Nanowrimo 2009

So far Nanowrimo 2009 is going well! Stats (which should updated as I go) are below…

a bedtime story

I told the girls a story tonight. It had been a while. Tonight I asked 1st-grader what she wanted in the story, and she said “a plane crashes on an island that’s not there- like, no one knows it’s there.” We had just watched a bonus feature from the Lost season four DVDs

(-which was so cool! It was about the orchestra music for Lost – I showed the bit to them because 4th-grader just started orchestra (we’re renting a violin, which she named Pyro) and because it was so cool! But I love “the making of” DVD bonus features in general anyway.)

, and I’d told them a little about the show, so that’s where that came from.

Then I asked 4th-grader for something to put in the story and she wanted to change her sister’s idea to a bunch of knights on a dragon instead of people in a plane. Where that idea came from is that for the longest time I’ve told them “Gina stories” – about Gina the Dragonslayer, whom I invented when I ran out of Jack the Giant-Killer stories. (Don’t tell the girls, but Gina is easier – she just charges in, whereas Jack has to outsmart the giants; ideas for clever heroism aren’t easy to pull out of thin air.)

So the story went something like this. A dragon is (once again) terrorizing the countryside and has captured Gina. Her knights are building something – a little owl came and gave them the plans for it. At it’s core is a big braid of leather that they’ve twisted around so many times that they can use if to turn a propeller on a big metal thing. A plane, with swords sticking out of it, for the knights to operate like oars. It made perfect sense to the girls, and I guess to me too.

These stories tend to be stream of consciousness, by the way. The knights saw the dragon flying by and released the propeller, and shot up in the sky. The plane and the dragon collided, and their combined trajectory took them out over the ocean. The dragon couldn’t get untangled and didn’t want to drown, so did magic dragony stuff and took them all to her lair — which was a tropical island inside some old granny’s recurring dream.

Long story short, well, the knights ran away from the dragon after they crashed (I explained how their cowardice was understandable, given what they’d just been through and how the dragon was talking all scary to them), and found Gina imprisoned in a nightmare inside the dream, and they were all rescued by Lancelot and the little owl.

The End.

Good Night.

Things to Say to God

“The Lord’s Prayer” is an example prayer that Jesus including when he was teaching about prayer. A lot of people have memorized it, so the challenge is really to keep something so familiar from losing its meaning and becoming just something we repeat without thinking.

Jesus did not mean this prayer to be some kind of magic speech that does something powerful if we word it just right. It’s a lesson about how we relate to God, and a recommendation of some things we might want to take to Him in quiet conversation.

In our Tuesday night group I wanted to look at how this prayer relates to other things Jesus said (and did). Jeanette, Peter, Miriam, Geancarlos, Geancarlos Sr, and Gwendolyn each took a part of the prayer and found other things in the bible that connected for them. There were some interesting connections, each leading in a different direction:

Our Father in heaven, Your name is holy

• Matthew 28:19  
• John 17:9

May your kingdom come, and your will be done

• Matthew 26:39 
• Acts 1:7 

On earth as it is in heaven.

• Luke 4:18

Give us today our daily bread.

• Proverbs 30:8
• Luke 4:4
• Isaiah 33:15-16
• Matthew 6:25
• John 6:35

Forgive us for the wrong things we’ve done, as we forgive those who have wronged us.

• Matthew 18:21-22
• Luke 23:34
• Matthew 6:14-15

Don’t lead us into temptation, but deliever us from evil.

• Luke 22:31
• John 17:15

(“Amen,” we always say at the end of a prayer. It’s not in here though… How did they know they were done praying?)

Green|Life

I have always thought that environmental justice and pro-life ethics should go hand in hand. I can imagine a movement that combines the two. I\’m not Catholic, but seems like that is a group where these issues might coincide. Yet even within Catholicism, I see the two issues are often situated among different groups within the group.

I reject that most issues are easy, black and white. The issues are complicated. It\’s actually a point in favor of fitting them together. Battle lines are drawn simply, stupidly. These are some of the complications I can think of. Just my thoughts. Disclaimer, disclaimer.

1. Many people consider Roe vs. Wade to be a landmark victory in the struggle for women\’s rights. \”Choice\” is not just a slogan; it has real meaning that even conservatives might agree with in part.
2. We want to make the world a healthier, safer place for future generations. We insist that our children have the right to clean drinking water. Don\’t they also have the right to be born? 
3. For most supporters of a cause, the scenario feels like the fight between good and evil. Evil empire vs plucky rebels. Both sides think they are the plucky rebels. Who wants to see good in the enemy? Who wants to change their mind, if it means going over to the Nazis?
4. If we consider abortion to be an evil still have to draw the line somewhere between protected human life and… something else. Should we also be working to make miscarriages a crime? What about zygotes that happen to never implant at all? Or are we just saying, Nature can kill but doctors can\’t? (I won\’t even bring up contraception… Or celibacy…)
5. I hate urban sprawl because I grew up hiking in the woods and I love nature. Is my environmental concern rooted more in the love of nature or more in the concern that the environment should be able to sustain human communities? Has the political divide between green and pro-life harmed the soul of the green movement?
6. Abortions happen, legalized or not. \”Black market\” abortions are dangerous, deadly and possibly common in places/times when abortion is illegal. Are pro-lifers seriously comfortable with that fact? Is it really the same as \”any other criminal\” suffering natural consequences in the course of their criminal activities?
7. Why are pro-lifers less green? Why are greenies less pro-life? Do activists tend to just take up single causes? Is it because our hearts are too small to really care about everything and everyone at once? Or, are we reliant on platforms to tell us which causes fit together? I reject that pro-life and greenness are philosophically opposed, but looking at our major political platforms it is easy to think that.
8. Are those of us who insist abortion is a bad bad thing ready and willing to provide for unexpected, unwanted babies? Are we supporting them now?
9. How much of a good, whether environmental consciousness or respect for human life, should be forced on individuals?
10. Is it easier to consider the welfare of the public in general or to love people in their messy specifics?

