The Elephant's Child

Don't Get All Excited.

My title is addressed to any fellow homeschooling moms who read my blog.  I know how we are.  We read about some wonderful crafty and seasonally appropriate thing some other mom has done and we feel like we're failing our kids.  Guilt.  It's what for dinner, since I forgot to take the meat out of the freezer even though I walked down to the basement four times to do it.

So stop it already.  My kid is doing well as a homeschooled kid,  but I'm hardly the perfect nature-walking, lap-booking, Charlotte Mason-ish Waldorfer that this photo might make it look like I am.

That disclaimer stated, we had a nice afternoon.  We went on a walk in the sun, with temperatures around 25 degrees Fahrenheit.  For once, there wasn't much wind.  Sparkle Kitty carried an old tote bag, and we collected bits of this and that.  When we got home, I manned the glue gun, and Sparkle Kitty told me where to put the glue.  She graciously allowed me to have some input in where things were put, but nearly all the arranging is hers.  I snagged some red and white gingham fabric from my stash, tore off a length, and used that to hang the wreath on our front door.

Can anyone identify the prickly balls for me? They are not horse chesnuts, since they're lightweight and mostly hollow inside.  I've Google-image searched all the possibilites I can think of and I'm stumped.

Killer Snowman Dissected.

And it appears that he's eaten the entire county. 

In case you can't read the type:

It lights up! (Because it's by the Painter of LIGHT, you see.)

It plays a medley of 8 beloved holiday classics! (Incessantly and slightly out of tune, I'm sure.)

It has 3 levels of movement! (His bowels are in fine working order; good to know.)

Okay, okay. It is indeed kind of cute.  But it's not $175.00 plus $19.99 shipping and handling cute.

INTERNET SHOUTING DAY

TIME TO HAVE A LITTLE BIT OF STUPID FUN AMIDST ALL THE HOLIDAY CRAZINESS. 

THE SECOND TUESDAY OF EVEN-NUMBERED MONTHS IS INTERNET SHOUTING DAY.  IT'S ALMOST AS MUCH FUN AS TROLL-BAITING.

DROP ME A COMMENT WITH A QUOTE OF ANY PARTICULARLY HILARIOUS JUXTAPOSITIONS YOU STUMBLE ACROSS OR CREATE YOURSELF. 

ENGAGE YOUR CAPS LOCK, GET YOUR #shoutingday HASTAG READY IF YOU'RE ON TWITTER, AND HAVE FUN. 

The Organ From Hell.

Excerpted from an email Mad Musician sent to his boss this week, after he spent the better part of a day driving to get to the church where this organ is:

After some nifty moves, including blind soldering (soldering where he can't see what he's doing? Yikes!), I got the tremolo (varies the wind going into a windchest to give the pipes served by that chest a vibrato effect) fixed.  But that's all I have to show for 3.5 hours of work. 

I got the (wind)chest opened up to fix the diapason  note (diapason is a type of organ pipe), but after some heroic efforts, I determined that to replace the valve it would be necessary to take the top off the chest.  To do that, it would be necessary to take all the pipes off it.  To do that, it would be necessary to remove the upper rack for the basses across the back of the case.  To do that, it would be necessary to remove all those basses.  To do that, it would be necessary to remove the rear center access panel.  To do that, it would probably be necessary to remove the chimes!  And then you could take the top off the chest (but not remove it from the organ. The wiring's too short!)  Then, if you were very lucky,  you might be able to make one of those replacement valves to work.  Fixing that one dead note would be a day's work! 

And the poor man's away from home tonight, too. I even have word, via gmail chat, that the "Quality Inn" he is staying in had a not-so-quality desk chair that poked him in the behinder with a loose screw. Spare some pity for the man?

See, organs are incredibly complex mechanical and electrical devices, and they're hand built, for the most part.  Each maker does things a bit differently, and not all the ways of doing things make repair work all that easy or are very smart, as you can see from my poor husband's account above.  At least one maker routinely glued the windchests permanently together instead of screwing them, which means there is no way to take them apart (without destroying them) to get at the little valves and do-hickeys that open and close the air to individual pipes.  Maybe they assumed they'd all be dead and gone by the time the thing needed repairs!

Good organbuilders, for example, attach leather with hide glue, which is water-soluble and therefore reversible.  Leather that has reached the end of its lifespan - at around 70 years old - can be simply soaked off in hot water and replaced.  Good organbuilders assume that someone down the road will need to repair and rebuild their work.

I think it's really a miracle that most organs work most of the time.  When yours doesn't, be nice to your organ technician.  If your technician can't fix your organ, or its turning out to be a more expensive job than you thought, the person to blame may be pushing up the daisies.

Sunday Moments.

Mad Musician improvising a baritone tune for the "Smash the Plates" song from The Hobbit:

Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you've finished, if any are whole,
Send them down the hall to roll!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!
So, carefully! carefully! with the plates! 

Communion service at church today.  "Love caused Your incarnation; love brought You down to me. Your thirst for my salvation procured my liberty." (Lutheran Service Book, our hymnal, hymn 334.)

