End of an Era

While completing my degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, I served as the middle school youth leader at St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Chatsworth, California. I learned a great deal about my own gifts for ministry and calling during those two years. For instance, I learned that while I can engage youth with gusto and joy I do not gain sustenance from the work as I do from teaching and leading adults. In spite of the fact that I am probably not called to full-time youth ministry anytime in the near future, I enjoyed the ministry there and the youth who were in my care.

Upon my departure, the other youth leader helped my kids to make a gift for me. Here it is, a velvet color-in image of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane:

Stephanie, Kristina, Holly, Erik . . . not to mention Michael, Chris, Jackie, Tina, Scratch, and several others whose names escape me eight years later: Thank you!

~ emrys

New Dishwasher

What better way to celebrate Good Friday than to bring greater cleanliness to our home? In observance of this holiday, before the evening worship service, I got on my knees and installed a new dishwasher.

Here is the red curtain covering the opening from the former dishwasher. When it bit the bullet during installation of the new kitchen floor, we decided to get a new one. Note the dishes in the sink awaiting hand washing, and the drying rack taking up a copious amount of counter space:

 After six hours of work . . . Yes, I said "six hours." Note that for much of the project I had the assistance of my very helpful three-year-old daughter. Note also that because the new flooring brought the floor level up almost three-quarters of an inch, the counter's edge required some carving out to make the new appliance fit. Plus there was trim work to finish, and the added fact that this was the first dishwasher I have installed new. So what probably takes a professional installation crew less than an hour took me about six.

No worries: it's done. Here is our new Frigidaire Gallery washer. You can see the black Floor Saver water spill tray poking out from under the front edge. This simple device sheds any leaking water out to the front, so that leaks are immediately discernible and need not destroy the flooring underneath.

~ emrys

Wrong of Passage: Film Review

This afternoon I saw the film The Hunger Games, the latest in the young-adult genre of films. I, like most fans I think, was attracted by the dark futuristic premise of a battle-to-the-death.

From the beginning, the film moves quickly. It's an edge-of-your-seat action flick, well composed to deliver conflict, tension, and surprise at every turn. The cinematography animates the tension well except for the choice to use so much shaky-camera technique. There are sequences in the film which leave the viewer almost seasick. I suppose, however, that much of the choice to film in this way was to reduce the otherwise R-rated violent content to a PG-13 rating. The cut-away and blurring shots reduced the amount of explicit violence on the screen.

More attractive and troubling about the film are ingrained attributes of the story's world. From the beginning we know that a small group of lower class adolescents must compete to survive an ordeal manufactured by a wealthy and powerful upper class. Within the group of adolescents are the favored and the underdogs. This stratifiction resonates with the underdog-loving bias of American viewers: young, untested naivete against older, trained experts. As the film progresses, however, we find that the conflict goes deeper than the knives and arrows the youth sling at each other.

The underlying social conflict of The Hunger Games is generational. Every adult character is evil, impotent, or simply blind to the atrocity of the Games. Katniss, our heroine, has a mother who is unable to care properly for her two daughters. (Her father has been dead for a long time.) The adults of the Capitol are either so evil (as we suspect about the President) or so blinded by their opulence as to be of no help to the cause of oppressed districts and "tributes." The so-called mentor of Katniss and Peeta, the retired victor of the Hunger Games, though at times wise in the ways of the Games, is a surly drunk. Only the training consultant, Cinna, seems to desire the best for the teens; but even his concern is limited to the absurd context of the homicidal game show. To sum it up: adults are not to be trusted.

The rite of passage is as old as human culture. Innumerable stories from time immemorial relate the tales of youth becoming adults. This aspect of The Hunger Games makes the film viscerally compelling. Say what you like about the acting, the cinematography, or the animation; the central theme of kids becoming adults--the hard way--will rivet every viewer. As it should! This theme speaks to a central truth of all humanity: the world is a cruel place, filled with evil, difficult choices, and unintended consequences.

But we must not miss the subtle change in The Hunger Games, as in other recent works such as Riordan's Olympians cycle and Lemony Snicket's Unfortunate Events. Whereas traditional rite-of-passage stories have focused on children battling for their wisdom against nature, a singular enemy, or  ignorance, The Hunger Games has made adults the enemy. Those who have passed through to adulthood (or have the money to avoid such passage) are the evil with which the youth must come to terms.

