Kirk blAug

We built a fire pit in the backyard earlier this summer. There were some bricks just scattered about in one part of the backyard from the previous tenant of the house. They were not doing anything useful where they were, so we decided to put them to good use. I had the boys carrying the bricks to where we put the pit one at a time and stacking them up. They are pretty good builders so this was an easy task for them. At the end of the day they worked pretty hard, but were very proud of the pit they made. This weekend it finally cooled off enough to try it out. So we did just that last night. We used it to cook some hot dogs for supper and some s'mores for dessert. There are probably a few improvements we can make. Perhaps we can make the pit more of a permanent structure in time. For now though, it will be nice to have the pit this fall.

Christine Augustine and I took the boys to the Saint Louis Science Center today. We saw a pretty spectacular Omnimax film about lemurs and we built the arch you see here. Everyone chipped in. It was a team effort.

I have been attempting to change some of my social networking habits lately. One of the things I have decided that needed to change was my use of that button which gives me an all too easy way to tell the poster, "Yes, I read your post. Yes, I was somewhere between slightly amused and having an epiphany. No, I cannot be bothered to do more than a single click in response." On Google+ this is the "+1" button and on Facebook the counterpart is the "Like" button. Pretty much every other social network has one too. Often a star or a heart. They all function the same though: confirmation without engagement. I do not think that I am saying that the confirmation without engagement (CWE) button is necessarily a bad thing. I know that if someone pushes that button on something I post, that confirmation is useful to me. I am not saying that anyone else should stop using it or that I necessarily will forever, although I may. This is a personal thing for me. I

This morning I got up for my run while it was still dark. After the first quarter of a mile or so, I looked up at the sky. I saw a few very bright stars up there. While this normally makes me feel humbled and connected at the same time, today it just made me feel disappointed. My disappointment was entirely relative to what I saw this past weekend when I looked up. Being in the country pretty far from any significant light pollution, I could see so many more stars than I normally do in the city. I am talking tens of thousands of times more. It was amazing and beautiful. It was a display of stars that I had not experienced in a long, long time. It made me think of the star gazers of the past such as Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. I thought of how they looked up at very much the same night sky, and probably an even more stunning display than the one I was seeing. I thought of other people at different places in the world who were also sharing the spectacular sight of that n

I went on an internet detox this weekend. That is to say, I went camping. It was a much needed one too. We went to a place that has no signal on my carrier. This meant that I could not even really try to use the internet. Chris' iPad uses a network that got decent signal which I did use to communicate with my parents so that they could come out to our campsite for a visit. Other than that five minute use though, I was free of the internet for about 60 hours. I must say it was peaceful. I was with my children and my partner, so the only notifications I received were the important ones in realtime and face to face. It meant that I had to find other things to do and talk to people without being able to look up the validity of claims. I would not want to do that all the time, but it kept conversation light and agenda free. Our world grows evermore connected as we humans progress. From paintings on cave walls to the printing press to the ultra connected state the internet

I got an email from my past self today. It is from a version of me six years ago and is about how I was frustrated with the job I was at an hoped that I would be doing something I liked better in the future. Every time that I get an email from futureme.org it completely catches me off guard. I always forget about the service a few days after I send a set of them out. However, I think it is an excellent way to communicate something to me in the distant future. I tend to write about what is currently going on with me and where I hope to be by the time I get it. A few years ago I got one that told me I was completely stoned and just chilling out in Columbus, Nebraska. It was received during a time that was just chilling out in St. Louis, Missouri (but not stoned, maybe drinking a beer). I thought that was interesting. It always forces me to reflect and appreciate all the changes in my life since the time I wrote it. I am always glad to have received it. I am doing something I

There are far too few parenting books that address parenting from a secular point of view. So when I was asked to take a look at McKerracher's recent offering into the parenting book realm, I was immediately intrigued. There is a strong argument to be made that the secular values of knowledge, reason, logic, kindness, honesty, and love make for a great guide in raising tomorrow's youth. Compared with many religiously motivated guides of mostly authoritarianism and fear based parenting, McKerracher shows exactly why both religious and nonreligious parents can benefit by only presenting religion to children in an objective and unbiased manner leaving them to make their own decision about what they believe once they reach a developmental age at which they are capable of separating what is real and what is not. In one chapter, she tackles the myth that I often hear regurgitated by religious apologists that children are innately believers in a god. By pointing out the logical