Bryce Moore's Blog, page 171

A Brief Update on Sugar, Diet, and Exercise

It’s been a while since I made myself accountable for how my health goals are going, and since I’m a believe that accountability increases performance, I’m here to correct that today.

Most times in the past, when I’ve stopped giving these updates, it’s because I’ve stopped really paying attention to my weight (and have thus started gaining it back). This time, the reason I’ve stopped posting is that it’s not really noteworthy to me at the moment. I’m actually at 187 as of this morning, a total of 30.8 pounds lost since I started the diet again back in January. I pushed hard to get below 195 (and become technically “normal” according to BMI), but since then, I’ve just been focused on staying below that and pushing for some more loss if possible.

I think the biggest difference is that this time, coupled with my exercise goals and my decision to trim most processed sugar out of my diet, I don’t view this as a temporary thing. I am not going to put the weight back on, because I don’t want to do the things (or not do the things) that would make that happen.

Of course, I’ve been wrong in the past, and I could be wrong this time, but let’s put it this way: I’m planning on buying a new wardrobe for my new size. Clothes that actually fit me. And if I’m willing to spend real money on something, that’s usually the best sign that I’m taking it seriously.

What continues to work best for me is this monthly goal I have of staying below a certain weight. For the past three months, that’s been 195. I’m lowering it to 190 now, and I’ll continue to lower it until I get to a weight I’m happy with and which is sustainable. I imagine this will be around 175, give or take 5 pounds. I certainly have padding that I can still lose, and as long as the weight is coming off easily, then I see no reason to lose my momentum. I had some blips when company came to visit or when I went to Florida for ALA, but other than that, the loss has been steady.

So there you have it: no news in this case was actually great news.

Thanks for all your support.

Nitpicking

Ugh. I debated long and hard before writing this post, but my blog is a place where I try to keep things real. To say what’s really going on in my life and what I think about it from time to time. So after taking a deep breath or three, here we go:

The kids have lice.

Even typing that makes me feel like I need to go on some walk of shame, Game of Thrones-style (except with my clothes on, ideally). Lice have such a bad rap. It makes me feel like I’ve failed as a parent somehow, to have my children infested with the creepy crawlies. (It also makes my scalp itch. A lot. Denisa’s too. But no matter how many times either of us have checked the other, we still somehow appear to be nit-free.)

But let me back up.

Yesterday morning, Denisa mentioned in passing as I was on my way out that MC had come down in the middle of the night with her head itching. It was Monday morning, and early, so my brain didn’t really put anything together. I just nodded and said she should check on it when the kids were up, and off I went to work.

At 10:15, Denisa texted me: “M definitely has lice. I caught one and then checked it against a picture online.”

Things went downhill from there. She checked the other two kids, and they both had it as well. She had them check her, but they couldn’t find anything, although that just made her think they’d missed seeing them. So she headed to the store and got some delousing supplies and came back to put them into action. TRC was done first, and then MC. But there was a meltdown with MC, which slowed things down a fair bit.

Finally, Denisa asked for reinforcements, so I left work (itching my head the whole way) and came home to help.

I used my typical approach to crises: research the problem, make a plan, and then put it into action. From what I found out online, I was relieved to discover that lice don’t actually transmit diseases, and that they’re actually pretty fragile little bugs. Take them away from a human head for more than a day or two, and they die. They also need to be 9 days old before they can lay eggs, so if you kill the live ones before then, then you’ve stopped the problem.

When you have lice, you need to treat anything that might have been in contact with the infected head in the last 48 hours. Wash it, dry it. Spray it down with delousing spray. That kind of thing. You need to kill all the lice in the hair, and ideally pick out all the nits that are present. Check back each day for more, and maybe repeat the killing in seven days’ time (to take out any lice that might have hatched since.)

In a nutshell, they’re bugs. Catch them before they lay eggs, and the battle’s pretty much won.

So now that I knew what we needed to do to get through this, I wanted to assess the problem. TRC had already been deloused, but Denisa and I looked through his hair for the nits. It took a bit to figure out what they looked like, since I couldn’t see the difference between nits and dandruff. YouTube was the most helpful resource. Basically, nits are glued onto hair. They won’t move if you brush at them. You have to pinch and slide them off the whole follicle.

