bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

A couple of cell phone pictures from my neighborhood.

A couple of doors down from my house and across the street.

This is at the north end of our alley — I had never noticed how enormous this tree is. There is a garage under this tree. It used to be in the same back yard with the tree. The tree pushed the entire garage into the center of the alley and crushed it. Along with the power lines running to my house. Word on the street is that when the top of that tree landed on the house at the right, the homeowner was in the crushed room, which he used as a home office; but that he escaped unhurt. Apparently there have been no reported injuries. Remarkable, considering how little warning people had, and how little time to take cover.

Power was back on, it seems, by 11 p.m., with new poles running lines down the alley (although the tree and the crushed garage are still blocking the end of the alley). I must say, the city crews and Xcel Energy did a damn fine job restoring power quickly. In the ten years I have lived here, Minneapolis has impressed me with its response to severe weather in general.

Aug 20, 2009

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1 comment on A couple of cell phone pictures from my neighborhood.
“How do you make it to the gym in the middle of the day?”

Reader Alishia asks about my post from the first day of school, "I'm just wondering how you make it to the gym in the middle of the day?" I answered in the comments, here's a lengthier answer.

1. It's an established routine for Monday mornings. Monday's the only day I go during the school day. We're all quite used to it by now, which makes it not at all difficult. We go there directly from music class and get home at lunch time.

2. I keep my gym bag packed and ready — and in the car — at all times, and always prepared either to run or to swim. Crucial.

3. My children are comfortable with the child care at the Y, where they have all been spending time since they were babies. Until each one was comfortable being supervised by the staff, between 18 months and 2 years old or so, my husband and I took turns playing with them in the child care room while the other one exercised. Obviously during that time I couldn't go during the school day.

4. My 4th grader brings schoolwork which he is supposed to do while I am exercising, so as not to waste the hour. I give him a checklist before I drop them off.

We have been doing it this way for at least a year, so it's very smooth by now. But I still tweak the procedure from time to time to improve it. For example, since we get home right at lunchtime, it occurred to me this week that I ought to have lunch ready before I leave in the morning — so Monday while I made breakfast, I put some hot soup in a thermos and set out the bowls, spoons, and plates of crackers before we left. That turned out brilliantly — we walked in the door, dropped our stuff, the kids went to the table and I poured the soup in their bowls. So as you see things can always be made smoother.

I have never tried a schedule where I get to the gym like this several days a week — I stick to 3 workouts per week, and only one of them has to be during the school day right now — but I can do it several days a week if I need to. After our baby is born this winter, I'll have to stick to evenings for a while as I do not, as a rule, leave newborns in child care.

Aug 20, 2009

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Public service announcement.

Let me share with you something that I always sort of knew but truly learned only yesterday:

If a tornado strikes your neighborhood, there is a good chance there will be no "warning."

No siren, no announcement on TV of a sighting in some nearby county. One minute everything's normal, the next — tornado.

I grew up in Ohio, a place that is at least as tornado-prone as Minnesota where I live now. The Tornado Drill was a basic fact of my elementary-school education. The sirens went off, we lined up and filed into the windowless, concrete-block hallway where we sat against the wall with our knees up and covered our heads with our arms.

We didn't drill at home, but the TV was always on, and once or twice a year there was Tornado Warning In Our County. We turned the volume up loud on the TV so we could hear it from the basement, where we sat under the stairs until the appointed time to emerge.

None of these, however, prepared me for yesterday's event. You want to know what prepared me for yesterday's tornado touchdown in South Minneapolis? Home videos of tornadoes.

Because it went like this. It was raining, but not thundering — indeed, the boys had been playing in the rain in the back yard for the hour after lunch. I was teaching Milo math, Mary Jane was watching Signing Time, Oscar was at the kitchen table working. The lights flickered and went out, which was a good thing because it got our attention — we looked up, and the kids started to exclaim excitedly and wonder if it was a Really Bad Storm. About forty-five seconds later the wind kicked up. I went to close the window and saw —

You know in home videos of tornadoes how there's always, not in the funnel cloud but in front of the silly cameraman whose wife can be heard begging him to turn that damn thing off and get in the basement, a bunch of random swirling debris?

