Taking a look at Renovations

With school drawing closer, I'm really under deadline to finish up the work on our house!

Last spring, Jenny and I decided to refinance our house and pull out some money for major renovations (this seemed insane, considering that so many American homeowners are going bankrupt, but we were OK). Our focus was on the "new" side of the house, built for my grandparents in 1958.

Since we moved into the house, we've all been living in the "warm side of the house," i.e. the original wing (built in 1954). As the kids grew up and moved into their own beds, things began to get crowded. Owen and JoJo now share the library, which isn't really big enough for one person, much less two with toys.

The reasons we stayed out of the "cold side of the house" were twofold. First, it's haunted. Second, two walls of the huge family room were taken up by energy-inefficient sliding-glass doors. The most recent time we tried to pay for heating both sides of the house in the winter, we ended up with a $541 heating bill.

The energy efficient improvements to the house, then, were tops on our list. We replaced the heating & cooling unit on the warm side. We replaced all the windows in the house with double-paned glass. We removed the sliding-glass doors and replaced them with walls and picture windows.

The house is haunted, too. There is a singing Santa Claus doll that Jenny's grandpa bought us for Christmas five years ago. Whenever a loud noise is made nearby, it starts shimmying and singing some stupid song called "Disco Santa." Mizpah died in 2004. The place is haunted.

Secondly, it's haunted because my grandma and grandpa's bedroom is there. That's their room, and in my mind it always will be. I was joking with someone at Oasis that sleeping there with Jenny would be like the first time I spent the night in bed with her in my mom & dad's house. Despite the fact that we were legally wed, I half expected my mom to come bursting through the door and say, "What do you think YOU'RE doing?"

Just this week, I got the cold side of the house ready for moving. I can't tell you how excited I became as I nailed in the final crown molding and swept up the final mess. How awesome!

As you will see from the photos, there is still much to do. I know that many of you--particularly the Ditteses--have been wondering what it looks like now. I'll take you on a photo tour of the new digs.

Photo 1: the family room from the outside. The wooden walls and picture windows are where the doors used to be. You will notice the french doors on the end of the room. We haven't stained the outside wood yet. That will be a fall activity.

Photo 2: detail of the back door and security light. We still have to pick out a color for the stain. I can guarantee one thing. It won't be the color of the trim above the bricks! That color looks best on a bowel movement, not a house.

Photo 3: looking toward the back door. You can see the flooring and the new ceiling fans much better in this one.

Photo 4: Closer view of the new windows on the west side of the family room. If you look closely, you can see the cool new lights in the hallway.

Photo 5: New hallway lights. This L-shaped hallway was always too dark. There was one light bulb in the corner expected to light both sides of the L. I found this lighting kit at Lowes that let me stretch out the lights. Now it's so much brighter! I have one 20-watt halogen light pointed at the steps to the kitchen, one pointed at the entrance to the family room, and three more to cover the space in between. Whenever I walk into the hall, I feel like I'm in an art gallery!

Photo 6: Here is a trick question--only the hardcore Ditteses will know this one. I think you would need to have spend 20 years of your life wandering the halls of this hallowed manse like I have to even answer it. This is a picture of the hallway in the warm side.

What's different?

If you figure it out, tell me in the comments.

Thinking Out Loud About School

School starts in three weeks.

There's a lot I need to finish. The renovations we have made to the house are on schedule, but there is still much work to be done. The family room needs to be livable by the time Julie visits in two weeks. That means that there are boards to stain and shellack, couches to buy, blinds to hang. Much, much work.

For the first time in quite some time there are also questions about school.

Not about me. I'm set to teach German again this year, along with two English classes. I will be adding podcasting to my teaching repertoire, using it to teach vocabulary words and dialogue in German--and to teach some cool things about German history and culture, too. It will be my fifth year at Station Camp High School, and my longest teaching stint to date looks pretty certain to continue indefinitely.

Ellie is looking forward to middle school. As you may remember from a previous post, she finished the school year at a public elementary school near where I teach. She loved it. She felt challenged by the work and respected by her teachers. She can't wait to get into 6th grade--6th through 8th grades attend middle school in my county, followed by high school.

The cool thing is that Knox Doss Middle School is just down the street from where I teach. On a decent day, she will walk over to my classroom after she finishes her class work and track practice.

Now Jenny and I are wondering about the boys. Owen will enter 2nd grade this year, and Jonah will be in Kindergarten. A new public elementary school just opened up on the campus where I teach, and I am leaning toward enrolling them there--70% certain--instead of returning them to Highland Elementary, the school that both I and my dad graduated from (1985 and 1958, respecitvely).

Not easy.

I need your prayers and your heartfelt thoughts. Perhaps by sharing this dilemma on my blog, I'll be able to sort this out a little better.

I don't need any prejudice. Please don't tell me what you've "heard" about public schools or speculate about the curriculum or fellow students. I have ten years experience teaching in public schools, and I have friends who teach at Station Camp Elementary.

This is how it breaks down. I'll start with the pros, since that's the way I'm leaning.

1. The education. The teachers are all highly qualified, and the curriculum is up to date and a little more challenging. Ellie learned more about science and history in the last 11 weeks at JAES than she had learned in 25 at Highland. This year she will take honors 6th-grade English. The teacher told me they learn 5-paragraph essays. I learned how to write a 5-paragraph essay in college. Owen will qualify for advanced classes that should stimulate him and meet his gifted needs.
2. Convenient location. The boys will be right next door. Their school would get out at 3:45; mine gets out at 3:15, so I would be able to pick them up every day as I was leaving. Last year, we had to arrange for friends to pick them up after school or pay $14 an hour to have them in after-school care at Highland. It was complicated, because they seemed to be at a different place every day.
3. Cost. About $600 a month--although public school isn't necessarily free.
4. Friends. It's a good school in an upper-middle class neighborhood. The kids are about twice as likely to get invited to a program at one of the megachurches in the area as anything negative.
5. Faith. Jenny and I have no reason to invest in a lifelong attachment to Adventism, since we ourselves have moved on a different faith community. We don't want our kids fantasizing about Heaven or speculating on the Second Coming. We want them to learn to live Christian lives within the community God has given us. The onus would be on Jenny and me, however, to teach what we believe and encourage positive interactions with their teachers and friends.

