Top Plays of 2015

Last year we brought you the Top 14 of 2014 based off of ESPN's daily Top Ten.  To be honest, and I don't know what this says about me, but my favorite things I look forward to on Friday is SportCenter's Not Top Ten.  This is a blooper reel of sports gone wrong from the past week.  I was going to have a blooper reel from our past year but really all we came up with was highlights.  We have been blessed this year. 

1. Hanging out with each other.  In looking back over this year we have had a lot of highlights but we both agree that we just love hanging out together which is why we have enjoyed many of the other things on this list.  

2. New computer.  I have been putting off getting a new computer as long as I could.  We finally caved and got a new laptop which has been great (besides trying to figure out how to run Windows 10).  In this instant information age it is nice to be able to get information instantly instead of waiting 5 or 10 minutes for a page to load.

3. San Diego and screen printer.  As you may recall, Arthur had the wonderful opportunity to go to San Diego through his company to review screen printers.  While there, he got the opportunity to see the large navy ships that had been on his bucket list, as well as the legendary Midway.

4. Increased involvement in church.  We are continuing to mentor in youth group but have gotten more involved in church which overall has been positive.  Arthur is on several committees.  I play in the bell choir and help with the community garden.  We also joined a new Bible study.

5. Hiking.  We have walked a lot of miles across the state this year.  Some through Kansas “cedar forests”, prairies, and back country dirt roads.  We fought blisters, bug bites, and sunburns.  We enjoyed scenery not out a window speeding by but spreading out before our feet to really experience it.  

6. Tall Grass Prairie (here and here).  This is currently our favorite place to hike in the state through the rolling Flint Hills.  We have wandered through cattle and bison herds.  There are miles and miles of trails and there were places that we couldn’t see anything that was man-made on the horizon.  Also afterwards we always eat at Ad Astra which is one of our new favorite restaurants.  

7. Hut to hut hike.  This would probably be our top highlight.  We went on an 8 day backpacking trip to the high mountain huts throughout New Hampshire’s White Mountains.  We saw and experienced some iconic hikes such as the Presidential Range to Mount Washington and Falling Water trail up to the Franconia Ridge.  We learned the basics of backpacking, discovered what our bodies could handle physically, and met some great people that we hiked with for a week.  Frequently Arthur would tell me, “This trip is awesome”, and it was an experience of a lifetime for us.

8. Boston.  We flew in and out of Boston on our trip to the Northeast.  We had great Italian food, lobster bisque, and Boston cream pie.  We navigated airports, bus stations, and the subway.  We walked through history seeing landmarks such as Paul Revere’s house, the USS Constitution, and the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill.  We also figured out how to understand people who disregard the letter R.  

9. Triathlon.  This is becoming a tradition for us to finish out our summer is the Salty Dog triathlon.  This year we both took home medals in our age groups and improved our times from the previous year.  We also enjoyed training for the most part (Arthur still doesn’t like running) throughout the summer with pool workouts and bike rides.  

10. Business skills- Arthur has really enjoyed acquiring new skills to apply at work.  This year, he got fairly proficient in Visual Basic and has been reviewing his old statistics textbook to apply automated statistical methods to some of the controls in the processes on which he works.  It has truly opened up a new exciting world to him.  In the new year, he hopes to increase his prowess with the Python programming language, which has a little more ability to get things "talking" to each other, and he's extremely excited about all the cool things he has dreamed up for work.

11. Getting a tent.  Over this year we have basically doubled our outdoor equipment with our new tent as a major purchase.  I love the idea of the freedom to stay wherever we want in the great outdoors.  I know that in real life camping may not be as wonderful as I imagine but I am excited for camping in 2016 (Maybe our camping forays will provide stories for a blooper reel next year)

12. Educational or thought-provoking TVshows/internet videos. As we have mentioned before we could be classified as educational junkies.  We love learning, watching, doing, or experiencing new things.  The internet brings these opportunities to our finger tips and let's us explore the world.  The past few evenings "we" have been trying to survive on Vancouver Island through Alone or touring Madrid, Spain while watching Rick Steve's Europe.

