Neumatikos

25July2008

Car Trouble

Posted by Puretext under: General.

My car broke down on the way to a tutoring session this afternoon. (Donations will be accepted via PayPal at my email address.) It was very peculiar. The engine died while driving down the road and wouldn’t restart. The only indication I had as to what was wrong was that the alternator light was on. Except that when the alternator dies, you don’t know about it until the next time you try to start the car. The alternator charges the battery. It doesn’t keep the engine going. When the alternator goes out, your first sign is usually that the battery is dead. But my batter worked fine.

At any rate, I was stuck for about an hour and a half in the parking lot of a local Sprint store with nothing particular to do. So I amused myself by reading an Agatha Christie mystery and by observing and talking to people.

First observation: Despite what one may think, apparently cell phone service salesmen make a decent living. There were some very nice cars in that parking lot. One that particularly caught my attention was something from about the fifties, teal, with wings. It was perfectly restored, with immaculate detail work. It also, I noted, idled far better than my poor ‘95 Camry.
Second observation: No matter where you go, no matter who your service is with, there is no way to break the $70 floor for service for two cell phones. AT&T gives me 450 minutes, with rollover, nights and weekend minutes starting at 9:00 pm. Sprint apparently will give me 700 minutes, no rollover, nights and weekends starting at 7:00, which is a pretty sweet deal. But it still costs $69 and some change. I can add as many bells and whistles as I want for $70, but cutting them all away will not take the price below that floor.
Agatha Christie is awesome.
I had a hilarious time with my tow service.
Read on, MacDuff!

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24July2008

Flickr Mosaic Fun

Posted by Convallaria under: It's Supposed to Be Funny; Pictures.

flickr mosaic

Here’s how you play:

Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search. Using only the first page, choose an image. Copy and paste each of the URL’s into the mosaic maker over at FD’s image maker.

The questions:

What is your first name? Valerie What is your favorite yarn? Simply Soft
What was the first thing you made with yarn? scarf What is your favorite color? green Which crochet or knitting magazine do you like best? Crochet! Favorite handmade gift you have received? Baby blanket
Dream project? bedroom quilt
Favorite notion? crochet hooks
What will you crochet/ knit next? Baby Christmas outfit for David What do you love most about yarn? texture One word to describe your craft. Crochet
Initial inspiration to craft. Biology homework

(HT: Crochet by Faye who rearranged the q’s a bit.)

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22July2008

On Immunizations

Posted by Convallaria under: Health; Science; Younguns.

What’s the deal with immunizations? One side is dogmatic about giving them and the other is dogmatic about refusing them. I’ve been recently looking at the controversy trying to decide whether to continue with the normal schedule of shots, to slow it down a bit (i.e. space out the shots over a longer period of time), or to discontinue them all together.

On one end of the spectrum I have my SiL who is staunchly against immunizations and has not immunized my two youngest nephews at all. She’s not alone as several young mothers in my church have made the same decision. On the other end of the spectrum is all my training in Public Health most of which can be boiled down into a single statement: an ounce of prevention goes a long way.

But it’s one thing to sit in a classroom and listen to lectures on preventative medicine and quite another to try and make informed decisions that could affect your baby’s whole life.
Read on, MacDuff!

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11July2008

Mystic

Posted by Puretext under: Essay; That Vision Thing; Theology.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a mystic. But I’ve discovered that word makes some people, particularly non-charismatic evangelicals, nervous, so let me explain. By “mystic” I mean a person whose devotional life is characterized by intensely affecting spiritual experiences. These experiences may be in the realm of simple theological insight, or they may take more literary forms. At times they may cross over into the realm of prophecy; that is, dreams, visions, words, and phrases laden with theological context.

From a natural perspective, mysticism can come from two sources. It can be personal, or social: On the social spectrum, mysticism can be presented as something to aspire to. Some Christian traditions – the Pentecostals, the Orthodox, some revivalist traditions – present mysticism in such a way that it seems to be the only way to have a properly Christian devotional life. At the other extreme, some traditions, particularly the Reformed and Protestants as a whole, seem to perceive mysticism at best as something useless, at worst as something suspiciously unchristian, smacking of Papism, adding to scripture, even beckoning the demonic. On the personal spectrum, a person could be naturally predisposed to have certain kinds of experiences, or they could find themselves completely unable to do so, or they could be somewhere in between. (Please note that, for the sake of simplicity, I’m lumping what a person thinks about these things in with the social scale.)