Of course there are also cons.

1. Owen doesn't wish to leave.
2. Friends. Owen and Jonah have good friends at Highland Elementary. They like the people they go to school with, and they don't have an overarching reason to leave (in the way that Ellie was struggling with teachers).
3. Family. It was tough enough on my family when Ellie left Highland. I feel like many of them are so prejudiced that they are now banking on her failure in life to prove me wrong. When she was faring poorly at Highland, my dad was one who jumped on the "there's something wrong at home" spin, instead of confronting some of the issues that were going on at school. If I send the boys to Station Camp, I might as well be putting them on a yellow school bus to hell.

So that is where things stand. I have prayed about this for the past few months. I feel led to make the break now, rather than drawing things out as I did with Ellie. Ellie wants them to make the move for many of the "pro" reasons listed above. As difficult as it was for her to switch, she tells me I should have done it sooner. She still sees her Adventist friends at church and at camp, but school is about school, and she likes the clarity of it.

One thing I learned as a teacher is that it's easier to be a Christian in a public school environment. I think the choices are starker, the outcomes more clear. One doesn't get bogged down in trivial stuff.

Comment below. I welcome your ideas.

Taking a Claw to My Fears

I am not a man who is defined by his phobias, but I certainly struggle with some.

My greatest fear is heights--something that has dogged me ever since I was young. Fortunately, it doesn't keep me from going to the tops of tall buildings (we visited the Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center in our 2nd Day in New York--as Jonah demonstrates in the picture at right, that is the Empire State Building under his left elbow). I have climbed my share of canyons and seen plenty of mountain tops despite this malady.

A close second is a pretty strong fear of crabs.

When I was five, I remember walking out on a pier during a visit to my grandparents on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We found a man there hunched over a plastic bucket. One by one, he pulled crabs out of a trap, nonchalantly snapping off their claws and dropping the bodies into the bucket. I can still her the snap, snap, snap of the claws. My fear of crabs is caught up in those terrible claws.

Once, right after I had met Jenny, we stopped during one of our hitchhiking trips at a tidal estuary in Wales.

Jenny was in one of her mad fits (a craving to exercise), so she decided to swim out to an island in the middle of the river, about 100 yards away. I waited on the shore and guarded our stuff.

As Jenny started to swim, I waded a little ways out in the water. I needed my exercise, after all!
Standing in the water, I felt something tickling my ankles. I looked down to see dozens of small, sand dollar-sized crabs scurrying all over my feet.

I screamed like a little girl and raced back to shore. By the time Jenny got back, I was ashamed--not only for failing to meet her physical challenge, but also for getting chased out of the water by a combined posse of crabs that weighed less than one pound.

But travel has ways of liberating one from his phobias.

At the Mystic Aquarium, I came face to face with crabs, and I finally overcame my fears.

The Mystic Aquarium is a wonderful place with a surprising array of experiences available in an aquarium dwarfed by others I have visited in Chattanooga, Boston and Atlanta.

One of the big draws for me was the aquarium's connection with Robert Ballard, the submariner par excellence who located the sunken Titanic and who has found shipwrecks and signs of ancient civilizations from Lake Huron to the Black Sea. An exhibit featured his many explorations.

The animal exhibits were fascinating, too. An aviary let the kids get up close to Australian parakeets. Belugas swam for us--I had taken care to copy the classic Raffi song, "Baby Beluga," to our summer soundtrack.

A display showed "mermaids' purses" or sharks' eggs. Part of the black, leathery shell had been stripped away, and we could see the embryos growing at various stages right before our eyes.

The highlight for me, however, was the hands-on pool. There were two crabs there: a huge crab, which huge claws (like the one Jonah stares at in the picture at side) and a spider crab (smaller claws but creepier looks).

In the full spirit of adventure, I reached for the crab.

"Pick it up from the back," the guide told me. "It won't be able to pinch you that way."

I reached in from behind and grabbed the crab. It jerked its claws and dangling legs back and forth helplessly. I felt such a surge of power and pride! I couldn't believe my fingers.

Next came the spider crab. It was easy. Those tiny pinchers were no match for my bravery. I was in command of the crabs--and my fears.

A few days later, we stopped in North Carolina's Outer Banks. What looked like a short hike from the Cape Hatteras light house to the beach turned into quite a trek through scrub and sand dunes.

I stepped over a pile of scrub, only to hear a haunting clicketty-clicketty-clicketty sound.

"A crab!" Owen yelled, pointing to a small crab now cowering in the shadows.

"Cool!" I answered.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Presidency

This is a classic sketch. If you haven't seen it, I guarantee you'll laugh.

Over ye go, Me Hearty!

"Owen, that does it. You're walking the plank!"

Kidding?

No.

These words were actually said by yours truly, two days before Father's Day, no less.

Every road trip has its highs and lows. For me, one of the highs was our visit to the fascinating town of Mystic, Connecticut. (One of the lows was Owen's behavior that day.)

From the time Julie had offered to rent the RV last Christmas, I had known the theme for this trip would be whaling. I read Moby Dick. I read five books on whaling and 19th-century maritime history. I rented films. I did everything I could to prepare.

That didn't stop Mystic from blowing me away.

The previous night we had camped near Orient Point, Long Island. We caught the 8:00 ferry for a ride across Long Island Sound to London, CT, passing four to five islands along the way, as well as a photogenic array of sailboats and lighthouses. We squeezed the RV through the narrow byway into Mystic, a town of about 45,000 close to the Rhode Island Border.

Outside a used book store the brightly painted sculpture of a sperm whale welcomed us to town. I knew this was going to be a great stop.

We drove to Mystic Seaport, a historic maritime village. They feature a boat yard where wooden ships are carefully wrought in the way they were made when Yankee Clippers were the finest of open-sea technology.

There were exhibitions about rope-making, clam-fishing, and knot-tying. We climbed aboard a Yankee Clipper in time for a guide to tell use how the sailors sang songs to work the ropes--since most sailors were "greenhands" or novices, the first few weeks of any voyage were a chance for the captain to help the crew to "learn the ropes," a saying we still use today. I also learned that a "slacker" was a sailor who didn't pull his fair share of the rope.

