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

Author: marathon (Page 1 of 12)

I will fear no evil

I swam in the Gulf of Mexico this morning.

The wind had whipped the sea into confusion, so I was forced away from the shore, into the swells.

Starting about 10 years ago, I regularly took my teenagers out into open water and taught them to swim efficiently for a mile or so.

But the unspoken challenge was to be brave in the dark, deep water.

I said very little about this and put on a calm, dismissive air whenever the topic came up. We also used the trick of giving our fears a funny name.

“Oh, lovely… a fished nipped at you? That must have been Reginald trying to give you a kiss on the heel.”

And, baruch Hashem, we passed many watery miles in safety.

But fear management is a serious business. And, for me, the key is living a life of integrity. Here’s how it works:

I’ve turned over my life to my Creator. I’m fine with whatever results may come of that. My job is to stay within His parameters, as best as I can understand them.

I thoughtfully concluded that I would benefit, physically and mentally, from a swim this morning. I believe He will back me on this.

So I go into the water confident that I am in the center of His plan, regardless of how things fall out.

A little later, I am among the swells. My instinct is to look for shark fins, but this is a fool’s errand. To swim efficiently means having one’s face in the water 90% of the time. In the brief moment of turning the head to breathe, one can see very little, and that through foggy goggles. You are doing well if you can sight the horizon so as to stay on course.

Still, the temptation to panic is always there, especially when you brush up against something unexpected. But statistically it is useless to be scanning the surrounding waters.

This is where it helps to firmly resolve not to even try to look for lurking dangers. The best response is to say, “I am here for a purpose. My life is in Your hands.”

I will fear no evil.

Going into such water at all is a kind of prayer of surrender to the Creator.

So I just swim, and leave the rest to God. Between temptations to panic, I enjoy the rise and fall of the swells.

Doodle approaching adulthood

“It is good for a man to bear the yoke when he is young.”

-Lamentations 3:27

Doodle is hitting adulthood at a full run.

He was up this morning around 4, coding. His goal is to be freelancing as a programmer as soon as possible.

We’ve had great luck as a family with the Upwork platform. Sudoku started freelancing at 16 1/2 years old and was clicking within about 6 months.

Unfortunately, Upwork now aggressively defends itself against under-18ers. Doodle tried to start up with them 8 months ago, did one job (successfully) and then got booted off.

So, he’s eager to restart things when he hits 18.

He has been coding for about half his life now, and has built a great many projects, some of which are discussed in this blog: games, tools, 3d experiments, etc.

His current focus is on being a dependable coder. In other words, a coder who can be trusted when he says a project is done.

This is a rare and difficult art.

Typically, one finishes a project in a frantic, exhausted late-night push. You send off the email to the client: “It’s done!!”

The next morning the coder awakens (very late, of course) to a flood of emails about all the bugs and errors encountered by the users of the digital product.

So, a family of methods and “tools” (really just more code) has arisen to professionalize the process of determining when you have really crossed the finish line.

And Doodle is, slowly but surely, learning how to be a “careful coding Ninja”.

But at 6:30 he had his sneakers on and the two of us ran the mile to the basketball court in near-darkness.

We have an old favorite family basketball game called “Gotcha”. The basic idea is that everyone lines up at the free throw line and has to get their ball in the basket before the person behind them does so. When you score before a person ahead of you (sometimes more than one!), you holler “Gotcha!”

…and the eliminated persons generally feel glad to get a break.

When you have good shooters, the rounds can go on for a long time before a winner is determined.

The big challenge of the game is to keep shooting accurately in the midst of so much running.

So, this morning, we did some warmup and then launched into Gotcha.

With just two of us, a round can be won in seconds or it can drag out for minutes. When someone manages to wins three rounds in a row, they have won a game. Then we rest.

But, before we began, I remarked that I had not won a game of Gotcha against him for a month or more. (That was very unusual. I figured it was just a run of bad luck. For years we’ve been close enough in skill for it to be exciting, but I would have to admit he’s been a little better than me for several years.)

Doodle nodded thoughtfully.

He started inspecting the court surface and found a tiny rock and made a chalk-like line halfway between the foul line and the “top of the key”.

“Whoa! That’s pretty far back!” I said. The line was about 3 feet from the foul line (my shooting line). “…not that I’m complaining.”

We began to play. I think you know how this turns out.

I was shooting well and hustling.

Didn’t matter.

After he had won two rounds, I issued my patented maxim:

“Proxima gana casi todo!”

Loosely translated, that would be, “Triple or almost nothing!”

I lost again.

For what it’s worth, he was working hard to beat me. I didn’t have to run as far, but I’m not as good at shooting well under conditions of exhaustion. Each game was taking 8-10 minutes, and we really weren’t resting between them.

Not one to give up easily, I asked to play again. He immediately accepted.

Some time later, I conceded before we finished the game. My shooting form was decaying horribly.

As he stopped running upon hearing my words, I got a really good look at him. He looked like a man who had just run an all-out mile. His eyes were bulging and his breathing was maxed out.

