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I finally got to read a book on vacation. And it was a long one so that was all I was able to have time for on vacation this year.

First and only book: “Impyrium” by Henry H. Neff.

It was good.

I could leave it at that, I suppose, but that’s not why you come here.

When I started it, I didn’t know if I would be able to get into it and make it all the way through. There’s a girl whose family has magic powers and they rule the kingdom and there are dragons and it all seemed so typical that I thought I’d lose interest. But I didn’t.

It was a lot of the standard middle-grade sci-fi/fantasy elements, just about all of them I think. But what I liked about it was what it didn’t have: no romance, no gore, no swearing. I’d recommend it for grades 6 and up.

Not that it was squeaky clean. There was one quasi-bad word that appeared two or three times. And of course there is violence – can’t be fighting bad guys without fighting – but like I said it’s not gory. And there is good magic and bad magic, for what that’s worth.

It was an engaging story, good characters, plot twists, and all that. Makes me want to go read book two, but I am not fluent in French. And that leads me to the main detraction to this book: the ending.

It does not have, as Rick Riordan says, a strong ending. That means it left a lot up in the air – the story felt incomplete at the end. It needs a book two, but alas, we English speakers do not get book two.

While I wait for book two, I just might read his Tapestry series.

The other detraction is that there is no pronunciation guide for the protagonist’s name: Faeregine. I had to watch the trailer for the book in order to get the pronunciation, but I didn’t do that until after I had finished the book, so I spent much of my time in the book trying to guess how it should sound. It’s “FAIR-uh-jeen” but with a completely soft J, so more like “FAIR-uh-zheen”. It’s hard to write an English pronunciation, since we don’t have a G sound that starts soft. Think of it as a French word and you’ll get it. Or just listen to the trailer yourself.

We were at an Independence Day concert. It wasn’t billed as such – it was to be just a normal concert of a gospel quartet. But it was on the 4th of July weekend so it turned into a celebration of America.

It was fine, but then they sang “Proud to be an American”. The song is fine, but it’s what the audience does with it that annoys me. We had been sitting comfortably throughout the concert. But as we approached the line “and I gladly stand up next to you” I knew that the audience would stand up at that line and peer pressure would compel me to stand.

Sure enough, right on cue at the word “up”, about a quarter of the audience (mostly the people near the front) stood up. The pressure of patriotism spread throughout the audience and eventually all the sections were standing for the remainder of the song. It’s not like the lyrics tell people to stand up, or any of the singers said to stand if we like America. There was no one standing and defending America at that point, so there was no one next to whom we could stand. But people stood anyway. Then the song was over and we all sat back down like we were doing before. I considered it a 7th-inning stretch.

At least the people who stood did it on purpose. That’s better than when there’s a performance of “America the Beautiful” some time before the national anthem at a sporting event and people just automatically stand because they don’t realize it’s not the national anthem.

But the best/worst part of the concert was yet to come.

After that song, there were more patriotic things, like the anthems for each branch of the military, and recognizing veterans in the audience, and so on. And then, since it was a gospel concert, they finished up with the Hallelujah Chorus to remind us that praise belongs to God and not our government or military.

I’m a fan of the Hallelujah Chorus, especially when it is performed as originally written. But I did not like the use of this song in this situation.

Why not?

Because people stand up for it.

We had just recently gotten back into our seats after standing for a Lee Greenwood lyric, and now the Hallelujah Chorus?

People didn’t want to stand, but it takes only a few people near the front, and then everyone else reluctantly gives in and stands.

It was annoying to have to stand back up, but the amusing part is the reason why.

Why do people stand for the Hallelujah Chorus?

Because the king of England did.

A long time ago.

My line of thinking went like this: we are celebrating Independence Day here, and America and stuff – our independence from England, so we wouldn’t be under their rule anymore, which means we don’t care what their monarchy does. So why are we honoring something the king did a long time ago, especially for an American celebration? Let’s exercise our independence from British rule and remain seated for the song.

I’m just glad it was something simple like standing. What if the king had sneezed during the performance of the Hallelujah Chorus? Or done a cartwheel? I’ll be glad when the standing tradition dies out, but since it’s been over 150 years and still going, I doubt I’ll ever see it end.

This post is a repeat – I’m phoning it in today because I’m getting ready to enjoy the holiday.

Happy Birthday

A M E R I C AA M E R I C AA M E R I C A!

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these are tweets.

• Rice is never good the second time around. It is one of the few things that do not make acceptable leftovers, like fresh breadsticks. My wife disagrees, because one can make fried rice out of it. But if you’re doing that much cooking then it’s not leftovers.
• Does anyone actually use those tiny plastic domes on the lids of soft drinks at restaurants? You know, the ones that say regular, diet, and other. And one more category. I know what they’re for, but I’ve never seen them used for their intended purpose. Usually it’s just a child who’s trying to annoy his sibling by pressing his (plastic lid) buttons.
• I’ve seen enough people spit into drinking fountains that I always let the water run for a couple seconds before I take a drink. An ounce of prevention…
• I don’t need Loctite to keep the bolts in place on my vehicles. After a short time on these Michigan roads there’s enough rust to prevent them from turning. They actually salt the roads year-round.
• What is the plural of “cyclops”? What would a cyclop be?

Gamma, having just read the school lunch flyer : When it says ‘reduced lunch’, do you get less food or just a lower price?

Gamma : Delta punched me…
Me : Delta!
Gamma : …last year sometime.

Delta : I’m mad! I need a 2-minute break.
Me : Ok, go ahead.
Delta : Good, I get to break things for 2 minutes.
Me : Oh no you don’t.