The crown jewel of the visit, though was the blacksmith's shop and the Charles W. Morgan, the only whaling ship remaining from an industry that was a backbone of the American economy in the 1850s.

It was in the blacksmith's shop that we came face to prong with the instruments of the whaling trade: the harpoon, the lance, and the cutting spade.

When whalers spotted a whale--"Thar she blows!"--they rowed away from the ship on whaleboats. The harpooner, at the front of the boat, got close enough to the whale for a solid shot (10 to 20 feet). After securing the harpoon in the whale's side, the crew of the whaleboat held on for a "Nantucket Sleighride."

As the injured whale towed the boat through the water, the crew maneuvered to tire out the prey and bring the boat up close. Once the whale was still, the mate approached from the back of the boat with the lance, a long spear which probed the inside of the whale, hoping to reach the lungs and cause death by asphyxiation. When the whale emitted a spray of blood from its blowhole, the cry went up, "chimneys afire!" and the crew secured the whale to to the carcass to the whale ship.

Yes, this sounds gross. It probably was.

The blacksmith's shop was hands on. I picked up a harpoon and showed it to Joshie. We imagined what it must have been like to get so close to a whale, throw the harpoon, and hold on for dear life.

Moored nearby was the Charles W. Morgan. It had been one of the last whaling ships to hunt for whales--long after petroleum had replaced whale oil as an illuminant and lubricant and the prices has collapsed.

As we entered, Owen's mood darkened. He is an animal lover; I am a history nut. Perhaps his take on the whaling story was opposite to mine.

We talked with the guide and toured the captain's galley--a bed with matters and a toilet, the captain lived in luxury, and he shared a table with his mates.
Owen kept up a negative whine, shoving his cousins and causing chaos.

"That does it," I said. "Walk the plank!"

He looked at me and frowned.

"I mean it. I want you to walk right off this ship and wait for us at the end of the plank."

Owen turned and stomped off. (The picture, right, shows him waiting for us when we left the ship.)

We continued into the blubber room, into which strips of whale blubber were lowered and cut. I had read that whale oil was some of the strongest smelling stuff known to man--and the lower decks reeked. It was said that you could smell a returning whale ship before you saw it; others insisted that whale ships could be smelled from three to five miles away.

Once the whale had been killed, there were only two commodities American whalers sought: oil and ambergris. In the sperm whale--preferred prey of Americans--the head contained a huge, 500-gallon chamber of a special oil known as spermaceti (its cloudy texture resembled human sperm and gave the whale its name). As for the rest of the whale, whalers cut into the blubber with the long whaling spades, rotating the whale in the water and peeling it as one would peel an orange, with one long line of blubber coming free.

(Other valuable commodities from sperm whales included whale teeth--sperm are one of the only whale species that have teeth instead of baleen--which were worth their weight in gold on the South Sea islands. Also, ambergris is a substance found in the intestines of sperm whales that was used in perfumes and seasonings.)

Back on the main deck, we checked out the try works, where the blubber was melted into oil and drained into barrels. We walked the plank to find Owen waiting patiently for us, ready to move on.

Later I left Julie with the kids at a kids-oriented exhibit, and I took Owen through the museum. Owen has a great personality, but he is something of an introvert. Jenny and I have learned to give him his space when he really starts to act up.

Together we examined wonderful examples of scrimshaw (artwork painted onto a whale's tooth) and watched ancient film footage shot during one of the last whaling voyages, around 1909.

We finished with a meal at the galley--my only sampling of fish & chips the entire trip. Before leaving, we posed for pictures on a doomed whale boat.

For me, Mystic was the highlight of the trip, both for the seaport and for the aquarium, which I will blog about next. That so much history and character could be bottled up in such a charming town! If you go to New England, it is a must, methinks.

Basking in the Art of America

My first stop in Washington, DC, was the museum that I loved when I was a kid: the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

I had wanted to begin our whaling trip there because of memories I had of the giant blue whale that soared over the marine wing of the museum. As I began to research the trip, however, I learned that this whale was no longer part of the museum--you have to go to New York's Museum of Natural History to see a full blue whale (although we later saw some skeletons in New Bedford, Mass).

In fact, the marine wing was closed for renovation, so Jonah, Owen and I headed for the mammal wing while Julie, Ellie and the Gates gang checked out the insect zoo.

I love the 'stuffed animals of the exhibits, and so did the boys--they had really loved Chicago's Field Museum last summer. They posed (right) with a chunk of seal blubber.

Later we visited the dinosaur room, in which so many different skeletons are on display, it is almost overwhelming!

For the afternoon, I decided to check out a new (for me) museum, the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art, which shares the old U.S. Patent Office with the National Portrait Gallery. I love art museums (it's a vice, I know--and the rest of my family hates me for it). When I visit a good exhibit, my pulse quickens, and my imagination begins to race. I really get stoked for these things!

To make things worse, I spent 2nd semester teaching American Literature at my high school. When I teach literature, anymore, I try to use music and art to augment the lessons kids learn about how American culture advanced through time. I had a heart full of American artists like Alfred Bierstadt, Georgia O'Keeffe and Winslow Homer; now I was ready to get an eye full.

We split up again. The Gates Gang (with Ellie in tow) toured the International Spy Museum across the street. I took Jonah and Owen.

Touring an art gallery with a kindergartner and a 2nd-grader is a real challenge. I knew that--if I was going to get anything out of this visit--I would need to provide a context for the boys to enjoy the paintings, too. Otherwise it was going to be a terrible afternoon.

The first gallery was an exhibition of landscapes. Before we started, I took the boys aside. "Okay, we're only going to look at a few pictures here," I told them. "For each one we look at, I want you to answer, 'Where is it?'."

They nodded.

"You can say 'desert' or 'Colorado' or 'Tennessee' or whatever you want."

OK.

We went to the first painting, a pretty straightforward picture. Seashore, said Owen. "That's the beach!" Jonah chirped.

We saw desert, New Mexico, a big river. We stopped before an abstract painting with lots of lines going up and down (brilliant, Georgia O'Keeffe). Where is it?

"That's New York City!" Jonah shouted. Owen looked at the marker. He looked back at me, stunned. "He's right."