Every fantasy story is, on some level, prophecy about the present day. We must ask whether this shift in the rite-of-passage motif is true about our age. (Some researchers and demographers believe this to be accurate, i.e. Chap Clark.) Adolescents, the generational invention of the past century, have been left on their own to navigate the world, challenged or rejected by adults. If this shift has not actually taken place, then we--especially parents and educators--must take note of how media like The Hunger Games will shape, and therefore predict, the personal stories of the adolescents in our lives. If this shift has taken place already, then we--especially parents and educators, I say again--have ground to reclaim by establishing rites of passage that support our worldview and entering into the lives of adolescents as allies.

My Christian worldview encourages me to engage youth and be present with them as they journey to adulthood. I do not imagine that this journey will ever be simple, formulaic, or easy. But if they are to trust that the Lord is working in every stage of our lives, the passage to adulthood must be midwifed by those on the other side of the transition. We adults have the duty to see that the gifts of God in the lives of adolescents--like the compassion of Katniss that drives this film--are identified and encouraged, rather than exploited or squashed. At the end of the film, we can see Katniss' new tension--and perhaps a film sequel--forming: the world congratulates her for coming through the Games alive; but the cost may be her own sense of virtue and compassion. Put in other terms: Will her soul endure through what her body survived?

Or work is not over after our own rites of passage. By turning back to help others through, we have the task of ensuring that the world of Katniss Everdeen stays forever fiction.

~ emrys

Finishing the Green Room

I rarely get projects done. Wait--that sounds bad, or lazy . . . but it's true. My projects usually fall victim to Zeno's paradox: as they approach completion, the parts of the project left to do get smaller and smaller; I have less motivation to get going on these small details; so the smallest, last details take forever to finish. Since they won't take long, I figure I'll get around to them eventually.

But this week we (for I cannot take sole credit for this one) have outsmarted Zeno's tortoise and outshot his bow. We have finished the Green Room.

Let me remind you of what the Junk Room-cum-Candle Room-cum-Green Room looked like as we prepared to put new flooring in, first before painting:

Then after painting, before complete junk removal:

One of the most visually atrocious elements of the Green Room was the door. All the doors in our house seem to have been reclaimed from industrial accident sites, but this one may have been through flood, earthquake, and industrial demolition before our homebuilder repurposed it:

I, however, am blessed to have two expert door refinishers in my life. One is handy with a power belt sander, and the other is good at looking stylish while brushing away sawdust:

With floor installed, trim finished, and TV hung, we're ready for playtime, Netflix, and Pandora galore:

 Thanks to the Amalfitanos for helping us keep up the tradition of red velvet couches (we got one from the Stanleys in Pasadena):

 I hope you noticed two photos up that the doorway lacked a door. After three rounds of Polyvinyl acrylic, the industrial rescue has a shiny new surface that we hope will stay lustrous until the cockroaches are extinct.

And at last I get to declare the Green Room complete!

Well, except for replacing an end cap on one of the radiators. But that's a small thing. I'll get around to it eventually.

~emrys

Trial and Error

Right about here is where I made the worst mistake one can make while installing laminate flooring:

But before my confession: some introduction. Here's what the floor of our addition looked like when we got it back from the construction workers. Note the sea-green tile on the right, the sickly color that had darkened our kitchen for the last five years.

 To put in new flooring, the subfloor must be level. The cost of concrete leveler was prohibitive, so I chose to install strips of wood to bring the new section up to level.

 One of the persistent challenges of this project was all the nooks and crannies that had to be taken care of. The coat closet needed carpet to come up and leveling strips placed. I discovered in this phase that the carpet in the closet was contiguous with the carpet in the room behind it. Apparently our hobbyist homebuilder completed the kitchen and adjacent room before deciding he needed to install a closet. Typical.

 Before I forget: Thanks to Russ for the use of his hammer drill, which made this method of leveling possible.

 Speaking of nooks and crannies, the botched repair of a termite-demolished floor left a soft spot that needed shoring up and leveling:


The first step in putting down flooring is removing as much furniture as possible. Here's our living room with a kitchen dumped into it:

Laminate flooring is a genius invention. Tongue and groove planks press together and lock in place. Most of the planks' thickness is fiberboard--a bunch of wood dust pressed into a solid board. A thin veneer of aluminum-impregnated stuff is glued to the top surface. The top surface is waterproof, as is the whole surface of the floor as long as the planks are snapped together tightly.

 

Flooring bought, concrete leveled, sea-green tile definitively out of style, and we're ready to give the kitchen a face lift.

 

Since our first floor was built right on the slab, we needed a 6-mil moisture barrier under the new flooring. Here's the soon-to-be mud room with the first few courses of new floor over the blue moisture barrier.

