Scattershots

Some shots from 2013, which have been hanging out on my desktop for too long.

First, my friend Don, whose journey to a community house for the disabled occupied much of my time and heart in 2011 and 2012. It was a journey filled with frustration and disappointment, but also filled with amazing graces from the Lord and divine appointments. Here he is, proud to be functioning well again:

 And the community with which he now lives, supported by two saints, husband and wife, who care for their charges 24/7:

 Two shots from the youth Game Nights at Nineveh: evenings filled with crazy games, good food, raucous fun, and of course the offer of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

 My Lovely, working on a painting project while Daddy does some woodworking at The Shop (with goggles in case the paint splashes):

 Lintel over the door of a former train station in Ithaca, New York. Uncle Jim tells me that a train used to run from Ithaca to the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. My grandmother used to ride the train direct to Bethlehem during her Cornell years. Now, if I wanted to ride the train to the Lehigh Valley, I would have to drive from Ithaca to Rochester (90 minutes), then take the train to Albany (a couple hours), then the train to Penn Station, NYC (an hour or more), then the train back west to Pennsylvania (90 minutes). Driving from Ithaca to the Lehigh Valley takes about three hours.

 Two shots of the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky across the Ohio River to Indiana, taken during one of my business trips to Luhville this year. Something about the blue light on the girders attracted my lens:

 Beans, rocks, beads, and salt, mixed together as a material illustration for Time for Children during worship. I can't remember exactly what I was illustrating, but I remember that the kids were not interested in eating this bean soup:

 Two pieces of hard evidence that as much as teenagers (and thirty-seven-year-olds) want to be considered adults, when placed in a room with building blocks, they will inevitably return to a child-like state:

~ emrys

Africa Bound!

In February four members of the congregation I serve, along with two other folks from neighboring congregations, will travel with me to Ethiopia. Our presbytery (local grouping of congregations in our denomination) has a seventeen-year relationship with several congregations of western Ethiopia, in which we send delegations back and forth across The Pond every two to three years. It's our turn, so the delegation from upstate New York will spend seventeen days visiting church leadership and congregations in the region around Dembi Dollo, Ethiopia.

Our involvement with our Ethiopian brothers and sisters has had two foci: First, to pray for and support the church leadership there. The Church is growing in Ethiopia, so much so that she has difficultly training enough pastors to serve in all the congregations. So we do what we can to equip the leadership for its task of cultivating congregations on the rise. Second, we have supported the Ethiopian Rural Education Project. After the Communist government of the 1980s destroyed all rural schools (and church buildings), rural Ethiopians from the 1990s to the present have had difficulty obtaining education for their children, especially at the younger ages before students are eligible to move to the cities for government-supported schooling. So we have been involved in an ongoing effort to design, distribute, and implement curricula that provides literacy and numeracy for five- to ten-year-old children, in their native tongue.

When we meet with our brothers and sisters in February, we will discover how we can help with the needs of the Church and the furthering of education there. I also hope that we will discover how the Ethiopian Church lives out its faith, and allow that discovery to be instructive to us. The Church there continues to pray for us regularly; I hope that we may receive even more tangible encouragement from them on our visit.

While we are there, the Church in Dembi Dollo will be celebrating the 95th anniversary of Presbyterian missionaries coming to Ethiopia. We have heard news of many missionaries and church groups with Ethiopian affiliations who plan to be present for the event, so I expect we shall experience a grand and lively party!

We crave your prayers for the journey: that God would give us grace in the many details, joy in the experience, servant attitudes in our time there, and safety throughout. If you would remember us to the Lord, we will be blessed. If the Spirit moves you to it, you may also contribute to our financial need: we need to raise about $6,400 amongst the group to provide for our needs while there. Checks may be made out to: "Susquehanna Valley Presbytery--EPT," with "Ethiopia Trip 2014" on the memo line. They may be sent to: Ethiopian Partnership Team--SVP, PO Box 87, Nineveh, NY 13813.

