Lift Up Your Hearts!

School at the Daley household could hardly have been called normal, since Grandma was there as a distraction and Mommy was sick for the first part of my visit.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed my glimpse into the official, sit-at-the-table side of their 24/7 educational process.

Jonathan is not at the moment as excited about math as he is about reading—unlike his Aunt Janet at that age, for whom reading was all right but math was a bowl full of candy.  He's doing well, though, with basic addition and subtraction (and even some simple multiplication and division), and enjoys the "math paths" that Grandma sends him in the mail, problems like this one:

Both boys also like using their Cuisenaire rods, base-10 blocks, and bucket balance.  The Cuisenaire rods are from our own homeschooling days.  We also had a set of base-10 blocks that I had made out of cardboard.  They disappeared somehow, probably in one of our moves, and trust me, buying a commercial set is well worth the $16 investment.  I can't get over the resources available to homeschoolers these days!

The fun is the same, though.  There are few thrills more sublime than observing the "ah ha!" moment in your child's (or grandchild's) eyes.

The Advent Conspiracy has nothing to do with my favorite computer adventure game.

Advent, celebrated during the four weeks before Christmas, is a season of the liturgical church year, a time of repentance and reflection in preparation for the coming of Christ, both as God who became man in a particular time and place (Christmas), and as God who will return to judge the world at its ending (the Second Coming).

That's the theory anyway.  In practice, it's a hard season to observe in a culture where Christmas events start before Hallowe'en* and the celebrations—instead of extending from Christmas Eve until Epiphany on January 6^th—end abruptly about noon on December 25^th.  Between Hallowe'en hype and Christmas hype, Advent—like Thanksgiving—gets lost.

Someone told me last year about the Advent Conspiracy, and I hope whoever it was will forgive me for not remembering.  I've searched all my e-mails and family blogs and come up empty.  This year, however, it was my sister-in-law who brought it up; her family is spearheading their church's incarnation of the idea.

I have a natural suspicion of "movements" and bandwagons, but so far I've seen nothing wrong, and much good, about this one.  It's a simple formula for making Christmas more delightful:

Worship Fully  It starts with Jesus. It ends with Jesus. This is the holistic approach God had in mind for Christmas. It’s a season where we are called to put down our burdens and lift a song up to our God. It’s a season where love wins, peace reigns, and a king is celebrated with each breath.  It's the party of the year.

Spend Less  We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation?....We’re asking people to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one.  Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the [A]dvent season.

Give More  God’s gift to us was a relationship built on love. So it’s no wonder why we’re drawn to the idea that Christmas should be a time to love our friends and family in the most memorable ways possible. Time is the real gift Christmas offers us, and no matter how hard we look, it can’t be found at the mall. Time to make a gift that turns into the next family heirloom. Time to write mom a letter. Time to take the kids sledding. Time to bake really good cookies and sing really bad Christmas carols [or really good Christmas carols]. Time to make love visible through relational giving.

Love All  When Jesus loved, He loved in ways never imagined. Though rich, he became poor to love the poor, the forgotten, the overlooked and the sick. He played to the margins. By spending less at Christmas we have the opportunity to join Him in giving resources to those who need help the most. When Advent Conspiracy first began four churches challenged this simple concept to its congregations. The result raised more than a half million dollars to aid those in need. One less gift. One unbelievable present in the name of Christ. 

Advent Conspiracy accepts no money and encourages participants to share a variety of ideas on how to give presence this Christmas.  But they also have a particular concern for the millions of people who suffer and die for lack of clean water, and for three years have supported the work of Living Water International.

The solution to this problem is directly beneath our feet. Drilling a fresh water well is a relatively inexpensive, yet permanent solution to this epidemic. $10 will give a child clean water for life. That's not an estimate. It's a fact. And here's another fact: Solving this water problem once and for all will cost about $10 billion. Not bad considering Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas last year. Our hope is that, by celebrating Christ in a new way at Christmas, the church can serve as the leading movement behind ending the water crisis once and for all.

LWI earns a four-star (highest) rating from Charity Navigator.  So does World Vision, one of my favorite charitable organizations, which has a Gift Catalog filled with ways to help, from water wells to farm animals to (one of my favorites) microfinance loans.

