The blinking and flashing and beeping and BLINKING AND FLASHING...!

There are folks trying to knock our house down this week.

Well, that's what it feels like, anyway.

This morning and yesterday morning, promptly at 7:30, people starting banging and scraping and prying and making all sorts of other noises outside our house that made the house shake at times. (Sound familiar at all?) In any case, the roof is being replaced.

The happy upshot of it, though, is that we're getting two (not one, but TWO) skylights in our apartment - one in our kitchen, and one in my study!

The skylight in the kitchen is in, and just has to be finished around the inside. So that's yay.

What's not yay is the early morning house-shaking.

What simply weird is the way I'm able to sleep through it. The banging and scraping (and did I mention the prying, and also the banging?) is very loud, but all low-pitched and fairly constant. And, unlike yesterday, not directly above my head when I'm in bed.

So I stayed in bed and buried myself in the warm covers, and slept through it.

Except those times when I woke up immediately, because the alarm clock was softly and gently chiming its high-pitched noise.

I'm weird.

Read this. Really.

Okay, it's long. But if you haven't yet, read this NY Times article about Bush, faith, and what makes his particular brand of leadership work for so many people. It's frightening - possibly more so than anything I've seen yet, and contains many private exchanges between Bush and advisors - many of whom are no longer invited to the White House because they question him too much.

EDIT: The following was the quotation from the article that I wanted to use. Thanks, cos!

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
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