TRC definitely had nits. Knowing what they looked like now, I turned to Denisa and she turned to me. Both of us checked out clean. Huzzah! I called DC in (MC was in her nap still). After a thorough check, DC turned out to be nit-free as well. No lice, either. So the crisis was downgraded from a 5/5 to a 2/5 right there.

But how to get rid of the nits? One thing TRC inherited from me is exceptionally thick hair. Dense. And his hair was pretty long. After I looked through it, I told him and Denisa that I thought it would take forever to get that clean, and that even then we wouldn’t know for sure if we’d gotten it all. My suggestion? Scorched earth. Buzz his head and then check over the stubble that remained.

TRC thought about it a while. He’d never had really short hair. But in the end, he agreed to go through with it. (No pics posted here, because he didn’t want them online. Sorry.) He actually looks really good with short hair, and it’ll be a lot easier for him to take care of it, so that’s something. Once that was done, finding the few remaining nits wasn’t too hard.

TRC was clean.

Which left MC. She got up from her nap, and Denisa and I went through her head again. We found a live louse, but almost no nits. (MC has much thinner hair, which made that job significantly easier, at least.) We’re pretty sure she’s clean now as well.

So then it was a matter of washing all the bedding, spraying down all the surfaces that might have had lice on them, and drying it all on high heat. By 9:30pm, we were pretty much done.

There’s no guarantee we got them all, of course. From what I’ve read and heard, they can come back fairly easily. (Miss just one, and it can lay 8 nits per day.) Still, once you know there’s a problem, it’s easier to get on top of it.

So there you have it. My big dark secret laid bare. From what I’ve read online, this brush with lice wasn’t nearly as bad as it usually can get. It seems we actually caught it sooner than later, and so it wasn’t as bad as we feared. Where did the kids get them? No idea. We’ve thought through all the likely places, but we’ll probably never know. Denisa called around yesterday to alert kids our kids had been in contact with, though, so hopefully this infestation stops with us.

It’s not nearly as big of a deal as I’d thought, now that I’ve researched it. It’s got a seriously bad stigma, but I think if people were more open about it, that would improve. (Hence my final decision to write this post.) Lice spread when they have a chance to go from person to person. They can’t jump or fly. They need scalp to scalp (or brush to scalp) contact to really be able to get around. If you have them in your family, just admit it, tell other people about it, treat it, and move on.

At least, that’s my suggestion. Now excuse me while I go itch my head one more time . . .

Stranger Things: 8 Episodes of Self-Contained Awesome

I’m online a lot. A ton. And so at times I have to remind myself that things that seem obvious and commonplace to me might not be even on other people’s radar. Last week, I heard a whole sector of the internet come alive over a new show on Netflix called Stranger Things. From what I heard, it was a thriller that mashed up all the good stuff of everything ranging from The Goonies to Poltergeist to Twin Peaks and beyond. Naturally, I had to check it out.

I have now emerged, 8 episodes later, to tell you all that you too must check it out.

(Just don’t be tricked like I was into thinking it was a good show to watch with your kids. (Goonies, right?) While there are kid stars in the show, it’s pretty dang creepy and scary. I’d say it’s for teens and up.)

I loved the whole thing from start to finish, and I really appreciated the fact that it didn’t just set the whole thing up, only to cut it off with a huge cliffhanger (ala other shows like Lost or Under the Dome.) That seems to have been done a lot, as the push with media is always to string things out into extra seasons or books or films, and it’s so refreshing to have something wrapped up in one season. (Not that they didn’t leave the door open for more. That only makes sense.)

The acting, the story, the characters, and the 80s setting all comes together in a fantastic whole that had Denisa and me up far too late Saturday evening. It’s been a while since we just had to binge watch a show, and it’s always a lovely feeling when you find something that can do that for you. Even more surprising is how under the radar this show was for me. I didn’t even know it was coming out until I saw it pop up on instantwatcher.com, and even when I saw it, it meant nothing to me. Hurray for word of mouth.

And so consider this your wakeup call. If you want 6-7 hours of fun entertainment for the next few evenings, look no farther. 5/5, easily. I can’t wait for season 2.

Surrounded by Asphalt

When Denisa and I bought our house (9 years ago now!), one of the things we loved about it was how much of it was surrounded with open fields and forests. We had a neighbor on one side about 50 yards away, and then a dairy farm across the street, and that was it. A while ago the plot in front of our house was sold, and a house was built there. We weren’t too jazzed about it, but it was 50 yards away or so , so it wasn’t a huge deal. We planted some trees, and that was that.