The difficulty, of course, comes when a person’s natural predisposition doesn’t align very well with the tradition they find themselves in.
Read on, MacDuff!

2July2008

A Reflection on Parenting (Part 2)

Posted by Convallaria under: Younguns.

Kyle and I have been having some rather extended conversations about parenting and the direction in which we wish to lead our children (novel concept right?). And we’ve been discussing the fact that we want to instill into our children a forward thinking perspective that looks towards long term goals and benefits. Now Kyle tends to focus mostly on legacy building, but I have been coming back to the need to raise our children in an environment that embraces responsibility at an early age.

In my last post, I talked about the current definition of childhood and how we have culturally glorified it to an untenable position. I would like to further look at this social construct in light of our responsibility as parents to train our children.

In our zeal to appeal to the modern world, we’ve let society dictate to us how we should respond our children’s youthful urges and behaviors. This dictation is undermining Christian principles because it in no way acknowledges a Sovereign God who has given us the duty to mold our children to seek after the paths of righteousness. On the contrary, society would rather have us be our child’s ‘best friend’ and ‘understand what they’re going through’ than to follow our calling to love, admonish and discipline our children. Society would rather we give unconditionally to our children’s desires without thought to their rightful needs.

The desire to give good gifts to our children is not a bad thing and neither is wanting to shield them from worries. But to let society dictate that the best way to do that is to allow them free reign to pursue their desires is decidedly unchristian and detrimental to their ultimate happiness.

1July2008

Exactly!

Posted by Convallaria under: Quotables.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. - Douglas Adams

And God’s fingerprints are all over the map and itinerary.

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1July2008

Good Post

Posted by Convallaria under: Goodblog.

This was a very good read and I thought that this in particular nailed it on the head:

All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives…. I came to see that our culture’s widespread use and acceptance of contraception meant that the “contraceptive mentality” toward sex was now the default attitude. As a society, we had come to take it for granted that we are entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we are opposed to the new life it might produce.

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30June2008

A Reflection on Parenting (Part 1)

Posted by Convallaria under: Health; Younguns.

I have found responses to this to be very frustrating. Ever since the Time article came out, there have been a lot of media sources jumping on it and railing about the horrors of teen pregnancy. Most of the topics that have cropped up in response to the initial article have been centered around access to birth control and better sex-ed. Both of which are missing the mark as usual.
Read on, MacDuff!

19June2008

I’ve found a solution

Posted by Puretext under: Reviews; Younguns.

For a long time now, I’ve disparaged families who are so negligent as to “use the TV as a babysitter.” I had my reasons:

TV are stuupid. Television is designed to pitch to the widest possible audience. In part, this is usually accomplished by also pitching to the lowest common denominator. This means that most television, even movies is noticeably lacking in any kind of content which might require an attention span. But people only mature and become capable of working with more complex information by being regularly exposed to stuff that is beyond what they’re actually used to. You don’t improve in anything unless you have to struggle a bit. Since TV constantly pitches low, a regular diet of television makes you dumb.
TV are annoying. Young children are geared toward repetition and memorization. Which means that, even if you find a way to expose your kids only to “smart TV,” they’re going to want to be watching it a great deal more than an adult is quite prepared to tolerate. I don’t care how much better than the standard fare Thomas the Tank Engine is. It’s not good enough for me to have to memorize it. And I don’t know that I want my kids memorizing it either. OK. Maybe Veggie Tales songs. But I have limits.

Unfortunately, ideals are all wonderful until you encounter real life, in which a child requires a great deal of stimulation.
Read on, MacDuff!

15June2008

Gathering Ambrosia

Posted by Puretext under: That Vision Thing.

Richard Hobson gives me permission to write this sort of thing:

A few weeks ago, my mother sent me a personality test. A real one - not one of those quizilla things. It turns out that I am an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: An introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging type (In this case, “judging” refers to the act of making a decision, or defining something, rather than the act of condeming). We are rare birds, quite literally - INFJs are approximately 1-2% of the human population. If you have 100 friends, and I am one of them, then you might have one other friend who has a similar personality to mine, and if you know who that other person is, I really wish you’d introduce them to me because it’s getting a little bit weird over here being the only one.

The Personality Page has a list of potential career options for INFJs, starting with clergy, then teaching. Next, if you skip over the medical options which are nulled by my aversion to cutting and poking people, there comes psychology, psychiatry, and counseling, which are options I had actually at one time considered. So it seems I have been unwittingly working my way down the list.
Read on, MacDuff!

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