Tools for Scoutmasters: The Bullying Circle

At a recent PLC meeting, we were discussing a recent development of bullying in our troop. We seem to have a perfect storm of

• Lots of new, young scouts
  
• Not a lot of older, experienced scouts
  
• Insufficient adult presence to help the older scouts
  

As a result, we've not been able to keep tabs on all of the boys, and have at times, left them to their own devices.

It is both fortunate and unfortunate that this is a new problem for us. Fortunate that we haven't had much of it in the past; unfortunate that we aren't greatly experienced in handling it.

So at PLC, our Scoutmaster came prepared with a handout on The Bullying Circle. It was a stroke of genius as it provided an instant framework for us to discuss bullying with the youth leaders. I highly recommend it. It is especially useful for visual learners, or any youths that do not process auditory information quickly.

In the course of our discussion, I asked the boys who in the troop they thought were the likely targets of bullying, or who were at most risk for being bullied. It didn't take them long to start giving names, and they were pretty accurate in their evaluation. I find it interesting that they can instinctively pick out which kids are at risk. What's more, they can usually identify the kids that are the bullies, the henchmen, the resisters, and all of the other roles. If you're a scout leader, use this to your advantage--your boys have a good idea of which kids need to be guarded and to which kids they should stand up.

Another way in which our Scoutmaster was able to relate the Bullying Circle to one boy was by placing fictional characters into the roles. For example:
Target - Neville Longbottom
Bully - Draco Malfoy
Henchmen - Crabbe and Goyle
Active Supporters - the Slytherins
Passive Supporter - Professor Snape
Disengaged Onlooker - The Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws
Potential Witnesses - The Gryffyndors
Resisters - Harry, Hermoine, and Ron

Trying to be more Christian (at least superficially)

Among all the talk in the news of whether or not Mormons are Christians, I did some thinking on the subject. It certainly isn't hard to imagine why other Christian faiths exclude Mormons from the Christian label. Among the several reasons, it occurred to me that in 30 years, I've never celebrated Advent, Epiphany, Shrove Tuesday, or any of the other traditional holidays.

That's about to change. Starting with Advent this year, I am going to celebrate as many of the traditional holidays as I can. I invite you to join me, especially if you've never experienced them yourself.

Advent starts on November 27^th this year. Here are some resources on how to celebrate. If you happen to be a seasoned Advent celebrator, please share tips and advice. I'm sure I won't quite get it right the first time.

25 Ways to Celebrate Advent

The Definitive Guide to Advent and Christmas

Introducing Prayers and Customs of Advent and Christmas

Advent and Christmas Season (From Catholic.org)

New Reader

HI JACK!

That's all.

Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit

One of my regular assignments with the scout troop is to meet with the boys assigned to do the food shopping for each trip and help them develop a proper shopping list. The idea is to get them to think about portions, amount, and cost so that we have enough food, but are not throwing tons of it away. It also helps control costs a little.

One of the food items that always haunts us is baked beans. The kids always want baked beans if they have hot dogs (it happens once or twice a year), and we always throw over half of what we prepare into the garbage.

On our most recent trip, we served brats and hot dogs for dinner. Naturally, baked beans were on the menu. As I talked with the boy buying the food, I made a point that we usually throw a lot of the beans away, so he should not buy 50 servings worth. Then I told him, "You don't need to buy the smallest cans, but two of the next size up would be okay." I had in mind a 28 oz can.

He showed up with two #10 cans of baked beans.

My newest assignment: compile a list of foods that we commonly purchase and catalog the size container that we recommend for purchase of each of these foods.

For the time being, I'd avoid camping near our troop.

Scoutmaster vs. Mother Nature

"If someone in your raft goes into the water, they are your #1 priority." That made sense at the time. It turns out, the safety talk you receive before going onto a Class III river is packed of important information but entirely devoid of nuance. My commitment to take the guides entirely at their word in this matter was going to cost me.

In other matters, it would serve me well, however. Before you get in the water, they teach you some important actions you can take to keep your boat upright. If your raft is going to hit a rock, you need to "love the rock;" that is, you need to move to the side of the raft that will make contact with the rock. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you lean away from the rock, the side that makes contact becomes light. As the water hits the rock, it responds by pushing up. When upward pressure of raft meets light side of raft, passengers are soon introduced to swimming.

"Whatever you do, don't stand up!" The worst thing that can happen to you in a river is foot entrapment. This happens when a foot becomes caught in an obstacle, preventing the person from floating down stream. The pressure of the current tends to force the person face down into the water. Drowning is the usual outcome of foot entrapment.

"If you do fall out of the raft, grab hold of the purple strap on the side of your boat." Presumably, the raft is going out of the rapids. If you're in the water, out of the rapids is definitely where you want to be. Also, holding on to the strap means you're close to help.

After the safety lecture, we were instructed to pick up our boats, carry them to the water, and get onto the river. RH, AH, JT, WG, and I stood up. AH and JT lifted the raft by the strap on their side, RH, WG, and I went for the strap on our side--but there was no strap. Alright, whatever; we lifted the boat up over our heads and walked down the trail.

It was a delightful day. The weather was warm enough, although a few degree more would have been nice. We approached the first rapid.

SPLASH

AH is in the water. JT grabs him, yanks him back in (JT is about three times the size of AH), and we're on our merry way. It was a good time to emphasize to everyone the importance of tucking your feet into the sides to help keep you in the raft.

Most of the trip was uneventful. It took a little while for me to figure out the movement of the raft with this group (it's always different depending on how strong the paddlers are and where they are placed in the boat), and so we went through some of the rapids backward. I actually enjoy doing the Class II rapids backward, even though the guides always yell at me about that.



At long last, we reach a rapid called Double Hydraulic. Unlike most of the other rapids, it doesn't have a creative name. Also unlike most of the other rapids, going in here can be really really bad (as opposed to just irritating and inconvenient). If you look at the above map of the rapid, you'll see that you enter the rapid from the left side and make a left turn before hitting the two hydraulics. It is recommended that you don't hit the rock at the entry point, but it isn't a big problem if you do so long as you keep your raft upright.

The water moves fast though, and as we approached the entry, it became clear to me that we were going to hit our left side on the rock. I jumped to the left side of the raft, joining JT and AH. RH and WG didn't join us. The left side of the raft lifted, RH and WG fell backward into the water, and AH was sort of catapulted over RH's head into the water. JT and I managed to hang on.

My mind started racing. Get them out of the water. As quickly as I could I stowed my paddle, crouched up in the middle of the raft, and looked for someone I might be able to reach. I found all three of the now-swimmers on the left side of the raft, and watched as RH disappeared into the first hydraulic. I started to move to try and get to a position where I could reach him when he came back up. I didn't think far enough ahead about the consequences of the raft hitting the hydraulic that had just swallowed RH and found myself in a cool, wet, and unfriendly to breathing environment. When my head resurfaced, I didn't have enough time to look for the boat before I saw the white wall marking the second hydraulic. Close my mouth, close my eyes, please don't hit a rock.