Well, I saw stuff like big branches and shingles and jagged pieces of wood in the air, flying over the roof of the house across the street. I think there may have been an instant of calculation — Have I ever seen a normal wind blow stuff higher than that house over there? No? Well, okay then — and I yelled for the kids to run to the basement, and they obeyed immediately (thanks for going off, power!) but by the time we actually all got down there under the stairs, it was over. We really did not "make it down in time." But our house was not damaged, so it turned out that we had all the time there was.

Even as I was herding the children into the basement, part of my mind was going, "Don't be silly! There can't be a tornado because there wasn't a warning! Or a siren!" This is the one problem with drills, with warnings and sirens. They lull you into thinking there will probably be a warning or a siren.

Of course there was a warning after that, and a siren. Where do you think the warnings come from? Somebody has to see a tornado and report it. That "somebody" didn't hear a siren first, he saw the tornado. Yesterday those first reports were from my neighbors.

Will upload some pictures later. Meanwhile, here is the Strib article. And here is a very good article by a local meteorologist underscoring the importance of not waiting for warnings and taking responsibility for your own safety:

The Minneapolis tornado is making a lot of people very, very uncomfortable. It's one thing if a tornado forms over fields with little/no warning, but within 1 mile of the MSP International Airport and 1-2 miles from downtown Minneapolis? That's an entirely different scenario, the definition of an "OH CRAP" moment. No watches or warnings were in effect at the time of the apparent touchdown. To the best of my knowledge no local TV station was on the air warning of dangerous conditions bearing down on the Minneapolis skyline. Worst case? No, the IDS would not have tipped over. But outer glass walls could have been stripped, shattered – raining deadly debris on pedestrians below, severing the Skyway system, turning cars (and buses) on the Nicollet Mall into projectiles. …

It's sobering to hear, but it's the truth: to some degree all of us are on our own. We are responsible for our own safety. If you see the cloud base rotating and lowering to the ground, in front of your eyes (accompanied by your ears popping and a growing roar, like thunder that won't go away) do yourself, and future generations, a big favor and get your butt to a safe spot, preferably below ground, below grade. Remember, the threat isn't being lofted into the sky like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It's standing up and being hit on the head by a tiny pebble traveling at 150 mph. Blunt head trauma. Flying debris. That's how most people become tornado victims. In light of yesterday's scare vow to maintain control over situational awareness, rely on your own wits (in addition to the NWS and local media) and realize that, in the end, YOU are responsible for keeping yourself out of trouble.

Oh, and a father-and-daughter pair who happen both to be meteorologists happened to have a video camera and recorded it from a hotel room. Here ya go.

Aug 20, 2009

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3 comments on Public service announcement.
Blowdown.

A tornado apparently touched down in my neighborhood about 2 pm today. Lots of my neighbors have trees down and serious damage, and our power is out, but we are all fine and our house appears to be unscathed. There's an enormous tree in the alley that shoved someone's garage all the way into the alley when it went down, taking out power lines as it went. The kids won't be allowed to play in the back yard until the power company fixes that one.

Aug 19, 2009

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First Tuesday. (updated)

We are at Hannah's for our inaugural day of co-teaching for the year.

The fourth-grade boys are studying geography at the table, a bit of review before jumping into world history ("Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners.")

Having completed their morning session of nature study (coloring pictures of striped skunks), my kindergartener and Hannah's preschooler grab some down time.

My preschooler can't really read this book, but she likes the pictures.

Typical kitchen counterscape. Lots and lots of used tea cups.

(added after lunch)

Our preschool girls work on their matching Kumon workbook pages, our slacker solution to the "But we want to do OUR schoolwork!" problem. Hazel is four and a half and MJ just turned three, but they both seem to enjoy these equally well. Later this year we hope to merge their reading lessons — we're getting pretty good at co-teaching reading even when the kids are not at precisely the same level.

"Tell me what you already know about adjectives. Oscar, you go first."

Aug 18, 2009

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Picture post.

