Chicago

We're headed out to Chicago this afternoon for Amanda's cousin's wedding. We are looking most forward to seeing Gregg and Allison and Shube. Shube has been in Champaign, Illinois for work. Usually we see her at least once a week, so it will be good to reconnect. We haven't seen G&A since Thanksgiving. The only bad part is that we are leaving Matty with Amanda's dad and Joni. We'll miss him. We just didn't think that he could make the six hour car ride there and back. Ben and Caleb will be fine as long as they can watch some videos on the way down, but Matty would make it hard for everyone. I am sure we'll have some fun stories when we get back. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Bunkhouse

Last night I spent almost three hours putting together the five crates of bunk bed parts that Roadway Express dropped off at our house yesterday. We put the boys in front of the babysitter, I mean TV and I went to work. Benjamin could not wipe the grin off his face when we surprised them around 9:45 pm. He has been talking about a bunk bed since he saw the one at the Arendt's house.

As we went to bed, I said to Amanda, "Now we are pretty much set up for five kids. If we had another boy, we'd just throw him in the bottom bunk. If we had another girl, we could put her in the other room." I think we're probably done after this one, but I like to goad Amanda.

Is there room for discourse?

I have considered myself a Republican for a long time? I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with labels though. My aforementioned friend Jared Friesen recently sent me a couple of articles. I would normally push things like this to the back burner, but they were by two of my favorite authors, David James Duncan and Rick Bass. I finished the DJD article today. It was all about the right-wing's sequestering of the Christian faith. In other words, if you are a Christian in America, you have to be a republican who believes in whatever James Dobson (he doesn't use his name at all) and everyone else in Colorado Springs tells you to.

When I was an RD at Calvin College we had many long talks about politics. It is where I first began to think that Christian didn't necessarily equal Republican. I met people there who loved Jesus and voted for other parties. They were great talks. We have continued these talks over e-mail.

For discussion starters, here are some of the questions that roll through my mind after reading a great article like this.

1. If you're a Democrat what do you do with the abortion issue? Can you vote for a part that supports the killing of babies?
2. Okay, so abortion is not the only "life" issue. What do Republicans do with "the least of these"? The poor, the alien, the outcast?
3. If you're a Democrat, obviously the government is not going to solve social problems, right? I guess at least Dems are addressing them, even if it might seem misguided. Is error better than indifference?
   
4. What about things like the environment, health care, affordable housing, education, war, peace, religious freedom?
5. Its cool to be a Democrat. I want to stay pretty clear of things that are cool.
6. Is there room for discourse in either party? People like Joe Lieberman are almost shot by the Dems and people with differing views are branded "unpatriotic" or "liberal" by the right.

What do you think?

What am I dreaming about?

Most of my dreams are pretty tame (again self-protection). I dream about things like going home to Amanda's pot roast that I smelled at lunch, someday going back on lala, watching my kids grow up, not disappointing my family, having a job that I like to go to every morning. Sometimes though, often on my way to or from work, my mind wanders to an unsafe place: a place of BIG dreams.

Yesterday I was home sick. In the morning Amanda took Matthew for a walk and I played Legos with the boys. We had lunch together. During nap time, Benjamin and I went to the hardware store and to Toys R Us to get sand for the sand box. It was a great day. It was hard too. I lost my temper a few times, but I felt very present with my family. Amanda and I have often talked about what it would take for me to have more days like this-for me to be home with the family more. This is what my dream would be.

• Move to the country. We love being outside. Our souls are more comfortable when we are out in the sun or the cold. I feel more myself when I am doing work outside-gardening, shoveling, mowing, building. We feel like it would be a good thing for the boys to have some room to grow and run and learn outside.
• Find some means of support. I'm not thinking of sending out letters to you to ask for money. Don't worry. I would like to find a job where I could work four 10 hour days or work part-time or something like that. This would allow us to have a huge garden, cut our own wood for heat, maybe even have some animals (chickens, maybe a goat.) We wouldn't need to make much money. Amanda figures if we had a house that was paid for (that's the clincher) we would need to make about $10,000-20,000 a year.

We have gone so far as to checking books out of the library upon such subjects as self-sustainability, homesteading, and gardening. The thing that I love about this dream is that it would be one of the hardest things that I would have ever done. For it to be a good and realistic dream, it must take a lot of work. This one fits the bill. My friend Jared Friesen, who lives in a shack in Belize, has challenged us to follow this dream. I love him and his wife and their willingness to follow a dream.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for allowing me to share my dreams. I'll keep writing about them. I'd love to read any comments that you might have.

