for now, the only thing we're growing on this farm is kids - not the goat variety

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Notes from Chilean news: marriage, debt, China, Antarctica, guns

According to the recent data released by Chile’s national Institute of vital statistics, we learn the following:

Between 1997 and 2017 the number of women marrying men who are 10 years or more younger than them has increased from 2303 to 2644. This happened in a 20 year period where the annual marriage total declined from 78,077 to 61,320. So the portion of marriages where the women are 10+ years older moved from 2.9% to 4.3% of all marriages.

On the other hand, during that same timeframe, the number of marriages where the man was 10 or more years older declined from 11,611 to 10,662. Compared to the overall decrease in marriage numbers though, this is actually an increase from 14.9% to 17.4%.

My takeaway is that older people are more interested in official marriage while the young are increasingly forming their families without clear intention and therefore without marriage, or much delaying it.

According to Chile’s central bank, household debt as a percentage of disposable income has risen from 62.3% to 73.3% over the four year period from the beginning of 2015 to the beginning of 2019.

Copper is such an important export item for Chile that special statistics are kept of all that is not copper. Thanks to a report by Chile central bank, we learn the following:

Since the free trade agreement between China and Chile in 2006, non-copper exports to China have risen from $1 billion per year to over 6 billion in 2018. During the same period, such exports to Europe remained unchanged and such exports to the US rose about 40%.

The top items are wood, food, wine, and lithium.

According to an article in yesterday’s El Mercurio, the amount of trash being generated in Antarctica has tripled in the last 20 years. 22 different countries relay to Antarctica through Punta Arenas in the south of Chile. Everyone is expected to remove all of their trash off of the continent of Antarctica according to the “Madrid Protocol”, so this means that the government of Chile is able to monitor the total trash production that eventually makes it back to Punta Arenas.

Apparently the protocol negates the use of anything that will result in liquid residue although it is said that Chile hopes to soon switch over to using biodegradable detergent at their outposts, which implies that they aren’t using such now.

Typically the trash comes back around this time of year as night falls on the Antarctic continent. The total was 345 tons of trash this year. But the recent average is running much higher with 632 tons delivered in 2016 and 698 tons in 2017. One reason given for the high numbers in those years was that the Brazilian base burned in February 2012 and then there were works of demolition and reconstruction over the following years.

The trash consists of the usual suspects but also there are oil residues that result from the operation of power generation machinery. These oil residues seem to be transported in large plastic drums.

Apparently the Chilean Navy is doing trips back and forth to Antarctica to serve the needs of the other countries stationed there. They offered the statistic that their ships traveled a total of 34,000 nautical miles and transported a total of 700 persons while performing services during this past season. This duty was performed by three regular ships given that the Chilean Navy recently was forced to retire an icebreaker ship due to its old age.

As of yet, there are no docks in Antarctica, so the Chilean Navy seems to be using ships that are built a lot like barges and include hoists or cranes. So, it seems that the flat bottomed boat is able to get pretty near the shore and then bridge the distance with some sort of swinging arm. They call these ships “skuas” which seems to be a play on the name of an arctic bird.

The article also refers to a fire that took place last year at the “gobernación marítima”. In context it seems to be a reference to some kind of governing authority in Antarctica.

Sebastián PiÅ„era’s administration has announced plans to introduce legislation in the coming week to make ownership of firearms more difficult. It is mostly centered around having a lot more red tape for those wishing to register a firearm. It also seeks to limit people to owning two weapons except by special permission.

Filling a child’s tank

By the time Thursday rolls around I’m having withdrawals. I’m ready to get my weekly toddler fix. For over a year now Sudoku and I have been volunteering weekly at a SANAME orphanage, and we love going. There are some horror SANAME stories that occasionally make the news, but there’s a lot of love to be found at the “lactantes” home where we help. From my point of view, the problems are not with the quality of care, they’re with the system. Children and parents go together. Not children and group homes.

