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If you are not sure how to spell a word, then you had better hedge your bets and spel each werd differently eech time. That way, you are shur to get at least one of them right.

Maybe it’s “flys”?

or maybe it’s “flies”?

Machine Design is a magazine that is sent to about 180,000 engineers. MD has been around for a while, and I’m pretty sure it has some editors on staff.  The magazine that came today had a nice little article about Urban Aeronautics‘ Mule, an aircraft that uses fans instead of wings or rotors.

I noticed the misspelling (or typo?) on the cover right away. I figured either someone turned off the spell checker or maybe that is how the British or French spell it (like “tyre”). Then I turned to the article and saw that “flies” was spelled correctly there. Looks to me like this one slipped past the editors.

Alpha is in the public school system and he is required, by state law, to have his immunizations.

I am writing about this topic today because he does not, by our choice, have all his immunizations. Nor will he have all the shots the state requires. So the school sent us a letter informing us that our child is not in compliance with state law and we needed to sign a waiver if we want him to stay in school.

I don’t know why they say he is required to have his immunizations since we can object to any or all of the shots. They should call them recommended, not required.

• “Required” would be non-negotiable, I would think.
• “Recommended” would be negotiable.

Since they are all negotiable, “recommended” makes sense.

I do have a theory as to why all the school forms say “required”. If the forms called them “recommended”, more parents might realize that all those shots are not needed. And then they might have more parents refusing some of the vaccinations. And then the authority of the government vaccination program might be questioned. And we can’t have that.

I filled out the form, indicating which vaccines we were waiving (whichever ones he didn’t have, that’s what we waived). Of course, the only ones he didn’t have were the ones we didn’t want him to have: polio and hepatitis B.

The interesting part was the claim on the waiver form.

I had read a website (it’s on the internet; therefore it must be true) that said to be careful what you sign on these waiver forms. If you acknowledge, in writing, putting your child at risk, that may be a “confession”. Now that may be a bit of a stretch, going from waiving a vaccine to having the state take your kids.

But why not err on the side of caution? What the website said to do was to modify the form to match your take on things.

I thought “Why not give it a shot? The worst that can happen is they’ll reject the form and send us another letter.” (pun not intended but quite clever if I do say so myself) So I found the part of the form that irked me and fixed it so I actually did agree with it. The part of the form that didn’t sit well with me was in bold on the form:

“By signing this waiver, you acknowledge that you are placing your child and others at risk of serious illness should he or she contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.“

We decided against polio and hep. B because of the low risk. The entire Western Hemisphere of the world has been certified polio-free for the last 15 years. Hepatitis B is transmitted by morally-objectionable activities, none of which our kindergartner should even know about, much less be involved in. It’s the same objection many people have about Gardasil. If, later in life, Alpha wants to travel to India or work with blood, then he can get the polio or hep B vaccines. But until then, his risk is very low.

I felt that the form did not recognize that the risk of serious illness could be low and that it wasn’t really putting my child at risk. But the worst part about the form was that it claimed I would be putting other people at risk.

What?

Other people should not be at risk if my child is not vaccinated. They could be at risk for one of two reasons:

1. If vaccinated people are at risk for a disease because someone else wasn’t vaccinated, that means the vaccine is pretty much useless.
2. If the other people are not vaccinated, then it was their choice to be unvaccinated that put them at risk.

Neither case involves my child. I did not want to acknowledge something that did not make sense to me, so I altered the form.

Now it says

“By signing this waiver, you acknowledge that you are placing your child at low risk of serious illness should he or she contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.”

I am no longer liable for other people’s illnesses. And I am not agreeing that my choice is risky. There, now I am more comfortable with it. All the school will do is file it away with my child’s permanent record. I think they don’t care what’s on the form as long as they have something to show the state.

What is the difference between vaccinations and immunizations anyway?

As you may have noticed, I changed the background picture of SBS again. Back to the fall shot of leaves in the yard.

Football has resumed, and has brought with it a thousand pleasant memories of the start of school. I will again be updating the Football Happiness Calculator, so check your mood on Mondays throughout the fall and early winter. Or don’t. I’m not keeping track.

But in the interest of summarizing my summer (would that be summerizing?), I give you these pictures.

First up, a day at the beach.

We had a week at one beach and another week (in a different month) at another beach. My kids had swimming lessons at the beginning of summer, and showed remarkable improvement from before the lessons to after. You can tell it was remarkable improvement because I just made a remark about it. So now my kids wander into the water without life jackets sometimes. They spent most of their time in the sand, building moats, castles, and other formations that were easily destroyed by wind, water, or mischievous cousins.

Next, a parade.

Regular readers of this site will note my displeasure of sirens in parades, and what better picture to show that than this? This picture was taken about a month and a half after I wrote about toning down the sirens. And I didn’t tell my kids to do that. They just instinctively know that loud sirens are bad for them. Just like any adult should also know. Or maybe my kids learned it from watching me.

Finally, the quintessential summer day. I’ll have to look up the etymology of quintessential. Mainly, what does “most representative” have to do with necessary fives?

Anyway, I like this picture because it shows what a good summer day should have. Swimsuits, a sprinkler, and freezy pops. This was one of the hottest days of the year and we, just like a million other people, thought we should go to the local water park. Since the water park was filled to capacity and had a waiting list (i.e. line down the sidewalk of people standing around and praying for people inside the water park to leave), we just went to the back yard and let the kids play while we did a lot of nothing. My nothing involved a nap on a hammock.

