Some Blog Site

Some of you may recall last week’s post about the bid for tree removal.

We were going to have a tree felled because it was

• dead,
• leaning over the garage,
• and almost scraping the power lines

If it fell, it would have crushed one end of the garage (where all my tools are, and storage boxes – no cars are in the garage) and knocked out the power (leaving live power lines on my yard). That’s why we wanted to hire professionals, and that’s why it was going to be a few hundred dollars (what with the bucket truck and all).

Here’s how it looked before (a few years ago, but you get the idea):

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On the back of the The Railway Children book that I read was a list of books. I always like seeing lists of books, especially classics. This book had a good list because the book (and therefore the list) was several decades old.

The series is titled Children’s Illustrated Classics Series and is intended For Younger Readers. This series was published by J.M. Dent in London.

So if you’re searching for what a well-read child should read, here’s a start:

My goal is to read at least one book during the summer vacation. I made it through three. Well, more like two and a half. And if blogs were books…

Anyway, here are the three books:

The Wedding

My wife recommended I read “The Wedding” by Nicolas Sparks.

Once I started reading it, I became worried. The book is about a couple who had been married for 29 years and the relationship had grown lifeless. Not actively bad, but not really good either. Did she recommend that I read it because she thought we were that way? Did she think I was like Wilson and just went about my business, leaving romance and relationship by the wayside?

I thought maybe I should work on communicating with her and maybe I should ask her if that’s what she thought. But, on second thought, I decided that she probably just enjoyed a nice story and figured I would enjoy it too. So I read it. And enjoyed it.

I didn’t find out until after I finished the book that it was the sequel to “The Notebook”. From what I’ve heard, people found “The Notebook” to be a little too depressing, so Nicolas Sparks had to write this one and make it uplifting. Yes, “The Wedding” starts out describing the problems with their marriage, but it ends well.

It was a good book. Go ahead and read it, unless you’re boycotting Nicolas Sparks books.

No, I have not read (nor watched) “The Notebook”.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

I also read “The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag” by Allen Bradley.

That one is the sequel to “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”, which I preferred over this one (henceforth known as TWTSTHB).

They were both good, but TWTSTHB was a little darker and the themes were a little heavier. Flavia solves the murder-mystery, but the storyline took a sad turn and never recovered. Yes, all the main characters are fine and healthy and all – it’s the storyline, the subject matter, that never recovered. I was reading this book to be entertained, and it is written well, but it uses subjects that I do not find as entertaining as other people perhaps do.

The Railway Children

After the vacations were all done, my wife got a book on tape CD from the library. It happened to be “The Railway Children” by E. Nesbit.

I ended up hearing about half the story – hear a few chapters, miss a couple, hear a couple, miss one, etc. By the time we had to return the audio book to the library, I was interested in the book. So my thoughtful wife checked out the actual book from the library just for me to read.

I liked the book. It is geared more toward children, but I just read it to myself and enjoyed it nonetheless. I don’t know that I would have finished it in time if I had to read it aloud to the kids though.

Wife: Which one of these dresses do you like better?
Husband: That one.
Wife: Why?
Husband: The other one has an empire waist, and I’m not a fan of the empire waist.
Wife, possibly glaring: My wedding dress had an empire waist…

Quiz:
What should the husband say next?
A. Oh, hey, look at the time! I gotta go to my (insert excuse here).
B. It did? All I remember is how beautiful you looked that day.
C. Umm…
D. (nothing, just back away slowly and leave the room)

Answer:
There is no right answer, of course.

The aforementioned conversation might have been hypothetical. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is strictly coincidental. No husbands were harmed in the making of this blog post.

A husband and a wife can say the exact same words but have very different meanings. Here are some examples:

Phrase: “The noodles are on the stove.“

Phrase: “The dishes in the dishwasher are clean.“

Phrase: “What time is dinner?“

Those were, of course, random examples from anonymous people.

Here’s my tip for wives: don’t read anything into what your husband says. Take it at face value – he is just giving you information.

Here’s my tip for husbands: try to guess what your wife means when she says something. Don’t take it at face value – she is giving you secret instructions.

The topic of the week at our time at Maranatha during our vacation was relationships. The speaker was Ron Zappia, whose bio in the link I just provided accurately reflects his speaking style. I bet he wrote that himself.

He gave a week’s worth of sermons, complete with illustrations (literal drawings – he used markers and a sketchpad on an easel). I am not going to recap everything here, but I will go over one particular point.

Without self-examination, there can be no self-control.
– Ron Zappia

That’s good, but that’s only half the equation of self-control. People need to see themselves honestly, but they shouldn’t be looking at just themselves. How does what I’m doing affect others?

That goes along with one of my favorite quotes about self-esteem:

Kids don’t need more self-esteem; they need more others-esteem.
– I forget who

That’s what I see as one of my tasks as a parent – get my kids to see that what they do does affect other people. If it helps them, then they should do more of what they’re doing. If it hurts them, then they should not do it. Be aware of more than just yourself.

But that strays slightly from Pastor Zappia’s point, which is that you need to be aware of yourself first. If you don’t think you’re doing something, then you won’t check how it affects others.

So two points for raising kids (the process of which I am merely beginning): get them to recognize their own actions/attitudes and get them to recognize the effects those have on others.

I suppose the third point should be to get them to change the behaviors that are not good.

“But how do I get my kids to do that?” you may be wondering.

I am wondering that too.

If I ever get the answer, I’ll let you know.

I was reminiscing about my early years in college and thought I would look up what the internet had to say about the band Tree Climbers Guild. Since there was no information out there, I get to write something. Now whatever I write will become the definitive guide to TCG.

Ahem.

Tree Climbers Guild was an award-winning band from Cedarville College in the mid 1990s.

The award was the Alpha Chi talent show, in case you were curious. Might not matter to anyone outside of the Cedarville family, but it was a big deal back then. It propelled TCG to fame and fortune. The fortune was, if I remember correctly, $100 for winning the talent show. TCG then put that $100 into studio time, produced an album, and sold a bunch of cassettes.

It had to be in the dozens, maybe even hundreds.

Here is their debut album: conclusion of the matter

I think that was their only album. The artwork, in case you can’t quite make it out, is a tombstone with a rose lying across the grave bed.

Here is the side of the cassette tape:

And here is the back of the tape:

Here is the outside of the album cover/liner thing:

And here is the inside, the liner notes and all the lyrics:

I am not going to type out the lyrics (go on, click on the picture to enlarge it and read for yourself), but here are all the song titles (aka discography, although it might be more appropriate to call it a cassettography or a tapography):

Side 1

• ghost of the coyote
• flight of the unsure soul
• never ending dream
• you are not
• the hungry sea
• as we stand

Side 2

• maybe tomorrow
• seventeen to my plateau
• silver burning
• foreign ground
• conclusion of the matter
• evening reverie

Bonus feature:
Riding on the coattails of the success of TCG was Somewhere In a Box. Since that tape was next to TCG in my collection, I will post its pictures here for fun.