Empty rocks and 3-volt spiders

They say laughter is the best medicine (which I wrote about in my April 8 post), so I guess my sons and I should be pretty healthy right now. I found a Mad Libs book at Goodwill and we did some  this evening, and sometimes we were laughing so hard it was difficult to finish reading the wacky stories that were making us laugh. (Sorry if they don’t tickle your funny bone as much - but the laughter seems to snowball as you do it more.)

The best was probably the one about computers, but I definitely dispute the statement that “they can also laugh better than a human” (italicized words represent filled-in blanks). No one can laugh better than my younger son. Perhaps if we hadn’t already been laughing so much, this wouldn’t have struck our funny bones quite so hard: “Each computer contains over 1000 tiny big semi-plates. These are actually electronic circuits printed on titanium chips, all of which are operated by little three-volt spiders.” But as it was, it took me several tries to get the words out intelligibly.

Happy Birthday, America!

I saw the making of a perfect July 4 snapshot and had to take it. July 4 is remembering liberty and its symbols (that’s the Declaration of Independence behind them), and it’s having a good time celebrating with a traditional parade. (My son is in his “Class B” Cub Scout uniform, ready to help hand out 1200 ice pops to children along the parade route; the Community Bank float was lined up nearby waiting for the parade to begin.)

The allure of life without alarm clocks

I read in today (in yesterday’s newspaper) about two men who stopped in town on their way down the Mississippi. Our local paper is one where Mark Twain worked for a time, so naturally they take special interest in any connection with him. And Bill Bowles and Justus McLarty see their pontoon boats as modern-day versions of Huck and Jim’s raft. Much more comfortable versions, of course - McLarty has solar panels so he can have electricity for his cell phone and broadband USB, so he can blog daily about his journey.

I visited his blog and his friend’s (though they only met at the start of their journey), and decided their adventure held no appeal to me. I’ve been on pontoon boats (they are very popular up in Houghton Lake, Michigan, where we lived for six years), but have no wish to live on one. I like being out in nature, but I prefer to have trees overhead. And ground underneath my feet. I know how to swim - but I much prefer walking for both exercise and travel.

I did feel a brief pang of envy for the idea of having the freedom to leave the structure of everyday life and head off on an adventure with no real deadlines. Occasionally I think fondly of the year I spent in Madrid as a graduate student, traveling (very cheaply) on weekends to various cities, mostly in central Spain. And the three weeks I spent traveling around western Europe by Eurail Youthpass on Christmas break.

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

I read with great interest Rob’s analysis at The Spyglass of the PC(USA) General Assemby’s decisions. For three years we have been attending a Baptist church, but my husband is still a “member-at-large” of our local Presbytery, and has been starting recently to look at nearby PC(USA) churches with open pulpits. The news from San Jose was not encouraging, but as Rob points out, the sky is really not falling. Yet.

I found a similar outlook today in the blog post by the pastor of the church where my husband was ordained. (He is a new pastor there, so we have never met. But I read his weekly blog posts.) He attended General Assembly not as a commissioner, but as an observer and to assist a friend with promoting a proposed piece of legislation (i.e. a proposed change to the church’s rules on how they do things). If you’re wondering about the title of my post, read his to find out.

Pastor Bill does not address the specific issues that Rob does in The Spyglass. Instead he has written a second post describing the committee meetings where his friend’s recommendations were presented - and rejected pretty much out of hand. Like Rob, he does not think the sky is falling - but he left GA discouraged and disappointed. After reading his first-person account of how things went in the Committee, I certainly can understand why.

A number of my conservative friends at World on the Web tend to dismiss the PC(USA) as a bunch of liberals. Occasionally I point out that there are still a significant number of pastors and churches that are conservative, that stay in the denomination to be salt and light, and because they don’t feel God has called them to abandon it. With each General Assembly, however, the argument seems to get harder to make.

