Monday 26 January 2015

Music Mondays: Editors, The Sting

So, Editors. Easily makes my top ten bands list, which I should probably blog sometime! If you love slaughteringly good vocals and ominous moods with a side of excellent poetry, do yourself a solid and listen, listen, listen to this band. Anyways, it's really nice when a band you love releases an album and you are on the ball enough to catch it at the time of release, but I'm totally not on the ball with these things anymore. So I get the next best thing, which is finding out about a new release way way later?

If you listen to this song and like it (i.e. you are sane), here's another of my favourites, Bricks and Mortar.

Sunday 25 January 2015

Changing Your Mind

"The beginning of a New Year is an an excellent time to try something new. As you make your list of resolutions and goals I want to recommend adding a simple four step process that could transform your life by, quite literally, changing your mind."

So begins a little post by Joe Carter on the Gospel Coalition blog which I recommend reading in it's entirety, not least for this quote by James M. Gray: "I saw something in his Christian life to which I was a comparative stranger—peace, a rest, a joy, a kind of spiritual poise I knew little about." Like, spiritual poise? I love old-fashioned Christians.*
However, if you're pressed for time, here is the method for changing your mind:
"1. Choose a book of the Bible.
2. Read it in its entirety.
3. Repeat step #2 twenty times.
4. Repeat this process for all books of the Bible."

I have been working my slow, sporadic way through the Bible for the last four years or so, and am currently in Luke. I struggle with slowing down to meditate or muse on the text-- as a reader I read to kill: fast and ruthless with zero patience for reading extraneous details, often taking in whole pages at a glance or two. This is a great method for breezing through fiction but it isn't a great method for mining the depths and riches of Scripture. I have been so appreciating already my second read-through of Luke; there are so many insights I missed, questions I didn't even think to ask, and details that slipped through my speed-reading fingers the first time around. It's a little early to say whether my mind has been changed, but I'm looking forward to continuing this journey.


*This is from his 1904 book How To Master The English Bible , available in a $0.99 Kindle edition. Linked through my Amazon Affiliates account.

Friday 2 January 2015

Science: Simple Machines


Back at it for the New Year! Here's what we did today:

-Looked at a picture of the six types of simple machines: wedge, pulley, wheels and axle, lever, inclined plane, and screw.
-Talked about how simple machines make work easier for us. I briefly summed up what each machine does in simple terms.
-Hunted around the house for things we could use to build some examples of simple machines, built them, and tested them out.
-Watched this video of a Rube Goldberg machine using all the simple machines. Scout Kid was fascinated; we watched it over and over and he attempted to replicate it with our machines.

I was glad we got to this topic as Scout Kid has a growing obessession with making pulleys, and this will only expand his scope. I'd like to revisit this topic, and maybe build our own simple-machines Rube Goldberg machine.