Until now.

The farmers who own the land surround our house on all sides are selling it to a company that’s going to build an Alzheimer Care Facility with 36 beds. The facility itself is going to be back behind our house, with a fairly dense copse of trees between us and it. Not ideal by any stretch, but we have few windows that point that direction, and there are all those mature trees between us, so that’s something. Directly behind us is going to be a driveway for the facility, although again there are some trees between us and it. We’re talking 20 yards or so from our house to that driveway. And then in front of our house (as close as 15 feet from our property in places, though thankfully more like 20 yards from the house) is going to be a second driveway for delivery trucks and employees at the facility. It’s going to have lights on 24/7, and it will wrap around to join the other driveway behind our house.

What this boils down to is that our entire property is essentially being surrounded by asphalt on all sides. Also, lights. I’ve been assured that the lights will hardly be noticeable.

I am more than a little skeptical.

The trouble is, there’s not much we can do. The land is already zoned for commercial/residential use. It doesn’t seem like they’re breaking any codes by doing what they’re doing. And yay for bringing in an important facility to help people in the area who definitely need it. But we’re still more than a little bummed that it’s coming at the expense of those beautiful open fields we’d loved at first.

We’re going to request that they plant some trees along those driveways to shield us somewhat from the cars and lights, but I have no idea what that will end up looking like. I’m trying to look for the good side to things, and that boils down to two things:

We own 1.5 acres of land, so we have a built in buffer zone on all sides. We’re at least guaranteed to keep that.
Once this facility is built, I don’t think they’ll be able to build anything else anywhere around us. This is it. It’s like ripping the bandaid off all at once. And I’ve seen pictures of other facilities the company has built, and they’re tasteful and well maintained. It’s not a going to be a trailer park, but still . . .

Worst case scenario, we sell our house and go buy one somewhere with those open fields and forests again. But I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that.

Stay tuned . . .

A Tale of Two Sweeneys

I still have my month subscription to BroadwayHD, so two nights ago I decided to watch Sweeney Todd in Concert with Denisa. Nothing the kids would be interested in, so I picked a time when they were already on their way to bed. Except TRC came in and asked what we were watching. I told him it was a musical, thinking that would turn him off, and he decided to stay.

Okay, I thought, He’s 12. He’s up for a bit of a darkness in a musical. And he probably won’t last through it.

And then DC stopped by to see what everyone else was watching. Denisa said she could stay and watch a bit too, thinking she’d be turned off by the subject matter.

She wasn’t.

So we had a nice family evening watching a musical about a homicidal barber and his cannibalistic downstairs neighbor. And surprisingly, the kids really enjoyed it too. There were a couple of parts they found disgusting or boring, but on the whole, they were riveted. Go figure.

Since that had gone so well, after it was done, I popped in the Johnny Depp/Tim Burton version and we all watched that one.

Just kidding. Well, not kidding that I watched the Hollywood version, but rather that I let the kids watch it with us. Far far far too bloody.

It was really interesting watching the two versions back to back. The concert version was totally stripped down. No props. No big costumes. No sets. The Hollywood version was the exact opposite. Tons of money up on the screen for you to watch. And the concert version blew Johnny Depp out of the water. This surprised me, because I’d remembered really enjoying the film back when I first saw it. This time, however, the differences were stark. Singing was right up there as the main trouble. When you go from Patti LuPone and George Hearn to Helene Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, you take an enormous hit in term of vocal skill. Night and day. This probably wasn’t as obvious to me before because I didn’t do the two viewings back to back.

But more than that, there’s a sort of manic joy inherent in the musical that was on fine display in the concert version but was lost when it went to Hollywood. The film is just too broody and bloody. Depp’s Sweeney is troubled and vicious from start to finish, but the Todd in the musical truly seems to love his work. He relishes it. He comes alive once he can start killing people. Plus, I think there’s a lot to be said for the show’s having a live audience. People you can hear laugh along with you.

The biggest contrast was in the number “A Little Priest.” It was a real show stopper in the concert. Just marvelous and fun. Depp and Carter weren’t able to keep that energy. That joy and sense of fun. And so it was a real let down.

In any case, it was a fun few evenings. Riffing on the scary theme, I then persuaded TRC and DC to watch the first episode of Stranger Things with us. That turned out to be a mistake. I loved it, but they decided that was too far over the scary line. Ah well. Can’t win every time . . .

