tonyandkirsten.org

Today is caucus day in Minnesota. It’s also primary day in 23 other states. As much as anyone, I’m excited about today and really want to see what happens when the dust has settled. That said, I just read a wonderful piece over on David Kuo’s website that keeps this day in perspective.

The great delusion of the build up to sort-of-interesting Tuesday is that it is SUPREMELY-IMPORTANT Tuesday. It isn’t. It is just a day when the presidential nominating process takes its largest leap forward. It is just a day when primary elections are held from sea to shining sea. It is just [sic] day shaped by politics.

Read more here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jwalking/2008/02/sortofinteresting-tuesday.html

God is indeed sovereign, no matter who gets the nomination or wins the election. Perhaps just as important is the fact that the American public still holds far more power to affect change than the White House. I find these to be very comforting facts.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to go caucus tonight, and might even stick around to make sure that my unbound delegate will stick to the issues I care about at the next level of the caucus. I’m just not going to get bent out of shape about this whole deal. I’m also going to continue working for change where it really matters — in the lives and hearts of individuals.

I hope you can do the same.

As I browse the web every day while feeding Erik, few things usually really stick out to me.  Today, several things did…so, I thought I would share:

On the serious side, I really enjoyed J.R. Woodward’s blog entry about mentoring.    He shares a list of types of mentoring relationships that I think makes for a helpful paradigm.  It looks like this will be the first in a series of entries on the topic of mentoring, and I am definitely looking forward to the rest of the series.

On to the ridiculous…

Can you imagine making a sign like this and doing such a good job that it totally blends in with other signs.  This would make an awesome prank!

If you are looking for Halloween costume ideas, here’s one that really made me laugh. 

And finally, if you haven’t found them already…the lolcats are one of my favorite late night/early morning reading-the-web-while-feeding-Erik timewasters.

Happy Web Browsing!

Is how many wonderful options there are out there for baby carriers. Sure, I had one of those “snuggli”-type carriers with Madeline, but it hurt my back after she weighed about 12 lbs. I had seen ring slings, but mostly only ugly ones!

A couple years ago at Faithwalkers, I met a woman who had a daughter about Madeline’s age (this is when Madeline was 7 months or so old). She was wearing her baby in a wrap (basically, a long piece of fabric) on her back. She told me all about it and gave me a website where I could learn more, but I was really intimidated at the idea of using just a long piece of fabric to wear my already good-sized little girl. But, I made a promise to myself to check into it for my next baby.

Fast forward two years and to make a long story short, I did check into it and discovered that there are a lot of great ways to wear your baby from the time they are born until they are a big toddler! Wearing a baby is a great way to get more done with your hands free, go crowded places without a stroller, comfort a crying baby (that you would be walking around carrying in your arms anyway), keep your little one close while you chase a bigger kid around the park, and more.

The two new kinds of carriers I have tried are pouch-style slings:

And Mei Tais (this is a “BBO”-style Mei Tai I made myself!):

Both of the these kinds of carriers have multiple positions you can use them in (cradle, tummy-to-tummy, hip, and “kangaroo” for the pouch; tummy-to-tummy, forward facing, hip and back for the Mei Tai) — hence the ability to use them for so long.

When it comes to these alternative styles of baby carriers, there’s something to fit every budget — from a do-it-yourself homemade carrier that might cost you a few bucks to make if you get fabric on clearance, to “rare” or trendy imported styles that cost hundreds of dollars.

I think this really must be an up-and-coming trend, because even Target is getting into the act. Many stores now carry “hotslings” in the baby section, which are a popular type of pouch-style sling. If you go to the Target website and search for “sling” in the baby section, you will now find quite a few options, including a couple different brands of pouches and ring slings, as well as one Mei Tai.

Here are a few great websites to check out if you want to learn more:

www.wearyourbaby.com (wearing instructions, do-it-yourself instructions, and more)

crafts.sleepingbaby.net (do-it-yourself instructions for baby carriers and other baby-related items. I used instructions from this site to make my first Mei Tai recently).

www.thebabywearer.com (reviews and info on all kinds of vendors/brands of baby carriers as well as discussion forums — almost more info than you might want to know!)

There are also a lot of local babywearing groups popping up, where you can go and learn first hand about different kinds of carriers, try them on, learn how to use them, and even sometimes borrow a carrier for a month or so. There are groups in the Twin Cities, Des Moines, and Iowa City (just to name a few areas where I know some of our readers live!).

Happy Babywearing!

I just discovered reCAPTCHA, and so far, I love the concept. I really love that they make it easy to use this on your own website.

I wanted to spread the word among the techie (and tech-interested) types that come by this site.  reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system from Carnegie Mellon University that also powers public OCR projects. The concept is simple. Public OCR projects generate tons of words that are difficult for machines to recognize. These are made a little harder and then used as a CAPTCHA for comments or email addresses to prevent spam. The results are then used to digitize books for the public domain. It’s totally win-win!

So, go check it out.

Also, while I’m at it. Everybody should be using something like the GRC password generator to generate passwords. Nice and strong. Useful for wireless access points and personal passwords. You just need a secure way of storing these, since I doubt you’ll remember a long one.

I enjoy reading a few random blogs about various topics that I find interesting. Sometimes I keep up more than other times, but my Bloglines feed-reader keeps me supplied with news about various topics from coffee to church marketing to cheap cooking.

One blog I read fairly often is called “Language Log.” It’s written by several college professors in the field of linguistics. While some of their posts are uninteresting or over my head, I find I often enjoy their commentary about modern uses and mis-uses of language.

