittao on my to do list.

Helen also seems a little frustrated by her struggle to complete her family history. She has to prepare the pictures she wants included before I can print out the final manuscript. Perhaps that will come next week - or the week after. Who knows?