Gotta Catch ‘Em All

I still remember the early days. How happy we all were. How excited. I took my kids (my kids!) out with me two days after Pokemon GO released. An innocent outing downtown to go and search for Pokemon. We were amazed to see how many other people were out and about hunting for the little critters as well.

“Gotta catch ‘em all,” we’d say to each other, smiling. Laughing.

It’s important to remember now just how much we didn’t know then. How naive we all were. The all-caps GO didn’t sound any alarms with anyone. Why would it? Would we have made the same mistakes if we’d known what far reaching effects those decisions would have? Of course not. Who would?

The truth didn’t begin to come out until a month after the release.

The game had swept the globe by then, everyone still caught up in the euphoria of getting out and interacting with those lovable digital creatures. The rumblings of trouble first came from New Zealand, which makes sense. It was the first country to get the game.

I remember reading the post on Reddit: “lol check out this Pokemon addict.” It led to a picture of a person with sunken eyes, smartphone clutched in his hands, a haggard expression on his face. He’d been found in the middle of Long Bay Regional Park in Auckland, whimpering next to the swing sets. Police dismissed him as a junkie, and why wouldn’t they? The tiny holes on his arms were obviously needle tracks.

No one had seen a Pidgey swarm yet. No one even knew they could. The first video of the phenomenon was still months away. Now the sight of their tiny beaks jabbing in for the veins is seared into all of our memories, but then? It was unimaginable.

In the days to follow, more and more victims began to crop up, and the symptoms became more defined. Loss of sleep. Inability to focus. A permanent feeling of being watched. An urge to continually check for Pokemon in the area. The gym battles between Mystic, Valor, and Instinct began to cool off after a few weeks, with only the really dedicated fans truly dueling it out for control. In the end, most of the players just stopped trying to catch so many.

But the Pokemon were in the wild by then. Invisible to human eyes, but clearly present when you looked through a smartphone’s camera. We thought augmented reality was a fun little toy to play with. We didn’t know it was so closely connected to the real world.

But the Pokemon did.

The world thought it was a publicity stunt by Niantic. That the company had tried to spark more interest in the game by upping the spawn rates of the Pokemon. And it was clear that something had changed when you went back to the game. Weeks before, Pokemon sightings had been steady but not overwhelming in population centers, and away from towns they had been almost non-existent. Now they were everywhere. Too many of them to keep up with Pokeball supplies, and more of them coming every day.

The streets were crawling with Ratatas and Caterpies. Beaches littered with Staryus. But it wasn’t just the basic Pokemon. They were evolving. Growing in power. Haunters, Beedrills, Raticates, and more. Hungry for Razz Berries, of course, but more than willing to settle for substitutes in a pinch. Substitutes like fingers or toes or even eyeballs.

That’s when the videos began flooding the internet. Firsthand sightings of feeding frenzies. When you see a fifteen year old devoured by a pack of Eevies, you can’t ignore the threat. And the world came together again, just as it had in the early days of the game.

“Gotta catch ‘em all,” we told each other, our faces mirrors of grim determination. We grabbed our smartphones and headed for every Pokestop we knew, setting up a steady flow of Pokeballs to keep up with the rising numbers. Apple and Google began churning out free phones. Verizon and AT&T removed all data caps and charges. We transferred wave upon wave of Pokemon back to Professor Willow, morning and night, but it didn’t seem to matter. The combined forces of Mystic, Instinct, and Valor were nothing compared to our foe.

The Pokemon overwhelmed countries that didn’t have the technology to fight back. All contact with North Korea disappeared, which wasn’t overly surprising, but the same phenomenon happened across Africa and Central America. Entire cities were gone before we’d even known there was a problem.

They diversified. Digletts burrowing through the earth. Fearows swooping down from the skies. Snorlax terrorizing our dreams. Vaporeons, Jolteons, and Flareons roaming the skies in packs. Every type required a different defense. Our meager few tamed Pokemon couldn’t keep up, no matter how hard we trained them.

Germany fell. Then France. England. Canada. The internet went down. Power plants died. Nuclear plants melted, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. It killed humans, but it only mutated Pokemon. We were cut off from each other and had to turn to gasoline generators to keep our phones charged enough to protect ourselves. But without the infrastructure we needed to keep the oil flowing and the gas coming, even that failed us at last.