 

Sara and Gwendolyn supervised the project. Gwendolyn learned the definitions of "long," "medium," and "short" as she carried planks to Jay and me. Just out the window you can see the back of Jay's car. Without Jay, I would have botched the job--even more than I did.

 

The smell of blue polyvinyl and duct tape meant that the new floor was coming. It didn't come quite as quickly as our in-house expert thought, however. We thought six hours would see the job done. But here we are, ready to start the main section, and it's already dark outside.

 

Even before we started the main section of the kitchen, we could get a feel for how the whole thing would look. Here's a glance at the new-and-improved mud room floor:

 Here's an example of what I would have done wrong. Jay directed me to finish the floor between the pantry and the living room, in order to keep the remaining courses straight.

With that section done, we could run flooring from the window to the refrigerator, moving course by course toward the sink. Doesn't it look beautiful, even only halfway done?

Which brings us back to this point:

In order to install flooring under the dishwasher, we pulled out the appliance--oh, but let's do one more load of dishes before we lose the convenience, right? When we did that last load of dishes, the machine leaked onto the floor. I sopped up water from that sea-green tile and saw that it had seeped under the moisture barrier. (That's all right--that's why the barrier is there . . . heh, heh.) What I hadn't seen was how the water had slipped between the moisture barrier and the last three courses of flooring.

Ignorant of the future, we finished the rest of the kitchen area. How sweet does this look?

We moved the furniture back in, set up the kitchen appliances (except the dishwasher), and started our daily routine. Forty-eight hours later, the corners of twelve planks began to lift up, making ridges and bumps smack in the center of the kitchen. I went through all the stages of grief ("Aaaaargh!" "No, it's just an optical illusion." "Maybe if I just press down hard enough on this corner . . ." *sigh* "I'm going to have to replace this floor.")

Two weeks later, when I had finally accepted that the fiberboard of ten square feet of planks had irreversibly absorbed that errant water, I stayed up past midnight replacing the floor. In order to replace ten square feet, I had to tear up forty or fifty, since the floor must be picked up and laid down one course at a time. While Sara slept upstairs, I dealt with this:

 To my dismay, I learned that the waterproofing glue worked really well. It took a hammer to get some planks to separate. Ironically, this glue is meant to keep water out--from the top surface, not the bottom. But now that I was putting the floor in for the second time, I felt like an expert. This time I made sure that the floor was bone-dry under every plank. And the kitchen was finally, really, floored.

Before moving into the next room, I began the trim around the kitchen. With the shoe in place, it actually looks like a pro did the job.

 Then there was the Junk Room. Well, that name is not entirely apropos. It has been Sara's Candle Room for a couple of years. We haven't been able to decide quite what to do with it over the long run, so it got the nickname The Wonky Room. Right before we floored it, Sara painted it green. This was the last change before its rebirth into bamboo glory, so we now call it The Green Room.

 Last Friday, I cut and locked in this thin little plank, the Last Plank:

Now, with only six hours and about one hundred dollars invested in correcting a basic mistake, we've got a fully functional kitchen and Green Room. All that's left is some trim and re-hanging a couple of doors.

 Many thanks to Jay for helping us make the dream kitchen floor come true. We're looking forward to the day when we can replace the carpet in our living room with another style of laminate flooring. And we're planning on getting a dishwasher tray, which will show it as soon as the appliance begins to leak.

~ emrys

What's Gonna Happen Next?

I now have three years' experience in reading children's books to my daughter. Some of them my daughter chooses night after night for their cadence and cuteness (such as Gossie by Olivier Dunrea). Some of them I think my daughter chooses because she senses that I think they're important to read (such as A Children's Bible).

A select few I choose whenever I get the chance.

Through the blessing of a multi-county interlibrary loan system, we had Adam Rex's Tree Ring Circus for about six weeks. Rex's brilliant focal point (a single tree) in which a fantastical menagerie comes to roost (including two tigers, three chipmunks, and a runaway clown named Pogo) provides the content for an expert piece of poetry. Tree Ring Circus sets the poem against a backdrop of illustrations that remind me of Tim Burton's works. Its off-kilter realism delivers to the eyes what a Moroccan tajine does to the palate: succulent satisfaction with layers of exotic spice.

The best part: the poetry and the illustrations together bring the story to a climax (when the elephant climbs the tree) which causes my daughter to ask in a gleeful voice, every time, "What's gonna happen next?"

Would you like to find out?

Adam Rex, Tree Ring Circus. You'll want to be three again.