Today one little toddler was unusually fussy. This little girl is a bit moody and can quickly turn from smiles to tears. A couple of weeks ago, I picked her up when she was ornery and was promptly warned by a new worker that the child wanted to be “en brazos” (held) and that she would cry even more when put down.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve heard such warnings. I remember getting comments from well-meaning adults about my own babies. Put them in a sling instead of in the grocery buggy and you hear, “You’ll spoil that child. He’ll never want to be put down.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Fill a kid up, and they’ll feel secure enough to walk away from you. Did you ever see an 8 year old who wanted to sit on an adult’s lap all day? Of course not! Not even a 4 year old. Not even a tiny toddler, if they know they can get their fill of affection and security when they need it.

So don’t be afraid of spoiling your little ones. If they want to be held, do so with confidence and without feeling guilty. Enjoy that they want to be near you! It won’t last forever…and that’s as it should be.

A data point on temperature reporting

It’s been a hot summer here in Central Chile, but I have had a growing suspicion that it has not been as hot as the numbers reported on my Android phone via Accuweather. So, yesterday, I kept a log of the afternoon temperatures to see how my readings compared with the forecast and with the reported temperatures on my phone.

I did this with a field thermometer that comes from my days as a technician, and I verified, using an ice bath, that the reading was accurate within 1/4 degree Celsius at 0.

I’m comparing this with the reported numbers for Providencia, but I would expect most of the city to be in a very tight range because yesterday was breezy. For what it’s worth, the Android/Accuweather app appears to offer weather reporting that is dialed in to my area. One can see slightly different numbers if you set if for Ñuñoa, for example.

We’re in a very typical area of Providencia.

My thermometer was sitting on a table on an outside porch, in the shade, with the door to the residence closed, thereby blocking any stream of cool air exiting the living area.

Here are my notes:

Forecast: 35C. I felt at 1pm that it won’t go over 32.
2pm – 27C
2:30pm – 28C
4pm – 30C (android says 33 at this time)
430 – 30.5
5pm – 31.5

At 5:30, the temperature began to decline. It never made it to even 32, but my phone was saying 36 around 5:30pm.

I can’t see any way to account for the wide difference between my readings and those of Accuweather.

Painting a memory

On the short trek from our apartment to the nearest park, maintenance workers from the condominio often roll out the garbage cans for the daily trash pickup. With hundreds of apartments, you build up a lot of trash in just 24 hours.

Oftentimes, the trash crew is there, shuffling the cans around, putting them one by one in the mechanic device that lifts and dumps their contents in the truck. The trash crew is a friendly bunch and have grown accustomed to our scanning over whatever is sticking out of the trashcans. We have no shame.

Most of it is truly just trash, but we’ve found a few treasures. We had a working telescope in our apartment for a year, thanks to not being too proud to bring home what was left in the trash. “Is that what I think it is? Do you think it works?” “Let’s take it and see.” It was! and it did!!

Then there was the time I found a beautiful, large woven basket. There’s one particularly friendly trash man who saw me pick up the basket. He walked over and said something in a serious, almost concerned tone about “huevos” (eggs.) I didn’t catch much else he said. I thought he was probably saying something about it being a traditional Chilean basket for gathering eggs — lots and lots of eggs (as it was a BIG basket). That’s what I wanted to believe he said, I guess. I noticed a bit of colorful dust in the bottom. No biggie. I shrugged, and told him I wanted it. He shrugged back and held out his hands as if to say, “Take it. It’s yours.” 

Take it I did. When cleaning out the colorful “dust” at the apartment, I saw little tiny worms emerging from the thick straw. Now the “huevos” comment made sense. At least he tried to warn me. He probably got a chuckle when the basket showed up in the trash again the next day. If I had had a big enough freezer, I could have frozen the little buggers. 