~ emrys

Carrying My Lovely

The morning before I left for my last business trip to Louisville, My Lovely Daughter took me out to the front lawn to pick dandelions. She handed me the bouquet of yellow and told me they were for me to take on my trip. So I wrapped the steps in a wet rag, stuck them in a ziploc bag, and hoped that security wouldn't confiscate them. I took pictures and sent them at each stage, so My Lovely would know she had gone with me. Here they are in the Syracuse airport, waiting to go through security:

 Here they are in DC, waiting for a connecting flight:

 Here they are in Louisville, Kentucky, arrived safely (though a little wilted from a day's travel, like me) in the hotel:

Here are the tired blossoms the next day, on the edge of the Ohio River:

And I thought a fitting send-off would be dispersal into the great Ohio River--who knows how far they've traveled toward the Mississippi delta since I let them go?

~ emrys

Thinking Cosmically

When I was in high school, one of my favorite series of books was Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy of four books). It has been at least ten years--maybe fifteen--since I read one of his works. No matter how long the span, however, Adams' words stick in the recesses of my consciousness like mental LDL. So I knew after seeing "DON'T PANIC" on this window in the DC airport that I was in for a treat of reminiscence:

[For those with less-than-optimal resolution, it reads, "It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover."]

I am thrilled that someone in the Dulles administration is well-read enough to see the value in printing a Hitchhiker quote for travellers to enjoy. It's especially fitting for someone returning from a glorious Colorado vacation to the duties of pastoral ministry. We need more DON'T PANICs in large friendly letters in our lives.

~ emrys

Creative Learning

 We purchase an annual membership to a national association of children's museums and science museums. Ever since we encountered the Discovery Center in Binghamton with a toddling Gwendolyn, we have discovered great joy in spending quality time in these paragons of civic effort. During this week's vacation in Durango, Colorado (our home away from home), we found that our membership pass gets us into the newly established Durango Discovery Museum.

Discovery Centers, Science Centers, and Discovery Museums have the twin goals of hands-on education and fun for kids of all ages. I do mean all ages; here is Jill climbing up a stylized tree house, finding her inner contortionist:

 As part of a promo weekend, the Discovery Museum had a set of Imagination Playground blocks--imagine Kinex magnified and fashioned from blue foam--of which Gwendolyn availed herself for about an hour.

 She systematically collected blocks from the scatter created by other kids' work; I did, on occasion, need to remind her that cannibalizing blocks from other children's projects-in-process was not allowed. She was quite determined to include every possible block in her architectural wonder. She required little help except to learn how twisting a foam noodle helps to thread it into another block.

 I took great joy in watching her creative vision play out on the sunlit patio. I also took great sobriety in watching the young children interact and noting that without parental intervention our offspring would have played out a version of Lord of the Flies. There was lots of enforced sharing and rebukes for stealing blocks. But aside from one meltdown among a group of twelve or thirteen kids, the afternoon's activities went off without serious incident. And a foam city brought concrete expression to the heart of my four-year-old daughter.

If you ever have the opportunity to engage the joy and learning of a children's museum . . . engage!

~ emrys

New (Wow!) Horizons

I understand naming stadia after the fan-attracting teams that play in them (for instance Giants Stadium in the northeast). I understand naming stadia after the companies that funded their construction (Staples Center, for instance). I do not yet understand what I saw in Louisville, Kentucky this week. Here is a photo of a stadium's name above a digital rolling advertisement screen positioned in view of both ticket-buying fans and Main Street Louisville:

The name is also stamped in story-tall letters facing the bridge across the Ohio River, on the opposite side of the building.

It's not Cardinal Stadium, though the name of that mascot figures prominently--that's the red C in the right of the photo. It's not simply the KFC Center. It appears to be the KFC (Yum!) [I don't even know how to represent it properly in text] Center.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the onomatopoetic ejaculation when verbally naming this facility. Is the (Yum!) there for purely visual appeal, so the uttered name is "KFC Center"? Or is the bubble pronounced, as in "KFC Yum! Center"? And if it's pronounced, does one indicate the exclamation point with inflection and pause ("We're going to the KFC Yum! . . . Center, kids!") or does one say the three words in one smooth phrase ("There's a long line at the KFC Yum Center today")?

I should have asked someone from Loouhvul while I had the chance. (Sigh!)

~ emrys

Community Is

other people loving my children.

We have been blessed to be part of a community in which people enjoy our kids. They will spend time with our children, feed them, and savor all the funny stories that emerge from their moment-to-moment lives.