I was stunned too. I'm not sure where Jo-Jo got it. (Later in the trip, we would visit New York.) At that point, I knew the visit would be great.

I had planned to skip the abstract paintings, but the boys were hooked, and their imaginations were fully dialed in. Nothing got past them, they figured out where everything was.

We moved into the collection of portraits of American presidents. Jonah was still on track. He pointed out George Washington, got a little tripped up on Jefferson (all the wig-wearers looked the same to him). He needed only a little help with Lincoln, and we journeyed through the other presidents with ease, including a fascinating exhibition on Lincoln's 2nd inaugural and subsequent assassination/funeral.

The last part of the tour was the one I had looked foward to the most, a trek through 300+ years of American history and art.

Our previous travels informed the kids of this wing--there were lots of bison and Indians, which we had learned about on trips West the previous two summers. I was blown away by the monumental Bierstadt painting, "Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868)." It was ten feet high and almost 18 feet wide, and it simply was breathtaking.

The print they sold in the gift shop just didn't do the original justice. I will include it at right, just for you to reference, but you will have to take my word on the magnificence of the original.

This is painting is what makes being an American such a great experience. There are places in this country where you can stand, look up at the mountain peaks, and get the feeling that angels are singing all around you--like you are looking directly into Heaven. Thank God, there were painters who shared this view and were actually able to capture the emotion on canvas!

There are fireworks going off in my mind at the memory of this painting, and I witnessed it almost three weeks ago (there are fireworks going off outside, despite the rain, because it is Independence Day, which may also explain my patriotism).

I will close with one more picture from the MAA. In the modern wing of the historical exhibit, we found this sculpture of a mother playing with her baby. It was a remarkable sculpture, because the fluid lines and the playful postures made this a work of art that was enjoyable from almost every vantage point.

You can see that even Owen found a good angle from which to study this piece.

By the time we met Julie and Ellie again, I was on cloud nine. The boys had had fun. I had gotten a mind full of art and a heart full of my country. I had blown some serious money in the gift shop. All was right with the world.

(Later, when I report on our Father's Day visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I will purposely leave out the dis-interest the boys showed there. All you need to know, dear reader, is that I got it right...once.

Shoeless Jo goes to Washington

Since he was old enough to walk, Jonah has had his own nickname: "Shoeless Jo."

For those of you not versed in the history of baseball, the original Shoeless Joe played for the Chicago White Sox 90 years ago.

He was one of the greatest players in baseball history, topping 3,000 hits (the standard for baseball's greatest hitters), hitting over .400 once, and retiring with the 2nd-highest career batting average when he left the game after the 1920 season.

But it was how Shoeless Joe left the game that obscures the greatness with which he played it. He was part of the eight men on the White Sox who agreed with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series against the underdog Cincinnati Reds. He accepted $5,000 to play poorly, even though his statistics--.375 batting average & 12 RBI would have won World Series MVP in many other years.

He was part of a legendary encounter outside the federal court house where he had testified in the gambling trial. A young boy, a distraught White Sox fan, confronted him outside the court house with the immortal words, "Say it ain't so, Joe."

It was so. For his ties to gambling, Shoeless Joe was banned from baseball for life and kept out of the Hall of Fame, despite his records. (For the record, my favorite childhood baseball player, Pete Rose, remains banned from baseball for his own gambling problems.)

My own Shoeless Jo earned his nickname through consistent negligence. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many times I remind him, Jonah remains shoeless. Yesterday we were halfway to VBS when I looked in the rearview mirror. "Did you put on your shoes?" I asked. (I had reminded him four times before we left.)

Jonah shrugged. "Nah." I tried to be angry, but he out-cuted me.

When we visited Washington, there was a lot of walking. Monuments, museums, walk, walk, walk. We were really exhausted!

On Tuesday we went to my congressman's office to take a tour of the U.S. Capitol his staff had arranged for me. (I had contacted them to arrange for a White House tour, but I missed out on the six weeks it takes the Secret Service to screen visitors.) At 1:30 Congressman Gordon walked into the office for a chat. Julie and I were the only visitors.

He showed us into his office to talk about a few issues. He was pleasant and courteous, showing us the different space-related curios in his office (he chairs a committee on space--of all things).

As I was talking to him, I saw Julie start to grin. I turned, and to my horror I spotted Jonah, squirming around on the congressman's nice leather couch.

In the 30 seconds I had talked with this important congressman, Jonah had found a way to slip off his shoes and kick back on the couch.

He certainly made himself at home.

I couldn't believe it.

Shoeless!!!

Julie snapped the picture that you see at left.

I have to admit, I have studied this picture carefully. Jonah is on the couch, pointing his bare feet at the congressman (if this were an Arab country, where feet are considered unclean, it would be equivalent to flipping the bird.) Joshie is next to him, shoeless as well.

Every time I look at the picture, I try to scrutinize Congressman Gordon's smile. It looks genuine, doesn't it? Or is it the opaque smile of an experienced politician? Behind the smile, is he thinking, "The people I represent HAVE GOT to do a better job of raising children! This is leather furniture! These miserable rednecks and their spawn!"

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. At least I will know, when I cast a vote for him in November, that he has certainly earned it.

Give President Bush the Credit He Deserves

This picture was taken at the RV park in Washington, DC, where we camped.

Jacob (Julie's son, age 6) and Owen posed in front of a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush.

Clearly, one of these boys is being raised to love his country and all it stands for. He has also been taught to give George W. Bush the respect he has earned as leader of our country over the past seven years.

And the other...has been raised to love his country and all it stands for, and--yes--to give President Bush the respect he deserves.

RV Riding

One of the most unique features about this summer's road trip was that we went in a 31-foot RV.

I had never camped in an RV or driven one, so I didn't know what to expect until I met Julie in Raleigh, NC, and clilmbed aboard. It was sweet. There was a room in the back with a queen-sized bed. A shower and a bathroom. The middle section extended out about three feet when we camped so we had room for a kitchen (including microwave, oven and stove) and seating for about seven. In the "fo'c'sle" above the drive there was another queen-sized bed.

