Some Blog Site

No, I didn’t misspell the name of the guy from South Africa. I’m just providing a mandala of the name “Nelson”.

But, so that those of you who were hoping to see a picture of Nelson Mandela are not disappointed, here is a Nelson Mandela Mandala

And I expect that some others of you are hoping to see a picture of the other famous Nelson.

That’s right – it’s a Willie Nelson Mandala. Not to be confused with a Willie Nelson Mandela mandala, that’s below. And Willie Nelson Mandela has to have been the answer to Wheel of Fortune for the category Before and After. If not, I will be disappointed.

That’s all the combinations of Nelsons I could think of for now. Real Nelsons, not cartoons.

I don’t know where else things are forged, but people like to add unnecessary words so the standard phrase is “forged in fire”. Maybe one could forge something in lava?

Anyway, Gamma didn’t quite know what he wanted for his birthday, so we bought him an experience. The experience of blacksmithing. And it comes with something tangible, not just pictures and memories.

He got to choose from a small variety of objects to make. He chose the rail spike dagger. That is a double-sided knife made from a railroad spike.

We showed up shortly before our appointed time. After signing the waivers and getting our safety equipment (goggles for those who don’t wear glasses), we went into the forge room. Not sure if it had an official name, so I just call it the forge room. Only people who have signed waivers are allowed in there, but it has walls of plexiglas so anyone can watch.

There were a couple of anvils and furnaces.

The worker guy was giving instructions and helping with stuff. For kids, he probably did 2/3 of the work; for the one adult there (not me, I was just spectating) the worker guy probably did 1/3 the work. Because the adult male could hit the metal hard enough to get it into the necessary shape, but the kids didn’t have quite enough oomph. They made progress, but they needed more help. They’d do their stuff, then the worker guy would “touch it up” with some extra strikes of the hammer.

The first step is to make the handle a little more decorative. Apparently the best way to do that is just to twist it – clamp the bottom in a vise and spin the top a few times. They had a specially-modified wrench for that.

The next step is to smack the blade portion into thinner shape.

There were a few iterations of this step – pound it a bunch of times while it’s glowing hot, when it starts to cool down put it back in the fire, repeat.

The worker guy’s job was to hold the item securely, and move it around to ensure even coverage of the hitting. Gamma’s job (and the other people who also purchased similar experiences) was to keep hitting, and aiming for the same spot on the anvil. The key was not to aim for a spot on the dagger, because the guy was moving it so you’d hit difference spots all over the dagger. He said some people had trouble aiming at not the dagger.

Then, Gamma’s final step, once the dagger was the approximate right shape and thickness, was to put the dagger into water to cool it off and temper it.

This step was not as dramatic as I had hoped. There was some steam and a slight hiss, but I wanted lots of steam and noise.

That was it for Gamma’s efforts. They handed him the dagger for a few minutes while they organized some things, then they took it back and said come back in an hour.

Not sure how it works with real blacksmithing, but for tourist blacksmithing they have you get the item close to what it should be, then they take it in the back room and grind it to be what it actually should be. That’s what takes an hour after you finish – grinding, sharpening, and polishing the knife.

What we did was go out to eat (late lunch), then we came back to the forge and picked up the finished product. As a bonus you get a leather sheath to hold and protect your dagger, and also protect your fingers.

Here is how it ended up:

It turned out nicely I thought. The edges weren’t that sharp, but the point could certainly do some damage.

I read some books this winter. Here they are, along with what I thought of them.

First up: The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase by Wendy Mass

This is, of course, the next book after The Candymakers. If you liked The Candymakers, you’ll like this book too. More of the same characters, as they continue with their lives. The ending was decent enough, but left plenty of room for another book to follow. If you didn’t read The Candymakers, then do not read this book – it won’t make much sense. Good book.

Next up: The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

I read the Secret Keepers book first, so my expectations were high. Plus my wife really liked Mysterious Benedict Socety, so my expectations were high. It was a good book, appropriate for all ages. A nice mixture of suspense and intrigue. But I still like Secret Keepers better.

Next up: The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey by Trenton Lee Stewart

I liked this one better than the original book. A little more adventure and action. Two thumbs up.