In case you're wondering, it's a lot quieter in the wall of water than it is in the last second before you go in. I was lucky enough to not hit any rocks going through. Very shortly after coming up, another raft was at my aid and pulled me in. I began to look around for the other rafters. I look upstream. There's JT in the raft finally making his way out. How the....whatever, he's fine. Soon, I found WG, and I caught a glimpse of AH. But where's RH. I started freaking out. Where's RH? Where's RH? Of course, no one is answering me. I keep looking back up to the rapid. Did he come out?

In retrospect, I realized that I was in shock. If I had taken a minute to calm down, I would have realized that RH was ahead of the raft in the water. He would have come out first, and would be down stream of me. Sure enough, he was three rafts down. As soon as I saw him, sanity returned.

I can't say as much for one unnamed passenger in the raft. He responded by going into a much heavier form of shock than I had. We took five minutes to try and warm him up and bring him back into his right mind. But for a while, he was insistent that he didn't want to continue. Fortunately, once he fought off the shock, he was back to his usual cheerful self and anxious to hit the next rapid.

RH was very kind, and chose to blame the outfitter for letting us take a raft that didn't have a strap on one side. When he went down, he had tried to grab the strap, which would have saved us a lot of trouble. But I do appreciate RH trying to place the blame elsewhere.

Initially, I tried to avoid taking the blame myself. In the end, however, I have to face it; I never gave the order to move to the left side when we hit the rock at the entrance. That one simple command would have kept the boat from tipping, kept RH and WG in the boat, and RH probably would have been able to keep AH from going in at that point. I wouldn't have gone in if I wasn't looking to rescue the swimmers.

End score in this round of Scoutmaster vs. Mother Nature:

Mother Nature, +1
Scoutmaster, -4 (one for each lost rafter)

My apologies to those I lost. I'm glad you're okay and I won't blame you if you never get into a raft with me again.



Tip for future rafters:
1) Inspect your raft before you leave. If it isn't properly equipped, request a different raft.

2) Give every order possible. It's better to be annoying and micromanaging than to go through what we just went through.

The Magic of Doing

I just finished reading Girls Will Be Girls by JoAnn Deak. Fantastic book, by the way.

As you can tell, I'm trying to bolster my confidence about being a father of two girls¹. I feel pretty good right now. This is a product of a) I'm doing most of the things that Deak said a father of a 3-year old should be doing, and b) 3-year old girls are a lot easier to get right than the 8-18 year old girls. Still, I'm glad I'm reading this now and getting ready for the harder years.

One thing I wanted to share that really resonated for me was in the last chapter. I suspect Deak put it in the last chapter so that it would be easily recalled. Translation: this might be important.

She talks about the inherent needs girls have for competence, confidence, and connectedness. What's the best way to develop all of these attributes? Doing stuff!

The stuff can be just about anything. Sports, arts, literature, service, cooking, camping, tutoring, civic groups, school newspapers...the list goes on and on. The key is to do stuff frequently and do a variety of it. As the girls get older, they tend to gravitate toward their favorite activities, but it's this initial push of trying something, experiencing it, and improving at it while sharing the experience with others that builds those three C's.

Why does this resonate with me? I see this same principle in action with my boy scouts. I talk with the older scouts at least once a year (when the new group of scouts is about to come in), and as often as I think is necessary, about their responsibility to protect the self confidence in the younger boys. I remind them that any criticism or bullying from them can cause great damage to a young boy's self confidence, and it can take years to repair the damage.

Luckily, the boys take this message very seriously and engage with the younger boys in very positive ways. They teach them how to do the basic scout skills, play various games, etc. Once they get these boys involved, you see drastic and rapid changes in the younger boys. It may seem silly, but the transformation really starts to become apparent about the first time that a boy can take down a tent without any instruction. It's simple, but it's accomplishment; and it starts the process of thinking I can learn this.

If you look at a group of boys who joined scouting together, you can see a clear difference in confidence between the boys who have been on 8 - 10 campouts and those who have been on 2 - 3. The ones that have done things are far more confident.

It's easy for me to frame this in terms of scouting--it's what I'm most familiar with. But remember, Girls Will Be Girls made the observation about girls. I see the same principle with boys. There's no reason to think that this doesn't extend to adults. Throughout our lives we should be working on being more competent, confident, and connected people. So let's all get out and do something.





¹ This was a bit of a gamble. I have heard a number of times that parenting books will just tell you all the things you aren't doing right, thus diminishing your confidence as a parent. Not so with Girls Will Be Girls. Even if you don't have girls, you should read this one.

In Memoriam: Dave "Sleeping Bear" Adams (oh, and apple pie)

First, the recipe. Then the why.

Sleeping Bear's backpack-style apple pie

Crust
1 Cup Crushed graham cracker
1 stick Butter

Filling
1 1/2 Cup Dried apple slices
1 1/2 Cup Water
8 tsp Sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Melt butter. Mix with graham cracker and form in bottom of a tupperware.

Add apple slices, water, sugar, and cinnamon to a pot and let cook until apples are hydrated. Let excess water boil out. Pour into tupperware.





The nostalgia inspired by the death of someone you haven't thought of in years is surprising. Yet, there it is--a result of a brief e-mail from my father forwarded to me from my Venture Crew Advisor.

My family, thanks to my brother, got pretty involved in a Venture Crew¹ that specialized in pre-1840's fur trade reenactments. Wildfire--that's what we called our crew advisor--was a long time reenactment buff who brought in some experienced friends to help teach skills that weren't his strong suit. Without exception, the people that Wildfire brought into to program were--let's just say they were colorful.

Critter was the true epitome of colorful. I've never met him, but I'm told the aptly-named-Critter can sense fear like an animal; and he'll certainly take advantage of your fear². If anyone could get close to the class of Critter, it was Sleeping Bear.

Sleeping Bear was also aptly named. His tent was always pitched as far away from the other tents as possible. We never worried about animals coming to camp when he was sleeping. Instead, we worried about the environmentalist groups complaining about noise pollution. But it wasn't his snoring alone that earned him the title of Bear. His temperament was a huge component of his name--particularly when he first woke up in the morning.

Rule #1 in camp was don't be stupid.

Rule #2 in camp was never wake Sleeping Bear without a cup of coffee in hand. If you had a mug of hot coffee in your hand when you woke him, you just might survive the ordeal. If you didn't have coffee, you'd likely be treated to a string of vulgarity that could only be published on the internet.

You also had to be careful not to violate Rule #1 in Sleeping Bear's presence. He didn't tolerate it, and he certainly wasn't shy about making his irritation known.

As with most people, however, Sleeping Bear had a lot more to him than you'd ever know from looking at him. This big bear of a man, with a thick scraggly beard grown half way down his chest and hair that hung to his eyes and over his ears was also that man that would teach us how to sew. He would show us how to sew shirts, or to sew leather.

"Sleeping Bear, I want to thank you for that brain tanned deer leather you gave me last summer," Shining Blade told him once. Shining Blade was about to go into his second or third year of college.

"I recall that was good stuff. Did you get good use out of it?"

Shining Blade grinned broadly, "Oh yeah!"

"What did you use it for?" Sleeping Bear's curiosity was definitely piqued.

"I made a present for my girlfriend out of it." Clearly, Shining Blade was one of the better students of sewing, having advanced well beyond shirts and pouches. This may, in fact, have been one of Sleeping Bear's proudest moments as a Venture Advisor³.