One day, we found a large, nearly blank, approximately 3′ x 5′ canvas. On it was a crude sketch of a rooster, done in pencil. The frame was very slightly warped but otherwise in good condition (and no sign of worms), so we brought it home. That faint rooster sketch lasted about a year or so before we 1) had the time and energy and 2) the inspiration to do anything with the canvas.

Over our “Christmas” holiday in June (I know, I know…sounds crazy. But try celebrating it during the longest days of the year and you’ll understand why we do it in June instead), we set to work. 

We chose a photo of a happy memory back in Chattanooga and planned our painting by superimposing a grid on the digital picture. We then lightly penciled in a corresponding grid right on top of the old rooster. And then we set to work painting the background. When needed, we avoided painting over the intersections of the grid to help with the placement of things in the foreground.

I say “we” because this was a family effort. All six of us took turns sharing ideas, techniques, and doing the actual painting.

We’re newbies at this. This is just our second attempt at a painting like this, but it’s so much better than our first.  It’s far from perfect. There were a few parts that we really messed up and did over, and there are some funny mistakes we made and just let be. I don’t know that we’ll ever “fix” them.  We used 3M strips to pin the frame to the wall, fixing the slight warp. 

It’s a happy memory — the time and place of the subject and the process of creating the painting.

Update for Ralph Moody (“Little Britches”) fans

Long-time readers know that we’re big fans of Ralph Moody and his memoir book series that begins with Little Britches. We have several posts around Moody and his books, this one being the most popular.  If you’ve not visited that post lately, the comments — of which there are many — are worth reading. You’ll find bits and pieces of hard-to-find Moody family history, for example, and a comment from one of Ralph’s granddaughters. Read and enjoy!

“The Invitation” as an exercise in moral courage

My life is very different from those of the people around whom I grew up. I started being noticeably different around the age of 12. One of the memorable outward signs at that time was that I started waking myself up 3 days per week at 6AM and running a 4-mile loop through “Highland Park”. (It wasn’t actually a park. It was more like a ghetto, though the prostitutes were generally off the streets by 6AM.)

As I matured, my different-ness manifested itself increasingly as non-conformism. I would, from time to time, shock the people around me by developing a “conviction” or an objection about something that to them just didn’t seem to be an issue. Most people rolled their eyes and quickly distanced themselves. A few came closer to find out more. This has continued up to the present day, and to this I credit much of the happiness which I now enjoy.

Thanks to an early bed-time last night, I had some wakeful-brain time during the wee morning hours to contemplate the influences that have shaped my life. To my surprise, I remembered something new, something to which I have given nearly zero thought for many years:

The “invitation”, also known in some circles as an “altar call”.

I grew up in “independent, fundamentalist Baptist” churches in the US. This is a branch of evangelicalism (strong focus on converting non-believers) which is a branch of Protestant Christianity. I know that corruption can be a problem in such institutions, but my own experience was generally good. By that I mean that the pressure I felt most from the church was the pressure to “do business with God” that amounted to “moral weightlifting”. Sure, there was pressure to give money and to evangelize outsiders, but that was not the main thing in my own experience.

The main thing was “dealing with sin” in your own life, issues like obeying your parents, sexual self-control, reading (all of) and memorizing (parts of) the Bible, praying regularly, obeying the Ten Commandments and other applicable rules from the Bible, etc.

Sin basically fell into three categories in my mind: routine sin, conviction sin, and embarrassing sin. Routine sin would be “I’m not praying enough!” Conviction sin would be “I should have spoken up when they started gossiping about her!” Embarrassing sin would be “I’ve been stealing money from my boss!”

The invitation was a time at the end of a (typically 1.5 hour) “church service” (which would include singing, prayer, and a sermon from the pastor) where the lives of all the church members reached their periodic climaxes. Soft, inspiring (some might say guilt-inducing) music would play for 5-10 minutes, with the congregation singing along quietly and the pastor would be speaking over the music, pleading with people to listen to the voice of God in their hearts and to get right with God, whatever that meant for them.

