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We went to the science museum in Toledo recently. The lower level of the museum has a section set aside for temporary exhibits. Temporary can be days or weeks or months. This particular exhibit seemed to be one of the longer ones at 3 months, since it was rather extensive.

It was a museum of guitars.

They had a giant guitar, some things to play with and try, but it was mostly guitar displays.

Early guitars, classical guitars, electric guitars, modern guitars.

I don’t know that there were many guitars of exceptional importance or value, but they had a wide range, all with placards indicating their places in history.

They did, however, have one rare guitar. It’s not the best photo, but it will give you the idea. I think they managed to get one of the original models for this display, so it is somewhat rare as there aren’t that many surviving from the early years.

That was my favorite guitar display of the day.

It is tempting to give an electronics device (iPad, Kindle Fire, anything else that has games) of some sort to youngsters who act up, in order to get them to sit still at an event.

But don’t.

That ends up being a reward for misbehaving. It should be this: sit still, and then you can play afterwards. Not this: you get to play if you’re being disruptive.

Which behavior do want to reinforce?

If I may try an analogy here: Raising kids is like firing a gun. Assume the kid is the bullet. You as a parent have a target for them to hit.

You do have a target, right?

Even if it is just “to become a productive member of society”, you should have a goal. You should have a plan to reach that goal, too. But that’s another topic.

So you want your kids to hit the target. The target is a long way off. What does a bullet need in order to reach the target?

Two main things: propulsion and constraint.

I’ll skip propulsion – the point of this post is boundaries. Constraint is the boundaries you give them.

A gun with a short barrel is inaccurate – the bullet has a low chance of hitting the target. Similarly, a child with no boundaries is going to veer off somewhere.

When is it easiest to correct the course of a bullet – at the beginning of its travel or near the end of its travel? At the beginning, I would expect. I’ve never tried to correct a bullet at the end of its travel. The same applies to people. Get them on the right course early, and it will save you and them much effort and grief later.

The right course at hand for this topic is being able to survive without being amused by a glowing screen.

And if you’re not familiar with the etymology of amuse, you should be.

For some reason, I’ve been reading books when it’s not summer vacation. Rather than wait until my annual summer book review and write an interminably-long post, I decided to write about them now.

Here they are, approximately in the order that I read them.

• 20 and Counting by The Duggar Family
  This is their life story, telling how Jim Bob and Michelle each grew up and met and everything. I don’t know what I expected before I started, but this book was more interesting than I thought it would be.

  If you have small kids, this book might give you some good ideas on ways to run things.

• The Closer by Mariano Rivera
  This was actually the youth version, not the full version. Beta picked it out at the bookstore. This also was more interesting than I expected it would be, although I did skip a bunch of about the last third of the book. The first part of the book was about his growing up in Panama and getting to the major leagues (not his plan, but he went along with it). Fine for all ages.
• Order of the Unicorn by Suzanne Selfors
  Beta was reading this through school. I forget if it was from the school library or a free-reading assignment or what. But I read it just to keep up with what is going into their minds. This is part of the imaginary veterinary series. The book wasn’t that memorable, but I suppose that’s okay because that means there’s nothing controversial in it.
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire
  Over 1 Million Sold!

  But not 1 million read.

  I doubt that many of the people who bought the book made it through that mess. We had tickets to go see the musical, so I thought I would get a head start and read the book. I started reading it but gave up. It was very crass. I thought it might get better, but about 10% of the way through it, my wife noticed I was reading it and said her friend told her not to bother with the book. So apparently it doesn’t get any better.

  If you’re thinking about reading the book: don’t do it.

  The musical is fine on its own, and does a fine job of removing the bad parts of the book. The currently-popular theme of villains not really being bad, just misunderstood, is still there. But there’s nothing you would censor for your kids, like you would for a lot of the book.

• Holes by Louis Sachar
  Good. One bad word. Interesting storylines.
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
  Not for kids. No reason for them to read it. What age is appropriate? Once they’ve had a government class in middle or high school, probably.
• Reclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture by Rob Rienow
  Great book. I liked it so much I bought a few copies and mailed them to people. If you’re not going to watch his DVD series on marriage or his DVD series on parenting, at least read this book.
• A Reader’s Manifesto by B. R. Myers
  I thought this might be interesting, given a positive review I read.

  But it wasn’t.

  And the passages of bad writing that it critiques (or condemns) are not necessarily clean. I’d say avoid this book.