Sleeping Bear also taught us how to do bead work, make charcloth, and he would tell us stories of the mountain man history. He was as fierce a friend as he was a critic, and could be both in the same sentence.

In the e-mail from Wildfire, it was clear that Sleeping Bear was looking forward to the Fall reenactment rendezvous. He had told Wildfire, "Bring the Yukon Jack and I'll make the apple pie." His heart gave out just a month shy of that camp out.

I'm not sure if the rendezvous was scheduled for the first or second weekend in October, but since I'm scheduled to be backpacking the first weekend, I may take a few ingredients to make an apple pie in his honor. I've pulled this recipe together as a composite of a few other recipes and trying to adapt it to the limitations of a backpacking trip. Whether or not I add the Yukon Jack has yet to be determined.




¹Venturing is a program sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America that gives an even stronger emphasis on high adventure and outdoor activity than does traditional Boy Scouting. While Venturing has it's own system of recognitions and awards, I couldn't tell you anything about them as I was just in it for the fun.

²Ask me to tell you a couple stories sometime. You probably think I'm making them up.

³Naturally, we had an interest in the careers of our advisors. Wildfire was retired Coast Guard. Cap'n Jack was a black smith. Doc was a dentist. When you asked Sleeping Bear what he did for a living, he'd say casually, "I'm a photographer." One day I heard him complaining about how he hated doing school portraits because "there's nothing you can do to make a chubby faced 10 year old feel good about how she looks in her pictures." But he did the pictures anyway when there wasn't much demand for his preferred line of work. I asked him what he preferred to do. "Adult photography," he told me. From the descriptions of the two projects he told me about it didn't sound as trashy as you're probably thinking, but I'm still amazed that he made it past the BSA background checks.

"You're not going to get excommunicated over this, are you?"

"Benjamin, can I talk to you privately for a few minutes?" SP₁¹ pointed to an empty classroom. We went in, unfolded a couple chairs, and sat down for a talk.

SP₁ is a pretty busy guy at Sunday meetings, so I understood when he didn't spend a lot of time with small talk. In fact, I'm typically a busy guy at Sunday meetings, and small talk doesn't interest me much anyway. I was quite happy to get to the point.

"I couldn't help but notice you were wearing a Boy Scout uniform last week²." In the sea of white shirts and suit coats, it does stand out a little. Yet, Being the lazy slob that I am, I will wear my scout uniform to my worship services when I have a scout activity that follows so closely on the heels of church that I wont' have time to go home and change my clothes. I figure the dress uniform is plenty appropriate for church services (although some people disagree), and the members of my congregation have seen me do it enough times now that, instead of weird looks that I'm dressed so oddly, I'm usually met with curiosity about which trip I'm going on today. In this case, I would be leaving to go to our annual week long Boy Scout camp.

"Why yes, I was wearing my uniform last week." I have quite the talent for confirming what people already know.

"I don't know if you're aware, but we released our stake scouting specialist a few months ago, and we haven't yet found a replacement." I honestly had no idea, and had never even heard of a stake scouting specialist. "So I thought it was fortunate when I saw you in a scout uniform." Oh boy, I think to myself. Here we go. "And yes," SP₁ says, "this is leading up to a calling³."

I don't know what SP₁ planned to say after this. I did notice him take a breath in preparation for his next statement, but apparently my silent laughter and shaking head interrupted his train of thought. The friendly smile shifted into confused worry.

"I'm sorry. I have no desire at all to work with scouting in the Church."

The confused worry barreled into dismay.

I give SP₁ a lot of credit, however. He recovered quickly and immediately asked about the reasons behind my statement. More importantly, he never tried to tell me my feelings were wrong, misplaced, or invalid. Or at least he didn't try to make me feel guilty for feeling the way I did (more on that later).

After a few minutes of describing my views on LDS scouting and why I am not a fan, he thought for a second and gave me a challenge. "I understand your line of thinking," he said, "and I'll be honest; I agree with a lot of it. As I say more, however, please understand that the Church has specified how it wants the scouting program to be administered, they have given us those policies and guidelines, and there is very little that we can do here to change those." I can feel the crescendo to impasse.

"What I'm hearing from you," he continued, "is a lot of I want, and I feel. But we didn't want to extend this calling for you. We felt that you would be the person that could help improve the scouting program in the stake and give the young men a better experience. In the end, this is about preparing our young men to be faithful and capable adults." He's tugging on my heartstrings now. This is, after all, why I am involved in Scouting to begin with.

I agreed to think it over for a couple weeks until we could meet again and discuss if I was willing to put my personal disagreements aside for the benefit of the teenage youth in my stake.

Naturally, I discussed this meeting with my wife. Her first course of action was to laugh at me. She then proceeded to ask a couple questions about how much travel and time away from home this calling would require. In a stunning display of lack-of-faith, I came up with a series of questions aimed to find out if I could take on these responsibilities without disrupting my commitments to family and current troop. She and I agreed that if I couldn't keep those commitments, then this calling was not something I could accept. I then sent this list of questions to SP₁.

Of course, SP₁ was on vacation, and I knew I wouldn't hear back from him until he returned. Not wanting to be wholly unprepared for the event that I could accept stake scouting specialist position, I began to prepare myself for the long and miserable discussion about what Church scouting policies I could make myself live with and which policies I absolutely could not accept. After a few days, I had put together this seven page document (yes, it's long) about what I think makes a quality scouting unit and where my vision conflicts with Church policy.

Side story: I asked my scoutmaster to look over what I had written and include anything he thought I should add. He added a couple notes, then commented that I was being awfully thorough. He then proceeded to ask, "You're not going to get excommunicated over this, are you?" Thanks, David.

After having written all of that, I realized something--I didn't feel good at all about taking this calling. It wasn't just that I didn't want to do it, I also genuinely had an uncomfortable feeling whenever I thought about doing it anyway. This made me nervous. It wasn't that I felt good about saying no, I just felt bad about saying yes. And now I found myself bracing for the scenario where I was pressed to put my personal feelings aside in order to take an inspired calling.

This created a bit of a problem for me. My mind was pretty well made up--I wouldn't be taking this calling unless they were willing to ignore a lot of Church policies (some of which they already indicated they would not)--but how were they going to take it if they said they felt inspired to ask me to do this and I replied that I felt differently than they did. Don't get me wrong--I have no problem taking my own inspiration over the inspiration of my religious leaders. The concern this gave me was a) would they agree, and b) I didn't feel any inspiration about saying no, just strong discomfort in saying yes. Can you really say you're inspired to an action without any positive feelings?

Fortunately, I never had to have that discussion (nor did I need to show the stake my expose on scouting [my church membership is safe {for now}, Dave]). It turns out that the time commitment the calling would require would take me away from home more than my family could support, and it would also require me to take time away from the commitments I've made to my current troop. On those grounds, I turned down the calling, and SP₁ graciously accepted those reasons.

Personally, I wasn't quite satisfied. I hadn't felt a single good feeling in all of this yet, and that bothered me. I don't particularly like navigating life on negative feelings. Naturally, the issues weighed on my mind for a little longer.