Spotted some people putting on jackets and leaving right after Communion.  I hope they had a family party to get to or something and weren't just leaving because the service ran 15 minutes past the one-hour mark.

During Altar Guild, I got a "We've never, ever done it that way, ever" response for demonstrating that the napkins *cough* purificators can be folded in thirds to represent the Trinity.  Oops.  I must work harder at keeping my head down. 

I took the last cup of real coffee after coming down from Altar Guild duty. Bwahahaha! Oh. Wait. I got the last one because the crew had carefully set aside a cup for the lady I work with.  I had to ask for what was left in the pot and about to be throw out.

Pastor sidetracked into a history lesson on the intertestamental period during Bible class because someone asked what Hanukkah was. I was surprised that someone didn't know about Hanukkah.  And I thought I lived under a rock.

Mad Musician chanted Psalm 85 today using an Anglican chant melody.  "What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome my husband is. "

Pizza for lunch; thick crust for Sparkle and Mad Musician, super-thin cracker crust with an enzyme chaser for wheat-intolerant me. 

We shuffled the desks again, and put Mad Musician back downstairs, this time in the dining room. I think we're done now.  Just have a bunch of tidying up to do in the upstairs office-den-school-computer-work-guest room.

I've lost my voice. Off to Le Wal Marte tomorrow for Tazo Wild Orange and Tazo Zen to brew together for the perfect cure. (HT to Melody for that one.) 

I'd run out for the teas tonight, but I'm too tired and I've just had a Sam Adams Blackberry Witbier.  The witbier is ok.  I'm not a huge pale-ale and weiss beer sort of girl, paritially because that style seems to be quite trendy right now.   These crispy, hoppy, fizzy, shandy-style beers are for people who would rather be drinking a white zinfandel. (Oh, Cheryl... are you listening? I know you don't like beer, but you might like the pale ales.  They're different. Sparkly and shimmery. Think Asti. )  I'll take the pale ales when I'm at the beach in the summer time. For anything else, give me a brew you can scrape off the floor if you spill it.

And last but not least, Pastor's side-tracked Bible class has got me obsessing about history again. Time to hit up the library. Yay!

Books To Read Before I Die.

My friend Jane's "Books to Read Before I Die" list has got me thinking about all the books I really want to read but don't seem to have the ability to tackle right now.

When you're a homeschooling stay-at-home Mom, long stretches of time to really get into a thick book are few and far between. Everything I do is always interrupted, and often.  It's hard to do anything in one go; tackling a work of classic literature is pretty much out of the question.

So that I have a list ready against the day I've got the time to read, here are some of the books on my "To Read Before I Die" list.  The starred ones are ones that I've previously read but need to re-read.

Lilith, George McDonald

*The Simarillion, Tolkien 

Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton

Confessions, Augustine (partially read; I haven't finish it.)

*The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis. (Read when I was 19 years old; needs to be re-read with an adult's eye.)

The Satanic Verses, Rushdie

Beowolf, Seamus Heaney translation.  (Partially completed.)

Beowolf, in an older translation.

The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, by Huber and Mills.  Partially read; I need to go back to the beginning, re-read what I've read so far and finish the book.  It's an absolutely mind-blowing look at energy issues.

Dickens.  Can you believe I've not read any Dickens at all?  It scandalizes my youngest brother. 

Moby Dick. Nah.  This list is books I actually want to read, not books I feel I should.

The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald.

*The Beautiful and The Damned, F Scott Fitzgerald.

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky.  If only because my youngest brother likes him, and I respect my brothers' opinions. (I have two. Brothers. Not opinions.) Dostoevsky may be the death of me.  It just seems so... dense. 

There Is No Alternative: Why Thatcher Matters, by Claire Belinski.

The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, by Vox Day.

Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, by Dowden and Achebe

The Proper Distinction of Law and Gospel, by CFW Walther.  Tried borrowing this from my father-in-law, but his edition is in German, as are several of his other theological books.

Christian Dogmatics, Francis Pieper.  No really. I'd like to at least try. (I'm sure it's above my head. But I'd like to try anyway.) My pastor said these aren't used anymore at the Lutheran Seminaries. Does anyone know if that's true?

And this is really just the start of the list.  There are a few books by an African economist that I'd also like to read, the titles of which are escaping me at the moment.  I haven't even started listing all the non-fiction that's stashed away on my Amazon wishlist, books about China, the Middle East, about consumer culture and commercialization of Christianity, why Catholics can't sing, the history of Christianity, the Byzantine empire, what happens to people after they win the lottery...

What are some of yours?  What books do you want to read before you die?

Please To Give Me Pony?

I'm not trained in art criticism, but the expression depicted here seems all wrong.  This looks like a pleasantly hopeful face - like Christ has just asked for a pony and is awaiting the answer.

And wasn't Christ crowned with thorns when he was scourged, after his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, after his arrest, and after his trial? 

Maybe those aren't thorns.  Maybe the artist is simply depicting Christ with a bad hair day. 