But love isn't just about the fun times. Community begins to emerge when other adults will take my children's character development seriously. They will correct my children when they do things that are beneath their character. And they will ask about what my parental expectations are in order better to serve my children. Their love will be tough enough to say No even when my daughter is being exceptionally cute, even when all the other kids are getting candy.

Community grows from others' willingness to seek to understand our desires for our children, and then serve those desires. It's an extra mile to go, extra trouble to take, extra hope to envision. But from that community will come my children's faith that life is neither My Family Against the World nor Me Against My Parents. They will learn that the network of support and accountability for their lives is broader than two people. They will discover that God is molding them with many hands.

We spent last week at Pilgrim Pines, a family camp to which family friends have been going for decades. Among all the normal campy joys of a week in rural New Hampshire I found a deeper and more sublime joy: hundreds of children running amok while hundreds of parents watched out for them all. I found a common atmosphere of character and trust. I found an opportunity to rest, not just because I was on vacation, but because the shared burden of caring for dozens of children is lighter than the stingy weight of raising my child by myself.

As with every camp experience, we are challenged to take what we find in one vacation week and carry it into the other fifty-one weeks. But at least we're one week ahead on making the world a better place.

~ emrys

It's the Destination, Not the Journey

I went to England last week to attend my Aunt Betsy's funeral. The adventure to get to Charlbury began with the procurement of a passport on short notice. My mantra became, from the moment the document arrived in the mail, Do I have my passport? Check the pockets, confirm its presence.

Pack the bags, be ready to leave at 12:30pm. Photocopy credit cards and driver's license in case wallet gets nicked overseas. Check for passport in bag. Hugs and kisses to my wife and daughter. Three-and-a-half hours to Jersey City. One hour to visit with friends in Jersey City. Leave for Newark International at 5:00. Plenty of time before 7:35 flight.

5:15: turn into sticky maelstrom of Newark airport. Follow signs for Terminal C parking. Pull into lot and take ticket. Glance at the price schedule: "Short Term." Experience sticker shock. Drive through lot and got to exit booths. Ask attendant where to find long-term parking.

"Exit airport, follow signs for P6."

Follow exit signs, leave airport, see no signs for P6. Begin to breathe more rapidly. Re-enter airport vortex and search for P6 signs. Pass Terminal C. Sign for P6: "bear left." Bear left. Next sign: "bear right." Bear right. Signs vanish. Gone. Heartbeat accelerates. Exit airport again. Re-enter, bear left, bear right. Signs vanish again. Curse not-so-under-breath. Exit airport. Look at clock: 5:30.

Re-enter airport, rip short-term parking ticket out of dispenser. Park in C lot. Check passport in pocket. Mentally prepare to put large fee on credit card on way home. Hustle for check-in. Experience no line for check-in or security. Remember that today is middle of Memorial Day weekend. Thank God for easy travel. Find gate and confirm flight number to London Heathrow.

Feel peckish. Go to airport burger joint and order greasy supper. Hear clerk ask for payment. Pull out wallet. Open wallet to find no credit cards, no driver's license.

Experience tunnel vision and cold sweat. Check cash: American dollars and British pounds still there. Not theft. Suddenly realize that I cannot remember taking credit cards off the copier glass.

Clerk repeats request for funds. Hand her cash. Wait for burger, pacing back and forth, studying ramifications of stupidity. Wonder how much to skimp in order to have cash to get home. Check for passport in pocket. Pray that cash I have will stretch.

Board flight and take off one hour late. Get three hours of fitful sleep from seven hour flight. Compose eulogy. Land in Heathrow at 8:35am local time. Board bus to Oxford. Arrive in Oxford, hustle to train station. Board train, arrive at Charlbury. Walk to St. Mary's Church at 11:45, forty-five minutes into aunt's service. Attend last twenty minutes.

Be welcomed by distant cousins and uncle. Give eulogy at crematorium service. Hang out with family for afternoon. Talk, eat, drink, enjoy. Let head hit pillow at 10:00. Pass out.

Wake up at 4:30. Check for passport. Walk to train station. Catch 6:00 train. Switch to bus at Oxford. Bus departs on time. Twenty minutes into bus ride, learn that an accident on the M40 will require a detour. Spend hour on back roads looking at watch to see how rapidly flight time approaches. Arrive at Heathrow one hour late.

