My personal George MacDonald unit study continues

Not long after my previous post about John C. Wright's review of Phantastes, I stumbled across two more local resources on George MacDonald.  The first was a mis-shelved copy of one of his novels that I hadn't read yet, in a church library.  It is one of the abridged and de-dialect-ized editions from the 1980s, but still much better than nothing.  MacDonald's fantasy novels for adults came at the very beginning and end of his career:  Phantastes at the start, and Lilith at the close.  The ones in between, besides his short stories and children's books, were almost all set in the everyday Victorian society of the time, and MacDonald attempted to bring spiritual truth very close to home for his readers.

I also finally got around to looking at the latest issue of Christian History magazine, and while the theme this time is the artist and missionary Lilias Trotter, there is quite a bit about MacDonald because he was a famous friend of a famous friend of hers, John Ruskin.

Trotter had a great deal of potential as a young artist, and Ruskin offered to train her and launch her into the uppermost level of the Victorian artist scene, but she chose instead to follow God, ending up in long-term missions work in Algiers.

Slices

The "Quick bar cookies" recipe on this post, which is actually a recipe for chocolate chip blondies, is very forgiving. I've recently tried substituting vegetable oil for the butter. This works all right, but comes out a little drier, as butter contains some water that the oil doesn't. I also tried adding cocoa powder and peppermint extract to make something more like a brownie. The family liked the result, and didn't realize that it was almost exactly the same recipe. Rolled oats were not in the original recipe, but I almost always add them, for nutrition.

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We've been very busy, and I was looking for a quick and fun project, and decided to paint one of our stump tables. The stump is a chunk of a large pine tree that my husband brought home from the county yard waste site last year. The wood was very green, and quite wet, so I kept it in the garage for months to dry it out, turning it occasionally. It picked up some dirt during that time, and lost over twenty pounds of weight, maybe as many as forty--I weighed it early on, and then later, but I don't remember the exact numbers.

Eventually I brought it in, and debarked it in the kitchen. There was some mold growing under the bark, so it had to come off.

The stump found a home in our living room/indoor parkour course. I counted the rings; the tree was sixty years old when it was cut down, and more than two feet in diameter.

Anyway, I mixed some paint to approximate a color that would fit into the decor, and painted the sides, just wiping the paint on with scrap fabric. I very soon had several eager helpers.

The color came out a bit bright for the room, so I plan on wiping on another coat at some point.

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A child wanted to learn to make angel food cake, after a lady from church brought us one. I had never made a foam cake, but our efforts were successful.

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Our resident papier-mache artist is thinking ahead to Halloween, and has made a good start on armatures (support structures for the papier mache) for upper and lower skeleton jaws, made out of milk jugs and tape.

A surprise, yet not entirely a surprise

Christian History magazine* has a new issue out on the role of the Church in the development of science and technology.  One of the articles interviews several scientists on how their faith and research connect...and one of them is physicist and 1997 Nobel Prize winner William Phillips!

He was the keynote speaker at a physics conference that I went to as a graduate student.  Apparently, once you have won a Nobel Prize in physics, you can have conversations like the following:

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  We would like you to speak at our conference.

PHILLIPS:  Okay, I'd be happy to...but I'm going to need some liquid nitrogen.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  No problem, how much do you want?

Phillips spent most of his speech (in front of an audience of hundreds of physicists) playing with liquid nitrogen and having a great time.  The joy he showed then makes it less of a surprise for me to see him interviewed in Christian History now.

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*Christian History has subscriptions, but financially it runs on the basis of donations:  they print and mail out the next issue when they have the money to do so.  They also sell back issues and reprints, which can be helpful for research, as each issue is centered on a historical person or topic.

Appliance woes

It's the Two Laws of the Modern Household:

1.  All plumbing will eventually leak, and

2.  All appliances will eventually fail.

We had trouble this summer with our refrigerator. Similar trouble to before:  the door gasket on the freezer compartment partially fell off, but it wasn't visible, because the freezer is on the bottom. Plus smaller children tend to open the freezer, and then not quite close it completely, which isn't very visible either.

So humid air got into the freezer compartment, condensed, froze, and blocked the air flow up to the refrigerator compartment.  Yes, it has a fan to send the cold air up.

We didn't lose much food, because we have a chest freezer, and several coolers. We also had three bags of ice left over from the church picnic. I did find that one cooler had lost its drain plug, but I was able to dig through our hardware stash and find a rubber cap that fit. I put it into the hole from the inside, so that pressure on it would only push it in more tightly.

Our dehumidifier also was not working well...two days after the warranty expired. But apparently we won the dehumidifier self-destruct lottery, because after a couple of days it started working normally again.

I say "self-destruct" facetiously, but really I do think in some cases these electronic appliances are designed to quit working prematurely.

Better engineering also can lead to products being designed to just barely survive the warranty period, mechanically.

If I were an unscrupulous manufacturer, I would direct some of my advertising budget into making a small percentage of my products built so well that they would last for years and years.  Our refrigerator has a 10-digit model number, with both digits and letters.  I have to wonder what information is being encoded in it.

Friends of ours moved into a new house two years ago, and since then have had to replace four major appliances, and have had half a dozen service calls on a fifth.

Looking up

I spent the Easter weekend with the stomach flu, and then the following week trying to get caught up on housework again.

One notable thing was that when I finally got out of the house again, to the library, I found two books of the Borrowers series in their book sale...both were in like-new condition despite being fairly old, and they were exactly the two volumes that I didn't have. 

The series has undeniably had an impact on my life; the Borrowers' resourcefulness in creatively re-using whatever they could scavenge was something that resonated strongly with me in the circumstances I grew up in.

Right on time

I went to the thrift store to look for new used shirts. I found one that was exactly like one that I had:  exact same brand, style, color, and size, but in nearly-new condition.

I hadn't even planned on replacing that particular shirt, just to mend it and keep it going for a bit longer, but when I put the two side-by-side, it is clear that it is time to retire it with honors.