Infidel

I just finished my book club book before our discussion Friday morning. The book was entitled "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I would highly recommend it.

Ayaan was born in Somolia and grew up in Saudi Arabia and Kenya in a devout Muslim home. She experienced and witnessed extreme violence and oppression against women all done in the name of religion. She has escaped to become a Dutch citizen now living in America and has fought for women's rights, especially Muslim women's rights. She as also since left the Muslim faith.

Her insider view of Muslim society is sobering. She cannot agree with the common statement declaring that "Islam is a religion of peace" and considers acceptance of that statement to be evidence of ignorance of what is happening around the world and what the Koran commands. Needless to say, she has been, and probably still is, being hunted.

The story of her life is intreging and the lessons learned are powerful. While she leaves all religion behind, it is interesting to consider whether the freedoms she so values and credits to the political system of the West are really to be credited to the Christian underpinnings of the West.

It will be an interesting discussion on Friday. And it is very interesting that she is one of the speakers at the January series at Calvin College this year. I may need to show up for that one!

Happy Birthday Brant!

Happy Birthday today to Brant! 9 years old! It is hard to believe this is our final year with a child in the single digits!

Perfect Sledding Conditions!

Today the conditions for sledding were perfect. I took the cousins to Charlie's Dump in Jenison for a couple hours this morning. The first hill was sheer ice. We went to the other side and found the perfect jump. We left after the majority of us had gotten hurt. My theory on sledding: if you don't leave hurt, you didn't have as much fun as you could have had!

Message to the California Cousins

All the Michigan Cousins are here for a Christmas sleepover and wanted to wish all of their California Cousins a Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from our little Santa and his reindeer!

enough!

I've had enough snow for the winter already and it is only December. Storm #3 is going to hit tomorrow afternoon with another 6-10 inches. The piles beside my driveway are already so tall that I can hardly shovel the snow over them. Maybe all this snow in December means that we will have an early spring...one can only hope!

The bell will ring 29 times today

The bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald will ring 29 times today in memory of the 29 men who died when she sank 33 years ago today.

If you haven't listened to Gordon Lightfoot's song about it in a while, be sure to listen to it again sometime soon.

In Honor of Election 2008

I'm Tony and I approve of this message...

Blogging

Hmmm...makes me think about the time I spend here! Don't be surprised if I disappear for more productive endeavors!

39

Stacey turns 39 today (for the first time)!

Happy birthday!

Grand Rapids (Kids) Marathon

This afternoon we went downtown for Brant and Erin to run their first ever marathon...26.2 miles! Wow!

Okay, so they didn't really have to run and they didn't have to do all the miles at once. Over the past month they got to do the first 25 miles on their own and they gathered to run the last 1.2 this afteroon. Still, I was pretty proud of them for accomplishing it!

For one moment there I thought it would be cool to actually run a full marathon. I sat down in the shade and that moment quickly passed!

Broken

We've now got our first hard cast! Friday after school Brant was playing Tarzan jumping off the swings and decided to land on his left wrist. A trip the the ER revealed that it was a "buckle break". That means the bone was still soft enough to bend but not completely break. If any of us old people had done that, it probably would have broken. They looked at it again today and decided to put a hard cast on it for 4 weeks. Brant has been a tough kid through it all!

"Real Outdoor Flavor"

This bottle of barbecue sauce got me thinking over dinner the other day. It says that it has "REAL OUTDOOR FLAVOR". Now, that statement begs all sorts of questions from me, like...

What exactly does outdoors taste like? Dirt? Grass? Sweat? Do I really want my barbecue sauce tasting like outdoors?

If it is "real" outdoor flavor, then is there "artificial" outdoor flavor? What would be the difference? What makes theirs real? Did they make this sauce in the open air instead of a factory?

Do other sauces default to "indoor flavor"? What exactly would that taste like?

The more I thought about this statement, the less it made any sense at all to me! If anyone can share any wisdom, feel free to do so!

My 12 Year Old

Today is Erin's 12th Birthday! Happy Birthday Erin Lynn!

This morning we began celebrating with a birthday breakfast as requested by Erin...monkey bread and scrambled eggs with cheese and bacon. Bowling is on tap for this afternoon with Olive Garden for dinner. Yeah!

Fairly Fun

Yesterday afternoon and evening we all headed out to the Hudsonville Fair (courtesy of the Kent District Library summer reading incentive). Although Stacey and the kids have gone for the last few years, this was my first time attending.

Much of the afternoon was spent at the carnival rides where I realized that I'm getting old. The bumper cars with Brant were fun and the Ferris wheel with Erin was easy (at least when she wasn't rocking our car while we were stopped at the top!). Even the big swinging viking ship was fun. But when Erin took me on the "Musik Express" (think Matterhorn for those of you who have old Cedar Point memories), I thought I was going to toss my cookies. The guy running the ride was laughing at me every time I went past him. I think he mercifully cut our ride short before he had a mess to clean up! It was off to dinner after that. Needless to say, I didn't eat much!

In the evening we watched the off-road derby races. Basically, it was a bunch of guys (and girls) in really old, beat-up cars (beyond recognition actually), recklessly speeding around a dirt track with berms to make the fly and big tires to make them bounce. It was great to watch. I was amazed that a car could still go with one wheel completely missing and the other wheel on the same side completely flat!

