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

I just had my second drive with rain-sensing wipers, and they are the greatest thing since intermittent wipers.

Before I bought my first car (at age 21 … my first motorcycle was at age 18, but that’s another story), I used to think that car ads were wasting their space by promoting intermittent wipers. Not only did all cars have them anyway, but even if they did have just off-low-high, the driver could just switch between off and low to handle inconsistent rain.

Then I got my first car. It was about 10 years old at the time, and I think the person who ordered the car forgot to hand in the page with the options checked. If it was optional or a convenience or a luxury, it was not on that car.

As you may have guessed, that car did not have intermittent wipers. After a winter and spring with snow and rain, I vowed never again to mock intermittent wipers (wiper no wiping, wiper no …). Okay, maybe I didn’t vow, but my appreciation of their usefulness greatly increased. Having to adjust the wiper switch every 15 seconds gets very annoying after a while.

Fast forward, umm, a few years to this year and now I’m in a vehicle (no, not mine, it’s for work) that has the rain-sensing wipers. I didn’t know the vehicle had the fancy-pants wipers (someone else was driving, otherwise I would have seen and used the wiper controls). All I noticed was that the driver wasn’t doing anything other than driving (both hands on the steering wheel) and the wipers were speeding up and slowing down based on how much water was on the windshield.

The intermittent wipers were a good improvement over the previous standard wipers, and the smart wipers are just as good a step after that. These days, I notice that I adjust the intermittent speed as the rain increases or decreases or stops. With the sensing wipers, you don’t even have to turn them on or off – just leave them on the automatic setting. When the rain starts, the wipers start going automatically, and when the rain stops, well, you get the picture.

Just do not, I repeat, do not, forget to turn them off when you go into a car wash.

Oh, if you’re looking at a vehicle, make sure that you can turn off the feature easily. If there’s one thing we learned from Wall-E, it’s that automatic features must have a manual override switch.

“When He set a limit for the rain And a course for the thunderbolt,”
- Job 28:26

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

Every year, I try to read one book. If blogs counted as books, then my tally would be much much higher. During most of the year, life goes on without much book-learnin’ on my part. In the evenings after the kids are in bed, I do computery stuff while my wife breezes through a few books a week.

Summer vacation is a different story – I know I have a week with multiple chances to read, so I eagerly anticipate (are you allowed to use the word “anticipate” without the adverb “eagerly” accompanying it?) choosing the one book that I know I will complete this year. I know I should set better goals (“Slow down there, are you sure you can handle one whole book?”), but with a 4-month-old and our other children along on the vacation, I keep it realistic.

Also, I bring along several magazines that I would like to read but wouldn’t be disappointed if I didn’t. Since the reading times are 15-30 minutes lulls in the action (e.g. after the beach but before dinner), I find that magazines are good filler if I need to read.

This year, while I was contemplating which book to pick, my wife decided for me. And it wasn’t even a book I was considering. I usually aim for the classics. Two years ago, my book was Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo. I was disappointed by Google’s feelings about that book. When I was researching that book, Google asked me if I really meant “toilets of the sea”. I am glad to see that Google’s opinion of the book has improved, as it doesn’t ask that anymore.

I forget what I was considering this year, as I hadn’t narrowed it to any finalists yet. My wife had recently read Same Kind of Different as Me (henceforth known as SKODAM), and she highly recommended it as the book I should read on vacation. She had read SKODAM because my sister had recommended it. My sister’s exact words were “You must read this.”

SPOILER ALERT

I had heard about the book, read the thingies on the back cover, and so I knew just a little bit about the book. As I was reading, the story sounded too cliché.  Part of the story is set in Texas in the early 1960s, so of course they had to work in JFK’s assassination in there.  Although claiming that the protagonist had a front-row seat to the assassination was pushing the envelope of believability for a novel.  It’s written by some Christian guys, so of course the guy goes to church and finds Jesus.  Of course the rich guy had an affair – that’s the standard back-sliding Christian sin of choice in novels, I would think.

Of course the black guy was oppressed (and oppressed is putting it mildly) growing up – that’s also a standard story in novels.  But come on, working the plantations in the 1950s and ’60s?! I mean, the story was written as a first-person account of life, and they almost had me believing it could be a real story if they had gotten the dates right. They forgot that slavery was a few decades earlier. And kids working the fields without being able to go to school?! Not even knowing there is school?! That’s not mid-20th century America.

It wasn’t until halfway through the book, when I got to the “after” pictures, that I realized the story was real. When I saw the pictures, it hit me that these were real people and this was their true story. At that point, I remembered that I already knew the story was real. I had heard it from my sister and even the book mentioned it somewhere on the cover or flap. But once I started reading, the story did seem so improbable that my brain had dismissed that little fact and latched onto the more believable description of the book as fiction.

END SPOILER ALERT

That book will get you thinking. About spiritual matters. About physical/material matters. About people matters. And about yourself.

Once I started reading that book, I finished it rather quickly. That left five days in the vacation and my book was already done. Right around the same time that I finished SKODAM, my wife finished reading one of her other books, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (by Alan Bradley, ISBN 978-0-385-34230-8, henceforth known as TSATBOTP). It is copyrighted as 2009 and lists the print date as May 2009, so it is quite new.

Even though it was a new book, the cover made the book look like it was decades old. I like the cover design – it was very well done, from the font to the coloring. That’s what made me pick it up and start reading it – I thought it was an older book. It wasn’t until later that I saw it was printed this year.

It is a murder mystery. Not being well-versed in murder mysteries, I have no reference to say it was better than something or like something else. I just know that it was a good book. The story was captivating and it’s the kind that makes you feel smarter for having read it. And it was clean – no gore, no romance. It’s written from the first-person view of an 11-year-old girl in England in 1950, so that should help ensure that future books (set for publishing in 2010 and 2011) are also clean.

If you’re looking for a novel to read, you should put TSATBOTP near the top of the list. To whet your appetite, I am including a couple of snippets from the book.

• If poisons were ponies, I’d put my money on cyanide.
• … I inhaled the camphoraceous steam of poultry eucalyptus, and somewhere up inside the sticky caverns of my head I thought I felt my sinuses throw their hands up into the air and surrender. I was feeling better already.

Maybe those scant fragments from the book don’t interest you. In that case I have done the book an injustice. Read it anyway.

“But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.”
- Ecclesiastes 12:12