Your church doesn't participate in Advent Conspiracy?  You don't have a church?  Not to worry!  Participation in this conspiracy is open to all.

President Obama has declared the swine flu outbreak to be a national emergency.  I'm not sure that's all that bad of a measure, given that it lifts some governmental rules for hospitals that probably weren't a good idea in the first place.  But as Susan McWilliams points out in this Front Porch Republic post, our media-hyped fears seem 'way out of line.  It's hard not to quote her entire post.

What Thucydides helps us to see [in his description of a plague in Athens during the Pelopponesian War], as George Kateb has written, is “the ways in which fear of death through contagion disorganizes all human relations”:

It is the peculiar power of contagious disease to isolate people from each other; normal communal ties give way before the desire of every man to avoid contact which could bring on the disease and with it, death. The wish to remain free of sickness overrides all duty and all affection.

The plague resulted in what Kateb calls “a kind of negative state of nature: instead of the war of all against all, there was the avoidance of all by all.” What is ultimately most horrifying about the plague is how it exposes the fragility of civilization.  You might not be able to build Rome in a day, but you can destroy Athens in a few weeks.

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I know I've been out of the comics loop for a while—having recently had three grandchild-comics available for my entertainment—but what's with the volunteerism theme?  I'm all for volunteer work, and think that one of the sad results of the "women's movement" was the conversion of so many volunteer hours into paid employment.  But when comic strip after comic strip at the same time starts pushing volunteer work, it sounds creepy, like groupthink.  Like the Florida public school system, which several years ago began requiring volunteer work from their students, many of whom probably cannot spell, much less define, "oxymoron."  (More)

Thirty years ago today was one of the most difficult and delightful days of my life.  To our wonderful firstborn, I wish a

HAPPY 30^th BIRTHDAY!

(You were worth the effort.)

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Facebook, finding it simultaneously useful and annoying.  But here's a funny thing about Facebook, as reported by Eric Schultz, who is the Chairman of the Board of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and writer of The Occasional CEO. (The NEHGS library, both online and in person, is one of my favorite and most helpful resources for genealogical research.)

This last summer, in the midst of its 164^th year, NEHGS had the single greatest month of membership growth ever.  Ever.

The reason?   Facebook.

Yep, that surprised the board, too.

Tales of Ancient Egypt, by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 2004)

King Arthur was my introduction to Roger Lancelyn Green's books, and this inspired me to find more by the same author.  Tales of Ancient Egypt did not disappoint.  Egyptian gods, goddesses, stories, geography and history are rather muddled in my head, and this book is a great help in beginning to sort them all out.  Like Green's Arthur stories, the tales are simultaneously appropriate and enjoyable for children and adults.

Two stories particularly interested me.  One is the Egyptian take on the story of Helen of Troy.  (Hint:  The real Helen remained safely hidden in Egypt until Menelaus could reclaim her; it was a sort of spirt double that went to Troy with Paris and inspired all the Greek-Trojan bloodletting.)

The fascination of the second, entitled Se-Osiris and the Sealed Letter, lies in what it did to my understanding of the Biblical story of the Exodus.  In The Sealed Letter, Egyptian magicians boast of their prowess with claims such as, "I could bring a great darkness over the land of Egypt that would last for three days," and "I...could bring a blight upon Egypt that would destroy its crops for one season."  The Exodus story of Moses and the plagues always seemed unsatisfactory to me, first in the very strangeness of God using plagues of blood, locusts, darkness, etc. to motivate Pharaoh, and second that the Egyptian magicians would counter Moses's plagues with plagues of their own, rather than the much more logical (and useful) removal of the effects the plagues.

What this Egyptian tale shows me, however, is that God was speaking to the ancient Egyptians within the context of their own culture, in a language they understood.

Our own homeschooling experiences were far shorter than I would have liked, so it has been fun watching other family members in their adventures.  (It has also been nothing short of astonishing to see what resources are now available, rather like the difference between a gas station convenience store and a Super-Wegmans grocery store.)

It is especially fun to watch the grandkids' schooling, since our own children were in public school at this stage.  On the one hand, school time is very short, even for kindergarten, when measured by organized, sit-at-the-table time, and Heather's still working on the best way to balance everyone's needs.  On the other hand, education, if not school, is clearly going on 24/7, and one cannot argue with the results.