They had two posts lately that really made me laugh, and if you consider yourself a grammar or writing geek you might enjoy them too. The writers of the posts billed them as “The dumbest story of the year so far about adverbs” and “The dumbest story of the year so far about adjectives.” You probably don’t even need to be a grammar geek to appreciate the second one. It involves a parent overheard saying to a child (who had just called something “silly”), “Don’t you remember? We do NOT use adjectives!”. That line made both me and Tony laugh out loud!

Spurred by a comment from Tina, I did a little looking into Dinesh’s past.

For the Googlers out there: here is some balance to my recommendation from his Wikipedia page and a critique of him from Campus Progress.

I have no idea if the allegations Tina brings up are true, or if they are whether Dinesh has recanted of his behavior. What I can say, is that if true, the actions she reported are extremely unloving, and I would not approve of them.

I guess as with all things, we must investigate the things we hear as well as the person saying them. Caveat lector!

So, on the way home this weekend, I heard a program on NPR that I hadn’t heard before: Word for Word. The premise is simple; the show plays entire speeches that are relevant and being excerpted for sound bites elsewhere. What caught my attention, however, was not the premise, but the content of this particular speech.

The speaker was Dinesh D’sousa. He is a conservative political scientist. He has a new book out, entitled, “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11.” The speech was from January 23rd, at the Commonwealth Club of California, located in San Francisco. In the speech he gives a very compelling reason to stay in Iraq until it is stabilized — in fact, it’s the most compelling line of reasoning that I’ve heard thus far. Given that he is defending his premise in front of a mostly liberal and intelligent audience, he got grilled at the end of the speech. I have to say, he is sharp, and did a marvelous job of defending his thesis.

I have not read the book, yet, but hearing his speech made me want to. At any rate, I highly recommend that if you have the time, you listen to his speech. It’s free, and it’s here: Dinesh D’sousa at the Commonwealth Club of California.

I realize that some of you reading this have different politics than Dinesh. That’s fine. That said, it’s well worth hearing a very intelligent viewpoint that’s opposite yours, as doing so is the only way to critically think about your viewpoint.

I hope you enjoy this.

It’s true!

Needless to say, a larger company with a real future in the online community of Ames, IA (and surrounding areas) has made an offer that I couldn’t refuse.

So, I sold out.

PlanetRock can now be found at the redesigned Rock ISU web site. (If it doesn’t look new, try refreshing it later in the day.)

Complaints can be sent to the new management.

Tonight at the EPIC teaching, Pat Sokoll gave a great message that could probably be summed up by saying, “God is in charge, you are not. So do what He wants you to do, not the things you think you want to do.” Okay, so that is a great oversimplification. He touched on a variety of subjects including dying to yourself, being a servant and truly being engaged in community (rather than being an American, individualistic Christian). I probably even missed some (or many) points while I was trying to keep Madeline from making too much noise. If you missed it, you should definitely listen to it once it is posted on the EPIC blog. Or listen again even if you heard it once since it was so profound.

So, on to my original reason for writing this post…One subject that Pat touched on was the differences between a technological versus a traditional society. As you might expect, we live in a technological society, while the Bible was written in a traditional society. The technological soceity evolved during and after the industrial revolution, but a lot of the really big changes to society have occured in the past 30-50 years. Sounds like a no-brainer in one sense, but when you look at some of the deeper implications of this, it can be very profound. When I first ran across this concept, it really helped me understand some of what the Bible says about Women’s roles in a way that other ways of explaining things did not.

In his message, Pat mentioned a “19 page booklet” (or something like that) on this topic. I’m not sure what exactly that is, but I can point you in the direction of a great free resource on the subject. The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has made available on their website a book called “Man and Woman in Christ” by Stephen B. Clark. This book is out of print, so hard copies are only availabe from used book sellers online. This is in html format, so you’ll have to get creative if you want to do anything other than just read it in your web browser.

While the focus of this book is a variety of issues regarding men’s and women’s roles, one of the primary foundations for some of Clark’s points on the subject come from this concept of a technological vs. traditional society. If you want to read just his chapter-long explanation of this, read chapter 18, which is about 35 pages long. The whole book (I think I have read almost the whole thing, if not all of it) is amazing reading — if you do read it, keep in mind that Clark comes from a Catholic background, so some of his thoughts make more sense in that light. But overall, he is right on in what he says about Biblical manhood and womanhood.

As a part of the “Believing God” study that many Rock/Stonebrook women are doing this summer, participants are asked to read Romans chapter 4 twenty times before the study concludes. While introducing the study on Wednesday night last week, Elaine happened to mention that when she did the study the first time she read Romans 4 in “just about every translation out there” in order to keep it fresh and not get too bored with it.

Always liking a good challenge, I thought to myself, I bet I could find at least 20 different translations to read it in, and hence read it in a different one every time! I actually found links online to 32 different translations (all but one is from either biblegateway.org or bible.crosswalk.com). So, I guess I will be reading Romans 4 at least 32 times…since I don’t want to leave any out!

If you would like to do the same, or at least get some more variety in your reading of the passage twenty times, here is a linked list. Please comment if you know of any other translations that can be read on the web, and I will update the list:

1. NIV
2. NAS
3. The Message
4. Amplified
5. NLT
6. King James
7. ESV (English Standard Version)
8. Contemporary English Version
9. New King James
10. 21st Century King James Version
11. American Standard Version
12. Young’s Literal Translation
13. Darby Translation
14. New Life Version
15. Holman Christian Standard
16. New International Readers Version
17. Wycliffe New Testament
18. Worldwide English
19. Third Millenium Bible
20. New Revised Standard
21. Revised Standard
22. Good News Bible
23. Douay-Rheims Bible
24. The Complete Jewish Bible
25. New Century Version
26. God’s Word Translation
27. World English Bible
28. The Bible in Basic English
29. The Webster Bible
30. Weymouth New Testament
31. Today’s New International Version
32. New English Translation

Happy Reading!