What are you feeding your head?

What default thoughts run through your brain? Oftentimes its the words from those of importance to you.

And you are that important voice to someone, so choose your words wisely!


64 Encouraging Things to Say to Kids

Electricity

"I can't really explain it/I haven't got the words..."    ~Electricity, from Billy Elliot

Visited Big Frog's dad today.  Learned some interesting things from the surprisingly recent past.  For example, I knew my FIL was born into a farm family that eventually had 14 sibs, but I didn't know that they had a woodstove because they didn't have electricity.

In fact, of all those sibs, only the youngest had power all her life.  Literally they did not get electricity until T was born, in 1947.

1947.

My FIL was 16 years old before he could flick on a light switch at home.

Mind blowing.

So I asked what that changed for them because obviously they had heat and light before that.  The kerosene lamps they could get rid of, but why replace a woodstove?  No surprise, they didn't.

Turns out the first big purchase his parents made for their newly electrified domicile was a refrigerator. 

A.
Refrigerator.

And what did it replace?  Not an icebox.  Why not?  Because they didn't have one of them. 

Prior to 1947 they ate fresh obviously, they canned a lot, and they sugar-cured or salt-cured their meats. 

Because they didn't have a refrigerator.

Because they didn't have electricity.

I'm starting to understand why Big Frog’s dad didn't allow a tv into the house. 

(When Big Frog's mom finally smuggled a tv into the house, Big Frog was 13.  The tv stayed packed up and tableclothed as an "end table" unless they were actively using it, and that was of course only when Big Frog’s dad wasn't at home.)

Longer than

I've now known Big Frog longer than I didn't know him.  I wasn't quite 18 when I started college, and that was 18 years ago.  And due to our physics prof's wife (not that she was there, but she claims responsibility for our marriage), I met Big Frog my first week of classes, in physics lab.  That prof's son, who was our ring bearer in 2001, is coincidentally starting his freshman year at Messiah this week.

Just last Sunday, I was talking to a high school senior who is taking AP physics this term.  I told him that it could change his life.  If I hadn't placed out of freshman physics, or if Big Frog hadn't been activated to serve overseas the year before, delaying his sophomore year, God would have needed entirely other means to bring us together.

Here's to the next 18 & beyond, Big Frog!

Old School

I've been out of school since 2001, when I graduated from Messiah College. (Home of the Falcons! Our football team is undefeated since 1909.)

And I always promised myself I'd go to grad school, that I wouldn't be one of those people who "took a year off" and never went back to school.  And I do occasionally flirt with the idea of getting my terp's license or my MLIS (Master's of Library and Information Science. But so far it hasn't happened.

But every year at back-to-school time (mid August for September start dates, not retail back-to-school time, which means May) I see all the pens and markers and super-cheap single-subject spiral notebooks and it's rare that I don't buy at least SOMEthing.  Usually the impulse limits itself to new markers or notebooks.  But this year it went old-school.

On Main Street Kernersville, there's a lovely little antiques shop, Remember When, where Barbara keeps a pair of hymns CDs by Alan Jackson on infinite repeat.  They don't sell those CDs due to some arcane music-selling law, but she tells not a few people what they are and sends buyers to other retailers to acquire them.  We have a set and sent a set to my mom, too.  I poke around in there and sing make-your-own-alto. And I usually ask a few questions, try on a few hats (Derby hats like you wouldn't believe!), and go on my way.

Today there were some really neat pieces in the store, like a table made of shields.  I thought it'd be neat as a lamp table in our guest bedroom, but it really deserves to stand alone so the detail of the shields can show.  Then we found this beauty.


We'll need to research the maker, Peabody-Stiggleman Co, of North Manchester, Indiana. A quick search revealed that in 1926, they made 30,000 desks for California schools.


It's perfect for a side table or some extra (kid-sized) seating. But I may need a classier lamp than my sleekly-modern florescent-tube desk lamp.

TIL -- airplanes

Before 1914, airplanes barely featured in military thinking. The French air corps, with three dozen planes, was larger than all the other air forces in the world put together. Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan, and Austria all had no more than four planes in their fleets; the United States had just two.

Source: Bill Bryson's book on America, 1927, excerpted at the end of his A Walk in the Woods

You zogged?

After *not* getting hit by the train when we stopped at a light and the gates started coming down towards our tail, GPS flipped out at us.

Me: Is JAARS in a residential area?
Big Frog: I zogged.
Me: You zogged?
Big Frog: It wanted me to zig, but I zogged.
Me: It wasn't a zag?
Big Frog: It was bad.

shawlette - future project?

Fortune's Shawlette