Modern living

Saturday I found someone who had firewood which I have neglected collecting all summer. So I took N. and R. and a moving van up to Herndon to load up as much as we could. At home Anne was making bread and some rolls to take to the party at the church but discovered in the middle of the process that we were out of butter. So she improvised and took some cream that we had and whipped it to make butter. So the 10 of November 2007 found me cutting wood and my wife at home churning butter.

Garden circa 2007

A couple of my favorite things about Gardening this year. First of all I had help from the
progeny and spouse that was lacking in previous years. One of the things I like about gardening is that I learned to look at it as one of the earliest commandments: Go and tend this garden. There are lots of ways to apply this in your life but I believe that none of the possible applications is better than the first. There are lessons of sowing and reaping that come no better than from the first lesson.

Secondly I love that I caught this praying mantis hiding in my basil. As much as I hate the pests of humid climates like Virginia I love the natural predators that come to feast on them. Can we just agree to call them "preying" mantids? As for this one I wish her all the fecundity possible.

Side Note: Insect Picture of the Day will likely have larger versions of this photo soon. I am not sure how I will handle the fame.





Thirdly, this is why I hate the pests of Virginia. After three years of gardening this is the first pumpkin we have had survive the ravages of squash borers long enough to mature. THE. FIRST. ONE. I hate squash borers. We can't grow a decent pumpkin, cucumber, or even zucchini thanks to them. The joke in Utah is that the reason you lock your car doors is because otherwise the neighbors will leave a bag of zucchini in your car and I can barely manage three or four from one hill.


Fourth, the asparagus is still in its experimental stage in the garden. We have six clumps growing now and I expect to be able to harvest quite a bit next year. I have some doubts about how to proceed though. Do I harvest all I can get for a time and then leave it alone or do I let some stalks grow and harvest others all season? More research required.

Next up: a recap of gardening in 2006

Unctuous Self-righteousness

[Conversation at the editor's office]

"Frank glad you could make it in. This is showing some real progress."
"Thanks Gene, I think that suggestion to 'make it more punchy' was what I needed for, . .."
"I do have one concern with maintaining believability here Frank. It's about this charity event you have your heroine hosting."
"You don't think people will believe a celebrity surrounded by a world of undereducated film stars, group think and empty emotions would latch on to a story of a woman widowed by a cruel war?"
"No, there's no problem with that. It's a nice touch. The problem is that I don't think we're writing an absurdist dramedy here. You can't have her baring reporters from a fund raiser for 'Reporters without Borders.' Our target audience wants to suspend disbelief for a few hours, .. ."

Modern Medicine

My 12 year old came down with some stomach flu symptoms last Sunday night. She was still sick Monday with more or less the same symptoms. I tried to get her to get up and take a shower but she said she couldn't. I have thought that my children are gifted dramatists so it really didn't concern me at that point. When she did take a shower Tuesday and started calling out "Daddy" is when the correct parental concern finally kicked in, unfortunately. She had pain in her lower abdomen which was asymmetric and suddenly the light went on. But we had delayed so long that her upper intestine was in spasms and her appendix had ruptured. For some reason the hospital didn't operate until Wednesday night. She will be there for about a week, they expect. She is on a morphine and an antibiotic drip. I can't help thinking that in an age not long ago we would have had once less child after a lingering, painful, feverish end.

And that is a trap of anxiety. What could have happened in other circumstances is one way to learn lessons from experience but it is not very helpful to make a stick out of it and beat yourself up. There are certainly lessons to be learned from the incident but the fact is in another day and time that her fate would likely have been sealed at the first sign of sickness.

Over all I am grateful for modern medicine and decent health insurance.

PBS' The Mormons

I watched the PBS special The Mormons with some ambivalence. It was not that I was unsure on whether to watch it but that I had conflicting expectations about how it would turn out. There is a long history of people willing to say bad things about Joseph Smith and the Mormon religion. The outside observer would feel obligated to provide these voices a stage in the interests of journalistic integrity, not to mention the interests of ratings and controversy. I have heard enough of those voices to know that if the filmmaker were to pick the loudest and most shrill that it would be a very long four hours.

Some of my fears did materialize. I saw people being interviewed that I had some public acquaintance with. I am sure none of them remember me but I have heard them before in person. The presentation made it hard to put the opinions of some of the people into a broader perspective. While the web site does clear up some of those issues, it is also not perfect and I do not know enough about the typical viewer to guess whether they will use even those resources.

On the other hand there was a lot of inspirational information that could not be hidden. The phrase Who hath ears to hear, let him hear occurs often in the Bible and this sprang to my mind as I heard the words of Harold Bloom near the end of the second night. I understand his mixed feelings about religions in general but his words are striking. "Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the prophet seer and revelator Joseph Smith." What trait could be more expected of a group of people calling themselves Christians than that all of their doctrine and rituals are are based on the presumption of a resurrection?

The other part of the documentary that really struck me was the story of Betty Stevenson. There has not been anything more inspiring on PBS in recent memory. Betty had recently been released from prison but she was still inprisoned by the things she was doing. When she tells later about learning about being connected to her descendants and her ancestors and knowing who she was it was a stirring example of the life changing power of the atonement.

Pinewood derbies

My son reached Pinewood derby age this year. The cub scout troop has open racing afterwords so parents and siblings can be involved. This strikes me as a particularly good idea after a conversation I had with a coworker. I was three hours late for work courtesy of a nice six-stitch Dremel-carved divot in my palm. When he heard that I did it helping my son with the power tools portion of his pinewood derby car he said that he had nothing but bad feelings about pinewood derby cars. He related the following story to me.

For his first pinewood derby his dad sketched exactly how the car should look on the rough block of wood. Jeff had his own ideas about how the car should look and spent hours crafting and shaping it until it was exactly what he wanted. When his dad saw the final product he snapped it in two in a fit of rage.

Permanent emotional scaring and the bodily harm aside we had a great time. Galileo (we use replacement names for our kids. Thanks Howard) and I had spent the day in traffic on our way to "take your child to work day" and had plenty of time to brainstorm. What we came up with is the car pictured at the top--the MC Escher. I have a bit of advice for anyone attempting something like this. First of all it is really easy to lose your sense of spacial relations (unless you are in fact MC Escher) and consequentially saw your project in two. So have a back up kit. Also, the drastic amounts of carving will accentuate the natural warping of the wood and you will end up with a dog-legged race car. I hear from the experts that this is actually desirable because one less wheel in contact with the track means less friction and increased speed. Finally it does not leave a natural location for most of the standard weighting methods. We used zip ties and 2 heavy washers which we removed once the race was over.

My car is the Suspended Disbelief in the foreground. The arch across the middle is about 1/8 of an inch think. It is obscenely thin. Every other decision was made around ways to go with the huge gaping chasm across the bottom. Most of the other fathers assumed that is was reinforced in some way. This design also makes it difficult to place the weights but it was well worth it.