Within minutes, the boys were running all around the back. Julie and I weren't sure of the safety rules to follow. We did feel pangs of guilt when we heard Owen (7), Jonah (4), Jacob (6) and Joshie (3) jumping on the bed in the back room. Soon there was a crash and we had the boys in seatbelts for the rest of the trip (I fixed the bedroom mirror at our first stop).

Traveling with kids in an RV is great. Someone needs to use the bathroom? Go then. We're not stopping. Thirsty? The refrigerator was stocked with Sprite, Diet Coke and juice boxes throughout the trip. The only stops were for gas.

Sure, this wasn't a very smart time to be driving a gas guzzling RV around the country. On the drive back from New York to Raleigh, NC, I know we spent $440, stopping four times to fill up. (Many pumps have a $75 or $100 maximum fill-up, so I wasn't able to calculate gas mileage very well.) Still, it was worth it because Julie's business, MyDietSolutions was picking up the gas tab.

To pay her back, we plastered decals on the walls of the RV. We wore brightly colored shirts everywhere we went that read: "I'm learning about BLUBBER!" and gave the web address. Whenever we went into the city, I stuffed my pockets with promotional pens and post cards, which we left everywhere we could think of: subway trains, restaurants, kiosks.

My favorite technique was sliding cards behind the posters that advertized on the subwasy in NYC and Boston. We must have given out more than 300 pens!

Driving the RV was quite another task. Since Julie was paying, I was happy to let her drive--and she did for 80 percent of our trip together. The further north we got, the more difficult that became. (Ellie and Owen modeled our shirts at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, right.)

We decided to stop in Atlantic City to check out the action on the boardwalk there. It was fun driving into Atlantic City. Somewhere I learned that the streets in the game, Monopoly, are named after streets there, and I sure was right! We cruised down Atlantic Avenue and crossed Ventnor, Kentucky, and Park Place. Julie and Ellie wanted to check out the Trump casino, so we aimed for Pennsylvania, which went past the Trump Taj Mahal.

Unfortunately we got to the end of the street and couldn't find a place to park. I got out to scout things out. Poor Julie had to turn the thing around. Later, in Plymouth, we would see the Goodyear Blimp at the airport where Julie's husband, Don, parked his plane. I joked, "We should have a competition between the RV and the blimp to see who can make the sharpest turn!"

While Julie stopped and started, back and forth, from one side of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, I slipped into the Resorts Casino across the street. I was blinded by the casino lights. (It really does mess with my brain. It was hard to concentrate on my mission--and I am not yet addicted to gambling.) Finally I found a parking guy who was so nice. He showed us the way to one of the outside lots, and he let us park for free.

This is how Julie got me back. When we got back from the boardwalk--and a buffet dinner at Resorts--she said, "I have a lot of work to do. Why don't you drive this leg?" So I hopped in for my first experience driving an RV and cruised up the Garden State Parkway towards the Big Apple.

Two hours later, I was squeezing my way onto the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Staten Island to Long Island. The lanes were n-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-r-r-r-r-o-w! My knuckles were white already, and I hadn't yet begun to navigate the interstate canyonlands of Brooklyn and Queens.

It was terrifying. I would be scared driving my tiny Saturn through that area, but driving an RV was horrible. I knew that the only thing worse than driving the Long-Island Queens Expressway would be the streets of Brooklyn. I kept going.

Julie made a game of it. "Let's see how many times you get honked at," she said, after one driver laid on his horn big time. I was scared of changing lanes. I was more scared in getting stuck in an exit only lane or getting onto an expressway that led back to the city. Both hands were frozen to the wheel.

And then the sun went down and we were finally out of the city on our way to Orient Point, Long Island. We stopped for gas, and Julie returned to the driver's seat. I wouldn't drive again until the drive home.

All in all, driving an RV is terrible. Adventure makes it worthwhile, I guess, but I still have flashbacks to the Long Island Expressway. This small town boy really got more than he bargained for there!

Worth the Wait?

Has it been three weeks already since I posted to my blog? Ouch!

There has been a lot happening--mainly our road trip up the Atlantic Coast, and I can't wait to blog about it.

To be honest, I was blogging, but I was being paid to do it by my sister's web site, MyDietSolutions, which sponsored our trip. I also wrote a blog about the trip, which (frankly) wasn't very detail-rich, and I had to include a lot of facts about blubber and weight loss. But there are some good pictures and highlights from the trip there.

If you are a friend, you are welcome to check it out, but in this blog, I'll get deeper into some of the things I experienced, so reserve your comments for here.

Also, I read a great book the weekend before the trip, and I have almost figured out post modernism and its applications to spirituality, but that is for later!

On with the show!

Baseball Summer

I'm indulging in my favorite sport, baseball, this summer more than I have in years.

My fantasy baseball team, the Arizona Run Devils, is #1 in my league of fellow high school teachers. I'm over 200 points ahead of the 2nd-place team thanks to awesome seasons from real-life baseball players Chase Utley and Justin Morneau. For those of you who don't know, in fantasy baseball, team members draft real players and get points for the statistics they earn in real baseball games.

Finally, I found this statistic in a recent column by Gennaro Filice:

The Cubs swept the Dodgers this week, evening the all-time series at 1,010-1,010.

The National League, in which the Cubs & Dodgers play, was founded in 1876.

I love this game.

Clues to the Tree of Life

I'm expanding my Podcast reach.

Recently I went through the offerings at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I listened to a podcast about the Assyrian collection. I want to tell the rest of what I learned in story form below:

In the halls of the Met's Near-Eastern Galleries, you can see the seeds of the Bible parading across the walls. Lovely, powerful beings march across the walls. Each one has four wings, and their power is symbolized in the enormous leg and arm muscles so carefully wrought by an artist long ago.

It's funny. When I think of an angel, usually I think of a tall, male figure. Now that I think if of it, he has blond hair and white garments. His figure isn't particularly striking--effeminate, perhaps. In my imagination, the power comes from his wings.

That's not how the writers of Genesis and Judges pictured angels when these books were written long ago.

They saw men very much like the one at right. They have long, braided beards, dark hair, and brightly painted, fringed clothes. They look like they could have stepped out of an advertisement for Gold's Gym. These men were known as Genii, from which we get the magical term of "Genie."

(The term, Genie, comes from the Arabic term, Jinn, which also refers to angelic beings, albeit beings with a different set of powers that those of our Western angels.)

