Sunday, April 20, 2014

April 20, 2014 - A Wonderful Easter

Happy Easter!

Today was a special day in our family's church life.  Today was the day that Christian became a deacon in the Aaronic priesthood.  This is a key step to manhood - starting to serve in the priesthood sets a pattern for a man's life. At 12 years old, a young man now gets more chances to serve others, and more opportunities to learn new skills and see where he will be of value in the world.  And I got to ordain him.

It was a full day for me during services today.  I directed the choir for a rendition of "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth".  They were fantastic, as always.  I'm very blessed to have such a wonderful group of people to work with.  Then I got to sing as part of a men's quartet.  We sang "That Easter Morn", an arrangement by a friend of mine in Oregon.  Then I got to sit back for a while and listen to a wonderful talk by our ward's seminary teacher.

Then it was Sunday School hour, and I got to take 6 12-year-olds from midway through Matthew 26 to the end of Matthew 28.  We had a really great discussion - I love to take these kids through the scriptures.  I hadn't really processed the fear coursing through Peter as he sat on the steps and denied Jesus.  He must have been terrified.

After Sunday school, we moved into the 3rd hour, where the men and women split for instruction.  The men ages 12 and up meet briefly together, and then split out by age group.  I went with Christian to his group, and we gathered my parents and Katrina's parents, and Aria.  Christian sat in a chair, and we laid our hands on his head, conferred the priesthood on him, and then ordained him to the office of deacon.  Hugs all around, and then we all went back to our regular classes.  I walked into my class and found them just sitting around.

"What are you waiting for?" I asked.
"You," they replied.

You see, I'm the 1st counselor in the Elder's Quorum.  The president wasn't there, and the guy who usually teaches wasn't around either, so I got to lead the discussion.  We had a really good discussion about home teaching - what we want from our home teachers, the value of the connection.  And then it was over.

So it was a busy day; a lovely Easter Sunday.  The sun is out, it's 65 degrees, the flowers are up, and Easter dinner is in the oven.  I'll have to write another post about my thoughts about the events of this day a few millennia ago.  Not today, but soon, while they're still fresh.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

April 12, 2014 - A day outside

I got my trail run in yesterday before work so I could take full advantage of today.  The plan has worked out.  This is not a musing post - it's more of a "this is what I did today" post.  Pardon the pedantic nature, I just have to write these sometimes.

I got up this morning when I woke up - 7:00 or so - played a video game, and made breakfast.  Then I got dressed for working outside and got busy.  I have 4 main outside tasks to complete in relatively short order:
1) clean up the 2 trees we had felled 2 months ago.
2) complete the leaf cleanup.  I had it pretty well under control in the fall, but...winter wind and time move the pesky things, and they're messy.
3) open the pool
4) complete the deck railing

For most of these tasks, I need to use power equipment.  Specifically, to move the leaves, I need the leaf blower.  To move the leaves to where they belong (the deer depression by the porch), I need to move a 2.5' diameter tree trunk, which requires the chainsaw.  I've tried to start the chainsaw a couple times since my last successful attempt, and had no luck.  I've had similarly bad luck with the leaf blower.  Today I had to get them both working, or at least find a solution.

I trust the leaf blower the most.  It's a Husqvarna, and started on the 2nd pull when it was new.  I suspected my previous bad luck was due to flooding the engine or ambient temperature.  I set the choke and the throttle, and off it went.  I was in business!  Yeehaw!  The leaf blower is a magic wand, a way to change nature drastically without hurting it.  We have a lot of ground cover near the house, and the blower gently shakes the leaves out of the ground cover and hurls them away. It's my own personal tornado.  I love it.  I forgot until this evening that I had actually started the blower once last week, so I shouldn't have been surprised today.  Ah, well.

I started with the driveway area - the wind deposits leaves under the front porch and against that side of the house all winter.  It was pretty deep.  It took about half an hour to get the leaves out of the gravel and concrete, and another hour to get them and the leaves on the gravel over the ground cover and into the woods.  Happy with progress there, I turned to the chainsaw.  I suspected I had a bad switch of some kind.  The choke wouldn't stay pulled out, and I thought the mechanism to keep it out might be functioning poorly, so I took a strip of velcro and wrapped it around the choke with it pulled out, and tried to start the thing.  It successfully held the choke in place, which was great, but...