It’s been weeks since I last saw another human face. I’m holed up in a remote cabin, and my last tank of gasoline ran out a few hours ago. Even now, the generator is sputtering its last few breaths. I have thirteen phones and as many battery packs as I could scrounge together. Once the generator goes, I might last another week or two. Is it too much to pray the Pokemon might turn on each other? That deprived of a diet of Razz Berries and human flesh, they might begin to starve?

Probably. But I can’t completely give up hope. Maybe there are still pockets of resistance. Perhaps New York City or San Francisco still stand. There had been theories that electrical fields could disrupt the beasts. Human ingenuity might have won out at the last second.

I hear them now. Scratching at my window at night. Clawing at my door. Now and then, the knob jiggles. There are squeaks and chitters at midnight, because they know. Sooner or later the power will be completely gone. At some point, I’ll slip up and make a mistake. And then I’ll be nothing more than another statistic. Another loss in a battle against a swarm of beings with no regard or care for human life.

“Gotta catch ‘em all,” we said, never knowing what would happen when we didn’t.

Alexa and Me: Three Days with the Amazon Echo

We have a new family member in our household, thanks to an anonymous benefactor: last week we got an Amazon Echo, Amazon’s always-on, digital assistant. How would I describe it? Think of having iPhone’s Siri always listening to you. No need to touch any buttons to wake her up. Just say her name, and she’s there. Add a nice speaker to that set up, and you’ve got the Echo. Now that I’ve had it few days, I’m here to give a few thoughts on the device.

First, it’s definitely a hit with the kids. TRC and DC love talking to the thing, and MC wishes Alexa could understand her. (It doesn’t help that every now and then, MC speaks clearly enough for Alexa to work, which encourages MC to keep trying,) We’ve heard the phrase “Alexa, tell me a joke” many many many many times over the last bit. (MC will happily keep trying ten times in a row.) So it definitely has some appeal as a novelty device.

But how about as something useful?

I think it’s going to be something that takes some getting used to in order to fully utilize it. It’s a device with a lot more potential than I first thought, but it’s potential that needs some things to fall into place to be fully realized. So far, I’ve used it to set alarms, check the weather, play music, tell me the news, and things on that level. Stuff I would use Siri for normally. And is it easier than Siri? Sure. There’s no need to go hunting for my phone. It’s always there, ready to answer your questions. But you need more than that if you’re going to justify a $180 purchase. So what else can the Echo do?

Ultimately, a whole lot. But that depends on your home setup. There’s an app store for the device, and you can install a bunch of add ons through that. Order an Uber or a Domino’s pizza. Turn on your television or the lights in your bedroom. Adjust your thermostat. If you have a bunch of smart devices in your home, then Alexa can talk to all of them, turning her into basically a ship’s computer for your whole house. And the thought of that is really cool. Of course, I only can set her up to control my entertainment center at the moment. I don’t have anything else that can connect to her.

Perhaps the most useful thing I’m working on with her at the moment is getting it set up so that Denisa can play Slovak radio programs for the kids. Doing so right now involves enough clicking and technology that it’s just impractical for Denisa to get it set up every time. It looks like the Echo interfaces well with online radio stations, which would make things much easier. (And it also does audio books through Audible. I wonder if I could get some Slovak kids books?)

But these are early days, and I can see the direction technology is headed, and I think Alexa is right there with it. She keeps getting upgraded. She’ll continue to have new capabilities added to her, and since she really just needs to hook into an internet connection to stay up to date, I don’t see a limit to how she can improve. It’s a speaker, an internet connection, and a microphone. Everything else is on the cloud, more or less. So I’ll be very excited to see where it heads next.

For now, the trick is going to be reminding myself she’s there, and making sure to take advantage of her. But there could well come a time when she just becomes an inherent part of the house.

I love living in the future.

Pre-Cataracts

So I went to the eye doctor last week for a checkup, mainly because my glasses prescription seemed to be getting out of date, and I wondered if that was causing some of the headaches I’ve been having for the last while. And at first, it was good news. My distance vision had actually improved: my glasses are too strong for what I need right now.

“Awesome.” I said.

“Not necessarily,” the eye doctor said, and he checked on a few more things.

Yup. Apparently one of the symptoms of cataracts is that your eyesight improves. I have pre-cataracts, which basically mean that my eyes are developing cataracts (clouding in the lens) in both eyes. It typically doesn’t happen until people are 50 or 60, but I guess my eyes just really like a challenge.