If you're the type who yawns at other people's blurry vacation pictures, you can just skip this post right here. I'll try not to overdo it.

The past couple of years, we've spent a week at Family Camp up at lovely YMCA Camp du Nord in the Minnesota north woods, right next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. We love it there, but for a few years we have planned a slightly different journey to a different YMCA Camp — YMCA Camp of the Rockies, specifically, the Estes Park Center near the eastern entrances to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. We were first introduced to this wonderful place when some friends of ours got married there — yes, AT the YMCA, in the outdoor chapel pictured in a previous post — five years ago.

We lodged in a 2BR family cabin, with kitchen, for the week. This is the view from our cabin in the dawn:

The view of the camp isn't great here — mostly you can see the Longhouse on the right, a big building with, I think, a skating rink and some conference facilities, and (more importantly for us) the guest laundry. Some other buildings tucked away on the left. I was going for the early-morning sunlight on the green mountains.

The first day we signed up everybody for day camp, including a half day for MJ. Mark and I took a short hike. You can hike right into RMNP from the YMCA camp, and access some great trails.

Later Mark hiked with the boys up a steep hill within the Y grounds called Bible Point. There's a mailbox there to leave messages in a guest book:

The boys spent four days in day camp. One of those days we took Mary Jane on a hike. She went two miles, mostly uphill. We were headed for Ouzel Falls, 3 miles in.

But when it was time to turn around (because of my blisters) she didn't last long.

Wednesday all three kids went into day camp. Mark went climbing at Melvin's Wheel on Lumpy Ridge, with a guide. I'm thinking this picture isn't of Mark, since I assume he had the camera.

Me, I was sitting in an Adirondack chair on the front porch of the administration building with my feet up, a big cup of coffee on the arm of the chair, and my computer. They have pretty good wireless there. It was a nice day. No photos of that one.

Thursday we crossed our fingers and put all three kids in day camp. MJ wasn't sure, but! They were having! Pony rides! So. She had a great day. And so did we:

We hiked an eight-mile loop. I had several layers of moleskin, band-aids, and duct tape on my feet, and the blisters held up pretty well, I would say.

Friday Milo was sick and it rained, so I took Mary Jane and Oscar on a hike to a little abandoned cabin site and mine. (No pictures.) MJ didn't want to hike in the rain, but I comforted her with Dum Dum Pops and she kept going. Oscar sang to her, too. That helped. After that the weather turned worse, so we packed up; the next day we drove back across the entire state of Nebraska, which is not as boring as you might think.

(We stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming, briefly, at the Sierra Trading Post Outlet Store, where half my clothes come from.)

Nice trip.

Aug 18, 2009

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Four thirty-eight.

Week one.

Day one.

I have a pot of emergency chili simmering on the stove. It's not an emergency, I suppose, but it's a good day for emergency chili anyway.

I have read eleven pages of Winnie-the-Pooh to the younger children.

I have spent ten minutes drilling phonics with my brand-new kindergartener. I have assigned a journal entry about our Colorado vacation. I have administered spelling instruction based on the five misspelled words in said journal entry (our, family, vacation, fountain, too). I have made the oldest read stories to the youngest while I taught the math lesson to the middlest. I have listened to recorder practice. I have gone to the gym and had a yoga class because the pool was closed for maintenance, and did I mention that every homeschooling parent ought to go to a yoga class in the middle of the first day of school? Highly recommended.

We had tea. I served packaged cookies and read Tikki-Tikki-Tembo. I remembered to say grace.

Since we arrived home from Colorado just yesterday afternoon, we've still got some catching up — the grocery shopping has to be done tonight, for instance. I am tired, tired, tired. But pleased with how the day went anyway. Oscar's not quite done with his math, but I am pretty confident he will finish in time to go shopping with his dad and siblings, and leave me to stretch out for a well-deserved nap after dinner.

Aug 17, 2009

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Your eight lifetimes.

Speculation as to why an hour is so long for a child, and so short for a grownup.

