Chariots of Fire

(This was a late entry for the Carnival of Beauty : The Beauty of Chariots of Fire over at Kimberly’s Cup.)

I must confess I have not yet seen the movie Chariots of Fire, although it is on the list that Mr Pages and I keep around for our precious infrequent evenings with nothing else to do.

I have, however, just recently completed a biography of Eric Liddell and found myself challenged in a most unexpected area.

Eric Liddell and Florence Mackenzie were engaged in late 1929 while he was in England on furlough. In the summer of 1930, Florence left England and sailed to Canada to attend nursing school. Eric had a short visit with her and her family in 1932 and then continued back to China. In January 1934, Florence arrived in China and the two were finally married in March of that year.

In September of 1936, they were separated again, he in Siaochang and Florence and their daughters in Tientsin, with the occasional yearly visit. In the summer of 1939, Eric sailed with his family back to Canada. He then sailed on to Scotland, alone. His wife and children joined him in Scotland in March 1940 and they sailed back to China, where once again Eric left his family in the safety of Tientsin, while he continued mission work elsewhere. In May of 1941, Florence and the girls sailed back to Canada. Eric remained in China. It was the last time they saw each other. Eric died in 1945.

They were engaged for five years and married for almost 10. As near as I can calculate, they spent less than 4 years of that time together - four out of fifteen years together as a family.

As I read the book, I thought of how selfless Florence Liddell must have been; how much she must have trusted her God and her husband; how hard it must have been for her, and yet, how she bore it all so gracefully.

And I thought, with great sadness, how I probably would not have reacted like her. I thought of how I would have railed and wept at the injustice of it all. I would have questioned my husband’s priorities. I would have become angry at God for not making it all “work out”. And I would have caused my husband, not to mention those around me, great pain and sorrow.

I know this, because, even now, today, in small, insignificant ways, I question my husband and my God.

And so I am challenged by Florence Liddell, challenged to trust my husband, challenged to trust my God.

For in the same way the holy women who hoped in God long ago adorned themselves by being subject to their husbands 1 Peter 3:5

Trust in him at all times, you people! Pour out your hearts before him! God is our shelter! (Selah) Psalm 62:8

(As a help in this area, I recently joined the Husband 30 Day Week Encouragement Challenge at S.H.M.I.L.Y. Time.)

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We’re in the process of making a backyard ice rink.

It’s not going so well.

There are two methods of making a home ice rink. The first involves laying out a plastic liner the size of the rink and then filling it with water and letting it freeze. We made a rink a few years ago using this method, and it worked well. It used a tremendous amount of water, and a leak in the liner meant that the ice filled most of the backyard right up to the house. We spent time chipping the ice out and carrying it to the front in the spring to keep the water off our foundation.

The second method is to stomp the snow down in a nice flat area and then wet it into slush, let it freeze, add more water, let it freeze and so on until the ice is built up. That’s what I tried this year.

I made the snow as flat as I could manage and started flooding. I spent 3 hours hosing water into the snow, and the snow kept sucking it up for a lot longer than I thought it would before it was wet slush as it was supposed to be.

As it turns out “as flat as I could manage” is nowhere near flat enough, and nowhere near level enough. The water runs to a few areas that are obviously low spots and pools there. I have been out for at least 3 hour long flooding sessions, and much of the surface isn’t built up at all, because the low areas aren’t filled yet. This means that much of the surface is still lumpy.

With the liner method, all the time is put in up front, a day to fill the big pool. But when it freezes it’s pretty much done. I liked that.

This rink is going to need at least 3 more flooding sessions to get it smooth enough to skate on properly. It will likely take the same amount of time that filling the liner would, but it’s spread in 1 hour blocks over the course of a few weeks.

Next year, I’m using a liner.

This site was set up to deny all comments due to the tremendous amount of comment spam that we have received on other Wordpress-based sites.

We recently realized how much I missed getting comments on posts, so we went searching for a solution. WonderfulPages now uses the Challenge plugin, which forces a commenter to add two single digit numbers together before their comment can be submitted.