Okay, I looked up quintessential. And I got nothing. But it did point me to quintessence, which had a lot. It does mean “fifth element”, and is not related to the 1997 Bruce Willis movie (as someone at work once told me, “I’ll save you some time. Don’t go see the movie – the fifth element is love.”). But according to ancient philosophies, the fifth element is not love, it is ether (or aether or æther but no one really uses the æ thing anymore, much less knows how to pronounce it).

The first four classical elements are earth, water, air, and fire – all natural items seen on our planet. Ether was for the rest of the universe. I haven’t figured out how Earth, Wind, and Fire fits in here and why they shun water.

We enrolled the kids in a Kids Bowl Free promotion, which entitles them to bowl up to two games per day for free (shoe rental not included). We paid extra (another $20 or so) for bowling for the adults too. So any day we want during the summer, we can go bowl and not pay any lanes fees.

Before this summer, I bowled rather infrequently, maybe once a year. We have gone bowling a couple times this summer, not a lot, but enough to get our money’s worth out of the deal. It had been a while since I had been in a bowling alley, and they added a new feature since I last bowled: speed readouts.

Now when you bowl, you get not only your score on the screen but also the speed at which you threw (or rolled or whatever) the ball.

Here’s a hint: don’t pay attention to the speed.

Unless maybe you’re trying to win a bet or something. Because, at least for me, speed and accuracy are inversely proportional. The faster I threw the ball, the fewer pins were hit. Here’s a good example. In this first picture, I was bowling normally, just aiming for the center pin and bowling at my normal speed.  I got a strike.

In this second picture, I was still aiming for the center pin, but I was also concentrating on throwing it as fast as I could.

I got a 1 and a gutter.  Not how you want to follow a strike.

How fast does a bowling ball go? My normal speed was 16-17 mph. I have no idea what a good bowling speed is. Is 17 mph a slowball? That was with a 16-lb ball. I topped out at 19 mph with a 13-lb ball.

And here’s a tip: always cut your thumbnail before going bowling. Because if you don’t, the ball will trim it for you.

A while back, I wrote about paper towels versus warm-air dryers in bathrooms, and how I much prefer paper towels.

I was in a public facility this past week, and I had the opportunity to experience using the XLERATOR® Hand Dryer. Normal hand dryers take way too long to dry my hands. I concede that the XLERATOR is efficient, but I almost couldn’t get my hands dry because I was too busy covering my ears with my hands. That thing is so loud that it is almost painful. I did feel like plugging my ears to block the noise. I suppose that it is a good thing that it dries hands so quickly, otherwise it might cause hearing damage.

I still vote for paper towels. Not only do they dry hands quickly, but also they are nearly silent.

“From the LORD of hosts you will be punished with thunder and earthquake and loud noise,With whirlwind and tempest and the flame of a consuming fire.”
– Isaiah 29:6

Previously, I had written how I did not like gas stations that printed your receipt for you at the pump, whether you wanted it or not. That is still very annoying.

I found a gas station that apparently is annoyed at people who leave the receipts at the gas pump.

Because I ordered a car wash at this gas station, I wanted the receipt. So I did not get to see whether this station gave me the option of not printing the receipt.

On the other hand, maybe driving-off-without-paying incidents are rigorously enforced in that town, and the gas station just wants their customers to be protected against mistaken incarcerations.

“Show me a sign for good, That those who hate me may see it and be ashamed, Because You, O LORD, have helped me and comforted me. ”
– Psalm 86:17

We spent our vacation week at Maranatha; thus we got to hear a number of good Bible lessons. Maranatha is like the Christian Reformed Conference Grounds, but it’s non-denominational and you get to stay in real buildings with all the amenities (i.e. there’s no camping). Oh, and the pool is at the beach, for what that’s worth.

The topic for the week was from Acts, mainly focused on the start of the early church. The speaker was Ron Cline, a man with a great voice for speaking. That makes sense, since he has a radio show (Beyond the Call). His voice is low and clear. When you meet him, that’s what you first notice.  If you listen to his podcasts, you will not get the full effect. They do not accurately represent the bass in his voice.

Just how low is his voice? He makes James Earl Jones sound like a little girl.

Okay, maybe not so much.

The one thing that sticks in my mind the most, from the content of the messages, was the statement that “you are a witness.” Not that you should be a witness, but that you already are one. If you are a Christian, that is your one main job – to tell others what God has done for you and what He means to you. “Now,” he said, “you may be a crummy witness” and never tell anyone anything, or you may be a great witness.

Our responsibility, as Christians, is to tell other people about what God means to us (but individually, not collectively). You choice is not whether to be a witness but rather what kind of witness you will be.

Ron Cline had a number of stories from his work with HCJB. The stories were about people who are doing God’s work and the amazing things that happen to people who are committed to serving God. And there is a lot of work to be done.

Much of the world is in bad shape, and much of the work involves taking care of basic needs (clean water, hygiene, education, etc.) that are unmet in country after country. It was hard to go eat lunch or go to the beach after hearing some of what other people’s lives are like, since our hardships (“what? that restaurant closed? Great, there go our dinner plans…”) are nothing compared to even a good day in a lot of places.

But feeling guilty won’t help anyone. Anyway, HCJB trains people to minister to their local communities. The people who are best suited for an area (language, culture, etc.) are those who are already there. I am just to be faithful to God by introducing Him to the people whom He brings in my life. That’s the big picture.

“For you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have seen and heard.”
– Acts 22:15