Hear from check-in clerk that I will miss flight. Break out in cold sweat again, fearing ticket clerk will ask for credit card to get new flight. Prepare to explain my unlikely story. Give passport to ticket clerk. "You're on the 12:05 flight." No questions asked. Heave sigh of relief, remind myself to thank brother for Premier Class air miles ticket.

Wait two hours, board flight. Arrive on time in Newark. Exchange remainder of British pounds for greenbacks. Spend moment stunned at how good the rate treats me. Get to car, prepare to tell lot attendant unlikely story of credit cards and convince her to enter numbers manually. Drive to exit booths. Hear "sixty-six dollars," highway robbery. See eighty dollars in wallet. Praise the Lord. Pay parking ticket with cash. Use remainder to fill tank with enough gas to get home.

Arrive at home. Kiss and hug wife and daughter. Go upstairs and put credit cards and driver's license back in wallet. Stash passport. Resolve to add "check wallet and money" to my travelling mantra.

~ emrys

Irish Roots

In order to get to my aunt's funeral last week, I required a new passport. In order to procure a passport for travel in fewer than fourteen days, one must appear in person at a federal passport issue office. The nearest (or fastest) one for us is in Philadelphia. Thus on Monday, May 21st, I took a one-day trip to Philadelphia.

After finishing business at the passport office, I had occasion to chat for a few minutes on the phone. While I did so, I wandered around the intersection of Chestnut and Front streets by the Phila waterfront, and came across a gorgeous little park introduced with this plaque:

 I have not studied to any degree the immigration patterns of the Irish or any other people group. But it appears from this memorial that Penn's Landing in Phila must have been a major point of influx for the Irish. This monument--some ten feet tall and twenty long--artfully combined what must have been a great mix of hope and despair experienced by nineteenth century immigrants to the U.S.

 Next time I have occasion to wander around downtown Phila, I look forward to giving this park a closer look.

~ emrys

Thank You

I
The white type on this hotel door key, an English phrase set off amidst a cloud of similar phrases in many other languages, reads "You're more than welcome." That's the motto of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Baltimore. I'm staying here for three nights for a work conference.

The staff of this hotel have tripped over themselves to accommodate me. Sometimes I think that I ought to expect this from a high-priced hotel set one hundred yards from the Inner Harbor. But then it occurs to me that by virtue of its place on the Inner Harbor, the Hyatt might easily slip into the belief that it can treat its clients however it wants. This staff has clearly not slipped in this regard.

When I asked the front desk clerk to confirm for me that wi-fi was free in the lobby but cost in the rooms, she said, "I'll make it free in your room." And with a few clicks of her Vaio laptop, it was so. When my small group was trying to figure out the best way to get to the other side of the harbor for supper, the concierge called us the free limo service that a local restaurant uses. The "thank you"s and "you're welcome"s have flowed freely from the staff. Although a frequent traveler to this level of accommodation (of which I am not one) might expect it as par for the course, I have been pleasantly surprised by and grateful for the courtesy.

Thank you, Hyatt Regency Baltimore!

~ emrys

The U2 Experience

On 20 July Sara and I went to the long-awaited fulfillment of my 2009 Christmas gift: the U2 360 concert at the Meadowlands. The show, billed to start at 7:00, opened at 7:45 with a mediocre heavy rock/metal band called "Interpol." Then the two-thirds-full arena entertained itself for half an hour while, we presume, the star act made itself ready. Finally, at 9:15, the Irish four took the stage to open with some of the classics from Achtung Baby.

Since the Zoo Station tour of the late '90s, U2 has combined good showmanship with technology and videography at their concerts. Perhaps emboldened by the fact that in an 80,000-person stadium the nosebleed seats can't see a lead singer, U2 has put cameras and oversized screens to good use. They amplify both sound and light to make a larger-than-life impact on the masses. The performance was as stunning as I'd hoped; what surprised and intrigued me was less the band and more the audience.

We used public transit to get to the stadium, which involved standing on the train platform for about an hour waiting for rerouted trains to get in order. As the platform filled up with fans ready for U2 action, I watched the restless throngs. I saw middle-aged couples with wedding bands; I saw college frat boys; I saw Baby Boomers who looked to be enjoying the first fruits of retirement, preppy high school kids, washed-up hippies, and dapper dressed professionals. I even saw a six-year-old girl with black ug-boots, tutu, jacket, and purple streaks in her blonde hair; she could have been a fast-forward version of my own daughter. The U2 age demographic would make most Church congregations jealous. Only skin color was uniform; my rough estimation, from observations made until the lights went down for the main event, is that the crowd was ninety-five percent white, two percent Asian, two percent Latino, and one percent (or less) African-American.