Let’s suppose that every time your age doubles, you live one “lifetime” which feels just as long as all the previous ones. This would mean, for example, that the years between ages 10 and 20 feel just as long as the years between ages 20 and 40. It makes sense to me — a 20-yeard-old probably feels as different from his 10-year-old self as a 40-year-old does looking back to age 20.

…And in the end it makes me wonder about parenting. A lot of people talk as if the goal of parenting is to produce a healthy and productive adult. Surely this is important: adulthood sure seems long and important. But I can’t help but wonder whether it’s more important to give your offspring a happy childhood than to prepare them for a happy adulthood. After all, by age 18 you’ve already lived about five and a half of your eight lifetimes!

Logarithms and the meaning of life… I like it. From Gravity and Levity, a blog I'd never heard of till VC linked to it today.

Aug 17, 2009

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The corpus and the cross.

Rich Leonardi has a cryptic post up about a hypothetical bumper sticker he'd like to see in the Cincinnati Archdiocese: "We Preach Christ Crucified." I read through the comments while waiting for him to update and explain himself, and came upon this comment:

Evangelical friends of mine maintain that their cross, devoid of a corpus, emphasize[s] the Resurrection.

I have heard this before, of course — Catholic crucifixes with corpus displayed emphasize the Passion and death of Jesus, bare Protestant crosses emphasize the Resurrection. I never thought too deeply about it much. As the commenter goes on to say, there would be no Resurrection without the Crucifixion, so there's a certain primacy there, but Resurrection is the final victory after all. What's wrong with emphasizing one or the other depending on one's personal devotion? We Catholics are masters of emphasizing some bits here and some bits there — if I wear a medallion of Mary I am "emphasizing" her, and we say truly that to do so is not to deny her greater Son — so if someone wears a bare cross instead of a crucifix so as to "emphasize" the Resurrection, well, so what?

Though it struck me as I thought about it … does the bare cross really emphasize the Resurrection?

An empty tomb is an image that emphasizes the Resurrection. The Risen Lord with the marks in his hands and side, that is an image that recalls and emphasizes the Resurrection. And we do emphasize those things — I have several images of the Risen Lord around here of one kind or another. The Divine Mercy image is one such, for example.

But what does a bare cross call to mind? It might symbolize the Resurrection, if indeed Jesus had "come down from the cross" and saved himself, as the jeering crowd dared him. Instead, he was dead when they took Him down. The cross itself didn't last much longer than that.

The bare cross, objectively, may call to mind the road to Calvary, with the soldiers standing aside hammer in hand. It may call to mind the dead man being borne to the tomb. But on the third day, attention would be forever elsewhere.

Aug 17, 2009

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I’m a few days off, but.

We were there five years ago, and back in the same place this week.

Congratulations on 5 years!

Aug 16, 2009

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Failure of calculation.

Often, when people plan for contingencies, they make the mistake of focusing on the worst-case scenarios — the scariest thing that might happen — rather than the most likely things to go wrong. Just such a thing happened to me this week.

I have had one pair of Vasque hiking boots for about nine years. They are well-worn and not at all worn out. They fit great and I have hiked many miles in them. They have good non-skid soles.

And yet for years now I have been bothered by their main drawback: They are not waterproof. They have partial mesh uppers, and the gusset leaks like a sieve. Because the soles are good and thick, I'm good for two inches of water, but any puddles deeper than that or a little rain, and I've got wet feet.

Admittedly I rarely deliberately hike in rain or deep mud. It has happened accidentally on occasion. And one thing about wet feet is, most of the time it's merely an annoyance, but occasionally it can be really dangerous to soak your socks. If the temperatures fall below freezing, for example. So for nine years, as I've pulled on my comfy, well-worn hikers at trailheads in Hawaii and Utah and Minnesota and Ohio and Wisconsin, I've had this bothersome little thought about how I really need to get some waterproof boots. I kept putting it off though, mostly because I wouldn't think about it much until I was already at the trailhead.

But for some reason as we were preparing for our family vacation to the Rockies this year, when Mark asked me if there was any new gear I needed, I remembered: I've been meaning to get some waterproof boots! And lo, the credit card was produced, and the order was placed with the fantastic Sierra Trading Post online store, and the new boots arrived. I put them on and walked around town. They were comfortable. They were so lightweight! And they were waterproof.