Time for a new adventure

Several weeks ago I wrote a post called Adventures with Alice, about the online programming course I was starting. There are times I’ve been frustrated with not being able to ask the professor a question right away, instead having to post a question in the Discussion area then remember to check back in a day or so. But for the most part it has worked out very well, being able to work at my own pace, fitting lessons and assignments into my evenings or weekends around other activities and responsibilities.

I just took my final exam (open book, which made it pretty easy), and printed out my certificate of completion for the course. Now I need to decide what to study next. Since our IT department at work is standardizing on .NET, I’ll have to find out whether Visual Basic .NET would be a good choice. I did have fun learning Alice (I had hoped to be able to create an applet through Alice that I could post here, but the forum about it tells me they are usually large, slow, and unreliable), but now it’s time to learn some skills more practical to the corporate environment.

As to my other recent adventures, visiting the past via my son’s time machine, that has come to an abrupt halt also. Our leaky basement turns out to have a crack in the foundation, and we have to move everything out of that area so work can be done to install a sump pump. And a snowblower-sized box was perfect for storing the board games and puzzles that used to sit on shelves in front of the crack. So while we could send Monopoly and Cadoo and some jigsaw puzzles floating around in time, my son and I will have to stay in 2008 for a while.

I was thinking, though, that our wristwatch teleporters might work for some travel around the country or around the world. I picked up an activity book on the 50 states, and maybe I’d better go looking for a globe too. If you have some interesting places to suggest we visit, please feel free! After all, we can go anywhere in his imagination - even outer space. (Matter of fact, he’d probably like that best - aliens might be the next best thing to dinosaurs - but I’ll try to slip in some geography lessons when I can.)

Time travel in a box

Put together one large (snowblower-sized) cardboard box, an almost-nine-year-old boy with an active imagination, and a reasonably creative mom trying to find ways to keep him occupied, happy, and learning over the summer vacation. Voilà! You have a time machine.

We took our first trip last night, just to try it out. The box is a bit cramped (unlike the snowblower, we can’t be disassembled for packing), so we had to just pretend to shut the door on our machine. The dial (which allows us to set the indicator knob - which looks surprisingly like the broken one off the clothes dryer - for DINO PAST, ICE AGE, PRESENT, or FUTURE) is on the outside, a minor design flaw. But it worked quite well, taking us back to some prehistoric era when pteranodons flew in the skies and triceratops tramped on the earth.

My son thought (optimistically) that we had gone back to a time when T Rex did not live. Just in case, we had incorporated a teleporter into the time machine, with teleport remotes on our wrists that will immediately return us to the time machine should we have to run for our lives. (The teleporter also makes it easy to travel geographically as well as in time, so we don’t have to stay in eastern Iowa.)

A bit of post-travel internet research informs me that triceratops, pteranodon, and tyrannosaurus rex all lived during the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era. We must have just been lucky last night. Today we did our research first before heading for the Ice Age, and knew we would see mammoths, dire wolves, and saber-toothed tigers.

I haven’t developed the pictures from our first trip yet. If they come out well, I’ll post them on my son’s web page, and provide a link here to them and to his journal of our activities.

 

Afternoon in the museum

I was quite taken aback, entering in through the back door of the art museum fifteen minutes before the doors officially opened (to rehearse with the choral group that would be singing as part of the city’s PatriArt celebration), to see a large bald man standing in the gallery, facing the opposite wall, wearing nothing but a Speedo bathing suit.

I was embarrassed to come closer, wondering who he could possibly be, and thinking that although from the back he bore a striking resemblance to a friend of mine, my friend would certainly not appear there in that outfit. As I came further in, I noticed other figures, extremely lifelike but frozen in poses that no living person would hold unmoving for that length of time. So the corpulent man was apparently just an amazingly realistic sculpture. I walked on by. The security guard seated across the room was clearly real, however.

Or was he? He did not look up as I approached. Or as I walked past. Only close up could I be certain that he was no more alive than the others. I headed on to my rehearsal, but made a mental note to be sure to check out the exhibit carefully once the performance was over.