It was a few days later that I happened to be thinking about my life in larger terms than just the microcosm of the three week dilemma I'd been going through. I considered some of the choices I've made since having moved to my current home, and the resultant lessons that I've learned. Then there was this sudden wave of emotion and reassurance. I won't go into the details of all the things I was thinking about, but in that brief moment of inspired recognition, I understood that the decisions I have made and the things I have learned will impact my family and my community for years to come; and that I would lose the ability to make that kind of an impact if I had accepted the role that had been extended. Most importantly, I felt good about having said no.



______________________________________________
¹ Stake presidency, first counselor. LDS congregations are referred to as wards, and a stake is comprised of 10-ish wards. The stake presidency oversees the administration of the wards in the stake and coordinates inter-ward activities.

² I volunteer with a scout troop in my community. It is hosted by a local Episcopalian congregation. Since my scouting involvement is outside of the LDS Church, it shouldn't come as a surprise that leaders outside of my congregation were previously unaware of my involvement.

³ The local LDS congregations are administered entirely by volunteers. As is the case in most of the world, people are usually asked to volunteer. It is commonly held belief that callings, or invitations to serve, are inspired invitations given from the Lord through the local church leadership. Whether or not each and every individual calling is inspired can be debated, but I can assure you from my experience in Church leadership that local leaders try very hard to let inspiration guide the general function of the congregation as a whole.

My Daughter Is Growing Up Faster Than I'm Prepared For

We have a kind of game we play to help Julie learn the scripture stories. We take out a copy of The Gospel Art Book, let Joules pick any picture she wants, and then Daddy has to tell the story of what's in the picture. Mama usually laughs at daddy because he uses words that are clearly too big for Joules to understand, but I'm trying.

In any case, we played this game for a few minutes before sending her to bed. I told her to pick a picture, and she picked this one:



Nope...I'm not ready to go into much detail about Potiphar's wife yet. Sorry, kid.

Zombie Statistician

I met with a physician at work today. He just purchased a copy of the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) and wanted to do some research out of the data. His question was whether having a certain condition exposed a person to premature death. He wanted to know if I would be able to extract and analyze the data.

He purchased 12 years of data; each year contains a sample of just under 8 million subjects. As a starting point, he suggested we start with the 2009 data and see what we learn from just that sub-sample. The only concern he had was that we wouldn't have enough follow-up data to know if the patients had died.

To me, it was a simple solution: extract the data, pull the social security numbers, and run them through the Social Security Death Index. As I said this, I realized that it wasn't likely that this purchased data set would contain social security numbers.

"Well, the website said it had social security numbers."

I furrowed my brow and looked at the set of 30 or so CD's sitting in a binder on the table in front of me.

"You mean to tell me these discs have social security for some 90 million subjects?"

"I think so."

I try to suppress the panic attack and say, "I think I'm going to have you take these discs back to your office and I'll check with my supervisors to make sure I'm legally allowed to work with these data."

Turns out I am. Another panic attack. I'm allowed to work with these data pending my completion of a number of training modules on the internet. These will undoubtedly remind me many times over of the stiff civil and criminal penalties to which I will be subjected should I even accidentally leak any identifiable information. Forget the panic attack--my heart just stopped.

So there it is. I died at work today, but will continue sifting through this mountain of data in my undead state. And the worst part of it all--it wouldn't even make a decent straight-to-dvd movie.

"That was dumb"

It's a start like any other day. But we know it isn't any other day. Steve, David, and I are debating about the best evacuation procedure. The things we can agree on are that Molly needs to see a doctor today, and that we need to get to the trail head to get the cars. The debate is on whether we take the trail, the road, split the group. Molly's major contribution is her commentary from the night before--"That was dumb."

"It would be stupid not to finish the trail when we're this close." David hates cutting trips short, and we only have four and a half miles to go. According to the map, it's an 800 foot descent over the last mile of trail. There's no way I'm going to be comfortable with Molly going down that. So I voiced my concern. David wants to push on and evaluate later.

In my mind, I set a deadline that when we reach the road, if David still wants to take Molly down the trail, I'm relieving him of duty and ordering him down the road. It isn't long before he is convinced that the best option is to send the boys ahead to the parking lot (with Steve and I), and he and Molly will take the road.

At the first sign of cell phone coverage, we call the outfitter. They agree to get the cars to us by 11:00. We make it to the parking lot at 10:30. No cars. Molly and David show up at 11:00. No cars. Not a big deal. I feel better now that I see the gleam back in Molly's eye.

11:30--no cars. I'm a little annoyed
12:00--no cars. I'm angry. But at least I've had a chance to wash some clothes and get them dry enough to wear. Now I won't stink for the ride home.

We manage to catch a park ranger. He gets a hold of the outfitter. Due to a miscommunication on our part, the cars were dropped at a different parking lot. Crap! Now I can't be angry at anyone! But it's a simple fix, and we're in the cars by 1:00 PM. Having been unable to reach a physician to get advice on whether to see a doctor nearby or wait until Cleveland, and based on how well Molly is feeling, we load up the cars and head home.

One more thing that I wasn't prepared for: David pulled me aside to tell me that he appreciated my being there. Apparently, having me and Steve there helped put him at ease. Now, David and Steve are my mentors. They are the two of the people in Cleveland I look up to the most. It's a surreal experience to have one of your mentors tell you that it's easier for him to deal with things when you're around. Unlike yesterday, perhaps this is a sign of progress.

Molly survived the ordeal. She did break her nose, but no reconstruction is necessary. The cut on her head is healing nicely. And as Danny so aptly put it, "Molly, you don't look so bad!" He said it as he patted her directly over the wound.

"My mom encourages me to come because I'm an antisocial little bastard"

Packing up went quicker than expected as the boys demonstrated a greater proficiency for trail life. The adults tend to take their time since we're usually done long before the boys anyway. Today, they take us by surprise and finish more than 10 minutes before the adults are ready.

While waiting, I pulled the boys together and told them stories from when I was a scout and backpacking in Maine. I focused on a couple stories about a boy who was a little overly sheltered by his mother and had a hard time adjusting to trail life. I commented to them that his mom needed to push him out the door a little more. John¹ immediately added to quote of the day, "My mom encourages me to come because I'm an antisocial little bastard!

I fully expect it's going to be a good day.

Not a lot of memorable activity happens on the trail, however. And then, shortly after lunch, we start to get a little rain fall. At the first sign of rain on the trail, it's a good idea to stop and put a pack cover over your pack--they are fitted to go over the pack in a way that leaves the straps exposed so you can still wear it. As soon as we got the pack covers on, it became apparent that we would want to stop and put up our rain flies and take cover from the storm. It's better to get to camp late and dry than early and wet. It only takes a couple minutes to get the flies up, and we rest under them. The boys fly is supported by a couple ropes and John¹ (being the tallest in the group) standing in the center to provide some pitch to the plastic.

The storm gets pretty heavy for about 20 minutes before tapering off. We wait an extra five to be sure, but then take down the flies and resume the walk. We take an easy pace today and reach the campsite around 2:30. We have just enough time to get a fire going to smoke out the mosquitoes, and to get our rain fly up before it start to rain again. The fire dies, and most of us take cover in our tents.

