Googley-Eyed

My favorite tool to teach geography, besides actual maps and globes is the amazing freeware of Google Earth. In the history of the world, no tool has been made that comes close to this fantastic software for teaching kids the majesty, the marvel and the mystery that is our earth.

My son's math book used a table of the world's more prominent mountains. Everest, Fuji, the Matterhorn and Colorado's own Pikes Peak were in that table. To spice up the day, we just switched to geography and used Google Earth to view satellite imagery of all these mountains and more. For example, with Mt. Everest, we saw how it was merely the tallest of many peaks clustered around it, while at Mt. McKinley, we viewed its solitary wonder. Looking closer at Denali, we saw the glaciers.

"What is that? A highway?" my son asked. He couldn't believe that what he saw were rivers of ice from year after year of snowfall actually running down a mountain valley, carving its sides like a sanding belt and carrying a pile of sludge to a--I'm getting excited too...Can you tell?--moraine and usually creating a tarn (lake). His eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him that he had swam (swum?) in a glacial tarn only a year or two ago. I took him to Grand Lake. I popped inside the photo bubble to show him the small beach we stayed at and the small harbor he and I had braved. He still remembered how cold it was, and was it ever!

Today, my son learned about glaciers because we had the flexibility that he never, never would have had in a class-based school. Oh, he would have learned about glaciers, tarns and moraines eventually, but once the test was done, he'd have forgotten them. My son and daughters are too bright and too unique to shovel into those schools. You know what? Your kids are too.

Today was a good day homeschooling. I love these days.

I Think I Have A Sore Thinker

I've been having a lot of theological discussions with my eldest daughter, a lot of it revolving around knowing God's will and whether this event or that event was God's will. Is a baby born to a single parent God's will? Is the death of an innocent child? She was trying to reconcile God's role in these sorts of situations. Did He cause them? Did He allow them? Why does good come from a "bad" or immoral situation and why does evil come from a positive and moral situation?

Just a little, light-hearted discussion about fate, God, good and evil. If anyone thinks parenting is a breeze, try weaving a free-will defense into a conversation with a 12 year-old. I think that despite my help, she actually understands a good deal.

Helping her process through stuff helps me process too. It's so easy to get all twisted up inside over friends who lose their young child for seemingly no reason. Showing my daughter how God chooses to limit Himself actually lets me re-explore the abstract concepts and reconnect it to the concrete examples. It doesn't answer every question, but it gives me the basis for asking the right questions in a meaningful way.

The more I look at parenting, especially after trying to explain such things, the more I realize that God designed it for us to identify--even if it's just a little bit--with Him.

Weird Things About Me

Weird things about me, and trust me, this is just the surface:

• I grew up in the "gifted and talented" programs, so I have a lot of cultural and creative stuff in my head that frequently boggles my wife.
• Related, I once took a "sample" Mensa test and they said I should test because I could very possibly make the cut. I figure Mensa is just a label and testing to get into a club won't change who I am, and, from the dues, I don't see that there's much of a benefit.
• I rode the last trip of the last privately owned long-haul passenger train, the Rio Grande Zephyr, over 25 years ago when I was 10 (yes, I'm 35 now).
• I love the Colorado high country and I wish I was an expert on alpine wildflowers so I could actually name the beauty I'm looking at.
• Related again, nothing tastes better to me than Rocky Mountain glacier water at the source after a few hours of jeeping.
• I think my minivan is cool, but I desperately want to tint the windows darker.
• I think I do accents reasonably well and deep down I wonder if I should have kept after an acting career.
• I love flannel shirts, sweats and being comfortable, no matter the occasion.
• I grew up in the 80s and I think today's fashions are the ugliest I have seen in my existence. On a side note, ladies, pink and brown do not go together! I'm a guy and even I know that doesn't work. I think we will wise up eventually and leave the hip huggers, flat hair and ugly sunglasses behind and someday wonder how we ever got along without hairspray, mousse, and pants that actually have a seat and a waistband.
• I miss being able to camp without having to worry about bear protocols and about whether we were allowed to camp in that specific area of the forest.
• I love rollercoasters and miss riding them because of my disability. Now I have to settle for Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. It's not the same.
• I have seasonal allergies. I ignore them, if I can, but I usually can't.
• We always seem to have two cats in my family. I'm also allergic to cat dander, so we have manx cats now.
• I have another friend with a spine injury and we're pretty close.

I'd keep going, but I'm going to rest now. Thanks for popping by.

Ugh! New Symptoms

What I have been trying to ignore for the last 6 months reared its ugly head yesterday. I have a new "tender point" and it's set up shop in my right jaw, of all the places it could pick.

For those not familiar with Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS), people with FMS suffer from tender points (among other things) that basically is a muscle or a section of muscle that is hard to the touch, tender like you wouldn't believe and usually inflamed. There are a lot of theories behind tender points. Some believe it's neurological, with synapses and nerves causing the muscle to seize. Others believe it is chemical within the muscle cells itself, where phosphate, which is used to key the cell to contract, never returns to it's holding tank and remains active in the cell, causing the involuntary muscle contraction.