Finally: Lost and Found by Orson Scott Card

This could have been a good book. But Card always seems to put just enough inappropriateness in his books that I can’t just recommend them outright. In this case, the activities of the bad guys are bad enough that I don’t want to describe it in this website. As usual, OSC is a good writer and the premise is interesting and the story is gripping. But overall the content is not for kids. Or teens. Or some adults either.

That’s it for the winter reading. Spring reading will be coming soon.

Somewhere along the way, the idea caught on (whether via romance novels or Hollywood or other) that there is one person in this world whom you were meant to marry. It does make for a good romance story – finding your one true love.

But I disagree that’s how the world works.

And I think that idea is bad for marriage.

First of all, if your chance of finding the right spouse was really 1 in a few billion, just about no one would ever have a good marriage. Those are horrible odds.

Second of all, throughout 99.2% of history, people have not had the luxury of searching the world for their one true love. So their search for love was confined to their local area. Again, what are the odds that your one true love would happen to be from your town, or the next town over? Yet people have successful marriages in this situation.

You may say “well, they had to make those marriages work, because they didn’t really have much of a choice.” And that’s the point, whether you have much of a choice or not, you have to make your marriage work. The problem with spouse-finding today is that people are not so much contrained by geography, so the wider-cast net brings so many choices, and that brings anxiety about making the right choice, and easy regret about making the wrong choice. Look up “the paradox of choice” for more on that effect.

And lastly, the reason it is bad – it puts people in the wrong mindset about marriage. If someone is looking for his one true love, let’s assume he finds someone and marries her. Then, because they are two different people and nothing is ever perfect, they start to have a disagreement after a little while. Things get rocky, and because he is of the understanding that his soulmate is supposed to be out there, he gets to thinking that this woman he married must not really be his soulmate. Therefore, he thinks he must have married the wrong person, and then the marriage really falls apart.

If he’s expecting there is one person meant for him, what will he do when the relationship starts to get rocky? Lament that “I thought she was the one…” Well, if you married her, then she was the one. Is the one. Make it work.

Successful marriage isn’t about finding the perfect match, but about being a good spouse. Most people throughout history didn’t get too much of a choice of a spouse, but still had good marriages because they got out of it what they put into it. And they didn’t expect to be a perfect match.

Don’t get me wrong – I still think you could make a wrong choice about someone. Just because there is not a 1:1 soulmate ratio out there doesn’t mean that just anyone would be a good spouse for you.

Think of it like the lesson from Ratatouille: not that everyone can be a good spouse for you, but that a good spouse can be from anywhere. Or maybe not exactly like that, but you get the idea.

Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a church that fills out pew-by-pew attendance forms, but a decade or two ago it was not uncommon for certain churches to keep an attedance registry in each pew.

In part of the service (usually during the announcements), the congregation would be instructed to have the person on the end of the pew take the attendance sheet, fill out their info, and pass it to the next person. Then the ushers would collect them all and in theory someone would look at them later. Usually that person would be the church secretary.

On some occasions, I would visit my brother’s church. No, he didn’t own it, it was the church he attended. I had to make sure I sat upstream of him so I got the attendance form first. Because if he got it first, he would fill out his information correctly but then also fill out my information.

Now if you can’t picture the church attendance registry form in your head, you need to picture that there is a line for name and address and phone number, and then there are checkboxes for things like “I am a visitor” and “I would like more information about the church” and “Please contact me about church membership” and various other options. All of which my brother would mark for me.

In this case, we both knew the church secretary (one of my other brothers), so I knew it would go nowhere. But he would also do the same thing in other churches, so I had to be on my guard – check the pew for an attendance book, grab it first or sit between him and the book.

Other times, if relatives weren’t visiting the church, my brother would make up names for the people in his pew. He’d get the number right, so the church attendance figures would not be off, but instead of his name he’d put Clark Kent, or Ronald Reagan, or Barry Sanders, or whatever. Just to provide some amusement to the church secretary during a probably otherwise dreary task.

What was fun was when my one brother forgot to tell my other brother that he wouldn’t be working in the church office that week. Then the backup secretary would have to sort through the attendance records and have to figure out why they didn’t notice Clint Eastwood was in the congregation that week.