The rain clears about about 4:15, at which point the party starts on filtering water. It isn't much longer before we find out just how wrong I was about today being a good day. The boys, David, and Molly finish pumping water up at the upper camp site (the tent sites were separated by a small hill and a stream), and Steve and I are tending the fire in the lower site.

SLIP, THUD, SPLASH.

"David!" Molly's voice.

"That didn't sound good," I tell Steve. I get up to walk up the hill and see what's happening. I can't see Molly, but I can see David hurrying down the hill. It registers that Molly must have slipped. David reaches her first and is feeling her head and back when I get up the hill enough to see into the stream bed. He's now helping her up, and I see why she called for help. Her nose is bleeding, her glasses are gone, and there is a lot of blood in her eye.

Oh no, she damaged her eye I think to myself. I evaluate that David has her properly supported, and he's helping her up the bank and to our site where she can sit for treatment. I turn and go straight for the first aid kit. David seems so calm! What I don't know is that Molly has told him her eye is fine--it's the gash in her forehead that's bleeding into her eye.

While David is helping Molly sit, I'm spreading out the first aid kit, and Steve is getting out gloves. The Boy Scouts of America requires at least one leader in each group to have Wilderness First Aid training for trips like these. Molly, Steve, David, and I are all trained; and it's a huge relief today. David and Steve take point on treatment, and discuss the options. I pull things out of the kit as they talk about them, making them available and finding other supplies to help, as well as disposing of garbage in the fire.

After what seems like 30 minutes (but was probably only 10), the bleeding is under control. The nose is clearly broken.

5:30 PM, we're four and a half miles away from the parking lot, and our cars aren't supposed to be delivered by the outfitter until tomorrow. These are the conditions under which we have to decide whether to evacuate or to wait until tomorrow to move. It's decided that we'll observe Molly for a few hours. If no signs of concussion develop, we'll spend the night. Otherwise, we make for a road to call 911.

Nothing develops.

Moments like these cause a lot of self-reflection. After everything was under control, I walked up the trail to get firewood, but along the way, the adrenaline rush came down and I had to stop for a minute to regain my composure and not break into tears. Silly, I know. I was fine, and I had no reason to be crying. Just one of those things that develops when the chemicals in the brain readjust, I guess. But it was clear to me in that moment that I'm not ready to be the leader in charge at these events. I've thought I could be for a while, but clearly I'm not. I don't think for a second that I could have kept my wits about me as well as David and Steve had. If forced to, I could get by, but not with nearly as good of a result as we had tonight. I need more time.

There was one thing that shook me more than anything else about the event. Molly is one of those people who always has a gleam in her eye. Even when she's criticizing something, she gleams. It's the sign of a truly happy individual. Tonight, the gleam is gone, and I just couldn't seem to process that. I hope I never see a gleam like that disappear again.

"I had a snack"

"Did you see the lightning storm last night?"

It started around 1:00 AM. Normally, as a safety precaution, we track the time between lightning sightings and thunder soundings. Tonight, there was no hope of doing so. The flashes were so frequent that we would see multiple flashes before thunder started. It was a constant light show with an accompanying symphony. The raw beauty and power of nature was stunning. At least until I fell asleep again.

The rain had stopped by the time we woke up. More than likely, the heat of the day was enough solar energy to prevent the moisture from solidifying and falling, but at night fall, the cool air was unable to contain the evaporated water any longer. We anticipated another clear day, although we took caution anyway.

We have a nearly constant uphill climb to start the day. We also anticipate that today will be the hardest hiking day of the trip (we were right). We get to see 4 more vistas on the way to the Bradley Wales picnic area where we stop for lunch. There are some exciting features at the picnic area. First, there's an established latrine--stocked with toilet paper. This means no digging, and that we can extend our precious supply of toilet paper. If not for this luxury, some of us may have run out.

The second luxury of the picnic area was a water pump with potable water. No need to filter our water here. We drank as much water as we cared to and refilled quite easily before we left. We also had a fair amount of fun using the hand pump to bring water up a couple hundred feet.

David illustrated his dumpster diving skills at the picnic area as well. He noticed a tent in the trash can--presumably not a very good one. What caught his eye were the cords on the tent. They were perfectly good cords with reflective pieces of sheathing. So he did what any self-respecting outdoorsman would do--took the rope and left the tent in the trash. The ropes would serve us well in the coming days as we set up rain flies.

After lunch, it was another 3 miles to our campsite. With about a mile left, my right hip started to throb with pain, and I had to slow my pace considerably. Before making the final push, we took a significant break, in which we obtained the quote for the day.

I made some kind of fictitious comment to one of the boys and they almost fell for it. I then told them that "gullible" was written in the clouds. At this point, Will got excited and told a story (Will could be the poster child for ADHD).

"I once told my brother that 'gullible' was the 2,761st word in the dictionary. Funny thing is that I was right!"

"Will, how do you know you were right. Did you check his counting?"

"No, I watched him count the words in the dictionary?"

"You did not! How do you focus long enough to watch your brother count to 2,761?"

"I had a snack."

After finally reaching the campsite, we looked around. It was another campsite scarce on water and heavy on mosquitoes. Danny looked at the map and decided that it'd be better to hike up a quarter mile to the next vista and camp there. The only caveat was that we'd have to come back to get water and carry the water to the campsite. Even with the extra work for water, it was a great decision.

From the vista, the only man-made object we could see was the bike trail through the gorge. A couple of us laid out our ground pads, laid down on the vista, and just enjoyed the relaxing view, perhaps while reading a book. The mosquitoes were light and the setting was perfect. Falling asleep was augmented with the satisfying feeling of being more than half a day ahead of schedule.

"We should have a Twilight marathon after this trip....Wait, no--that sounds awful!"

Tuseday morning, 3:30 AM and I need to relieve myself. This always poses a dilemma when living on the trail. These things need to be done a few hundred feet away from water sources, and preferably a few hundred feet from camp. Consequently, middle of the night trips require putting on clothes, boots, and wandering sleepily through the brush to find a suitable location. Today, it's complicated even more by the fact that it's raining. If I go, I have to prevent water from getting into the tent and stay dry so I don't shiver the rest of the morning. I decide to wait.

Fortunately, the rain has stopped by the time we get up at 6:00. Decisions are much easier to make when you're getting up anyway.

We come upon our first major vistas today. Looking down over the gorge is an incredible experience. The only evidence of humans is a bike trail at the bottom of the canyon, a farm across the canyon, and a cell phone tower. No roads. No highways. No cars. And nothing between us and the bottom but an 800 foot drop.

At one of these vistas, we managed to get cell phone reception. It would be the first of two times we could get messages out to the rest of the world. Steve took the opportunity to send a text to his wife: "Happy 30th Anniversary." Thanks, Denise, for letting us borrow Steve.

Our plan today was to walk about 5 miles. At the last vista before our scheduled campsite, Danny looked at the map and decided that we were making good enough time to justify going two more miles. They boys agreed to it, and we pressed on. It was an ingenious decision, too. The scheduled campsite was short on water, heavy on mosquitoes, and light on tenting space. The campsite Danny took us to was heavy with water, had plenty of tent space, but still had a lot of mosquitoes.