I felt like I was living a piece of Americana (besides also feeling really dusty!).

The "Fun Slide"...as opposed to the "Boring Slide"




From the top of the Ferris wheel (while Erin wasn't rocking us!)




When dads see their kids driving!




Cars met often on this turn.




I'm pretty sure that Ford Fiestas weren't built for off road racing. This is how it had to leave the track.

How Does Your Garden Grow

Once again we planted a 4X6 raised garden where we practice the "Square Foot Gardening" methods. We are now enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of our labor! We've been enjoying beans for a couple of weeks now with our pole beans just starting to produce now to go along with our bush beans.

There are two highlights for me so far though. First, we decided to experiment with potatoes this year. We took one potato that had sprouted, cut it into quarters and planted it in a pot. Yesterday we tipped the pot over and this afternoon we enjoyed a harvest of "new potatoes" at dinner. They tasted really good. I'm thinking there will be another pot or two of potatoes next year.

The other highlight is our tomato plants. I don't eat tomatos, so I'm not that excited about what they produce. But following in the footsteps of my father, I'm very proud of how tall my plants are. The picture below should bring back memories of my dad and his tomato plants for those of you who are family. I don't believe I've beaten his record, but it was fun hauling the ladder out to tie them up!

Pronunciation...

One of the stops we made on our train trip was in the city of Havre. Knowing the unique pronunciation of a certain Green Bay Packers quarterback (or is that ex-quarterback?), I was very curious to see how they pronounced the name of their city. I was happy to hear some linguistic sensibility when I heard them pronounce it Haver rather than Harve.

Old Time...Merced

I'm spending the weekend here in Merced for Gateway Church's 25 anniversary celebration. I arrived LATE last night after my flight got all rerouted. Today I'm pretty free until dinner tonight.

So I spent the morning driving around Merced looking at some old places to see how the city has changed over the years.


I stopped by our old home. As I was taking this picture the lady who bought it from us came out and we ended up talking for a while. She gave me a tour of the backyard. It was nice to see the place where so much of life happened!


From there I drove past the two apartments we lived in before we bought our home. After checking out the new UC Merced I headed through downtown and "just happened" to end up near Marie Callendar's and I had to stop by for a piece of chocolate satin pie. This picture is to simply to make Stacey jealous!

Interpretation Please...

I was fascinated by these signed posted in the railway at Seattle's King Street Station...our final destination. No body taught me the meanings of these signs in drivers education. If any of you could provide some interpretation for me, I would be very grateful. The middle yellow sign doesn't look like a very encouraging end result. And the bottom orange sign seems to demostrate the bad results of drinking and driving a train. I'd love your wisdom on any of these!

Disaster!

On our trip westward we saw two evidences of destruction.





First of all, as we traveled through Wisconsin we saw dramatic evidence of the flooding that has swamped the mid-west. Our train slowed down to 10 miles an hour for a stretch where there was water right up to the tracks on both sides. Out both windows it looked like a massive lake. Only, there was never a lake here before. This was a farmer's field.

This track was shut down until just a few days before we came through. They told us that the water level had risen 5 feet above the tracks! There is one river nearby that floods at 7 feet and the highest it had ever been was 9 feet. During the last flooding it measured at 14 feet!

On our eastbound return trip we were able to cross this stretch at full speed. The water had gone down some, but the lake was still pretty huge.




The second bit of destruction we saw was a derailment from just a few days earlier. This train derailed because of high winds that blew it off the track. They told us that no one was hurt, but it was still pretty sobering to hear and to see as we were speeding along at 80 miles an hour.

On the way home Stacey sat next to a freight train engineer in the lounge car who was returning from a west coast delivery. He told her that the train had been carrying toilet paper and Oreos...nice combination! Policy is that whatever is spilled is simply buried where it is spilled. He was tempted to stop and take a few packages of Oreos as he went by earlier, but would probably have lost his job.

He went on to tell a story of when they had a spill of a load of corn. They buried it, but evidently not deep enough. The local bears got to it after it had had just the right time to ferment. Needless to say, they had a lot of bears who were in their way and had little motivation to move!

Happy Birthday to Me!

I got to spend my birthday in Montana, North Dakota and probably a little bit of Minnesota as I slept.

At lunch Stacey snuck a candle to our waiter and my New York cheese cake came with a candle in it. They frown at fires on the train, so they didn't light it. (I hope my wish will still come true!) I then got to open my present while the train rolled down the track. I got a new game called Puerto Rico. It looks great! Now I've just got to learn how to play and convince others to play with me!

Speaking of dessert...below is a picture of the chocolate raspberry torte which I enjoyed at each lunch and dinner on the way to Washington. It tasted even better than it looks!

Our Eagle

I mentioned in an earlier post that we saw a bald eagle the second day after we arrived at Birch Bay. This first picture is taken from our condo porch. The second picture is after walking up closer to it.

It ended up that we saw this eagle regularly. A couple of the evenings around dinner time it would catch a fish from the bay and then take it to a tree right next to the condo where we all ate together and would join us for dinner. I preferred our dinner which wasn't still breathing and flopping around as we ate it!