Humble beginnings

Howdy from Michigan!
Just in case I didn't tell all of you (Which I probably didn't, Oops) I'm in Michigan helping my big brother Ross fix up the 'fixer-upper' that he bought on the 18th. It's 1080 sq ft, and is very... quirky, shall we say. It is definitely a good house for "My first Fixer-Upper". it has a basement with a rather low celling, and all the wires, pipes and everything else are easy to get to, so I don't have to go crawling around in a crawlspace!
Here are a few photos:

Notice that beautiful color on the front door. Yep, It's gonna go, along with the door itself, it's fairly hard to open due to the fact that it's coming apart at the seams, and the paint job isn't all that great. Ok, It's TERRIBLE! They dripped paint on the light, the door, and the trim! The side that you can't see is by far the worst.

This photo doesn't do the paint justice.  It is WAY worse then it looks in the photo. He put one coat of a rather dark color on top of white, which means you see white streaks throughout. And, as you can see, there's a little green on the trim that's around it. Definitely going to be repainted.

This is the old fuse box. It's not hooked up anymore, but it was left in the wall. As you can see, it's not very attractive. It's also been painted about 10 times. Oh yeah, and it's in the living room.

This is the stairway down to the basement. It's a little narrow, but manageable.

This is the main room in the basement. it's a little old fashioned, ok, it's just nasty. It's going to get a new floor, new wrapping around the support posts (blue things) and a lot of paint. The celling is also a bit low. Under the ducts, I can almost touch with my head.

Note that I've been making making fun of the house, but Ross said that's okay because these are the "before pictures". You should hear what he has to say about it. Now before you go questioning Ross's judgment, it is very structurally sound, except for the sagging celling in the living room. More on that later.

We're working on a couple of short movies

Maybe 'movie' isn't quite the right word. More like, "Our first attempt at a very short short". That works better.
Anyway, Peter Mixon is on vacation from Georgia right now, so we're working on a short short again. But this time we've learned from our last attempts. Small. Keep it small. Since it's our second or third attempt at actually making something coherent, we're keeping it small so that we can actually finish it. I'll post it on this blog once it's there.
Sir Paul, movie-maker-not-quite-extraordinar

Plodding along

I sit at my computer, with heavy eyelids, but a feeling of accomplishment. Today, or more precisely, the latter part of today, was just one of those days. Those days when all I want to do is go out to the wood shop and work on a project, but have things that need to be done first, things I didn't really want to do. I'd rather just sit there staring at the wall. plop on the couch and just... sit there. But things needed to be done. I new I needed to get up, and get things done. Then I thought of what Bob Shultz would do, he called it "Plodding". Taking large tasks (even ones that just 'seem' large) and deviding them into manageable chunks, and then taking the chunks one at a time. So I started plodding. I needed to do an hour of piano, so I told myself "just do 20 minutes". So I set the timer for 20 minutes and started playing. Once the timer dinged (Which was sooner then I was expecting) I got up and walked around a little, and then sat back down and played some more. Soon I had done more then an hour. By the time I was finished, Dad and the siblings were home with dinner, Pizza! And now I'm writing this post. It's a satisfying feeling, to over come difficulty and be able to move on with the day. Plodding makes things so much easier when things look hard, or you don't feel like working because it's raining outside,  days when nothing seems to be going right.
when the going get's tough, the tough plod!

A Book that is epistemologically accurate

Something I've been thinking about lately is how inconsistent people are when they are trying to prove evolution, or that there is no God. So they write books about it, and make TV shows to show how right they are, and how it's impossible for there to be a God. Because if there was a God, "Then why would he let 'so and so' happen?", or "Why is there sin in the world?" Wait; What did he just say? "Sin"?  Well, if we all are cosmic dust, then what is sin? Who determines what is right and what i wrong? If there is no standard of ethic, then there is no absolute standard.
So, I've been thinking: "What if I wrote a book about a world where there was no God, and made it completely accurate?" What would a book like that look like.
Well, if some one was reading it, and skipped the preface, and jumped straight to chapter one, this is what they'ed see:
Chapter one:
Chapter two:
Chapter three:
Chapter four:
Then End.

And after that maybe they'd read the epilogue, and it'd say something like this:
Epilogue:
When I decided to write this book, I was stumped about how to start it. I couldn't use "In the beginning", or, "Once upon a time", or "Long, long ago" because all of those are referencing time. And time is something invented. This seems foreign to us because we can't imagine life any other way. We've never experienced anything where there was no time. It would be like trying to explain a fourth dimension. We simply cannot comprehend it because it's so unnatural for us. Our brains just don't understand it.  Whether or not there is a forth dimension is not in the scope of this book, the point of this book is to make you think, and ask questions.
(And you can now brag that you read a whole book in under five minutes)

Paul T. Leavitt