We left the boys to fend for themselves. The adults took a few minutes to bath out of the stream and do some laundry. The water was cold, refreshing, and it was nice to get some clean smelling clothes. We then worked on pumping water and starting a fire to smoke out the bugs.

There was more Twilight discussion at some point in the day. The themes that get established early in the week tend to recur often throughout the week. I suggested that we should do a Twilight marathon on Saturday night after we got home. The idea was met with instant praise--for about three seconds. Then it occurred to us that we really had no interest in such a thing. We all very suddenly had other plans.

"Natalie Portman Makes Any Movie Better"

(Please forgive the lack of pictures. I'll embed some when they get uploaded to my troop's website)

This was the conclusion we reached within the first two miles of our trip. It doesn't matter if the role is beneath her, or if the movie is absolutely awful. The mere presence of Natalie makes the movie better. We would recall this conclusion several times throughout the week, though I don't think any of us could give any explanation for why. In fact, the following exchange is an important part of the trip:

Boys [okay, and me (on Sunday)]: "Natalie Portman makes any movie better."
...
Steve (on Friday): "You guys have been talking about Natalie Portman all week. But can any of you name her filmography?"
Boys [okay, and me]: "Uhhhhh....."

It was a little after 2:00 PM on Sunday when we drove past Pine Creek Outfitters. I knew we'd missed it when Steve said, "Shit! Er, dammit! Er...sorry boys!" A quick course correction and we pulled into the outfitters parking lot and started to unload the vans. We hadn't had the chance to inspect the boys packs yet, and so we spent some time repacking so that we could make room to distribute the food. Not a small task--at two pounds of food per person per day, we had roughly 120 pounds of food to distribute over nine people. Food distribution was further complicated by the fact that only one of the five boys in our crew had any significant backpacking experience. Four the other four, this would be a first time event.

Our biggest challenge was getting Austin's pack to the right weight. Ideally, a pack weighs no more than a quarter to a third of the person's body weight. Austin (the youngest in our group) tips the scales at a robust 80 pounds. If you look at the Pack Weights table, you'll see we had a hard time getting his pack weight down the first day.

We left from the outfitter at about 4:00 PM and arrived at the campsite around 5:30 PM. The start was kind of slow as we got accustomed to the packs, the heat, and pacing each other. The start of the trail is also primarily uphill. Naturally, that's a little more difficult. It didn't take long for the adults to set up their tents. They boys had a little more trouble though. We eventually figured out that their problems were a product of Danny attempting to set up the two man tent with the poles from the three man tent. The tent looked more like a hammock. We also found that, under that much tension, we had to be careful when removing the poles. When it was done haphazardly, the pole whipped back and nearly took John¹'s head off. Well, okay. It hit him in the chest and he sputtered and mumbled something. But we decided to be careful anyway.

One of the great challenges of wilderness backpacking is food planning. You need to plan enough food to provide enough calories for the trip, but without many leftovers. There are no garbage cans in the wilderness, you see, and so any uneaten food gets put in a bag and carried out in your pack. As you can imagine, we don't like to keep uneaten, rotting food festering in our packs for a week. "Why not just dump it in the woods?" you ask. Quite simply, doing so encourages animals to develop a dependency on human trash, which isn't good for the animals. Thus, any left over food gets passed around the group until it is completely eaten.

Having a person like John¹ is really handy on such a trip. John¹ weighs about light 240 pounds and we've never had enough food for him on any camping trip. Between him, myself, and Will, we managed to eat all of dinner and finish off the chocolate and butterscotch puddings. Don't fool yourself. Eating pudding is difficult work--the palate begins to resist after a while.

Distance hiked: 1.97 miles
Change in Elevation (from lowest to highest): 350 ft
Steps: 9,350

"Danny won't make the banana cream pudding. It's like he's afraid it's made of Satan or something"

Monday starts at 7:00 AM. Danny wakes up the boys and the adults wander out of their tents packing their gear. All of the meals on this trip require that water be boiled. For dinners, the boiling water is added to pouches of freeze dried food. For breakfast, the boys add it to packets of oatmeal, and the adults add it to bowls of Kashi. Hot chocolate and coffee (for adults) are available as desired.

After breakfast, the bags are packed again. Having dropped some weight from the meals we've eaten, we redistribute the weight in hopes of getting closer to the target pack weights. We're a lot closer this time.

Before leaving, we take a trip to a "50 foot waterfall" that lies "200 yards downstream." First, I'm certain it was more than 200 yards. Second, the waterfall sure looked like more than 50 feet tall. It was quite impressive. After a few pictures, we head back to camp where Molly, David, and Steve are waiting. As I come into camp, I tell Molly that we had an accident with her camera. "The boys were throwing rocks over the edge, and we thought it'd be fun to document the path of a rock. So we tied the camera to a rock, and I went to the bottom of the waterfall. Will threw the rock over, and I was supposed to catch it. Unfortunately, it was an incomplete pass." She didn't believe the story for some reason.

Very early in today's walk, we had our first encounter with mountain laurel. Mountain laurel is a pretty, small white flower and it grows in abundance at Pine Creek. In abundance. There were places on the trail where it was mountain laurel as far as you could see. We happened to be hiking during the peak of the bloom. As we entered this first gathering of the flower, the sun shone down on it and the forest shone in a heavenly shade of white. Very beautiful.

For the boys, the highlight of the day was John and Will getting into an enormous discussion of the Twilight series. Seeing it in print won't do the moment justice, but this is John's summary of the Twilight movie:

"Bella, I love you, I'll never leave you"
Two scenes later, "I have to leave you again". Then he comes back,
"Bella, I love you, I'll never leave you."
Two scenes later, "I have to leave you for some reason."
Why does she keep taking this loser back?

We walked into camp at the bottom of Four Mile Run, Right Branch. The campsite was small, and it was difficult to fit all of the tents into the space there, but we managed to squeeze them in with enough clearance to start a small fire to clear the bugs. The boys enjoyed the the small waterfall at the stream, which also provided very clear water for pumping. On a trip like this, we carry our own water filtration pumps because clean water isn't available along the trail. The filters take out sediments and bacteria, then push the water through charcoal. In some places, after all of this is done, the water has a yellowish tint caused by absorption of tannin from the plants in the stream bed. The beautiful thing about running water in small streams is that it hasn't had time to absorb the tannin and comes out very clear and tastes oh-so-good. That water from this campsite may have been the best we had all week.

The boys were quick to make dinner (for which we were proud) but soon had an argument about what to make for dinner. Their options were cheese cake or banana cream pudding. Danny was particularly opposed to the banana cream pudding which inspired a quotable moment when John¹ told us, "Danny is so against the idea of making the pudding. It's like he's afraid that it's made of Satan or something!" Part of me wishes they hadn't made dessert at all, however, as they had a hard time finishing all the food they made. Eventually, not even John¹ refused to eat any more. We were so shocked we have named a new state of being after him. This state of being is called Tonon and is the state obtained when one cannot physically consume any more food.