My wife looks forward to Christmas music. I used to try to hold out until after Thanksgiving, but she would turn to that one radio station that switches to all Christmas music the first week of November.

This year, I stopped resisting. But it seems to me that the radio station song selection is awful. If you want to hear the same few songs that aren’t really about Christmas, then go ahead and listen to the radio. Sure, they might have the word “Christmas” in them, but that doesn’t make them Christmas songs.

Anyway, disillusioned with the radio, I turned to our CD collection. Then, unable to find our CD collection, I turned to Amazon. (Amazon’s process for buying music digitally is way better than iTunes’ process, in case you want my opinion on that.)

All that to say this: I got to assess a number of Christmas albums and am giving you my favorites.

Top 3 Albums

• Evie – Come on, Ring Those Bells
  A classic. If you don’t know these songs then I am sorry for your sad childhood.
• Reliant K – Let It Snow, Baby… Let It Reindeer
  I was unfamiliar with this album before this year. But now this is my kids’ favorite album. I burned them a CD that has the slower angsty songs removed.
• Various Artists – Handel’s Young Messiah
  The one from the early 1990s. This is a very good way to be introduced to Handel’s Messiah. I hope you already have this CD, because it is out of print and you can’t buy digital copies of it. Not legally, anyway.

  I realize the whole Messiah composition is more appropriate at Easter time than Christmas, but it is not out of place at Christmas, so we’ll stick with tradition and allow it here.

Honorable Mention

• Mannheim Steamroller – Mannheim Steamroller Christmas
• MercyMe – The Christmas Sessions
• Sixpence None the Richer – The Dawn of Grace

Also, slightly related – if you’re looking for a recording of the Lord’s Prayer, I recommend Susan Boyle‘s version.

I don’t go through a lot of music, so I’m sure I missed or forgot some good ones. Any other recommendations?

You know what video is not going viral right now?

The one of you sitting around, watching videos on your phone.

Get out and do something.

Similarly to how the arguments against incandescent bulbs do not apply to me, arguments for water conservation also do not apply to me.

I let the water run while I shave. I run the water while I’m brushing my teeth. And I run the water while I’m loading the dishwasher.

Why don’t I care? Because my house has well and septic.

Not only is water essentially free, but it also follows the law of the conservation of mass: water can neither be created nor destroyed.

How do I “use up” water by letting it run? Answer: I don’t. All I do is move it around.

Here’s a well-and-septic system:

Water gets pumped out of the ground, up to my sink. Then it flows down the drain and back into the ground. What is the problem with that? It’s a zero-sum game – the water travelled a little bit, but its amount and location didn’t change.

“Turn off the water while you brush your teeth, and it could save you 5 gallons of water a day.”
“Benefits include a reduced water bill and conservation of fresh water.”

I pay to run the pump. I don’t care about that cost, and I just showed that no water is wasted (i.e. removed from possible future use) by letting water run. I have yet to be convinced there is a good reason why I can’t let the water run as much as I want.

I could see how someone could argue against lawn watering because then much of the water evaporates and doesn’t go back into the ground. While the argument shouldn’t be that water is wasted (since it just changed phase rather than disappearing), I will agree that the water does change its net location. Why it’s bad to provide rain for someone else is another discussion. I won’t put up much of a fuss either way on that argument, because I don’t water my lawn. Why help your lawn grow when that just means you’ll have to cut it more?

I know people have criticized the newer math sections in elementary schools, due to the way they comply to Common Core.

One of my kids’ math sheets illustrates one of the absurdities:

It’s the “How did you figure this out?” part that would aggravate me if I were still in school.
How did I figure this out? You just spent hours of classroom time teaching me how to figure this out, that’s how.

I would guess they get a lot of nebulous answers – with math, by writing the numbers, etc. I liked my son’s answer: “using my knowledge”. That is how it’s done, after all.

But the people who dismiss this question as useless are missing the hidden agenda.

It’s not a math sheet – it’s subtle career projection test.

In my years in the industry, I have found that audits – not financial audits, but business process audits – ask similar questions. I think these math sheets are secretly trying to gauge which students would make good process auditors and place them on the appropriate career path.

A general business process audit question would be something like “How do you know how to do your job?” To which my default answer would normally be something like “Well, I went to college and then the other people here at the company told me how our product is supposed to work and then I used my knowledge.”

But since the how-to-survive-an-audit pamphlet said not to answer in that manner, my default answer now is something like “I follow the engineering process workflow document, which is located at this intranet web address. No, I do not have any paper copies of it, because that would be bad.”