The repertoire for the concert revealed what I saw at the Pop Mart concert in 1998: as a whole, U2 fans connect more with the old classic songs than the new ones. The songs from the early '90s elicited more clapping, dancing, and singing along than those from the last four albums. When the band played I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, all eighty thousand fans were on their feet, singing, clapping, and swaying. All around us were closed eyes, raised hands, and straining voices, anticipating every line and echoing every refrain. Under the night sky, immersed in the amplified beat and soaked in The Edge's aching string-work, I sang along with Bono, lifted my palms to the sky, and wept. Like the ancient clans brought to tears by Gaelic bards, I succumbed to the power of music. And it felt like . . . worship.

Now I know why folks follow bands like U2 across the country for entire tours. They want to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They want to feel larger than life, ecstatic with sound and light so bright they can only come from heaven. They want to be carried out of themselves, if only for a moment, and into something powerful and orchestrated and harmonious and . . . more than human. They want to worship. And the opportunity comes only once very four years at the cost of one hundred dollars a pop.

~ emrys

Jamestown: Life Complicated

Last week David and I rode to Jamestown, one of the other two historic sites near Williamsburg, Virginia. Before last week, if you had quizzed me on early American colonial history, I could have told you that Jamestown was one of the first three English settlements, founded in the early seventeenth century. It's come a long way since then, with motorized fountains, bronze sculptures, and flags from all fifty states at the entrance:

After our tour from the National Park guide, I now remember that Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded by the Virginia Company in 1607.

I remember learning that the first settlers encountered native Americans immediately upon their arrival. The character of those encounters depended both upon the history book one was reading and the person recounting the story. In elementary school we learned to make black paper Pilgrim hats and eat squash given by the native peoples on the first Thanksgiving. In middle school we learned that the threat of attack from the natives meant that every settlement had to have a palisade. This singular part of colonial history was full of ambiguity.

Less ambiguity now: I don't think any native American flags fly over the Jamestown monument.

The first Jamestown settlers chose the location of their landing mostly to avoid the camps of natives and to hide from Spanish vessels in the Chesapeake. They imagined that the most significant obstruction to long-term life in North America would be Spanish competition (which had already founded a colony in St. Augustine, Florida). Boy, were they wrong.

Agriculture jumps to mind as the primary economic engine for the first colonial settlements. But as we found out on our biking tour of the old Jamestown sites, glass-making also brought in some dough for the colonists. According to the placards at this site, English glassblowers could not satisfy the demand for glass in England at the turn of the 1600s. So there was a market for American glass.

We walked around the excavated site of the former glass works, and looked on as craftsmen in period garb showed us how the art is done.

I learned that glass is naturally green because of latent ferrous deposits in the silicate base. In order to make glass clear, one has to add other minerals.

I imagine glass in the 1600s to be like plastic in the late twentieth century: cheaper and easier to make than its forebear, and lighter. We have plastic (better in some ways than metal or glass); the Jamestown settlers had glass (better than pottery).

David and I had a fun National Park guide. I'm amazed at how much adults are like middle-schoolers. Give them a lecture, and they get fidgety and bored. Give them a class in which they might be called on to answer, complete with visual and tactile aids and role-playing, and they pay attention. Here's David, playing the part of a "savage," whom the colonists are asking for corn.

Which brings me back to the original Jamestown settlement. They landed in the middle of a drought, but did not know it because they'd never lived here before. As the fresh water decreased, the brackish water from the river increased, and their wells became salty. Our guide told us that drinking brackish water too long "makes you stupid." As a result, when the settlers needed their wits the most, they were losing them.