Jonathan can read.  It is still laborious enough that he tires easily, but he has reached the stage where what he needs most is simply to read, which he is happy to do, whether to himself or to others. And not only books, but signs, maps, computer screens, anything and everything.

I think more reading goes on here than anything else.  Noah asks to be read to at any spare moment (or not so spare), usually the same books over and over and over again, until he knows the story well enough to "read" it himself.  It's a hoot to hear him tell The Three Billy Goats Gruff:  You wouldn't understand much if you didn't already know the story, but he has all the nuances and tones of voice down pat, from "It only I, the little billy goat," to "I coming to GOBBLE YOU UP!"

This post clearly isn't going to cover all I had planned, so I'll cut it short and post it anyway.  Being part of the adventure doesn't leave much time to write about it.

If there's an advantage to Mommy being sick, it's that Grandma got to supervise, i.e. watch, Noah doing his chores.  His is not a difficult regimen, but still pretty impressive for a three-year old, particularly the enthusiasm with which he demonstrated his skills.

• Clear his own breakfast dishes off the table and put them in the dishwasher.
• Brush his teeth.
• Make his bed.
• Sweep under the table, which is only fitting, since most of the crumbs seem to be his.
• "Help Mommy," which on this particular day meant cleaning the tub in the bathroom.

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As a child, I always had trouble cleaning my room.  What should have been a 10-minute exercise turned into an all-day project, because of course the most important part of cleaning my room was reorganizing the bookshelves, and a book, once in my hand, demanded to be read.

Tonight, trying to get my office in order, and with no time to spare for distractions, I came upon the paperwork I received along with my seasonal flu shot.

Plus ça change:  Twenty minutes later, I finally tossed the papers in the trash, and will be back to work as soon as I've posted this—meaning what should have taken half a second to deal with will have eaten up about 40 minutes.  I was inspired to try to find out where the vaccine had been manufactured, hoping it was in some country whose quality control I thought I could trust, i.e. not China.  The information is surprisingly hard to discover.  Although the papers were covered with remarkably fine print, I could see no point of origin.  "Manufactured by..." does not necessarily indicate where.  Once I found out the names of the company and  of the vaccine, however, I could do an Internet search.

Not that that helped, except negatively:  there was at least no evidence that the manufacturing facilities were in China.  I must also say that the name of the company itself was reassuring:  Novartis.  For no good reason, I must admit—but anything from Basel must be reliable, right?

How Tim Keller Found Manhattan.  Although a church in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination gave us our best church experience, it also gave us our worst.  What I have since learned about other PCA churches leads me to believe that, although they are a sound, orthodox (small "o") denomination, with many wonderful people, there appears to be something congenital that predisposes PCA churches to the sins of arrogance, pride, and distancing themselves from the real world.  I'm not particularly picking on the PCA here—my own current denomination-of-choice, the Episcopal Church, has its own sins aplenty, and persists in displaying them prominently in public.  But our PCA experience was bad enough that I had been fairly determined never to set foot in a PCA church again.

Until now.  I haven't done so, but should I get the opportunity, I think I will be pleased to visit Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.  The first chink in my armor was the Christianity Today article (linked above) on the church, the pastor, and their vision.

The Kellers stick to a few rules. They never talk about politics. Tim always preaches with a non-Christian audience in mind, not merely avoiding offense, but exploring the text to find its good news for unbelievers as well as believers. The church emphasizes excellence in music and art, to the point of paying their musicians well (though not union scale). And it calls people to love and bless the city.

The point about the musicians seems minor, but is illustrative of the way the church reaches out to the people who call New York City home.  A glowing article may be taken with a grain of salt, but we were privileged to spend an evening with a lovely young couple who are part of the city's artistic community, and they confirmed the church's positive presence in the city, from its rigorous intellectual honesty, to its respect for New York's harried businessmen and struggling artists, to its emphasis on mercy and justice for the poor. (More)

On the Nobel Prize system, that is.

I mean, it's bad enough they don't have anything for mathematicians.

When I was in college, my roommate's father was a chemist.  Whether he ever had a chance at a Nobel prize I never knew, but we always watched the Nobel news carefully because he certainly knew many fellow chemists who did.  In the process, I learned that there was often a signficant time lag involved, the work for which the prize was given having been done many years earlier.  When I thought about it, that made sense:  one never knows the true impact of a discovery or an action until one can look back on it from a more distant perspective.