I hadn't really thought about the cultural implications to what I believed an Angel to be. Yet it is clear from the relief that I'm seeing things quite differently from the way they were at the time the Bible was written.

Genesis 3 closes with an extraordinary image: an angel holding a flaming sword, guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden and barring Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life.

Of course Revelation ends with the same image of a Tree of Life. But this is one where the angel is not barring the way, but instead it is showing John the way into heaven--quite a twist, and what I would describe as quite the happy ending.

In Revelation 22, the Tree of Life is more of a species of tree than a single tree, since apparently these trees line the River of the Water of Life (verses 1-2). What kind of tree could it be?

It "bears twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations" (2). Those are some good hints. Fruit falls every month. Its leaves provide healing. When I think of fruit, I think of apples or peaches--but they fall once a year, they can't possible produce in every season (at least not during winter). Have cherry leaves been used as a medicine?

Later rabbinic traditions held that the tree of life was so tall that it took 500 years to climb to the top.

Let's review the clues: the Tree of Life is tall, it never goes out of season, it produces fruit, its leaves are for the healing of the nations.

The ultimate visual clue--if one connects the origins of the Biblical tree of life with Abraham's cultural origins in Mesopotamia--can be found on another relief. This pictures another Genii--this one with the head of a hawk rather than a prince. His wings are behind him. He has the powerful arms and legs from the original picture. Like the original, he carries a bag full of incense.

Look at his right hand. In it is the seed of the Tree of Life.

It is too long to be an apple, too narrow to be a pear, too large to be a grape or a cherry.

It is...

...a pinecone.

That's right, the people of the ancient Near East saw the pine as a tree of life. It is evergreen, almost magical. It certainly isn't what I would have expected from previous readings of Genesis or Revelation.

Is it what you expected?

After I post this blog, I'm going to walk up my driveway to get the mail. As many of you know, it is lined with pine trees that my grandpa planted over 50 years ago.

Today, as I'm walking, I think I might better imagine what John saw in Revelation 22: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing...down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life."

Walking through those pines today, I'll feel closer to heaven--closer to Eternity which has been promised me.

A Fitting George W. Bush Memorial

Some folks out at the University of California at Davis have come up with a great way to honor George W. Bush when he leaves office in a few months. The propose renaming San Francisco's Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, the place where the fecal matter of San Franciscans is treated before being dumped into the Pacific Ocean, the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. (The seal is presented here.)

As I understand it, it would take a whole lot of fecal matter to make that place stink as bad as Bush's presidency!

A Wee Bit o' Bracknell

We have refinanced the house, and we're in the middle of some pretty big changes at the Ole Dittes Manse. We have all new windows now, and the family room will soon have four fewer doors and one new floor.

This is in advance of Jenny and me finally moving into my grandparents' bedroom and giving the big bedroom to Owen and Jo-Jo (who are currently crammed into the study at night).

I'll post pictures once the family room is finished--this should be within the next three weeks. We still need paint, and floors, and some electrical, and siding...do you understand how crazy things seem right now?

Meanwhile, I'm still doing the transplanting work outside that I detailed in an earlier blog. I found three pine seedlings (barely two inches tall), which I dug up and moved into some gaps in the row of pines at the end of the orchard. I also found two apple seedlings under the old apple tree, and I hope to transplant those this weekend.

Better yet, some of the planting I did last fall has come up! Last May, my mom got Jenny and me 20 bluebell bulbs for our anniversary. The Newboldians who read this blog have fond memories of the Bluebell Forest that grew near the college. It was a 12-acre wood, and in late May and early June it was carpeted with thousands of bluebells.

Now the Bracknell Wood had a 100-year head start, but we're catching up. Last fall, Jo-Jo and I planted the bulbs in the woods next to our wedding site. This year about 12 flowers have come up.

(Admittedly the photo looks awkward, but if you look carefully, you can see the platform of our wedding chapel in the background of the pictured bluebell.)

In many ways this restoration will cost us well over $30,000. Yet in many more ways, it will be priceless. This place is a timeless place for Ditteses (and now Georges, too). Every tree I plant, every bulb I push into the ground is something I know that I will see in ten years and more--something that will probably outlive me and pass on as a gift to generations to come.

We cleaned out the attic (ahead of adding a new layer of insulation), and I found an old steamer trunk. It was empty of any artifacts, save for a bag full of very, very old women's shoes.

At first I was disappointed. Then I looked at the bottom. A torn sticker there had the words "G. Dittes." The sticker bears the name, not of my Grandpa, but of my great grandfather, Gotthold Dittes. Images appeared in my mind of his flight from Germany at age 18, the long trip across the Atlantic from Hamburg to New York; a photo of him at Niagara Falls, where he stopped on his way to see family in Minnesota (eventually he returned to New York to work and raise a family).

Did this steamer trunk make the trip? It's probably impossible to figure that out. All I know is that it won't be going back into the attic. Once the bedroom is finished (and I have restored the trunk), it will be my night stand: a great reminder of grandfathers, my love for travel and adventure, and the timelessness that makes me love this place so very, very much.

God's Favored Creatures

"God has an inordinate fondness for beetles." Biologist J.B.S. Haldane

I'm reading science again. Earlier this year I read two books on physics. This led to my sermon on Einstein--and I'm proud to say it's one of the most influential sermons I have ever preached. In the 2 1/2 months since I gave it, nearly every lay speaker at my church has referenced it somewhere in their talk. What a compliment!

Now I'm into astrobiology: The Living Cosmos by Chris Impey, where he goes into the development of life on planet Earth and speculates on the possibilities of life across the galaxy. There is plenty of evolutionary biology to be found here--something I appreciate, since my knowledge of evolutionary theory is pretty weak. Of course, there is plenty of our Creator to be found, too, if one has the spirit to seek...and find.

Impey conveys biology in a way that I had never understood it before. Instead of the two-kingdom approach of plants and animals, he presents life in a much broader array. I always saw the Animal Kingdom as a progressive chain of animals with bacteria at the bottom and humans at the top. The Plant Kingdom had a similar, somewhat hierarchical order.

Impey presents at Phylogenetic Tree of Life. This is based on genetic differences. The three branches of the PTL are Bacteria, Archaea (primitive microbes first discovered in the 1970s), and Eucarya.