~ emrys

Understanding the Basics

Today we were blessed with a gorgeous spring day with temperatures in the upper 50s and low 60s, the sun was shining and all thoughts of winter were a mere memory as we looked excitedly towards spring.  I was doubly blessed that the Favorite Sitter wanted to come play and took on the task of running Gwen around in the back yard.  They played hard for over two hours and Gwen was pretty worn out by the time they came in and we were getting ready to take the Favorite Sitter home.  Gwen was near tears a the thought of Favorite Sitter having to leave.  I pulled Gwen into my lap for a moment before we left.

"Gwen", I said, "are you tired?"
"No."  Ok, I really didn't expect for my active three-year-old to admit she was tired.
"Are you lying to us?" Favorite Sitter asked.
"No." Gwen replied.
"Are you sure?" Favorite Sitter continued
"No." So we're in the answer "no" to everything point, ok.
"Gwendolyn," I asked gently, "do you know what lying is?"
"Bad." she matter-of-factly answered.

Fear

"We'll schedule you for a CT scan."

The words were no surprise. I knew a CT scan was the next step in the differential diagnosis of my inflamed sinuses. After one round of antibiotics and a trial period of antihistamines, we decided that an image of the problem spots was in order. The easy, straightforward procedure made sense.

Yet something devoid of logic crept up on my soul during the drive to the hospital: fear.

The last time someone in my household had a CT scan, it was part of treatment for cancer. So my heart, in the strange way the human spirit makes irrational associations, chained the specter of cancer to the words "CT scan." After seven years and an official declaration of "cured," the ghost remains.

Before I could get a handle on the outpouring of my soul, I saw images of my daughter growing up without a daddy, a house full of unfinished projects, and a wife for whom no amount of insurance money would replace a life. I imagined the call from a physician asked to do the read of a routine scan who found something ominous: "We need you to come in immediately."

Then I remembered how much I knew, and how much I didn't know, and I let the "what ifs" drift off into God's oblivion. Half an hour later I spent two minutes inside the whirring ring of the scanner which compiled the computed tomography of my sinus cavities. Seven days later I sat in my doctor's office listening to the reading of "mildly inflamed sinuses" and figuring out the next step.

Another round of antibiotics for me. And another moment when the future trumped fear.

~ emrys

Look Who's 3 - and some Gwendolysms

Decked out in her princess skirts and birthday bling, Gwendolyn had a great birthday with family and friends.  Most days she will now tell you she's "twee" and hold up the corresponding fingers.  But there are some days when she'll tell  you she's four, or seven or ten.  We promptly correct her and ask her to slow down!  Her favorite movie these days is Cars - "I like the red car!"

He speech seemed to pick up at an amazing rate in the last few weeks and she is quite the little chatter box.  Since most of children's speech is picked up from conversations around them, here's a little peek into our world through Gwen quotes:

"Mommy, I gettin' too big for my pants"

G: "Mommy I need medicine, I sick"
Me: "You can't go play with K if you're sick"
G: "Mommy, I all better now!"

Regarding a package that came in the mail: "It for me!  It my birthday". Um, nope, its car parts.  Nice try though.

After taking the laundry out of the dryer for me: "I a big hepper".  Yes, yes you are!

"Mommy, I take a nap. Now I need a wowwipop".  (Exchange the w's for l's for a full translation - and I was so glad to get the nap too that I was happy to indulge her with a wowwipop!)

Life is full, and Gwendolyn is a great joy.  Happy 3 Years to my Baby Girl!

Two More Years In The Life Of

our home. Here are the highlights from the journal of our house in the last twenty-four months:

Garden shed painted green and brown. It matches the house, if you don't put the two too close together.
Installed a new railing on the stairs.
Went European on our toilet.
Reinforced the wall on the pellet shed, so we wouldn't have a mid-winter avalanche of pellets on the back porch.
Repaired french drain on rear end of house.
Bedroom closet renovation completed, and bedroom repainted. Looks fabulous.
Removed window in upstairs bathroom in order to accommodate new medicine cabinet and mirror. I don't have to lean over to shave in the mirror anymore. Huzzah!
Contractors push out front wall on first floor, adding eighty-eight square feet of new interior (kitchen table and mud room).
Stained new exterior surface with a color that might eventually go on the rest of the house.
Replaced a leaky kitchen faucet with a new one bought on the cheap after someone returned it without a non-essential part.
Added shed roof on front of house to keep storm water from leaking in the new wall.

First project for 2012: new floor in the kitchen!

~ emrys