Beamer: year in review

About February of last year, I bought a BMW 325i. I was driving a Honda Ridgeline at the time, and the gas mileage wasn’t that great, and really the vehicle didn’t match up to what I did (I drive about 35 miles each way every day, and sometimes we go out to eat.)

New cars are always met with excitement, so at first it’s really hard to find the flaws with something (same thing goes for cell phones I’ve found), but after a few months you start to notice things that are designed poorly.

So, with that, the entire inside of the beamer is wrong. It’s unintuitive, cryptic, and confusing. Most things aren’t labeled, you’re just expected to know what things do from memory. This is fine for a knob that controls volume, but unacceptable for two protruding black sticks flanking the speedometer. One of these, when pressed, converts the units of the current display item (say, from Fahrenheit to Celsius). The other resets the gas mileage. One of these you turn to change the clock, but only when the clock is the current display item. The other turns, but doesn’t do anything (that I know of).

How do you change display items? Well, intuitively, you click a tiny button at the end of the blinker lever. There’s no sort of symbol that tells me to do this, I’ve just learned that it’s the way BMW thinks things should be done.

The back seat is also too small for what we have right now, which is two kids in two car seats.  The trunk is tiny. I can’t even fit a 2-kid stroller in the back of it, yet in Sara’s Jetta we can fit the stroller, a ton of groceries, an edger, and still have room for a random swine flu pig zombie found on the side of the road.

So, you’d think I hate the car. But I love it. It drives better than anything I’ve ever had before by miles. It accelerates nicely. The turning is perfect. The engine has a pleasant hum that’s great in neighborhoods and rewarding while gunning it to get onto a highway.

Though anecdotal, this makes me think one thing: if you do what you’re supposed to really well, the rest of the stuff that you do poorly can be overlooked.

Changes coming shortly

I’m going to be moving my blog to something custom written that is powered mostly by Twitter.

Seeing how I tweet a few dozen times a day, I need something that lets me push some of the longer updates or the cool things to the blog, since I’m sure that the 5 readers here aren’t entirely the same as the people on Twitter.

So, a heads up, if you had a really witty comment for any post, you might just want to Bgtwt it instead, because this database won’t be publicly visible in the next 16 hours or so.

I Read Books: Parenting Beyond Belief

I realize I haven’t written one of these posts in a good while. That’s because it’s been forever since I’ve finished a book. Color me busy. Kids do that.

Thanks to @vanweezy, I got to read Dale McGowan’s Parenting Beyond Belief. It’s a collection of essays and short stories edited by McGowan discussing different challenges associated with raising children in the absence of religion.

Unfortunately, our kids are so young that lots of the essays were hard to immediately apply. I hope that in 5 years or so when our kids are asking questions and learning about how the world works, some of the points will come up and I’ll get to look like a decent parent.

Lots of high profile authors contributed, or were excerpted, like Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette, which gave the book some more credibility, though my readings were usually written by McGowan himself. He’s got two daughters that have informed lots of his insights and suggestions. Of course, it made my kids’ youth more obvious, so I’ll have to wait to hope for similar discussions.

A bittersweet note about this parenting book is that it doesn’t have answers, just essays describing evidence and reasoning and anecdotes and a few tepid conclusions, not necessarily agreeing with the surrounding authors. I appreciate this, because it says to the reader, “hey, we’re kind of winging it too, but this is what we think works.”

However, interestingly, Sara was doing a parenting study (I *think* it was called Faith Based Parenting) with her small group at the end of last year, and it was the exact opposite. They had answers for EVERYTHING. While I’d love a cheat sheet that says, “when Nate throws his food, do this,” it’s unrealistic, and putting the study’s claims under scrutiny revealed as much.

The study would offer guidelines, and when I started interrogating the pages, looking for footnotes or endnotes citing studies and psychologists and educators for references, I found none. Instead, it would be crap like, <Random Bible Book>:<Random Chapter and verse that supports this claim>.

Parenting Beyond Belief had lots of footnotes, nice chapter endnotes for further evaluation, and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers – because no one does. Comparing the two techniques, it strongly reinforces the idea that, though Christians will call atheists “arrogant” for not believing in a god, Christians have an unsatisfying answer for everything, while atheists are ok admitting, “I don’t know.”

Overall, I’d say the book was good to read, and if you’re a parent, it can provide some uplifting essays. If you have young kids, it’s probably best to read it, put it on the bookshelf, and then pull it out again when the kids are 4 or 5, when a lot more of the essays feel applicable.

Quiverfull: not so bad

I read about the Quiverfull movement a few weeks ago, and at first, it terrified me. Why would women want to regress to subservient status? Why would anyone want 17 kids? Isn’t education valuable?

But then, this morning, after I got out of the shower, I saw something. Sara had peed on a stick, and it had 2 bars on it. This, for those not in the know, means she’s pregnant. I then looked up into the mirror and saw Jesus staring at me, with a quiver full of arrows over his shoulder.

Fate!

I know, I know, you think, “but Terry doesn’t believe in fate, or Jesus, or punishing a uterus until it shrivels up and looks like an aborted raisin.” But that was pre-Jesus-in-the-mirror Terry. Now I do. I know, some people would call this pareidolia, but they didn’t see it. He even winked, just like in the movie Dogma!

So, heads up, we’re going to aim for about 15 kids. We’ve got 2, and now one on the way, so that should mean only 12 more pregnancies. The great news is we’ll be done by the time Sara’s 40, so we shouldn’t have any problems with fertility.

I’ve talked about it with Sara, and she’s ecstatic about the opportunity to burn her college books and start attending church 7 times a week. Also, we’ve already purchased Evie a training washer and dryer, because she’s going to be doing it a lot with all the other kids. And I tattooed Nate’s back shoulder with a cross. As God would have me do.

I hereby renounce my love for Texas Tech, the heathen school where kids drink copiously; football, that stupid sport that encourages engorgement; caffeine, because it separates me from the Lord; computers, because they don’t have any faith; Chipotle, because cilantro is the hair of Satan; and House.

I’m really looking forward to turning this page and starting anew. I’ll be studying the Bible tonight, if anyone would like to come over and enjoy some warm cocoa and help me throw things at Sara (subservience doesn’t happen over night!), please call me. Email is evil.

God Bless!