Not a Whole Lot

This week there’s really nothing to report in the way of hobbies, major life events, etc.

Sunday is the Henry Weinhard’s Day Run, which I’m doing with the wife and my two brothers and I guess a ton of people I don’t know. I haven’t run since I ran with the dog on Monday. We did walk on Wednesday, but not for long because I thought my face might freeze off. I’m going into this Henry’s Day deal pretty cold, but if I slow it down to a shuffle I’ll still be able to meet my very basic goal of not walking.

Running the whole way is a big deal to me. I feel like there’s something to build on if I can at least complete a run. I can imagine longer and longer runs. But if I stop running, it feels like the next run will be even tougher. Running, however slow, feels like big-picture progress.

Which reminds me of Meet the Robinsons because of the “keep moving forward” theme. But my all time most-inspiring kids’ Disney movie is Lilo & Stitch. That “ohana” stuff gets me every time.

Running with the Pooch

I’ve begun running with the dog in the mornings. We started this week with very short distances, less than one mile. He’s out of shape and I don’t want to push him. Maybe that applies to me too, haha.

Each day we ran a little farther, so we’ll probably hit a mile next Monday and then continue on from there. Eventually I want to get up to two or three miles with him, and of course longer runs alone. I don’t really know how much endurance running a dog can do. Or maybe that’s me too, too.

Uh sih luh

I think Donkey is dead. Here’s what I got this evening: “… however, very soon [he] starved to death.”

Donkey’s only hope is that “starved to death”, 饿死了 (pronounced something like “uh-sih-luh”) , is figurative and just means he got really hungry.

It also might depend on what 就 means. It’s right between “very soon” and “starved to death.” There are several possible meanings for the character in the dictionary, and I can’t sort out which one fits here. My brain is fried from playing with C# all afternoon. Maybe next time I’ll figure it out, before moving on to the last sentence of the fable.

Donkey Does the Dew

Tonight I spent a little time on my translation project. “Donkey and the Grasshoppers” is coming along. I left off last week stuck on a couple characters I couldn’t find in my dictionary, just when it was getting good. I had known for a while that Donkey was listening to the grasshoppers singing as was quite moved by their music, and then last week Donkey asked the grasshoppers, “What do you eat, cai you zhe yang dong ting de 噪音?” Hmmmm.

This week, I finished Donkey’s question, the grasshoppers’ answer, and a little more. Those two characters were “zao yin” which means noise or sound. I’m still not 100% certain on zao – the character in the book actually has three tiny 又 characters instead of the three tiny boxes.

So, tonight: “Donkey asked the grasshoppers, ‘What do you eat, that makes you have such a pleasing sound?’ The grasshoppers answered, ‘Dew.’ So, Donkey determined that from that time on he would drink nothing but dew, …”

Kind of a cliff hanger! I’m assuming Donkey won’t suddenly be able to make beautiful nachtmusik, but what exactly will happen, and what moral will Aesop draw from it, and how far from the original meanings will my pre-fluent language skills take this thing? When I’m done, I’ll post this for some of my Chinese friends and get their response. Hopefully it won’t cause an international crisis.

Hobby Night!

I have started setting Thursday aside for hobby stuff. I have too many different things I’d like to be doing for one night to be enough, but that’s life. Last week was the first. I spent over an hour trying to translate a Chinese version of one of Aesop’s fables. Something about a donkey and one or more grasshoppers. I’ll probably get back to that tonight, but another strong possibility is writing fiction.

Week four, I think

I’m in my fourth week at the new job. Lately I’ve been updating and writing new queries to compare an old database with a new one. I’m trying to write them so that they are useful for verifying the first time the new db is created based on the old one, and also for verifying that the two stay in sync going forward.

My first few weeks, I studied up on the new application, and then played with Excel and VBA.

What else have I done? Learned how to use the old UI, updated test cases, played with C#, poked around in the dev build of the new UI, I think that’s about it.

So far it seems like a good fit. It’s a good sign that I’m armpit-deep in SQL already – it’s one of my favorite things. And as it turned out my little busy-work VBA project actually resulted in something useful to our team. Bonus. I don’t mean I get a bonus, I just mean, you know, bonus.