I Had It So Much Easier

I didn't get around to blogging days three and four. But I guess that's part of the experience of single fatherhood. I could take the time to do it, but I figured I'd jot down my thoughts on the week as a whole and get to packing for my trip. Enjoy!

This is the second time I've done the week on my own, and it's been a good experience. These four day forays are (hopefully) the closest I'll ever get to experiencing single parenthood, and the best chance for me to understand what the single parent's life is like.

Let's be honest, though. What I went through in these four days is nothing like what a single parent experiences. Here's a very short list of why:

• Four days is hardly enough to have the full experience.
• Janelle planned the meals and did the grocery shopping before she left. I just had to cook them. That means 60% of the effort of the meals was taken care of for me.
• I would be surprised if the majority of single parents didn't make less money than me. I could be wrong about that. But I work at the Cleveland Clinic, have flexible hours, good pay, great health benefits--I don't worry about a lot of things I would worry about if I was still fighting to get more than 36 hours a week a Pizza Hut just so I could qualify for a health plan that doesn't even compare.
• Also work related, sitting in front of a computer all day is a lot less stressful than standing next to a 400 degree oven and pushing pizzas through as fast I can, or inhaling steam from opening and closing the dishwasher.
• I had cheap daycare.
• Most significantly, Joules doesn't consider herself a child of a single parent. She knows Janelle is coming back, and she's looking forward to it. My single parenthood is, to her, the anomaly, not the rule.

But a few things have happened that I think have given me a little bit of insight into what single parents face. Some of the things that never really occurred to me until I had to try it:

1. Stay-at-home-moms have it easy compared to single moms. Yes, I understand that's probably a loaded and potentially offensive statement, but I really believe it.
2. Everything crisis is amplified as a single parent. When you realize at 8:15 at night that you're out of milk, the stay-at-home parent can either go to the store or send the spouse. There's still someone to put the kid to bed. The single parent either loads the kid in the car and goes to the store in the middle of bedtime, or goes without milk until the next day.
3. Striking the balance of financial prudence and convenience gets harder. Using the milk example again, I could have picked up milk at the CVS next to the hardware store and paid more money for it, or I could have made an additional stop at the grocery store. Sure, all parents face this kind of dilemma, but the single parent rarely has the option of procrastinating until a trip can be made without the kid.
4. I'm very lucky to be married to a woman who will let me nap or decompress after work if I feel I need to. In turn, if she's had a rough day at home with Joules, I'm more than happy to take over and let her decompress. The single parent doesn't get to decompress. Ever.

So, to modify the sage words of the time traveling great ones, "Be excellent to single parents." They don't need pity, or constant charity, but a chance to decompress every now and again.

A little milk wouldn't hurt either.

Single Fatherhood: Day 2

6:50 AM

"Joules, it's time to wake up."

"NEAEAEAEAEAEH!"

So I laid down with her to try to help the transition out of sleep. I woke up again at 7:30. Wasn't that just a brilliant idea.

Once she was up, she was up though. Eggs for breakfast and out the door by a little after 8:00. Not a bad start. We make the drive to Nara's house, and I realize that I've parked in the driveway of the house next door. Oops! Rather than fixing that, I just hopped out, grabbed her, and tried to rush her in.

I walk out the door and all I hear is screaming. Hopefully it only lasts a minute. I'll never know, because Cindy wouldn't tell me if the day was pure hell anyway.

My day starts with another trip to Hillcrest. I had an ingenius idea over night about how to get data that only prints in pdf form to have consistent delimiters so I can convert it into a csv. Just for the sake of ranting--if you ever, ever, ever build a database, please consult a statistician. Anyone who ever works with the data will thank you for it.

Enough with the self praise. It's an uneventful day at work. I'm mostly ignoring things I don't really want to do. I'm sure I'll pay for that later. Unlike the day before, I manage to get out of work in time to pick Julie up at 5:00. Just like the day before, she's asleep. Unlike the day before, she just barely fell asleep and has no intention of waking up.

Cindy heads back to the other room and gets Joules's clothes. Yeah, that's right--Julie found some of Nara's clothes and decided she wanted to wear those. Maybe that's a sign that Joules wants new things to wear. She must be exhausted, however, because she hardly flinches when we changer her clothes. When I ask her if she wants to go to the hardware store I get a half-hearted no.

We go to the hardware store anyway. I unstrap her car seat, and ask her if she wants to go inside. Again, a half-hearted no. So I pick her up and carry her. She instantly falls asleep on my shoulder. Normally she loves the hardware store because I always buy one of the 25 cent Tootsie Roll pops. It's 25 cents I don't have to spend today.

When we get back to the car, I'm strapping her into her seat and ask her if she wants to go home and finish her nap. "nnnnn...." She never does get to the o. So at home, I carry her up to bed and let her sleep. I change my clothes and go out to weed the planters in front of the house. At about 7:15 I go in to make dinner, and at about 7:45, Joules finally comes downstairs.

After she eats, she demands to go outside again. Two of the older neighborhood kids are out, but no one her age. So she chases after them as they ride their scooters. Eventually she gets her hands on the Hello Kitty scooter and tries it out. Mixed results, but no major contusions. While she tries to figure out how the scooter thing works, I talk to a neighbor woman I've not met before. We finally go back in at 9:30 with surprisingly little protest.

Bedtime is harder tonight. She didn't protest coming into the house, but she's screaming bloody murder at the suggestion of pajamas. I give in and let her get into bed in her t-shirt. After we read, I promise I'll come back after I start a load of laundry. More screaming. I start the load of laundry anyway, and when I come out of the laundry room, there's Joules with her pajamas in hand. I put her shirt in the load I just started and put her pajamas on her. Back up to bed, two seconds of screaming, and she's out. What did Nara do to her that has her so tired?

Back downstairs to watch TV until the load in the wash finishes. I never do make it off the couch again. Two loads to fold on Thursday. Didn't clean the kitchen counters tonight either. One more thing to do on Thursday. Sleep.

Single Fatherhood: Day 1

6:50 AM, shaking Julie's legs

"Joules, it's time to wake up." Her first response is to barely open her eyes. When she recognizes it's me, she closes them again.

"Joules, you get to go play with Chumby today! Do you want to go play with Chumby?"

No response.

So I shaker her a little again. "Julie, do you want to get out of bed?"

In her sing songy voice, "No."

"You just want to go back to sleep?"

That same lyrical voice, "Yeah."

Ten minutes later she was awake and wanting to be held. She got cereal for breakfast before we changed her and grabbed her things. She was mostly ignored, though, while Janelle and I gathered up the last things for camp and loaded them into a friend's van. Shortly after they left, Joules and I went to Chumby's house. She marched in without hesitation and without so much as a good-bye.

My work day started at Hillcrest. Somehow I've become the Clinic's expert on accessing information from the obstetric database there, which is a little frightening, seeing as my approach to data extraction is a slightly enhanced version of guess and check. I like to call it barely-educated guess and check. After a couple of hour of fighting the database and getting about half of what I wanted, I went back to the main campus.