But somehow he was still sinking most of his shots. Grace under pressure.

I took a moment to soak it all in.

This is my son on the cusp of adulthood.

“Do you still want to wrestle this morning?” I asked.

“Yup.”

The Decency of Ralph Moody

We recently received this nice note as a comment elsewhere in the site. I thought it would be worth sharing as a special post:

What a treat to find this site.

My mother and father were divorced when I was 6yrs old and I lacked a father figure.   At around 7 yrs of age we began reading this and an eight year old boy, along with his own father, filled that hole in my life.    I never cried so hard when Father died and “so long partner” still brings the feeling of loss to my soul.
I’m 65 yrs old now.   In 1982, while reading to my own sons, the longing to tell Mr Moody what he’d meant to my life grew strong enough to attempt to reach him – when I did I found he’d recently past.   I was devastated for having waited too long.   Now I read with my grandchildren.  Also, since retirement I have met dozens of men in the shooting world with whom I shoot and I’ve shared Mr Moody’s series with many of them, their appreciation is great though I can’t imagine the hooks going so deep as they do in my own life.   I consider him a gift and a treasure.   The decency that exudes from every page of his series is a decency I strive for, too often failing, in my own life.   I loved that man and his family without ever knowing them.    John

Workhorses and Angels

Okay, time to brag on the kids some more.

What could be more appropriate to a family, with many limitations and of modest means, than to work on our voices and learn to love singing?

Okay… yes. In theory, it makes perfect sense. But this is 2019, and we are surrounded by shiny screens, self-balancing wheeled gizmos, “People are Awesome” videos, pianos that make “Chanting Monk” sounds, etc.

Isn’t singing … uh … rather pedestrian?

Yes, it is. And it usually requires a kid to be under special circumstances for them to inconvenience themselves enough to work on their voice enough to strengthen it, enough to enjoy their own voice, enough to hear the subtleties of harmony. Certainly being part of a good choir program could do this for a youth. Another possibility would be growing up in a culture of singing as is the case for the religious set.

We mostly lacked those type of advantages, but it seems we’ve been able to cobble together our own inspiration and knowledge to get to the promised land of singing.

We just had our breakthrough moment on the above piece of Christmas music. (I plan to record our next sing of it. We’re happy to send an audio of this out to our friends. New friends, too. You can introduce yourself here.)

It was Milkmaid on the soprano, Rosebud and Sudoku on the alto, myself on the tenor, and Doodle singing bass.

Yes, dear little Doodle is getting to be big Doodle and may be due for a more dignified blog name. His range goes a step below me, and he struggles to hit middle C.

But he is really the main workhorse behind our singing progress. He had to endlessly help me on these tough accidentals in the tenor line (he learned all the parts so as to help the rest of us), and he’s the one who pushes new music on us and is the first to figure out what’s going wrong when we sound bad.

Appreciation also is deserved by Rosebud, who practices singing nearly daily with Doodle. Thanks to their faithful practices, the two weakest voices in the family have nearly become the two strongest. They love to sing now, and it shows.

This morning, during our basketball game, there was a little down time for some reason, and they started singing something quietly together.

Somewhere along the way, they got inspired. I asked Doodle about it and he pointed to two things:

  • One was my stories of singing anywhere and everywhere once I had learned how to harmonize in my late teens (this was one of the early connection points between Milkmaid and I)
  • He says secondarily he’s been inspired by online videos of strong singing and harmony. (See the BYU Vocal Point performance of “Nearer my God to Thee”.)

So that’s what it took to get our breakthrough moment. We all nailed our parts. We stayed on pitch. As you can see, we ended with “the song which now the angels sing” … and it sounded angelic to me!

Wikipedia alert

I am of the opinion that a person capable of being convinced generally only needs a few good hints and pointers, so I’m going to keep this short. If you look to Wikipedia as a source of knowledge, you will want to take an hour or so to follow the trail I lay out here.

We watched the Laura Poitras documentary Risk this past weekend and I was left confused by the end. So I went to Duckduckgo.com and did the following search: “was the Russian government responsible for the DNC hack”.

Below are the top 10 results.

I consider these results to be pretty balanced, but how would I know if the search engine was leaving things out? At least I can tell, just from the headlines, that there are conflicting narratives represented here, and I appreciate DuckDuckGo for that.

Of all these results, I found the content of the Wikipedia article most remarkable, given what I learned from the other links. Below are screenshots of that Wikipedia page shown in the results: (you might find it easier to read the most-recently archived version here, which should be identical to the below since it was archived since the last edit to the Wikipedia page)

And below are, perhaps most crucially, screenshots of the “Talk” page associated with the above article: (you might find it easier to read the most-recently archived version here, but there may be some differences)

Good luck! Seek and ye shall find.

Extra credit assignment: Once you’ve decided on what you feel are the most crucial pieces of information in this story, do your own search on your favorite search engines and see if you are happy with the results.

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.

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.

“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.]

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.

 

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