(If you disagree with me, you can purchase this fine piece of artwork for yourself here in four monthly installments of $31.25)

It's That Time of Year Again.

The urge to purge comes upon me and I am possessed by a burning desire to throw stuff away and list furniture on Craigslist.  I start rearranging the living room, ostensibly to make room to set up the Christmas tree, but really just because I'm feeling the first few twinges of cabin fever.

Advent.  Primarily a time of spiritual preparation for the second coming of Christ, it's also a handy time to clean and organize in advance of Christmas itself.  Good discipline, right?  A kind of fasting from stuff, if you will.

I tried the living room yesterday, and made rather a mess of things.  I pulled everything apart, and couldn't put it back together.  Mad Musician came home yesterday to furniture randomly strewn across the thirteen by twenty-six foot room, books piled on the dining room table, and his wife hiding upstairs on Facebook.

He was up to the challenge, though.  What a guy.  Fortified by tortellini and boiled eggs, we sat and puzzled through the living room problem. 

Structurally, there are only two places the piano can go.  Due to the whiz-bang geeeniuses who installed the heating ducts back in 1920, there's a structural weakness in the center of the house which precludes bookcases of any kind along the interior wall of the living room. (Who needs a triple header under a load-bearing wall? Not us! We're the Heating Guys! Get the saw! Wheeee!) It also means that no matter where in the house you happen to drop a marble, just walk to the center load-bearing wall and wait.  Within a moment or two, your marble will arrive, neatly parking itself against the shoe molding. Ding!

The living room has seven openings, including the front door of the house and a six-foot wide cased opening into the dining room.  All windows are smack-dab center of their respective walls, which means the largest clear wall space I have is about six feet, and that's immediately adjoining the front door.  The open staircases feeds down into the living room and the room needs to accommodate at least two different traffic patterns.

My next house is going to have a dead end living room.  I swear it will be done.

Mad Musician suggested that it's perhaps time to move his desk and bill-paying paraphernalia up to the upstairs office cum school room cum TV room.  Good call.  That will allow the living room to be just a living room and music room and not a living room, office, and music room.   

You know what this means, though, right?

We're going to have to rearrange the office, too. 

Tuning the Big Austin.

When your husband is up inside the innards of a 1928 Austin universal wind chest, which is a large, walk-in, air-locked, pressurized box of reinforced boards that provides the wind to all the pipes mounted on its top, and your husband is 6'-3" tall, the one thing you definitely don't want to hear is,

"I crawled in here forward; I don't know if I can turn around."

Good thing he took a cell phone in there with him.  He needed it to tell me, seated at the console, when to turn the organ on and off.  When you turn that organ off, there are intermittent soft sighs as the air seeps back out of the very extensive wind system of the organ after the blower stops. It sounds for all the world like moaning ghosts, especially in a large, quiet, empty sanctuary after nightfall.

We were tuning until nearly nine o'clock.  That organ is large enough that you could easily spend two or three full days tuning if you were to tune absolutely everything on it. It's a four-manual organ, with pedal, great, swell, choir, and solo divisions.  The solo division is in a chamber one story up above the balcony, at the opposite end of the church from the console and main organ chambers, which are, standard Presbyterian/ Methodist style, front and center behind the altar.  We used cell phones to assist with the tuning of the solo division, since there is no way someone sitting at the console can hear the poor soul up in the solo yelling "Next!" when it's time to hold the next key.

I spent close to twelve hours sitting on the organ bench, my feet dangling because I'm too short to rest them on the pedal board. (We're nice technicians, and do not adjust the bench unless absolutely necessary. Even then we put it back the way it was when we came.) Mad Musician spent the same amount of time contorting himself into the smallest and strangest of spaces, reaching carefully across ranks of pipes with his tuning knife, being careful not to "butt-tune" any mixtures.

A mixture rank has from two to five pipes that play together when you play one note on the keyboard.  They're tons of "fun" to tune, since you have to block off all but one the pipes with pipe-cleaners, and tune each one to blend with the others. Mixtures are what give sparkle and shimmer to some organ registrations.  For the mixture on the swell Mad Musician had me turn on the stop we were tuning the mixture to (the reference stop) then turn the reference stop off to tune the individual pipes of the mixture to the others.  

"Butt-tuning the mixture" means to bump the delicate little ranks of mixture pipes with your behinder while you're bending over to reach across to tune something else entirely.  Not a cool trick, and a good example of why ordinary lay people should not go poking around inside an organ chamber.

I'm just in awe of Mad Musician's ears. (Well, I like his behinder too, but hey, I'm married to him.)  After many hours helping him tune, I can finally hear when two pipes are out of tune with each other, but it takes me a few seconds of listening and concentrating.  He can hear it right away. 

Fortunately, Mad Musician was able to repair what he needed to repair inside the Austin wind chest and extricate himself. I did not have to go in after him.

For a man who claims he's no good at dancing, he sure seems to be able to move around wonderfully in the tight and delicate of spaces of a pipe organ chamber.

Back Home Again

It's good to be home.

It will be good to back to more-normal blogging schedule, too.