The Scene: We are in a hotel with a pool.
Child, having just read an older comic strip that didn’t make much sense to him : What’s a bikini?
Me : A girl’s swimsuit.
Some Wife, remembering an earlier trip in an elevator when a family with girls was headed to the pool and certain boys didn’t know how to conduct themselves: And what do you do if you see a girl in a swimsuit? Do you laugh? Or stare? Or point?
Other Child : No, you run away screaming.
All Children : AAAAAAAAAHHH!

And of course they were waving their hands over their heads and pretending to run.

Delta, stomping very madly across the floor
Me : What’s the matter?
Delta: He looked at me while I was going potty.
Gamma: The door was open, I didn’t know.
Me : Shut the door then.
Delta: But I want it open!
Me : Well then, don’t get mad if people look in.

Having replaced our minivan’s struts, I thought it wouldn’t be much of a problem to help my brother-in-law replace his struts. Or rather, his minivan’s struts.

Even though I knew what to do and how to do it, it still took about 2 hours per side. The main culprit is the sway bar link bolt. If you have any vehicle whose sway bar link design includes using an allen wrench to hold the bolt still while you turn the nut with a normal wrench, replace it as soon as possible.

Looking back, I think it would have been worth it to get a 3/16″ hex head socket for my wrench, rather than trying to use an allen wrench. As it is, I lost another 3/16″ allen wrench. I have about 3 sets of allen wrenches, you know the plastic organizer with 8-12 allen wrenches lined up. And they are all missing only the 3/16″ size. I would love to be able to buy a 5-pack of 3/16″ allen wrenches. But all I can do is buy another full pack of all the sizes, because no one sells normal allen wrenches of just one size.

Technically speaking, I didn’t lose my last 3/16″ allen wrench. I have it, but I can’t use it anymore. Before starting the project, the allen wrench looked normal, with a ball-type thingy on the long end and a standard end on the short side.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Notice the ball-end has been snapped off. It’s stuck inside the sway bar link bolt. That was after the first problem:

I had to switch to the long end because the short end was too far gone. It ended up rounding itself off, but that’s after it twisted at least 100 degrees around. That bolt did not want to give up, and it was stronger than the allen wrench.

After running out of allen wrench, my only option was to grind the bolt off. That was slow going. I really need to get a cutoff wheel for my angle grinder, rather than just a grinding wheel. And it heated up the bolt so much the ball joint on the other end of the bolt fell apart. The ball joint of the sway bar link, not the wheel hub ball joint. That would have been bad.

After spending a while grinding off the bolt but getting only about 1/3 of the way through, I thought I’d try again because the grinding was taking forever. This time I clamped some vice grips onto the other end of the bolt (the stock link is perfectly round, so you can’t get a good grip on that end – except the grinding gave it a nice big flat spot). The nut certainly wasn’t freely spinning, but I could turn it. I think the intense heat is what broke it free. If I had realized that earlier, I could have saved myself some time.

After all that, I had a new sway bar link to put on but no allen wrench to keep the bolt from spinning. I was so glad to see the aftermarket part did away with that design and the bolt can be held in check by a hex shape on the ball-joint end. No allen wrenches needed.

It took us two days to do the job, because they gave my brother-in-law one strut that was correct and one that was backwards. At least he thought to compare the new strut to the old before we took the old one off. So the first day we replaced the one strut we had, and then he went and got the backwards strut replaced, and he came back the next weekend.

All’s well that ends well.

Sticking with the theme of last week’s post about having a plan for how you child will learn how to navigate the internet, I’m posting this week about what we did with introducing phones.

It seems a lot of kids are getting phones while in elementary school. I remember a few years back, my brother-in-law was telling us how his 6th-grade daughter was complaining to him how she was the only one in her class without a phone. He thought she was being dramatic, so at the parent-teacher conferences, he asked one of the teachers if that was true. The teacher answered that yes, the daughter was the only one without a phone.

Now, just wanting to fit in with the crowd is not necessarily a good reason to get something.

We tried to wait as long as possible before getting a phone for our kids. The oldest got his first phone in 8th grade because there were a number of things he was involved in after school that he needed to call or text us when he was done and needed to be picked up at the school. Back when I was in school, I used the pay phone in the lobby to call home collect for things like that. But since there are no pay phones anymore, we decided to go ahead with the phone.

We certainly didn’t buy him a phone, as that’s a waste of money. We just went to the phone store and got a SIM card for one of our old phones that would have netted us only $30 if we traded it in when getting our new phones.

I had been looking for a cheap flip phone as a sort of learner’s permit – one that could call and text but no internet. All the flip phone still came with web browsers, so those weren’t safe. We settled on the old iPhone, which has the convenient feature of being able to disable the browser (and other features if you want). He doesn’t have the passcode to enable the browser, and he doesn’t have his own iTunes account, so we will let him search the app store for games and apps, but he has to have one of us install it. There’s a lot more flexibility on the iPhone regarding parental controls than on a flip phone.

Plus, one of the things we didn’t foresee when we got him a phone in 8th grade is that the high school classes are setup assuming the students have certain apps on their phones. I’m sure the teachers would have made arrangements if we had said he doesn’t have a phone and can’t do what you assigned. But it makes the kid’s life easier just having that there, and not being annoyed that he has to go to the teacher to get special arrangements.

Beta got his phone is 7th grade. I was trying to wait until 8th grade like we did for his brother, but with kids at the elementary, middle, and high school, our schedules were a little more packed than they were when Alpha was in middle school. He had to borrow a phone to call us to get picked up and by that time we were familiar enough with the limits we could put on the phone so it wasn’t as big a step. Gamma and Delta still have to wait until middle school activities keep them after school though, before we get phones for them.