The good news is that it’s a simple, common operation that’s typically effective. The bad news is someone will have to take a scalpel to my eyeballs, and I’m going to have to watch them do it. Oh, and there’s a chance it won’t work and I’ll go blind. That too. Though that’s a rare outlier, and there’s always the risk of catastrophic failure with whatever you do, right? On the other hand, it sounds like while they’re doing the surgery, they’ll be able to fix my vision to give me 20/20 vision again, most likely. It’s a process that isn’t covered by health insurance . . . unless you need to have cataract surgery. So there’s some silver lining in there too.

This isn’t something I have to get done anytime soon. It could be a year, could be ten, could be more. But it still was a bummer of a thing to hear to start my day with, and as I’ve been walking around since, I can’t help being much more conscious of my eyes and the important role they play in my life.

Funny how that works.

In the meantime, I’ve ordered some new glasses online. They should be here in a couple of weeks. The process was really simple and so much cheaper than getting them at the eye doctor’s. Once I’ve got them, I’ll have to write a post if all goes well.

It Doesn’t Matter If You’re Wrong as Long as the People You Listen to Say You’re Right

I went to the school board budget meeting last night. It turned out to be a rout in favor of passing the school board, though that just means the towns get to vote on it at the end of the month. Nothing close to this being over yet, alas. There was a much smaller turnout, as well. And for the first while, things were going very smoothly. We were running through the agenda, approving budget articles left and right. No questions. No soap boxes. Just go go go.

And then we hit a few snags.

In a nutshell, there are some people in the community who are convinced that the school board is trying to pull a fast one on them. That they’re using tricks and fiscal sleight of hand to steal money from their pockets. And when you start with that frame of mind, it’s possible to go on a snipe hunt to “catch” the school board at their game. And so we had three or four people get up (some repeatedly) to ask accusatory questions, trying to publicly catch the school board with its pants down. And in each instance, it turned out to be a false accusation (even if in some instances, the people making the accusation refused to acknowledge they were wrong.)

But in general, I’m fine with that. If people have questions, they ought to get answers. And if they don’t like the answers given, such is life. We don’t get to pick our facts. But what got my goat a little last night was when two or three people kept asking the same questions over and over again, as if the answers were going to change if they just kept asking them.

And I understand that they didn’t understand the answers. That they were confused by the answers. But I suppose in the end for me, it isn’t important that every single person in the area understand every detail about the school budget. That’s a goal that isn’t going to be met. And is such a large meeting really the best forum for trying to reach it? There comes a time when you have to call the question and just move on (which is thankfully what happened yesterday evening.)

Denisa and I were talking about it after the meeting, in conjunction with a discussion about the horrific events in Nice last night as well as some other internet discussions I’d come across during the day. And in the end, it all seemed to intersect at one point: narrative. Today, there are many different voices out there, each of them saying something different. (Some louder than others.) And the internet has done a superb job of connecting like-minded individuals. Basically, if you have an opinion, you’re going to be able to find someone who shares it.

And that’s where the trouble can begin. Our lives are shaped by reality, but what “reality” is depends on our point of view. It depends on the narratives we’ve chosen to believe. Take politics. Die hard Republicans all believe one narrative about a person (that Hillary Clinton is a criminal who deserves to go to prison, not back to the White House). Die hard Democrats believe a different narrative. One that is pretty much the exact opposite. Hillary Clinton is falsely maligned and held to an unfair standard, and that she will be a fantastic President. In both narratives, people have facts to back themselves up. But the facts of one side are disbelieved by the facts on the other.

This same principle holds true for so many other things. Take ISIS. You have a group of people who believe they are right. Who are willing and ready to do terrible things in the name of that belief. But the thing is, they don’t think those things are terrible. The narrative they’ve chosen to buy into tells them that those things aren’t just not terrible: they’re necessary. They’re for the greater good. The rest of us can be abhorred and heartbroken over what’s happening, but to the people inflicting those crimes on other? They feel justified. Their narrative supports it.

But it doesn’t have to be so extreme. This crops up everywhere. People who believe video games are great or are the cause of real world violence. People who believe in God and miracles and people who don’t. Basically, pick any hot button topic, and you’ll find this principle at play. In each case, each side is firmly convinced they’re right and the other side is wrong, and they use facts to back themselves up. The other side might dispute those facts, but as I saw yesterday evening, in many cases it doesn’t matter if the “facts” you believe are wrong. What matters is that you believe they’re right, and you have a few people who agree with you.