***

Here is where the failure to calculate properly set in.

In nine years of wearing them, I had become very used to thinking of the woefully inadequate dryness of my breathable mesh hikers. Seduced by the promise of _solving this problem,_ I failed to sit down and think clearly about the following vital question:

Which is more likely —

(a) that I will find myself standing in three inches of water while trail hiking, in weather conditions under which wet feet create a serious hazard, while on a non-backcountry trip to the eastern Rocky Mountains of Colorado in mid-August, or

(b) that new boots will give me blisters?

Reader, I didn't even bring the old boots with me to Colorado.

Fortunately, I did bring my running shoes, which are even less waterproof than my hiking boots and of course have no ankle support, but which are cross-trainers with a decently grippy sole. So I had alternative footwear which proved adequate for more hikes, at least after Mark and I had buried my four (yes, FOUR) nasty blisters in moleskin and band-aids and sealed them to my skin with duct tape, in a sort of hybrid of the advice we found on the Internet and the advice we got from the nice nurse at the first aid station.

This story has a happy ending. With the moleskin and duct tape, and thick socks, and my running shoes, Mark and I hiked more than eight miles today on a nearly deserted loop trail — a memorable hike through various stages of the post-burn forest succession, with wonderfully varied terrain. We climbed 1,450 feet at the beginning and made our way back down along a long gentle slope, only getting confused and having to argue about the topo map once. And when I peeled off the tape at the end of the day, the blisters were still there and they didn't look any worse than before, which is about as good as you can ask for an eight-mile mountain hike.

The story has a thoughtful ending as well. I'm not saying it was a bad idea to buy a new pair of hiking boots. Someday it may happen that when it really matters, I have dry socks instead of wet ones. (Assuming I get them properly broken in at some point.)

But what have we learned here? I think, that it's important to identify what the problem is before you try to solve it. And to recognize that "good enough" is relative. I had gotten so used to thinking of my old boots as "not good enough" that I failed to realize they were, in fact, exactly the tool for the job. And having left them behind in favor of the shiny new "good" thing that wasn't actually adequate, I had to use shoes that just last week I would have called dangerously inadequate. And discovered that they worked, well, pretty much just fine. I had to take extra care crossing water and I felt the lack of ankle support here and there, but the proof is in my non-sprained ankles. In a pinch, or a chafe anyway, sturdy-soled running shoes work.

Lesson learned.

Aug 13, 2009

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Define your terms.

Jen has a good post up about a recent visit to Adoration in which she felt little but nevertheless took away great insight. That's the main thrust of her post and is a good reason to go read it. I was struck by a particular point she made, a side point:

I've been brought to a place where I no longer even think of it in terms of whether or not God exists — "exists" being a weak word with an obvious antonym, implying that nonexistence is possible. To say that something "exists" usually has the unspoken implication of a transitory state, since every material thing in the universe will eventually cease to exist. Duck-billed platypuses exist; spiral galaxies exist; I exist. The English language doesn't have a proper word to describe the state of being of God, who always was and always will be, who is more real than reality, other than to simply say that God is.

English – perhaps all languages, I don't know – is a bit impoverished when it comes to the words "exist" and "existence." We apply them to the unique kind of existence possessed by God, who alone exists in and of Himself; and we also apply them to what material objects are doing for as long as they last. Really the two kinds of existence are so very different that they ought not to have the same term apply to them.

Lacking a concise way to distinguish between them can lead people into logical fallacies. For example, "the universe" is sometimes defined as "the set of all that exists." Not a good definition, if you also hold that God "exists" *and* that God is not a member of the set defined as the universe, but is rather its creator and logically not part of a set. This will get you into trouble with atheist pedants who can then counter that the contradiction is yours, since if God is not a member of the set of "all that exists," then God must not exist. Always remember to define your terms! If the universe is defined as "all that exists," then God has to be said to do something other than exist. Transcend existence, maybe, or pre-exist.

Aug 12, 2009

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