Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Dad Life - What a Hoot!

Listen carefully to the words - I especially love the Aladdin part!

Dad Life from Church on the Move on Vimeo.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The Pen, the Sword, and All That..........

There are many variations on the saying "the pen is mightier than the sword." Playwright Bulwer-Lytton is most often credited with it as a line in a play in 1839, but actually the Greek poet Euripides is believed to have been the first to say it a long, long time ago (considering that he died in 406 B.C., it was a long time ago).

I have been pondering the post on acceptance I wrote a week ago and felt the need to write this one. Perhaps I could have said it differently, or thought it through more thoroughly. It was not my intent to open old wounds with my typewritten words. When I write, I very seldom think through as I'm writing; the words go from my brain into my hands and come out here on a page. I usually write very quickly, because I write "on the fly" as it were, and it wasn't until I was attacked in the comments that I stepped back to read, really read, what I had written.

It is interesting that the post was about acceptance. I am not writing this one to gain anyone's acceptance; rather to gain peace for myself about having hurt another person, however inadvertently. I still feel the same way about not needing anyone's approval, and it is for that very reason that I write this. It doesn't matter to me whether anyone thinks I'm weak or strong for writing this; the fact is that I hurt someone else unintentionally and that's not how I choose to live my life. Jesus is my model for meekness and humility, but sometimes human nature gets in the way.

I can still be strong enough to stand up for myself and accept myself regardless of what other people think of me, but I can also be strong enough to apologize if I don't feel peace about an issue, and so I sincerely apologize for the pain I caused another individual. It was most certainly not my intention.

No matter who was credited with saying it first, it is indeed true. The pen is mightier than the sword. Oh, and you might want to jot down that bit of trivia about the saying - you know, just in case you happen to get in the Cash Cab or something and it comes up!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled silly and optimistic blogging.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Camera Obscura

On Father's Day we (okay, the boys and Jerry - I took pictures!) built a camera obscura. Here is a link that will tell you how it works. What it is, or was in our case, was a cardboard box with a hole drilled into it. Tom had told us about one of his classes in Arlington when they had covered all the windows in the classroom until it was completely dark and then put a pinhole in one of the window coverings. The Arlington streets and skyline were then projected onto the back wall of the darkened classroom, upside down. He said they watched people walking by, cars and clouds - all upside down. We tried first to put a piece of blueprint paper onto the back wall of the closed box but no image came out. We discovered that would take a LONG time for the exposure to put an image on the paper.

Jerry is closing his office in Delaware and as things were being moved out of the office, an old blueprint machine was about to be thrown away. More about the Delaware office in a future post, though. Jerry and I decided that we wanted to play around with the machine before we threw it away, and there was an unopened package of blueprint paper too, so the boys and I started doing some experimentation to see what we could do with it. It doesn't take much to amuse us, as my readers already know!

We tried using the paper as sun paper - you know, the kind you used to use as a kid when you would lay rocks and such on it and leave it out in the sun and the images would appear in contrast on the paper? We left ours in the sun too long. Turns out you only have to expose it for a few short minutes, but that diazo (blueprint) paper also needs a chemical reaction to finish developing, like a photo. That's why there's ammonia in a blueprint machine to finish the development process.

Later on after taking the box back in the garage, Andy got inside it to see if there would be an image projected onto the back wall of the box. After a few minutes of his eyes adjusting to the dark, he was able to see our driveway projected upside down on the back of the box. Then a neighbor walked over to visit and Andy saw him approach - upside down - on the back wall of the box. As if the neighbors needed further confirmation that we weren't wrapped too tight, having our son in a cardboard box on a 90-degree day confirmed it!

We half-celebrated Father's Day last week. We'll be doing the second half this weekend. Andy's gift to Jerry ended up being delayed in shipping with UPS and didn't arrive in time, so we get to celebrate twice. I'll post about Jerry's gift after he actually gets it, if I get a chance. If not, have a great weekend, y'all!







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