This shouldn’t be an issue for the majority of our readers. :)

If you have any problems, contact us.

{edit: I also found out that *blush* the default mail was setup incorrectly. If you’ve been trying to reach us, try again}

We just started using Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy.

We completed the first major assignment and made a model of the nine planets. (well eight planets and a dwarf planet, but who’s really counting?!) The planets are actually to scale, according to size. We did not include our 12 1/2 foot sun, although we measured it out in the kitchen.

On a whim, we wondered what the distances between the planets would be if we measured them out to scale. I found just such an activity at Astronomy at Home: Science Experiments for the Entire Family. So Thursday evening found us at the church hall, unrolling toilet paper rolls to see just how far away Pluto really is.

The kids had a blast. We all had a blast. I’m so very glad God called us to homeschool, because I can’t imagine doing anything else!

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the sky displays his handiwork.

Day after day it speaks out;
night after night it reveals his greatness.

There is no actual speech or word,
nor is its voice literally heard.

Yet its voice echoes throughout the earth;
its words carry to the distant horizon.

In the sky he has pitched a tent for the sun.
Like a bridegroom it emerges from its chamber;
like a strong man it enjoys running its course.

It emerges from the distant horizon,
and goes from one end of the sky to the other;
nothing can escape its heat.

Psalm 19:1-6

I’ve looked for a while to find a program to use to organize and view and edit my digital photos.

I quite liked the slick interface of Picasa by Google, but the feature that is touted as its strength is one I hated: the ability to have virtual albums without rearranging the files on disk. I like having the files rearranged on disk into directories and subdirectories. I don’t have the time or desire to tag every image with the names of every person in the picture and the location and all of that so I can call up every image of MrsPages in one fell swoop. If you do, this program is for you. You take the pictures off your camera and leave them where they sit. Picasa lets you organize them, and keeps track of which picture belong together, so you never have to reorganize the files on your hard drive.

I want my photos to be divided into subdirectories by year, then by month, then by event:

I want to be able to automatically browse them that way. I had a hard time getting Picasa to even show me a directory structure, because it was so “friendly” that it wanted to keep me away from all that.

I now use (and love) Faststone Image Viewer. It doesn’t have “albums”, it just lets me look through my carefully named folders on disk. It has some great features for doing touch-ups, cropping, resizing and other basic (and not-so-basic) photo operations. A great viewer, powerful editor, and it’s FREE.

As a bonus, it comes with a fabulous batch editor. You can take an entire directory of photos and resize them (for upload to a website for example) and add watermarks or text. Check out the galleries on the Manitoba Living History website to see that in action.

Faststone is easy to use, very powerful, and lets me work the way I want to work. What more can you ask?

Okay, not quite, but my passport did arrive.

Opinions are mixed on whether or not I managed to pull off the “don’t look like a terrorist in your photo” thing.

(This is a narration that Page2 (almost 9 years old) wrote today for a story in Baldwin’s Fifty Famous Stories Retold. For more information on narration visit Simply Charlotte Mason.)

Wise King Canute

O, wise King Canute, great king of the Danes,
told his officers never to praise him again.
He proved his foolish officers wrong,
that he was not so very strong.
He told the water to not touch his feet,
but the water and his feet did meet.

–LittlePage2

A table is not a chair.

My very first “public” blog for the Carnival of Beauty was in the Beauty of Bread. I posted my recipe for my Whole Wheat Bosch Bread and I forgot to write in the recipe instructions when to add the yeast!

Yikes!

Of all the terrible mistakes to make. I’ve fixed the original post and mentioned the error at the Carnival.

I apologize most profusely.

–Mrs. Pages

There are a few blogs I try to read regularly. One of the first blogs I ever visited was by Ann V. over at Holy Experience.

Ann has a beautiful, gentle spirit that inspires and challenges me. Pop on over and be blessed!

Let your beauty not be external – the braiding of hair and wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes – but the inner person of the heart, the lasting beauty of a gentle and tranquil spirit, which is precious in God’s sight. 1 Peter 3:3-4