Completion update for February

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since my last update! I haven’t forgotten about anything. Here’s some recent activity off the list:

• I finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the second of three Easton Press books I am reading for Reading-1.
• I also finished Brainwave by Poul Anderson, which is off the (massively long) Basic Science Fiction Library list targeted in Reading-2. Excellent book, and my first Poul Anderson novel. I checked out There Will Be Time from the library yesterday just because I wanted to see more from Anderson; I can’t recall if this is also on the Basic Science Fiction Library list. (Update: It’s not, but I also checked out Titan by Ben Bova, which is on the list, and I actually started that one last night.)
• Last night I finished The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals by Gene Veith, thereby completing Reading-12. Another outstanding book, although I know already I will need to read it again just to make sure I am understanding all the chains of reasoning Veith lays out about the Lutheran faith.
• We completed the first item from the Home sublist, Home-11, by having a couple of companies come out to the house during February to give us estimates on finishing our basement. Both companies specialize in “basement finishing systems” that consist of insulation that attaches to the concrete walls and which have a sort of reinforced-fabric front, rather than just the usual drywall. Their products were very nice and we came this close to signing on the dotted line with one of them. But the price was just too high for us right now, since we are trying to eliminate our non-mortgage debt. We are probably going to wait until August or September and look again, focusing on good old-fashioned drywall rather than anything so expensive as the stuff we saw.
• Although we never got the makeup for the class we missed on baptism, I’m marking off Faith-6 as done, since we formally joined our church on February 10. I don’t think one afternoon class was going to give me enough space to think and ask questions about something that deep, anyway. But I’m working on it!

There will be several more completions that are currently underway and will be done in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.