Dreams--A new blog topic

In my never ending pursuit of interesting blog fodder, I have been thinking lately about sharing some of my dreams. Not the dreams that I have at night, rather the dreams I have at midday, wide awake. This is scary, because as Springsteen says, "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?" How many of use have shared something that we are thinking about, a job we'd like to have, a life-change that we'd like to make, a goal we'd like to reach, just to have it not happen. We feel foolish, ashamed, thwarted.

When I was 18-26 or 27, I was full of dreams (see picture at right.) All I could do was dream. Now that I am 30, I have entered the slough of reality. I have been turned down for more jobs than I've gotten; I've disappointed myself at every turn and those that I love even more; I've lost people that I love . . . All of this has led to an aversion to dreams and dreaming. Self-protection? Of course.

I am blessed though. My dreams have not all come true. God has granted me dreams that I never had. I always dreamed of being married to my best friend. God gave me Amanda. I vaguely had dreams of being a father, but they weren't paramount. God has shown me that this is where dreams come true. The three boys that He has given me daily challenge me, shape me, bowl me over and make me grateful.

As I begin to share some of my dreams (I will do another post after this introduction), please post comments about your dreams. It is a risk. Yes, but maybe we can love each other more as we come to celebrate the dreams come true and lament the ones dashed.

Do you have Showtime?

Most of you probably don't have Showtime. I mean, why would you? Who wants to spend more money on the "idiot box". Well, if you do for some reason have Showtime or if you are thinking of getting it, now is the time.

Starting tomorrow night my favorite radio show of all time This American Life (see earlier post) is beginning a TV show. It is Thursday, 10:30 pm ET on Showtime. I would love to see this. Brad and Gregg both sent me this video link to one of the stories that they are going to be doing. You should definitely check it out. This is quintessential TAL. Whenever they do a radio show there are always these great moments in the show that are so dramatic. It will be very interesting to see how they do this on TV. I heard a few weeks ago a great interview that Terri Gross did with Ira Glass the show's host. You can listen to it here. You could also download the Fresh Air podcast. It was the February 26 episode.

If you can watch, do. If you can't watch, listen.

"The War" by Ken Burns

This morning before work I was listening to the NPR show Fresh Air on podcast. This morning they were talking to the documentarian Ken Burns. He is famous for his such works as JAZZ, Baseball and most notably, The Civil War. (You probably watched at least parts of The Civil War in your American history course in high school.) He is also famous for his visual effects. If you have a Mac you're familiar with his zooming and panning of a still photo. He has recently completed a new documentary on World War II entitled The War. The PBS series will not premier until September, but they had him on Fresh Air this morning because of the somewhat controversial nature of the series.

I'll touch on the controversy, but first I think this will definitely be a "must see" for any history buff. Burns focuses on four American towns and how the towns dealt with the war. The towns include Mobile, Ala.; Sacramento, Calif.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Luverne, Minn. He said they tried to get an eastern town, a Southern town and a western town. Then they needed a small town in middle America. This is the most interesting thing about the documentary. Instead of focusing on a generalist view of World War II, which Burns admits, has been overdone, he decided to look into how the war affected individual people in individual towns across America. It will be a seven part, 14 hour series on PBS. Look for it. You can listen to the interview here.

On to the controversy. The controversy, as I understood it, was twofold.
1) There are no scholarly historians involved in the film. The film focuses on real people who had experiences during the war, either on the front lines or here at home. This seems very paltry to me. Burns said that he wanted to know how it felt to be involved in the war. He didn't care about the leaders or the strategies.

2) The film contains 3 obscene words. (Yes, that one.) All three of these expletives comes in context. They played the clips on the show today. In one, a soldier gives a first person account of a battle and in his emotion, lets out an F-word. The other two are references by the narrator to ways that GI's described messed up bureaucracies. FUBAR was one of these references.

Both of these seem like paltry items. Burns idea was not to make a scholarly work. It was to make a feel piece. Second, war is hell. You don't have to watch the news from Iraq long to have that cemented. If the F-word is used in its description, then it seems well placed. I can't wait to see at least a little of this documentary.