No luck.  I pulled and pulled, starting to sweat.  My second thought was that the on/off switch (which is configured to influence the choke position) might be a problem.  I wasn't able to move it up and down, despite trying to do so numerous times with a fair amount of force.  I didn't want to break the thing.  So I took off the engine cover, verified that the switch was designed to rotate and that it wasn't rotating, and then removed the switch.  Turns out the tension spring for the switch was sticking in the divot, so it was stuck in the "off" position.  I exercised it a couple times, confirmed it would move no problem, and put the engine cover back on.  My chainsaw is a 16" Poulan, the cheapest chainsaw with a decent review I could buy.  I'm very happy with it.

Flip the switch to on, pull the choke out, and it stayed!  First pull, it caught.  Set the choke to half, it took off.  Success!  I filled the engine with gas, added chain oil, checked chain tension, and off I went to cut our huge oak trunk up.  I learned last night that this is called "bucking".  I learned today that bucking a 30" trunk with a 16" chainsaw bar takes a long time and pretty good accuracy when setting the cut.  Nevertheless, I made 4 successful cuts, rolled 4 large wedges away into the meadow, and opened up a way to get leaves past the trunk and into the deer depression.  I cut up some brush, put the larger limbs in a pile to cut for kindling and towed the smaller limbs out to the property lines.

And then the leaf blower came back out.  The depression is now so full it's invisible, the ground cover is clear to grow.  The place looks much cleaner than it did, which was my goal for those pieces for today.  I said farewell to those tasks, changed into shorts, and started work on the pool.  I was just removing leaves and tightening the cover.  I got some of the outside chairs out of the basement, brought the pool pump out, and that was about it.  I actually got to sit by the pool (still covered) and read tonight.  It's been so long since I could do that comfortably.  Really exciting.  I can't wait for consistently warm weather again.

The kids cleaned their rooms, jumped on the trampoline, did laundry, and played Spyro (PS1 viedo game).  Katrina sprayed for bugs, took Aria to a first aid certification class, and then took off for a girls night with a friend who is soon moving to the West Coast.

It's been a really productive day, and a beautiful one.  We turned the heat in the house down to 63, and today it was up to 70 in the house.  Tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer.  Lovely weekend, couldn't be better.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

April 8, 2014 - Life as a Guinea Pig

This morning, walking down a hallway at work, I had an epiphany: I am my own guinea pig.  I will cede cuteness to the actual pig from Guinea.  But I experiment upon myself quite a lot.

The last few months at work have been really stressful for a host of reasons.  I won't elaborate, I'll just say that we've all been extremely busy for a few months now.  When someone has too much going on, they respond in certain ways.  Some people get angry, some get more effective, some just shut down.  Over the last few months, I've been able to step outside myself and see how I react.

Can you see that little bit of white near the middle
of the frame?  It's all gone now!
It's been interesting to see how I worked, how much I accomplished, and how I felt as the pressure increased and then started to ease.  I'm mostly through the huge push of this, and can see a bit of relief coming soon.  And although I'd like to be more candid, thinking that a future employer might read this someday make me think that I probably shouldn't be quite so forthcoming on this topic.

In other news, Spring has arrived.  Our tulips are up, the very last of the snow melted this evening.  I captured it just before it disappeared for good.  I put up the trampoline over the weekend, and the kids have been on it every day since.  They've been riding their bikes, running through the woods, and jumping, even in the rain.  
Jacob in the air.  The black lump on the far side is Libby.

Tomorrow I'm headed into the city with Aria to see Wicked along with most of the rest of her 8th grade class.  Should be a ton of fun, I'm really excited.  Me, the guy who thought he might never see a show on Broadway, headed there for a middle school field trip.  Life hands us weird things sometimes.


Saturday, April 5, 2014

April 5, 2014 - Walks and Waits

After a long period of intense stress with work, the pressure is starting to ease a little.  This weekend is also General Conference for church, which means that it's a full 2-day weekend for our family.  No church meetings in our building means I don't need to prepare a lesson for Sunday School, or direct the choir, and I can sleep past 6am.  Frankly, it gives me back about 6 hours of constant action, and it's nice to get the break every once in a while.

So today I got up early and went on a trail run, covering nearly 7 miles of the AT between Hosner Mt Rd and Miller Hill Rd.  It's a very hilly section - the first section on either end is a serious climb, and then it's about 2 miles of small up and down.  It was a good run - got some nice pictures of the sun coming up over the hill and the fog-covered valley below.  The main thing about this morning's run, though, was the wildlife.  I stopped to take some audio of the birds, saw robins and pheasants.  I also heard a very deep click click click that certainly came from an animal, but I have no idea what it was.  And once, ahead of me, I heard something crashing through the brush.  A white tail flashed across the trail.  And then it went back.  I don't know if it was predator or prey.  The trail was also littered with deer dung on the way back.  It hadn't been there on the way in.