13. Half Marathon.  I'm trying to decide if this was a highlight.  I have love/hate memories of running this race.  I loved running through the Flint Hills, downtown Manhattan, and K-State's campus.  The course was beautiful.  I hated about every step past mile 10 and the last few hills.  Some days I loved training for this race and other days I hated running endless laps around the track for tempo miles. 

14. Trying new things.  On a few occasions we went past watching new experiences on TV and tried them ourselves.  Arthur now shaves with a safety razor.  I'm learning to paint with watercolors.  In the kitchen I experimented with Swedish pancakes.  Arthur is trying new workouts.  We both learned a lot about backpacking. 

15. St. Louis Art museum.  The St. Louis Art museum made quite the impression an Arthur and he talks about it frequently.  He was most impressed by the older pieces that could almost be in a history museum such as furniture. 

So there are our Top Plays of 2015.  It's always fun to look back over the memories of the past year but also some excitement over what is going to make our list in the year to come.  Happy New Year! Omnia Vincit Amor.

The Best of 2015

As we close out 2015 this week we thought our posts would focus on recapping the year.  It's hard to imagine but we will have posted 80 times in the past year.  Obviously we have too much time on our hands since our lives aren't that exciting.  Therefore the next two post will be a CliffNotes version of the year.  This post is about our best posts from a writing and journalistic perspective.  Later in the week we will publish the highlights of the year.  Arthur is all about efficiency so readers can read two posts to get a snapshot of what we did or were thinking about in the past year.

Each year Pulitzer prizes are award for journalism and literature split into several different categories.  Here are our "Pulitzers" for the year.

Feature Reporting:  An American Story.   In this post we take a look back about how our lives and our families' history and future has been shaped by immigration. 

Political Satire: Executive Authority.  This post was an exploration of the roles of a husband and wife in a marriage compared to the Presidential Cabinet.

Best Use of Photography:  This is My Father's World.  A classic hymn set to pictures depicting the beauty of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

Investigative Journalism into Marriage: Titans Clashing, Harmoniously. We explored how our different Myers-Briggs personalities interact in our marriage, for better or for worse.

Best Beat Reporting:  Dress Rehearsal.  The majority of our posts chronicle our day to day activities and we picked this as the best.  The use of alliteration such as "bovine beasts" used in this post helped push it over the top. 

We are also experimenting with increasing our interaction with those who read the blog by encouraging commenting.  I think we have it set up to allow comments now (hopefully).  We would also like to do a Reader's Choice for the year so comment below to vote for your favorite blog of 2015.  It could be one of those listed above or anything else we have written this year (Using the archive links on the right hand column may be helpful).  Omnia Vincit Amor.

Christmas Letter/ Year in Review

Greetings Family and Friends,

Merry Christmas!  I hope this blessed season finds you all happy, healthy, and merry as we again reflect on God's wondrous gift to the world.

Truly, this has been a blessed year full of fun.  Much has stayed the same since last year; we are both still enjoying the same jobs with Alex making the lame awesome as a physical therapist and Arthur fighting the never ending battle with inefficient processes and, this year especially, a particularly cantankerous board defluxer.  Arthur has been given more responsibility with health and environmental management; Alex is already trusted with the quality of life of her patients so they didn't feel the need to add to her load.

As we did last year, outdoor activities have been a source of great joy; the triathlon (in which Alex won in her age division) and bike ride we went on last year are quickly becoming beloved annual traditions.  We also spent a fair amount of time hiking in preparation for a wonderful backpacking trip we were blessed to make with the Appalachian Mountain Club through the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  This trip was definitely a major highlight of the year, and one which for many years hence we will remember with great fondness.