I don’t mean to turn this into a big discussion on relativism, just a general observation that narrative is so important to all of us. In my experience, the truth is almost always found in the middle spaces. I think in times like these, it becomes increasingly important to listen to both sides in an argument. To acknowledge bias when you have it. To try and be well-informed and not let your personal preference for what you wish the truth were interfere with what the truth is.

Now if we could just figure out how to help everyone do that easily, we’d be set. In the meantime, I think it’s okay to accept that some people will never see the other side. They and their friends will continue to be convinced they’re right. And it’s okay for people to be wrong. Of course, when enough people are wrong (and think they’re right), then you can get into some pretty awful situations . . .

And that’s about as far as I want to think on this Friday.

How to Help Your Kids Improve Their Reading

There was a time, years ago, when TRC wasn’t a big reader. Granted, it was in Kindergarten, right after he’d learned to read in the first place, but still. I remember wanting him to read more, and so I started reading aloud with him in the evenings. This lasted all of two or three evenings, because after that, he decided he wanted to read the book faster so he could find out what happened, and he really hasn’t stopped reading since. Seriously.

So for four years or so, that’s what I thought “encouraging your kids to read” consisted of. (Come to think of it, I helped a bit earlier with him too. I told him he could start staying up a half hour later if he could read all of Green Eggs and Ham, way back at the very beginning stages of his reading. That worked easy peasy too.)

But one thing you learn as a parent is that each child is different. The time came for DC to learn to read, and I used the same approach I’d used with TRC. First, the Green Eggs and Ham bribe. But she didn’t jump all over it like TRC had. Where it had taken him days to do it, it took her months and much more coaxing.

Not to worry, I said to myself. It might just be a bit soon for her.

But the years passed, and things didn’t seem to improve. She was reading at her grade level, but she didn’t really have a love of reading at all. This is something I couldn’t really understand at all. I finished Lord of the Rings in second grade. I love me some reading. But I didn’t want to give DC a hard time. She’d grow into it. She looks much older than she actually is, so it’s easy to assume she’s farther along in her education than she is. That had to be it, right?

About two months ago, someone asked her to read something out loud on the spur of the moment. She happily agreed, and then did her best. It was a real struggle for her, and I saw that first hand and couldn’t really get around it. My daughter was struggling to read, and she was already through with second grade.

This wasn’t working.

Reading is such a huge part of school and life. If you can read quickly and read well, it’s so much easier to stay on top of your school work, to learn new things, to come across new ideas. I wanted that for my daughter, but I didn’t know how to get it.

Like with many things in my life, I prayed about what I could do to help. The answer I got was to start reading with her every evening. I’m a goal-oriented fellow, so I added that to my daily routine. I sat DC down and told her that she and I would be reading the Chronicles of Narnia every night. It was one of my favorite series growing up, and I thought she’d love it too. But there were some stipulations I made with her. First, she’d be reading over my shoulder. She had to be following along on the page with what I was reading. To help this, I used a piece of paper to underline each line as I went, moving the paper as the reading continued. Second, she’d have to read out loud herself, some on each page. To keep her honest, I told her that at any time, I might tell her that it was her turn to start reading, and she’d need to pick up from where I’d left off, right away.

It was new to her, but she liked the idea, so we started with Prince Caspian (the family had read Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe a while ago, and I wanted fresh material.) It went very well. She struggled reading out loud, but she really enjoyed the story. (I do voices, because how can you read out loud and not do voices?) It took a few days of effort to establish the pattern and the habit, but we hit our groove soon after.

We’ve now finished all of Prince Caspian and 2/3 of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, following that same pattern. A chapter a night. She reads with me, and she reads out loud on her own now and then too.

I’ve been amazed at how well this has worked. For one thing, she’s started reading a ton more in general, finishing many books in her summer reading program. Reading aloud has also become much more natural for her. She still struggles on longer words, but she handles shorter words like a champ and has improved so much. But even more importantly, it’s given me something to do with her every day that she really looks forward to and enjoys, and that I enjoy too.

In the end, it wasn’t anything earth shattering. I doubt I’m doing anything different than what most parents are doing, and it’s a shame it took me this long to come up with the basic idea of “just read to her more,” but such is life. Sometimes it takes time to come up with obvious solutions. And so I  thought I’d pass this obvious solution on to any of you who might need a little kick in the pants to follow suit.

Thanks for reading!