visited 20 states (40%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or vertaling nederlands duits?
visited 10 countries (4.44%)
Create your own visited map of The World or Best time to visit Nakano
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I have some private projects that I keep returning to. On of my favorites is the map of my campaign city. The City of Tallon was envisioned to be your basic Edgar Rice Burroughs-style Big-City-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Wilderness. This is an inherently insupportable fantasy, yet it occurs in much early fantasy and pulp sci fi. A great deal of my campaign world’s economy, ecology, and magic system was created specifically to make this type of city possible. But that’s the subject of another post. Today I would like to show how the city evolved graphically. Pretty pictures follow the cut. We build world views like we build houses: brick by brick (or opinion by opinion), over the course of time. We use pieces that match and fit well together. If we are a good builder, our house is comfortable and strong. A debate is like trying to convince someone their house is built poorly. The more fundamental the debate, the closer you get to the foundation of the house. The big debates are all about foundations. No one wants to tear down their entire strong, comfortable house because the first course of bricks is drawing criticism. It is a phenomenal amount of work, requires destruction of something you love, and leaves you without shelter in the interim. Hence, people rationalize the work they have put in, saying yes, there might be flaws, but it is otherwise strong and serviceable. In fact, it is a well-constructed as any house out there. Better, in fact, because it suits them. Other people’s houses are strange and uncomfortable, so where is the impetus for change? So a couple of things have come together to produce some moments of nostalgic fun. First, I saw the new Star Trek movie. I’m not blind to the plot holes and other difficulties, but it was extremely fun. On the way out of the theater, Susan mentions she wouldn’t mind watching some of the original series again. Second, we upgraded our cable and it came with a DVR and on-screen programming. Tooling about I see that TOS is playing at 1 in the morning. Normally, I would never know, but now it’s easy to just say, “record the series for me, please”. So the upshot is, I’ve been watching the new enhanced versions of the original series. The space effects have been re-shot with modern technology. This adds just enough “gee whiz” factor to offset the problem that I pretty much have the original episodes memorized. I’m leaving each viewing with a nice, little-kid-watching-Star-Trek-again-for-the-first-time buzz. Very satisfying. So I had a very fruitful meeting with my Religious Education Committee (i.e. “George”). We need to come up with some budget proposals in the wake of the recent church upheaval. Our minister has left for greener pastures (I can’t blame him). And our student attendance is so low that most week-ends, only my own daughter is present. We are bleeding off members left and right. This is a retirement area, so families with children are hard enough to come by. When they come to a church that is struggling with internal issues, it can be like Kryptonite. So, I need to justify my position as Director of Religious Education for next year. The only certain thing is that business as usual won’t cut it. With the Minister gone, I am the highest-paid staff member (which still isn’t saying much). Cutting R.E. is not really an option. If the church wants to attract and keep young members, an R.E. program is essential. But they can’t continue to put money into it at the current attendance rate. So after a lot of brainstorming, the best that we could come up with was for me to voluntarily cut my hours in half, and used pre-generated curriculum. This is tough because I currently write about half my lesson plans (to tailor them for our kid and fellowship demographic) and I am extremely frugal. I rarely use even half the materials budget. Normal curriculum calls for more art projects, field trips, etc. Stuff that costs money. So I’d have to ask for more for supplies. Also, I would require the church to throw more money into program promotion. If I’m going to cut my time, I want the church to put some dollars into advertising. Then Susan came up with a brilliant idea. Currently, my time is pretty much divided between administration and execution. My first proposal was basically cutting the administration top end (using pre-written curriculum, or re-running previously created custom curriculum). Susan said, “Half your volunteers walk away saying that they never knew half the stuff you were teaching. Why not set aside one Sunday out of the month to run an R.E. class in the Fellowship Hall, in place of a normal service?” Without a regular minister, the board must now fill each Sunday with a guest speaker, and the fees mount up, as well as the difficulty in finding quality speakers. I have a number of lesson plans that could be presented to all ages that would probably be well-received. The church would continue to pay me as normal, but now they have one less speaker to hire per month, and the R.E. program gains greater visibility within the Fellowship. Win-win. I’m really excited (and nervous) about this. I hope the Board goes for it.
The Barbershop Harmony Society has a collection of 12 standards that are collectively called the BarberPole Cat tunes. In theory, if you are a BHS member from a Swedish chapter, you could visit a chapter in Japan and be able to sing any of these songs with the local members. I say in theory, because each member is encouraged to qualify on these tunes, but it is not required. So far I have only qualified on three. Usually we are so busy preparing for this show or that performance, that the Pole Cat tunes are usually a low priority. Now that the annual show is done with, we are going to concentrate on these for about a month. It is my fervent hope that after this month, I will have qualified on the other nine and be entitled to proudly wear this pin. Well, after a year or so on Live Journal, I’m back to WordPress. I have had my own hosting for some time, but hadn’t really looked into what WordPress can do when you’re not using an account at wordpress.com. It’s pretty nifty. The editor is far more seamless; it’s a jillion times more customizable, and who knows, maybe I’ll do a podcast some day. I’m not leaving Livejournal though. I’m using the cross-posting plugin, so I’ve got the best of both worlds. Come leave a comment over at the new site, so I can make sure my spam filter doesn’t catch any false positives. I just got an invitation from a friend to go play ping pong with him this afternoon at the Senior Center. The saddest part is, I’ll probably go. It's done! When I was 20 years old or so, a friend came over to my house and asked me to go rock climbing with him. I had never done anything remotely like this, but it sounded like fun. We drove out to a quarry in Snelling, California, and after about 15 minutes of instruction and safety tips, we were on our way up. There were many times when I was hanging on to things by fingertips or even fingernails. The stress and excitement were extreme. The euphoric feeling I achieved when I got to the top was all worth it though. Once atop the quarry, it was a gently stroll through a forest path to get back down to the foot. Today is the stroll through the forest. The show is done and it was a rousing success. Yes there were a few problems, but by and large they were the sort that are not apparent to an audience—things like one person out of the whole chorus flubbing a lyric, or the whole chorus slowly dropping a full tone throughout the course of the song. And some mistakes were more apparent. But most of it was fantastic. I received enough compliments on the scripted part of the show to keep me blushing for months. Bud and I really clicked as a comedic duo. Bud brought the audience to hysterics with Spike Jones' "Man on the Flying Trapeze" routine. After the show, at the afterglow, the guest quartet gave us a bonus performance, which rocked. They are the Gold Medal champions for the Evergreen DIstrict (which includes Washington, Idaho, Alaska, British Columbia and more). They also ran a game called Polecat Tag. Polecat tunes are the 14 standards that are common to all chapters of the Barbershop Harmony Society. If he has qualified on them, a member from a Swiss chapter can sing with a Japanese chapter. In Polecat Tag, a quartet starts a polecat song. Then anyone can tag any member of the quartet in mid-song and take over that part. We were rotating parts like crazy; the more advanced members even tagging into alternate parts (A bass singing tenor, for instance). It was a blast. Well, it's the morning of the annual show. I always get very nervous at times like these. Not stage fright, I've never had that. I'm just mentally assaulted with all of the things that can possibly go wrong. I love doing the annual show, but I think, even more than that, I love having just done the annual show even more. |
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