In the Eucarya strain, humans seem insignificant. We are one of 5,400 species of mammals. This compares with 8,200 reptile species, 10,000 bird species, 29,000 fishes, 290,000 plants, and 1,200,000 species of invertebrates, of which 950,000 are insects.

It's a bug's world, apparently. As I noted above, you could take the total number of vertebrate species, multiply that number by five and you STILL wouldn't total the number of species of beetles.

This gives me a unique view of God. Maybe He does have a fondness for beetles. Instead of the human-centric view that I have of Him--that he created me in His image, that he set mankind above all fauna, that he sent his son to die for human beings--maybe I should consider a more beetle-centric view.

Consider this: we exist to feed beetles. The crops we plant, the dung we create, our very bodies themselves once they have left this mortal coil--all go to feed beetles. I don't know of any humans that eat beetles--or who use them to get food. No, it seems more and more that beetles are the top of the food chain.

God created man...for beetles? I need to check back with Genesis 1.

The organization of life in genetic branches also makes for some fascinating comparisons. Remember that in the new biology, humans are linked with plans, invertebrates and other complex organisms.

It is well known that humans share 99% of DNA with monkeys, but did you now that we have 85% in common with dogs and 67% in common with moths? If you could examine the DNA of the banana you had for breakfast, you would find that it holds 50% in common with you, as does yeast.

That seems crazy. I am, after all, 'fearfully and wonderfully made,' according to Psalm 8. Not as much as I thought, however, since I'm only twice as fearfully and 100% more wonderfully made than a grapefruit--in terms of my unique DNA.

Insult to injury: Impey reports that the E coli bacteria, which has 4,500 genes in its genetic code, has 1/6th the number of genes that I have. That's not a broad leap.

I don't have time to go into his astronomical observations, but they are fascinating, too. I'm not finished with the book, and I have a feeling that the refresher courses I have had in biology and chemistry are setting me up for some pretty remarkable physical conclusions.

I'll keep you posted, as always.

Reading The Road, Waking to the Light

A father, a son. They walk together through a barren, grey, postapocalyptic landscape, pushing a shopping cart and rifling abandoned houses for food.

They are the "good guys" the father tells the son. They push south, hoping to find others like them--trying to avoid the gangs that roam the countryside plundering the only edible things that remain: other humans. There are signs of horror, but no hints as to what could have caused all this--no hope that there is a single other place on earth that might have been spared. The only hope is in the "good guys," which may be the father and son only.

Before Cormac McCarthy's book, No Country for Old Men, became an Oscar-winning movie, his book, The Road, was a postmodern gospel. The father and the son: the father always watching always protecting, the son's humanity reaching out to the pitiful humans they do run across, reminding his father that there is hope in "the good guys."

I bought this book a month ago. Jenny picked it up, and she didn't go to bed until she was done. It was powerful. "You have to read it," she urged, but I was still trying to wrap up Moby Dick. I didn't get a chance to read it until two weeks ago.

It took awhile to sink in. I read it over several nights, and couldn't really get into it.

Then, last weekend, we were in Huntsville, Alabama, for a short weekend away. I had a dream. I was in a car, racing through a postapocalyptic landscape, dodging debris on the freeway. I was in the back of a convertible, barking at the driver.

We saw a shadow next to the road, and the driver pulled over. I had a terrible feeling. "No! No! No!" I screamed. "Keep moving."

It was too late. The shadow pulled something up to its chest. I saw a bright flash. My head hurt. I felt something rattle around, and then my eyes flew open. This is what it is like to be shot, I thought.

I didn't get back to sleep for a long time. I lay awake, and as I lay there, I thought about The Road and its peculiar vision that had rattled my unconscious in the same way the shotgun blast had done. I thought about my own sons, and I thought about the good guys--about hope.

The Things I Have to Teach

There are only four weeks left with my German 2 class. Tomorrow is Culture Day: our weekly examination of German history.

We have really enjoyed Culture Days this semester. We began the year with Napoleon and the destruction of the First Reich in 1806. March found us in World War I, and I worked hard to show the German side of things--and the horrors that all nations went through in that great war.

Of course April has been World War II month. The kids have been really interested as we have charted the rise of Hitler and the devastation of the end of the war. I was helped by three movies that I watched with the class: Europa, Europa, Downfall, and As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me.

Now I find myself in a dilemma. It's time for the Cold War. When one is studying German history, that means introducing East Germany. But there is no East Germany, just as there is no Soviet Union.

I find East Germany incredibly difficult to explain to these kids. It loomed so large: our opponents in the Olympics (back then they were the steroid-laced cheaters, now it's the USA), our mortal enemies. The Berlin Wall seemed 100 feet high in my imagination.

Now it doesn't exist. It fell years before these kids were even born.

What is an East Germany?

I have tried film. I rented The Lives of Others, an oscar-winning German film that follows a Stasi spy who ends up protecting a couple under surveillance. It's a great film, but it isn't appropriate for kids--a little too drawn-out, methinks.

I think I'm going to play a spy game. I'll show a video about Checkpoint Charlie. Then we will play a game: three kids will want to escape to the West, three kids will be "normal" East Germans who support the Socialist State to varying degrees, three kids will be Stasi agents. At the end of the game we will see who has figured out each other.

Do you have any other ideas? I'm teaching a foreign language, so this should be second nature. But I could teach the planet, Venus, about as easily as East Germany!

Sowing and Uprooting

There is a haunted house just down Boiling Springs Road from where I live.

At least that's what the kids on Highland Drive call it.

It's an abandoned home. Built just 20 years ago (by my former choir teacher, Mr. Schimp), it is now abandoned, sold to the state of Tennessee. Two years from now a four-lane highway will run through that spot.

Right now it is an empty place--nearly haunted. Last fall two trees on the property fell, one of them crushing the garage. The back door is open. You can walk in at any time and tour the home. The paint looks great and the wood floors are shiny. It is a house built with a lot of love--and lived in passionately until about four years ago.

I was walking on the property a month ago, and I noticed daffodils everywhere. What a shame, I thought. A year from now bulldozers will come and cover them with asphalt.