Along with the New Hampshire trip, a major highlight of the year was going with Alex's family up to Nebraska for a weekend.  There we got to go with our niece for the first time to the Omaha Zoo, walk around the forested areas near Arbor Lodge in Nebraska City, play in the leaves, spend time with family, and eat some of the most amazing smoked salmon imaginable.  

The year has seen many changes as well.  Alex, while maintaining her love of gardening, has also taken up watercolor painting while Arthur is working to improve his computer programming proficiency.  Friends marrying and moving has caused our social circle to change significantly, yet we still enjoy our friendships with many people in the area.  We both continue to mentor youth kids through our church, and Arthur has continued to become more active in church governance.

2015 has true been a year full of fun, growth, and love.  We look back on it fondly while simultaneously looking forward to wonders in store for us in the new year.  As always, we thank all our family and friends for your enriching involvement in our lives, your continued support, and love.  You are all in our thoughts and prayers, and we love you all.

Merry Christmas!
 Arthur and Alex

Christmas Dilemma

During lunch at work this week I was quietly studying TIME magazine's article on the 2015 person of the year about Angela Merkel when my boss comes in and asks my thoughts on an important dilemma:  In the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer what is the echo to the last line, You'll go down in history?  Instantly I knew it was "like the dinosaurs" as I have a knack for random, useless trivia.  He looked at me like I had gone off the deep end.  "Like the dinosaurs? That's not even close, it's Paul Revere.  But someone else is telling me it is either George Washington or Christopher Columbus.  I just can't remember which," he replied.  This puzzled me.  How can there be so many answers that people are so certain of.

Of course whenever I face dilemmas such as this as a good wife I make sure to get my husband's opinion-- "It's George Washington, of course."  Now it was on to Google to find the truth.  My first Google search might have been a little bias since I included "dinosaurs" in the keyword but it came up with a couple of hits.  After watching several version on YouTube, George Washington seemed to be more popular.  Arthur tried to do an ngram search which looks for phrases in books an ranks how frequently they are used each year-- pretty scientific, but it didn't come up with any hits.

We found a few articles suggesting that different parts of the country use different echoes for the song.  Pulling back from info learned during my Research Methods class in grad school (this is probably the only time I have ever put to use anything I learned in this class) I decided to develop a retrospective cohort study.  A retrospective cohort study is when a group of individuals that have a particular trait in common are followed over time to determine an outcome.  Therefore my best cohort would be those who were taught and raised in the same environment so I called my brothers to get their opinions. 

To my surprise my younger brother answered George Washington.  Where in the world did he learn this and how did we know different words to the same song?  I then called my older brother who is very reliable with knowing anything that "might go down in history" since he is a history teacher.  He was a solid supporter of the dinosaurs. We then discussed what caused this difference among our cohort, ie why the youngest brother sings the wrong words.  We discovered that we both had the same elementary music teacher who taught us this song but this teacher retired by the time our young brother was in school.  My older brother is teaching his 3 year old daughter that Rudolph will go down in history like the dinosaurs for the following reasons:

1. Santa and Rudolph don't get old and were around before George Washington but couldn't have possibly been around before the dinosaurs.  (Editor's note:  Christmas creates some weird time space continuum issues such as Rudolph being ageless as his story first appeared in the Montgomery Ward cataolauge in 1939 and then was set to music.  Gene Autry didn't make it a #1 on the charts song until 1949.)

2. He wants to raise his daughter with a global perspectivje and not too American-centric.  It is not very globally minded to think that history only focuses on key American figures like George Washington or Paul Revere.

Arthur here; Alex asked me to provide a counterpoint in favor of George Washington.  First off, Santa is an American cultural icon; the Germans have a separate character named  Weihnachtsman (“Christmas Man”), the Russians have Ded Moroz (“Grandfather Frost”), and the English have Father Christmas.  These are not native names for the same icon, these figures have their own dress, mannerisms, and background story.  This simple point of information is important in refuting Alex's two arguments.