The key words there are seize, contraction, and nerves, which are all elements of pain. I don't know what labor feels like, but I believe these pains could be relative to them. Regardless, they are not pleasant.

The other side of tender points is the exhaustion they produce. Your muscles expend energy when they are used, whether you voluntarily use them in running a marathon or you involuntarily use them in biological processes like digestion. This is why you're sleepy after lunch. Digestion is mild, however. If someone has FMS, they usually feel like they've climbed a mountain or run two dozen miles because their muscles have been contracting for that period of time, even if they've just been sitting at a desk or more likely just lying down.

Tender points show up wherever you have muscles and usually stay there. This is why I'm concerned about my jaw. Last night, my face was swollen and my whole right side of my head felt like it had a migrane. Finally, I was able to get my wife to use trigger points and pressure to cause these muscles to physically relax enough. Suddenly, I felt a rush of drainage and the migrane-like pain began to subside. I don't know what it was, but my suspicion is that I now know what TMJ feels like. I'll let my doctor decide if that's what it was.

This is not fun and I don't like playing "Guess the Syndrome." I'm very frustrated that this has shown up. I'm fighting it through prayer and faith that God can keep this from happening again. You have to fight. You don't have a choice. It's either fight stuff like this or lie down, make out your last will and testament and then simply languish. I choose life, and I'll fight.

Wanted: One Very Rare CD By Keith Thomas

For the past 15 years, I have been trying to get hold of a CD of an album that I purchased on cassette when it was brand new. It was called Kaleidoscope by Keith Thomas published on the Dayspring label. Here's the track listing:

1. Te Deum
2. It's Only Natural
3. Pinwheel
4. Imagine
5. Home Away From Home
6. Arms Of Love
7. Suspicious Heart
8. Kaleidoscope

The reason I'm looking for it is that one track was used in our wedding and it was a beautiful song. This year marks our 15th year together and it makes it a sentimental treasure. The rest of the album has some great instrumentals and a few vocals that are beautiful messages that years after hearing it, still impact me.

Because my life here has been good to me/As I pass through, You supply me with all I need/Life here has been good to me, in this home away from home...

and another,

Maybe I'll fly/Maybe I'll fall/You'll be my friend/Right through it all/I've got Your arms of love around me...

Simple messages, those, but they are so very profound as I age and bear witness to these simple verses. At the age of 17, I needed the messages they gave me. At 35, they are reminders and promises.

Now ask me if I can find it. Yahoo! doesn't have it. Someone is selling it used over at Amazon, but at a high price that if you know us, you know I couldn't afford this even saving for a year. Does anyone reading this blog have this or know where I can find this for a more reasonable price?

Homeschool Kids Trump Public School Teachers On Test

I find this interesting in that the homeschool students passed, but the public school teachers admitted that they could not. The bias against homeschoolers is truly scary sometimes. Intellectual abandonment? I guess the kids showed them.

Government Help - n. An oxymoron

Ronald Reagan was right. No more dangerous words in the English language have been spoken than, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you." The danger comes when fallible humans think that they can make it their business to help other fallible humans. They may be able to, but because they're fallible, their help is not perfect for the situation and often it fails to solve the majority of the problem.

Take for example, our government-regulated, low-flow toilets. Unless you have a "pressurized" system, these toilets frequently require extra help disposing of solid waste. They were legislated because people thought we were flushing away perfectly good tap water that could be conserved. While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I'm convinced these toilets are at the rest stops along the way.

Another example is our Social Security Disabilty Determination system, a well-intentioned debacle that is all but killing those it was intended to help. In summer 2006, I filed my paperwork with the SSD system. Every doctor I've been to in the last two years has agreed that I am disabled. Yet, here we are, leaving the summer of 2008 and I still don't have a favorable decision. Mired in red tape and bureaucrats, this government system tries to help those people who need it, those who have worked until an injury or illness made it impossible, but in the end, SSD drives those same people into bad credit, bankruptcy and yes, even suicide because of their ineptitude.

It is a difficult thing to admit, especially for left-leaning Americans and outright socialists, but the government is very poor at improving peoples lives. It's the reason so many talk about faith-based initiatives. Those organizations that realize the nature of man and work with it instead of against it will find greater success. They are morally driven to help people and are less vulnerable to corruption (key on less vulnerable, not invulnerable).

If you are looking to the government, you are already desperate. If you are hoping for real help and maybe some validation for your suffering, the government will likely be unable to provide it. Instead, try doing what the faith-based people do. They look to God as their Provider and their Source. They take God as their ultimate supplier, not the government because they know that the government is made up of broken people whose desire to help is choked in a monolithic culture of bureaucracy. They know that God will work through them and take care of those who wrong them. In short, they work for the Big Guy and He takes their work seriously.

Links

• A screed against SSD
• Centers for Independent Living
• Faith-Based Initiatives In Government-ese