People were invited to come down (I’m giving the most generous version/interpretation here, which is 99% of what I experienced; I know that the marketing tactics in this situation can go waaaay beyond this) to the front of the church (to the “altar”, which in my church was a sturdy wooden table where the “communion” (different topic, sorry) elements would be placed) to “get saved” (become a Christian), “get rededicated” (a murky second-step in being a Christian), or as a way of helping them defeat some particular sin by taking a more public stand against it. They might also choose to confess the sin to someone privately at the front, just ask people to pray for them, or — the big one — confess a sin openly to the whole church after the invitation had concluded.

Generally, you were supposed to have your eyes closed while all this was going on, but of course, as a kid, you can’t help but look to see who’s going down to the front and speculating what sin they had on their mind.

In every church, there seemed to be some soft-hearted people who went down often. That was no big deal, and I tended to think of those folks with pity. The big events were when unexpected or well-respected people would “respond to the invitation”. That was kinda rare.

But, let’s face it. All of us needed to make that humbling walk from time to time. And someone who never ever went down to the altar would perhaps rightfully be viewed as a phony Christian.

So, I want to focus on the difficulty of this for a teenager. The cool kids tended to not respond to the invitation, and you know that they’re all going to see you and nudge each other if you start down the aisle. Then there’s your parents, siblings, your basketball coach, your neighbor, and your school teacher.

On the other hand, you shouldn’t care about them, their pity, their curiosity, their amusement. God is God and the truth is the truth, right?

So, the music is playing, the pastor is pleading, the congregants are singing, and a sin begins to weigh heavy on your mind. Your heart starts to thump really strongly. Maybe you start sweating a little bit.

For me, once the battle inside my heart got that strong, I knew I had to go down. Unless it was just a clear-cut “no”, then it needed to be a “yes”, on principle. I didn’t want to “harden my heart”, like Pharaoh did in the story of the 10 Plagues and the Exodus from Egypt, thus rendering me increasingly spiritually insensitive. I felt that just one unjustifiable no-go could tip the scales of my heart in an irrecoverable way.

So, I went down. Maybe 10 times in my life, I went down the aisle. Probably five of those times I talked about the specific sin with one of the “deacons” — they were who would come alongside you at the front, kneeling down beside you at the front pew (padded bench) and putting their hand on your shoulder in a re-assuring sorta way. I never remember confessing anything to the whole church, but sometimes I did go directly to some other person or group to make things right.

I remember having a kind of exhilaration and lightness — just about the time I made it down to the altar — that came with getting out from under those emotional burdens. It felt like an incredible life hack that you could get a renewal like that just by being humble and honest.

My spiritual journey has taken me very far from that place, and my kids are not experiencing altar calls. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I was greatly benefitted by those occasions and I see those exercises in moral courage — or something analogous — as being essential to a well-lived life.

[I would really like to hear, either privately or here in the comments, the thoughts of others who experienced altar calls and have other insights on them.]

My last drawing (until later)

I’ve still been drawing every day.

With so much drawing, I’ve filled up my second drawing book.

I asked Pa if I could stop having drawing on my school list. He said yes.

So, as of the end of my drawing era, I was most interested in shadows and textures. I was really starting to get the hang of them. One thing I never figured out was rumpled fabric. I tried many times, but I could never do it well and it never seemed realistic.

I worked on shading and textures up until a few pages from the end of my drawing book.

I wanted to do something easier for the end.

On my last page, I decided to make the drawing below:

I thought it would be fun to make up one drawing out of the whole page.

I needed a character that would be easy to draw. I don’t really know what they are, so I decided to call them Gerbils.


All the individual situations are my original creation, but the whole thing was inspired by “The Mighty Fruit Fight” page in Where’s Waldo? The Wonder Book.

At first, I was going to copy a lot from that picture, but I decided to first draw my own ideas that I had come up with.

After that, more and more ideas kept popping into my head until the page was filled.