For the first, being an American construct (perhaps more accurately a Coca-Cola construct) I don't think it's too much  of a stretch to put his origin story in a post Industrial Revolution time frame.  I mean, come on, elves might be handy, but there has to be some industrial know how going on there to explain the claimed levels of productivity.

To her second point, as we have already seen, any song featuring Santa Claus is going to be inherently American-centric, so we might as well recognize one of our greatest Founding Fathers.  For the record, Washington ranks sixth in Time's most significant historical figures.  I'll admit, number two on the list (Napolean) has a name that also works well with the syllabic pattern needed for the song, but Washington is a solid choice.

Anyway, petty disputes like these, which we both like to win, are really no barrier to the marital bliss we both enjoy.  Even in the correct wording to a Christmas song, Omnia Vincit Amor.

Busy as Elves

It has been a busy weekend around our home getting ready for Christmas.  One of our biggest projects has been trying to finish up Christmas cards to send out.  This year I decided to paint watercolors for each of the Christmas cards.  I have no idea what I was thinking at the time but I realize now that was probably a little too ambitious.  If you happen to get a Christmas card from us those are limited edition cards.  If you don't, we apologize but my painting momentum ran out and you can read the blog Christmas letter and know that we wish your family a merry Christmas and a happy new year.  In addition to Christmas cards to family and friends I also had my 8th grade girls that I mentor make cards for older members of the church.  We had a lot of fun with project and it was fun to see their creativity.  Then I spent a few evenings finding addresses for all of those cards.  While I like to be more of a traditionalist I can see how sending a virtual Christmas greeting is rather appealing.

Saturday was spent in the kitchen making goodies for Christmas gifts.  We also had a few friends over in the evening for a get-together so I prepared extra food for this.  It was double batch day-- double batches of granola, wheat rolls, and two different types of soup. While I was cooking Arthur was being SuperHusband with his ability to leap large piles of laundry in a single bound, a powerful washer of dishes, and always fast to respond to his wife's many requests including whipping up the family Christmas letter in no time at all.

Another one of my projects was literally being one of Santa's elves.  On Friday one of my coworkers shared this story about her 5 year old:  Last summer they visited Santa's workshop in Colorado Springs on vacation and her daughter asked Santa for a spork and a miniature stuffed Pike's Peak.  They have no idea why she asked for these things.  Fast forward to this Christmas season and they have visited Santa and wrote letters to Santa without any mention of the spork or Pike's Peak and thought she had forgotten.  Then she brings home her letter to Santa from school...asking for a spork and a miniature stuffed Pike's Peak.  Her mom tried to explain that Santa may not be able to find these things anywhere.  The daughter's response was, "Mom, that doesn't matter.  Santa has elves that can make anything."  Her mom wasn't quite sure what to do when she related this to us at work.  I volunteered to be an elf and was able to sew a stuffed Pike's Peak or something that can hopefully be pulled off as Pike's Peak.  It was fun to dust off the sewing machine and get creative with just an idea and no pattern to follow.  While we have been as busy as elves around here it has also been a lot of fun preparing for the Christmas season.  Amid the business and flurry of activities we have also tried to prepare our hearts for the true reason of the season-- the coming of Christ the Lord.  Omnia Vincit Amor.

The Night Sky

Note to Reader: As a writer it is a lot of fun to use Calvin and Hobbs comics and Biblical references all at once.  There are a few videos of some length that would be worth watching when time is available.

We frequently write about how much we enjoy being out in nature.  However, especially over the last century the link between nature and our daily lives as a society has gotten weaker.  We live indoors, we play indoors, often we work indoors, and we even travel for the most part indoors with cars.  Now I’m not saying this is a bad thing.  In fact at this moment I am very grateful for this fact as I am snuggled indoors relaxing on the couch while looking out on the world covered with snow and ice with a chilling temperature in the low 20s.   However in some ways as we become more indoor oriented our world gets smaller since we interact less with nature and don’t understand it as well.  I don’t have the skills to track or trap any animals.  I can’t predict the weather by looking at the clouds.  I can’t look out across the landscape and have any idea where I might find a water source- unless I see a water tower on the horizon.  Lately I have been thinking specifically how we have lost touch with the night sky.  Actually in many areas you can’t even see the stars due to light pollution.  