Objet d’yard

The picture above may not give the full impact of the sight that met my son and me as we left for church this evening. I’m not sure which was more surprising - that half our back yard was covered by such a large branch, or that it had fallen on an apparently uneventful afternoon. No storms, no lightning. We had spent the afternoon indoors (and both my husband and my neighbor, on whose clothesline the end of the branch had fallen, confirmed that it had most definitely not been there this morning), but I’m pretty sure it was sunny outdoors, and whatever winds blew hadn’t been strong enough to draw our attention.

A check at wunderground.com showed me that the winds had been around 30 mph during the afternoon, with a few gusts reaching up to 45 mph. I’m pretty sure that’s not enough to rip a 5-inch diameter branch from a healthy tree. [6/29/08 I was informed this morning that yes, that wind yesterday was enough to have done this. But probably it had been weakened by winter storms - otherwise why didn't more branches fall? Of course this makes me wonder how long before the next one hits the ground.] So I can only assume that some previous storm (we’ve certainly had enough of those recently) had cracked the branch, and it had simply taken until this afternoon for the break to become complete.

We dragged it off the neighbor’s clothesline - no easy task - and left for church. Tomorrow we’ll tackle the difficult job of cutting it up into manageable lengths. We’ve had much smaller branches fall during various storms, and we have piled them next to the garage, and occasionally we remind ourselves that we really need to borrow a pickup truck to get them to the municipal Compost Site. Now I think that has become a priority, as the pile this will make will dwarf the previous one. Too bad the only fireplace we have is a decorative, very much non-working one.

I try not to turn everything into a spiritual lesson, but I couldn’t help thinking, when the preacher this evening quoted John 15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches…apart from me you can do nothing,” that we had a perfect object lesson in our back yard. All those green leaves will soon shrivel and die. I’m sure the branch was doing a fine job of abiding in the trunk, until whatever-it-was happened. But that storm or lightning was too strong for it. I’m glad that Jesus also said “No one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:29), and I don’t have to worry that I’ll be ripped out of the Vine by some terrible storm.

6/29/08 I am also happy to add that the tree is now chopped up, thanks to a friend from church. I told  my small group about it this morning, and one man hwo has both a chainsaw and a need for firewood offered to cut it up, and another man who has a trailer will come tomorrow to take it away.

Happy Re-Birthday to Me

Eight presidential election cycles ago, many Americans did not know what the phrase “born again” meant. Southern Baptist theologian James Dunn remembers being asked by Jews and by the press what Jimmy Carter was talking about when he said he was born again. I had started the year having no clue about it, but by the time Carter was chosen as his party’s candidate for President, I had come to a personal knowledge of what it meant.

Thirty-two years ago today, I went with my older sister to the church she had recently begun attending. We had both grown up in a liberal UCC church, where being a Christian seemed to be primarily about loving your neighbor and taking good care of the environment. Belief in any particular doctrine was strictly optional.

I had taken confirmation class that year (which was also my sister’s second year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). I had given a great deal of thought to what I believed, and had gone from being an agnostic to wanting to believe in God but not knowing how. I was intrigued by passages of Scripture in the hymns and anthems we sang in church (I was an alto in the church choir).

ll lll l l lll ll l lll ll

I used the self-checkout lane at Wal-Mart today, as usual. The first time I tried it, over three years ago, I was surprised how much trouble I had scanning items - the checkout clerks made it look so easy. But now I scan them quickly and easily, and I was disappointed to hear an employee say that the self-checkout lanes will probably be going away due to frequent equipment problems (the woman in front of me couldn’t get the system to accept her debit card and had to insert thirty one dollar bills in the machine).

I discovered this evening (from wikipedia.org) that the UPC was first used to scan a product as part of a retail purchase thirty-four years ago today. (To mark that bit of history, that pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum sold at Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio is on exhibit at the Smithsonian.) I was twelve years old then, and often helped with the family shopping. I’m trying to remember, now, what it was like to buy groceries without UPC codes and scanners.