There are several mistakes, for example, the text at the top says “WAR OF THE GIRBLES”. It was supposed to say “WAR OF THE GERBILS”. I guess I was just too focused on the drawing part 🙁

But no biggie.

Also, the guy on the turtle’s head (see below) looks like he’s holding an arrow on his head. That’s supposed to be a spear with which he’s about to stab the other Gerbil.

Also, the gerbil who is about to be stabbed in the the scene above is missing his tail.

I don’t think that flags really blow up the way shown below:

Un-blown-up flag:

Blown-up flag:

Also, in the two pictures above, you can plainly see that the Gerbil Kings’ tents have self-supporting systems built in…

 

Kids these days

Sheesh.

Doodle just walked into the kitchen, while I was busy horking down the fruits of the Chilean countryside for my afternoon snack, and announced that Rosebud just learned about trig functions from him.

Doesn’t a Dad have a right to teach his own daughter trig functions without interference from … interlopers?

His justification was, “She keeps seeing them in the game code at Khan Academy and she was getting frustrated about it, so I said, ‘How about I just teach you?'”

13 year-old teaches trig functions to little sister

All that was left on the glass when I returned from snack

WHAT KINDA FLIMSY EXCU….

Just then Rosebud trotted into the kitchen with a big smile on her face.

Kids these days (shakes head despondently)…

A father has to be vigilant at all times. There’s no telling when someone is going to pop up with some coup to pre-empt his right to one of these “fabulous firsts”.

To the barricades, men!

But seriously, if you know any kids between 8 and 12, try to push them toward that Khan coding/gaming area.

You never know what kind of malfeasance may come of it.

 

Sculptures

A few weeks ago, there was a sculpting competition in a sculpture park about two miles away from where we live.

The whole competition took about a week. Each person got handed a big block of marble and were told to carve something out of it.

We first found out about it because Marathon, Sudoku, and I were taking a bike ride up Cerro San Cristobal. We decided to really explore the sculpture park for the first time.

While we were there, we noticed there was a lot of whitish smoke. Then we saw a big tent set up and all the people with their big pieces of marble. None of the sculptures were very clear yet. We decided then that we would want to see when they were done.

As far as we could tell, there were about 20 sculptors, each one making one sculpture. (A few of them had helpers.)

Below is a list of a third of the competitors. This is one of three lists that were there. (Notice the guy from Taiwan! Listed as “Taipei, China”.)

We — all but Mom — took a bike ride down there two Sundays ago–Marathon, Carman, Sudoku, Rosebud, and me.

The sculptures were pretty amazing. There were a few at the end that had granite, but apart from that, they were all marble.

Here’s a slide show of some of the works.

Dad’s favorite part was the textures. Some sculptures were glossy smooth while others were rough and chopped at wonky angles as if to resemble age.

Now I’ll get to the particulars.

One looked like a guy frozen into an ice block. The whole thing was smooth, all in one piece. The guy looked like he was trying to get out, but most of his legs and part of his arm was stuck.

One was like a bunch of plates stacked on top of each other.

One was a big waviness with a bunch of writing in small letters going around it at the base and up the waves to the top.

Another was what looked to be a Greek/Roman guy with a blindfold and a sash that read, “OMNIA VINCIT AMOR”. That was my favorite.

Another was like one of the water things that you sometimes see in parks, with all the little pools, with a trickle of water flowing slowly down from each pool to the next. The water was also made of marble.

Another was like ten people sitting on a boat.

Another was a pregnant woman. This one was cool, because it was all rough in the back, and slowly changed to smooth in the front. None of the other statues had this.

Another was like a jet scooter, with granite handle bars. Most of the granite parts were cylinders. Marathon said this was done with a hole saw.

Another was an A, but with waviness on it. This was Marathon’s favorite.

Well, we got back from our bike ride and told Milkmaid how awesome they were, but that she would have to see them for herself.

About a week later, Milkmaid, Sudoku, Rosebud, and I went back to the sculpture park, but already most of them had been taken away to different parts of the country.

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