This past fall Arthur and I sat out on our front porch and watched the lunar eclipse and blood moon.  Of course we had read on the internet about what day the eclipse would occur and when would be the best time to view it.  Sitting there watching I did wonder how I would react to this eclipse if I lived long ago when people didn’t predict eclipses or even know how they occurred.  These people might have even slept out under the night sky all the time and all of a sudden the moon is disappearing and is deep red.  I can see how this would be unnerving and frightening.  Frankly today most of us wouldn’t even notice unless we specifically go out to look for some wander in the sky.  

Continuing with this thought of how times have changed, think about navigation.  Explorers used to rely on the stars to orient and direct them to foreign lands.  Of course the stars are only visible at night so during the day they would just hope they were continuing on the correct course.  Can we even imagine that?  Our navigation now relies on satellites in the sky instead of stars.  GPS systems that recalculate instantaneously any time of the day.   GPS navigates within a few feet of the destination.  Stars point in a general direction, usually pointing towards north, and the rest was up to the explorer.  

Another example is time.  Our cellphones clocks are all controlled by radio waves throughout the sky.  Time is also measurable down to atomic levels.  In the past the seasons and months were measured by the appearance of different constellations appearing in the night sky.  

Besides using constellations as a calendar they also served as entertainment.  I have recently been listening to an audiobook about astronomy discussing the planets and stars and the historical links to mythology and folklore.  Ancient people watched these stories and myths play out across the night sky, retelling these stories for generations. In listening to this audiobook, I realized that I can only identify 2 constellations—the Big Dipper and Orion.  There are countless stars in the expansive night sky I know nothing about.  

While I don’t know much about the constellations I do enjoy the wonders of the night sky.  Many years I have gotten up at midnight or early morning to watch the Palisades meteor shower. A meteor shower is a different form of entertainment.  Your eyes are straining watching for flashes of light streaking across the darkness and your neck starts to spasm with constantly looking upwards.  If watching it with someone else it can get discouraging when they say, “Oh there’s one.  Did you see that?  There’s another.” While at the same time you are always just milliseconds too late.  While I was in South Africa there was a gentleman from Australia with another missions team.  He was an amateur astronomer and living in the southern hemisphere he was familiar with those constellations and pointed a few out.  Of course the most recognizable was the Southern Cross.  One evening we were staying at a house in the middle of nowhere, right along the edge of a wildlife park so it was pitched dark and we hung out on the balcony admiring the brilliance of the stars—thousands of them with the Southern Cross as the most prominent.  It is also on my bucket list to see the Northern Lights.  I thought surely during 3 months of living in Alaska I would have that opportunity.  Alas it was poor planning to go during the summer when the sun doesn’t set.  However during the end of the summer it did get dark enough to so some stargazing.  We didn’t see the Northern Lights but once again I will never forget stargazing on the beach with the moon reflecting off the Pacific Ocean.   

Through each of these experiences the night sky was clearly proclaiming God’s glory.  Looking at the night sky we can either feel insignificant like Calvin or be in wonder at the majesty of God and marvel that the God of the Universe wants to have a personal relationship with us.  In Psalms 8:3-4 the psalmist has these same thoughts:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 

 what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

David remarks later in Psalm 19:1, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."  The following video is a favorite of mine that highlights how nature, especially stars declare God's glory audibly even though we are not aware of it.   

 

God also uses a star also to have an important role in the story of Christ's birth.  The star of Bethlehem signaled the Magi of the upcoming event and guided them to worship the Christ-child.  The following video ties information about prophesy and the constellations to the star of Bethlehem.  While I am not a biblical scholar or an astronomer I love the idea that God wrote this story in the night sky before setting the universe in motion-- What a mighty God we serve.  Omnia Vincit Amor.