Leaders of the colony had been chosen by the Virginia Company, and the names of leaders were not revealed until after they landed--to prevent factions forming on the boat ride over. Thus leadership was not democratic, but appointed. The personalities of some of the leaders did not lend themselves to good relationships with either the natives or the settlers.
The cultural divide between European and native widened when the English discovered that the native women did all the farming, gathering, and tending the home. The men went hunting and went to war. The former male activity especially was a luxury of the nobles in England; English men were expected to work, tend the fields, and build homes. Because of the delegation of tasks in English culture, native men received the stigma of being "lazy" from the get-go. When it came time to ask the natives for help, believing the other culture was inherently slothful could not have made the conversation easier.
The Jamestown settlers' motives for coming to Virginia were not entirely economic. The group had an express intent to spread the faith of the Anglican church to new continents. The colonists had a zeal for the spread of the faith, even if it was more imperialist than the sort of zeal most Christian missionaries share today.
Last week our power went out for forty-two hours. Not only did I discover how much of my life requires electricity, I gained a new appreciation for cultures and times that live without it. The matter of clean water, for instance, that I take for granted as long as we have a water purification system, the Jamestown settlers could not take for granted. Disease that now keep us in bed for a week (until the antibiotics do their job) could wipe out a whole town in 1607.
I remember first learning about the colonists of Jamestown and Plymouth as if their success in America were a foregone conclusion. Since we're here today, there must have been a sort of manifest destiny at work--like SuperBowl champions saying they knew all along they'd win it. I have discovered this view is far from the truth. Not only did the colonists have drought, disease, relations with the natives, and poor leadership working pretty hard against them, they had the looming spectre of financial loss. The Virginia Company was a for-profit firm in London, the shareholders of which expected a return on their investment. If too many years passed without profit, the colonists would be called back home--whether the natives had become Christian or not.

[this photo needs explanation: it's a view of Jamestown ruins through a glass floor in the museum:]

During their second winter, the settlers lost two-thirds of their populace to starvation. The natives were hurting, too, because of the drought, but being natives they had the resources to tough it out. The Virginia Company settlers were in trouble. The next time a ship stopped by Jamestown, all the settlers got on board for London. The Jamestown settlement was over.

[here is a piece of slate, a permenant record of writing and drawings from Jamestown:]

Over, that is, until they ran into the next supply ship sent by the Virginia Company, at the mouth of the James River. The Company had put a new commander in place, and he told the settlers to turn around and get back to work in the colony. With so many variables at work, after all it was one new head honcho and an extra supply ship that kicked the town into feasibility. And the next season the weather improved greatly.
The following year a Virginian variety of tobacco was cultivated from smuggled stock, and the colony had her first cash crop. In the end, what made the colony viable in the long term was neither religious zeal, nor abundant health, nor perfect relations with the natives. The clincher was humanity's long-standing addiction to tobacco products, and the theft of a plant from the Caribbean.
Contrary to the simplified lists of dates at the beginning of your textbooks, history is more complicated that multivariable calculus. One just never knows if or how a new venture will pan out. It might even become the beginning of a new empire. And if you dig deep enough in your history, you might find it much messier than you expected. Your victorious civilization might hinge on international thieves and cancer-causing addictions.

Life is complicated.

~ emrys

Going European

Travelling across the Pond gives one the perspective that things can be different in so many ways. Cars can be smaller. Vacation can be a given. Flushing can be customized. That's right: instead of the unwieldy one-size-fits-all, six-gallons-on-every-flush handle most Americans have on their toilets, Europeans--and, by our experience, especially the Brits--enjoy the option of a "light" flush or a "heavy" flush, depending on what type of product needs to move down the pipes. For most of December and January, our upstairs toilet ran on and off even when we were nowhere near the handle. An old fatigued flapper allowed water to seep through until the tank refilled itself every hour or so. Not only did this sometimes keep us awake at night, it drained our water treatment tanks faster than we'd like. At last I trundled down to the local hardware store to find another flapper. As I perused the shelves for the cheapest option, my eye alighted on a box whose front face announced, "Save Water." That convinced me to pick it up, at which point I noticed the familiar face of a two-button flush handle allowing for different excretory circumstances. Save water, spend less time tending to the chlorine tank, and teach our daughter that less can be more, all in one purchase? Count me in! I brought home and set about installing this complicated contraption in place of the original rubber ring:

Push the small upper button when you only need to incite a stream; push the lower button (marked with two dots for the blind?) when you want to open the sluice all the way.

We've had it in for a month or so now, and it seems to be working well. Even if we're not saving that much water on each flush, the random running has stopped, which makes for quieter nights and fewer trips to the cellar for the chlorine tank.

Thank God for tips from across The Pond!

~ emrys