It was a nice morning for a run - 40 degrees, no wind.  Had to keep moving to stay warm, and it worked out pretty well.  I've been doing a Tough Mudder-style run once a week for the past month, and this was this week's run.  It ended up being too short, so I did a 5K on the treadmill later in the day.

When I got back home, it was just before 9, so I hopped in the shower, and took the 3 younger kids to Danbury.  This weekend is the grand opening for the Lego Store in the Danbury Mall.  There was a master builder there, building an 8' tall model of the Incredible Hulk.  The kids were also able to contribute to the build by building subassemblies.  We got to the mall 15 minutes after it opened, and there was a serious line.  It took us a full hour to get into the store, 30 minutes to get our stuff, and 30 more minutes to get to the cash register and pay.  Christian and Jacob both chose to get cash instead of a birthday party, so they spent their birthday money.  Christian made the excellent choice of getting a remote control Lego Technic car.  It's got independent suspension, is 4 wheel drive and 4 wheel turn.  Perfectly driveable, but built more like a rock crawler and goes pretty slowly.

The kids spent the afternoon building their sets, and in the evening we watched The Incredibles.  A good day.  I'm completely exhausted, ready to sleep.  Tomorrow holds a bunch more things to do.  Carpe noctem!




Friday, April 4, 2014

April 4, 2014 - Book Review: Words of Radiance

Certain I needed to blog, I was uncertain what to blog about.  And then I realized I had not put together a review of Brandon Sanderson's latest masterpiece, Words of Radiance.

Words of Radiance is book 2 in Sanderson's Stormlight Archive.  The grand story arc starts with regular humans, and tells the story of the return of their legends.  Thousands of years ago, really bad monsters and really powerful heroes battled it out.  Then the battle ended, and we've had peace for a long time.  In book 1, ominous things start happening: a main character starts having visions, another main character gains some magical abilities, and then another one does, and then we find out that a third had them all along.  These are things lost to legends, and each person who finds that she has magical abilities is shocked by the idea.

Words of Radiance takes off exactly where Way of Kings ended.  It's a hard book to write about - the characters are well-written; the magical system is fascinating, complex, and limited; the religous, cultural, and bio diversity invented for this world is stunning.  And although Words of Radiance answers many questions, it leaves many more.

So how to write this without spoilers?  Sanderson likes to take concepts and twist them.  In Steelheart, for instance, Sanderson takes the notion of superheroes and ties it to the old adage that "absolute mpower corrupts absolutely".  Thus, his superheroes are nearly all bad guys, ruling the world as despots.  In this series (only in book 2 out of a planned 10), it seems that Sanderson is doing something similar, bringing his plot into a more realistic realm.  We met Kaladin, our first main character, at the beginning of book 1.  He has a serious personal crisis in WoR.  He is far from perfect.  Some guys we were encouraged to hate in WoK turn out to maybe have different motives than we had thought.  And we meet a group of shadowy figures in WoR that may be after the right thing but going about it in the wrong way.

These are all humans.  There are mythical creatures that may also be enemies to the humans, but the humans are so busy destroying themselves they aren't able to start to deal with the non-humans in their world.  And in addition to the known non-humans, there are legends of other, even more scary, non-humans.  In most fantasy series, there is a single Big Bad Evil Thing Rising From The Depths.  In these books, there is certainly something ominous, but the people aren't united in their opposition to it.  And we aren't even sure yet if the ominous things happening with the humans are a good thing or a bad thing.  I guess, in summary, I don't even know yet who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are.  I understand the motives of the people we first think are the good guys, but the more I meet the bad guys, the less sure I am of their badness.

Picture a mostly non-magical feudal society.  Then picture that one group of warlords gets nuclear weapons.  One group of warlords gets chemical weapons.  They both have means to deliver them sufficiently to wipe out the other.  Some want to use their new weapons, some don't want to repercussions.  It's a messy situation with no clear heroes.  And although it appears that we know who our core group of heroes is, we see some old villain characters in a new light, and realize they might not be villains after all.  And someone we thought might be a good-leaning neutral character might be anything but neutral or good.  It's fascinating to not have the answers thrown at my face, to have the chance to evaluate and pass judgment on these characters myself.

So I'm currently in my 3rd reading of book 1.  Having read book 2, it now makes much more sense.  Once I finish it, I'll read book 2 again.

At any rate - highly recommended.  Go check it out.