But now we have the Nobel Peace Prize given, not for actions proved peace-promoting from the perspective of history, but to encourage actions that might, maybe, possibly, we hope will do so?

President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his nascent initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and replace unilateral American action with international diplomacy and cooperation.

For once, words fail me.  To his credit, I hear President Obama was surprised.  It would be greater credit if he refused the honor on the grounds that he doesn't deserve it, even if he hopes to someday.  But that may be too much to expect of any human being, let alone a politician.

If you'd told me I'd be the regular reader of a business blog, I'd have thought you crazy, but Eric Schultz is Chairman of the Board at the New England Historic Genealogical Society and once wrote a genealogy-related post that hooked me.  Hiis blog, The Occasional CEO, is about business, yes, but more about people and history and innovation and instersting ideas.  Best of all, he writes really well.  This is old news to regular readers, as I've quoted from The Occasional CEO several times.  Here, in brief, are five of his posts—spanning more than a year—from my backblog.

The Incalculable ROI

The Erie Canal was 363 miles, 83 locks, 675 feet up and down, and cost $7,143,789 to build. A calculation of the ROI [Return On Investment] on the project would show that the construction cost was paid in nine years. In 1882, when tolls were finally abolished, the canal had produced revenue of $121 million, more than four times its operating costs....But, what did the Erie Canal really do? How do we, in retrospect, measure the incalculable ROI?

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I'm sure there must be a legitimate reason behind the new Federal Trade Commission rules for bloggers, but it looks pretty nonsensical from my perspective, another example of one-size-fits-all rules that inconvenience millions in an attempt to collar a few offenders.  It invites comparisons with the TSA's airport screening, except that I'm a lot more worried about terrorists than about those "I lost 300 pounds on this simple diet" ads.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.  Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.  Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products.  [From the Hartford Courant, October 6, 2009]

So here goes.  I suppose I'll have to put it in my About link, too.

I have no idea what others should expect from anything I review or comment on.  I'm one person, not a research laboratory.  You may love a book I find objectionable; you may dislike the recipe I say is fabulous.  Such is life.  Sometimes I get books for free, from publishers, which I'll acknowledge in the review, but no small tip is going to make me say I liked a book when I didn't.  (So far, I've received all of one book this way, and I haven't read it yet, which is why you haven't seen any such acknowledgement.)  I also get incalculable return from Lime Daley, but I like to think that's because of my familial relationship with the owners, not because of any endorsements I make on this blog.

I don't mean to pick on the FTC; they have a tough job.  But I'm much more interested in disclosures, say, of gifts given by textbook publishers to school boards, or from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.  When Internet bloggers attain the respect, authority, and power of doctors and school boards, when it takes more than common sense to realize their reviews might not have universal applicability, then I may be convinced of the need for regulation.  I won't be in that category anyway. 

Thirty years ago we entered the world of adventure gaming.  We had graduated by that point, so I believe it was my brother who first hooked us up to the University of Rochester's computer system, on which was installed ADVENT, the one, the true, the original computer adventure game—running on a DEC-10, I'm pretty sure, though my memory is misty on the details.  After ADVENT we moved on to the original Zork, which was just as much fun.  No devotee of today's high-action, graphic-heavy, semi-realistic games will ever understand the delight of those simple, text-based games.  (The links will take you to Wikipedia's description of the games, but I'd avoid them if you ever think you might play them yourself.  The ADVENT—Adventure—entry especially gives too much away.  And if you're wondering why the name was ADVENT rather than Adventure in those days...believe it or not, it's because "Adventure" has too many letters.

What was truly wonderful about the games was the social interaction.  One of my favorite memories is of the houseful of relatives who had come to share Thanksgiving with us.  We had a borrowed terminal and the old-fashioned type of modem—new technology then—into which one fitted the telephone handset after dialing in and hearing the carrier tone.  We took turns typing commands into the computer, and everyone participated in solving the puzzles, each person contributing his own special knowledge and way of thinking.  The idea of "cooperative games" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, being associated with the misguided self-esteem movement in public schools some years ago, but these, truly, were cooperative games, in which we all won and to which everyone had something to contribute. (More)