Last Saturday I decided to do something about it. I took a plastic bag and a spade with me on my afternoon walk. Owen rode his bike. In broad daylight, I walked up to a clump of daffodils. With four thrusts of my spade, I uprooted the whole lot and deposited about 90 daffodil bulbs in my sack. I have to admit that I felt somewhat guilty for "stealing," considering that these daffodils belonged to the state highway department and its giant bulldozers.

As I walked home, I wondered what to do with all these daffodils. I stopped by the pump house and planted six bulbs along its block walls. That still left me with almost 90 bulbs.

I walked up to the wedding site. I planted daffodils there four years ago. This year there were bunches instead of single flowers. Near the wedding site, however, I found thorns getting a head start on the other plants growing in the woods. I put down the spade and found a pickaxe.

For the next three hours I dug up thorn bushes. I built a fire. Every time I found a thorn, I dug it up. I threw the thorns on the fire (I just love the crackling sounds that thorns make when they are being burned). Into each hole I placed a daffodil bulb and covered it with dirt.

This went on the rest of the afternoon. It was getting harder and harder to find thorns. Meanwhile the woods were filling with green daffodil stems (the flowers had already wilted).

As the number of thorns dropped, I thought of the prayer of St. Francis

Where there is hatred, let me so love
Where there is injury, pardon

It thrilled me. This is what life is about, I thought, whether you own property adjacent to a 'haunted house' or not. We are here to rescue the Daffodil Bulbs of this world from the bulldozer, and we are meant to sow them wherever we dig up thorns.

I went back to the haunted house the next day and got a new batch of bulbs. I haven't sown them yet. Hard as it may be to believe, there are still thorns in my woods--there is still work to do. It should keep my weekends busy for the rest of the spring.

Youth Legislature

I'm blogging from the Tennessee State Capitol, where I'm sponsoring a group of students from my high school in a weekend youth in government conference.

This is not for the faint of heart: three days of grueling meetings, featuring debate and lawmaking. It's fun, though, seeing students grow over the course of the weekend. My students have proposed the following bills:

• Eliminate voting fraud by requiring state-issued photo IDs in order for people to vote
• Provide funding to provide a heart defibrilator to all marked police cars, which are usually the first-responders to accidents (this was our club's highest-ranked bill this weekend, and I'm proud to say that it passed the House by a 77-8 vote)
• Provide a tax rebate to Tennesseans who buy hybrid vehicles or train/bus passes
• Ban abortions for all teens--even if they have parental consent
• Decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana
• Allow the use of cell phones in schools in the case of an emergency

The state of Tennessee allows students to use legislative facilities--even the Supreme Court chambers--to engage in mock debate and lawmaking. I have four students running for office, including one who wants to be governor next year.

It will be a long weekend, but in view of the long-term benefits of a program like this, it's worth my time, I feel. When I was in academy, I loved statewide and regional events (in my case they were music festivals, where I got to practice my choral skills). I would have totally loved a conference like this one, where research, debate, and critical thinking are honed.

Ellie School Update

Ellie darted through the raindrops and slid into the car next to me.

I have learned not to ask, "How was your day?" It's a question kids hate to hear, and they seldom have an answer prepared. I waited for her to get settled as I pulled out into traffic.

She sighed and smiled. "That cafeteria just outdid themselves today at lunch," she said.

Inside I leapt for joy. A painful, exhilarating, worrying and necessary change was beginning to work itself out before my eyes.

The back story: a year ago, Ellie began to unravel. She got stressed out. She couldn't sleep. Her grades dipped slightly into the B range (with one insulting C). She began to seek confrontation with me, and she would go into emotional outbursts when we did cross words on things like why she had to do her homework and silly stuff like that. Shortly after the school year ended, a severe outburst at Camp Meeting time led us to seek outside help.

The counseling found that underneath the surface, she had had a tough time at school. She didn't feel respected by her 4th-grade teacher, and she had struggled to do well in her class. At least one family pulled its child out of Highland Elementary because of this poor first-year teacher. I kept Ellie there because I hoped that her experienced 5th-grade teacher would be better.

Before 4th grade, I felt that Ellie was "teacher proof." She has a strong desire to please authority figures, and she had used her blazing intelligence and perceptive personality to win over every teacher she had had since she was 4. In 4th grade she ran into a wall.

The problem continued this year. There weren't confrontations with me anymore, because we had worked that out over the summer. But Ellie hated school. She loved her friends, but she made it clear that she had learned to "tune out" the teacher and pastor when they lectured her and her friends. Over Spring Break all she could talk about was starting 6th grade at the public middle school just down the street from where I teach.

The day after Spring Break, Jenny called me at school. Ellie had refused to return to Highland, claiming she was sick. She had spent the day at the clinic with Jenny. On my way out the door, I picked up an Out-of-Zone Form. On the way home, I was given the following impression: take the morning off work; register Ellie at a new school. It was March 10, the worst time of year to switch schools.

The next morning we registered Ellie at Jack Anderson Elementary, about 10 minutes' drive from my house. On Wednesday she went to school for the first time--a huge school with over 800 students, yet one of the best elementary schools in my district.

It wasn't easy for her. "I hate it there," she would say in the early days. "All of the kids are snobs." On her third day, she experienced catastrophe. She had brought a sack lunch to school, and she sat down at a table at lunch. When the other kids got through the cafeteria line, the all sat somewhere else. Your typical 5th-grader would rather sit on an electric chair than sit alone at lunch.

This week it got better. She made a friend, Andrea, the girl who was the "newbie" before Ellie arrived. She also started to figure out the whole lunch thing. With Andrea sitting with her, she had an ally with whom social conquest was possible. Which boys can you laugh at? Which girls should you just ignore?

Ellie always talked about the cafeteria--always. The food was rotten. The pizza had sausage. Yuck. Ick. The usual. I realized--this is how she tells me about her day!

As Ellie described her quest in detail, it was pretty clear she was making the right moves. She knew not to act needy; she didn't overreact to some of the girls' tricks. She brought home her papers. They had solid, A-B grades.

Then on Thursday, she complimented the cafeteria food--the potato wedges, the grapes, the biscuits. "They outdid themselves," she said.

I'm sure you did, I thought to myself. I'm sure you did.