I felt good about my afternoon's work as I finished up a project that I should have finished at the end of last week. The mood was fouled by a trio of factors, though. 1) whereas my computer failed Monday morning, the hard drive had to be wiped. Not everything got installed the same way, which means a couple of vital programs aren't working as they should. The end result--no reports. 2) An e-mail from an investigator complaining about 'problems' in my analysis that he wants me to fix. The problems reflect imperfections in the data, which can't possibly be fixed. This is the fourth or fifth time we've had this discussion. 3) the Systems people showed up at 4:25 to reinstall printer drivers. I needed to pick up Julie at 5:00, and finally left work at 4:55.

At last, I picked up Julie. She was asleep when I arrived, but not for long. She stumbled down the stairs at Chumby's house, wearing one of Chumby's shirts, with an enormous contusion under her left eye. Carrie apologized profusely, but I brushed it off. Kids happen after all. But I'll be perfectly honest--I wasn't prepared for how bad it was. It doesn't look like a bruise though, more like she got pinched. She was pretty cuddly for a while, and I can tell it still bothers her a little.

Pizza for dinner. Nice and simple. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it's cold water to remove stains from a white shirt before washing it? Yeah, that's right Carrie...she got pizza sauce all over Chumby's sparkling white shirt. Payback's a...lot more work for me.

We did manage to weed the garden today though. Well, I did anyway. Joules snuck back inside, climbed to the top of the pantry, and pulled down the giant jar of jolly ranchers. Now she's watching Harry Potter and waiting for the sugar high to tail off so we can go to bed. Hopefully I can get some laundry folded.

Many thanks to Carrie for watching Joules today. And especially for the bread. It turns out I'm out of bread...I'm almost out of milk too. Just not enough time left today to go to the store.

Things left to do today:

Dishes
fold laundry
wash another load of laundry
clean Chumby's shirt
put away toys in the basement

Single Fatherhood: Day 0

I committed myself to it after dinner tonight. Seeing as I'm not truly a single father, I felt it was okay for me to cheat a little and let Janelle make dinner. But after dinner, Joules put on play clothes and grabbed her shoes, so we made our way outside.

I had high hopes for getting some things done. As soon as we got outside I pulled out the trampoline, which was almost entirely ignored so that Joules could climb all over the car. I did manage to fold a couple tents that were in my garage from past camping trips. I was about to move to weeding the garden when it happened--the dreaded sound of neighborhood children.

That sound is the biggest productivity killer in the world. As soon as she hears it, she's bolts for the front of the house and I have to race her to the street. She always stops at the sidewalk, but I still yell at her to stop every time; some kind of compulsive distrust.

So I sat in Cool Matt's yard and talked with him about his summer camp job while the neighborhood kids fought over toys. Matt writes hip hop with morals for kids, and he gave me a good history hip hop because, "No offense, but you don't look like the hip hop type." If I had a smart phone, I would have pulled it out to Google "hip hop" just to show that I wasn't offended.

Now we're home, a load of laundry started, and Joules is winding down for bed. If I don't fall asleep when we do story time I might get a second load started. If I'm lucky, I won't get too annoyed that I never did get to weeding the garden. Maybe tomorrow.

Packing List

I'm heading to Pine Creek Canyon in just 9 days for a 7 day backpacking trip.



Part of the fun of this kind of trip is the minimalism required to carry your life on your back for that long. My packing list:

2 shirts
2 pants
1 long sleeve shirt
1 light fleece
3 pairs of socks
2 pairs of underwear
1 mess kit
1 fork, knife, spoon
1 pair of boots
1 medium weight sleeping bag
1 ground pad
1 two man tent
1 stove
1 fuel bottle
1 flashlight
3 extra batteries
1 roll of toilet paper
1 bottle of soap
1 hat
1 first aid kit
2 water bottles
1 water filtration pump
7 days of food

Total weight: 30 lbs

Signs of the times? Not likely.

Following the tornado in Joplin, MO, I found myself in a discussion about whether this was another sign of the times. The argument presented to me was that these natural disasters are becoming more frequent. I countered that I did not believe this was the case, and before I knew it, evidence was being presented to demonstrate to me that these events were, indeed, more frequent now than in the past.

The evidence as it was presented was that since the 2007 adoption of the Enhanced Fujita scale--a scale the measures the strength of a tornado--there have been 5 EF5 tornadoes, four of which have occurred in 2011. Upon my stating that it was not possible to determine if that was any meaningful change without EF tornado data from before 2007, I was informed that there had been about 50 EF5 tornadoes since 1950.

The basic assumptions that immediately came to mind were that annual tornado frequencies follow a Poisson distribution. So 50 tornadoes over 57 years (1950 - 2006) suggests an annual tornado rate of 0.877. The annual tornado rate from 2007 - 2011 would be 5 tornadoes in 5 years, or 1.000. I didn't run a formal comparison, but my suspicion is that the difference in those rates wouldn't be noted as significant by a statistical test. And I said as much.

And then followed the counter argument: "You seem to have missed the fact that there were four tornadoes in 2011 alone."

Well, if you're going to give me silly arguments, you're going to get walloped with the evidence. So here we go.

I went to Wikipedia and pulled off the data for all of the EF5 tornadoes since 1950. I loaded them into a spreadsheet, and then imported the data into R 2.12.2 to do some analysis. First, let's take a look at the annual frequency of EF5 tornadoes.



As you can see, many of the years saw no tornadoes at all. Many saw only 1, and in 12 years, there were more than one EF5 tornadoes observed. I'll also point out that in four of the multiple EF5 tornado years, two or more tornadoes appeared in the same storm system. For instance, in 1974 we saw six EF5 tornadoes all on the same day. In 2011, three EF5 tornadoes were noted on one day in April.

Perhaps the most interesting observation, and this is strictly visual, is that there appears to be a more dense appearance of tornadoes on the left side of the graph than on the right. In other words, there were more EF5 tornadoes in the beginning of the study period than in the end.

Looking at the data in a slightly different way, we see how frequently multiple tornadoes are observed in a year. In the figure below, it's pretty clear that multiple EF5 tornadoes are pretty rare. Based on the data for 62 years, and having seen 2 years with 4 tornadoes, we can expect to see 4 EF5 tornadoes occur 3.2 times every 100 year. In other words, about once in every 33 years. That last time we saw 4 tornadoes in a single year was 43 years ago. Seems like we were due for a big year.


Now, just to solidify this even more, let's run a poisson regression model to see if there has been a change in the frequency of EF5 tornadoes between 1950 and 2011. Running the model (using the glm function in R), we find that there has been a 1.1% reduction in the frequency of tornadoes over time. However, this reduction is not statistically significant (p = 0.129). Based on the data, then, all we can say is that there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that the number of EF5 tornadoes has increased since 1950.

What does this have to do with signs of the times? Well, all I'm trying to say is that if you think that these natural disasters are God's way of telling us that the end is rapidly approaching, then you might want to rethink how that fits the data. If four EF5 tornadoes in 2011 is a warning from God, he must have been trying to send an even stronger warning in 1974. The sophist in me wants to ask if the end of the world was closer at hand in 1974 than it is now.

Ultimately, the point is that the Second Coming of Christ cannot be boiled down to a single event. It's a process that has been underway for a long time now. I think there's very little point in trying to interpret the "signs of the times," especially when we have so little data to be able to understand if anything we're experiencing is any different than what past centuries have experienced. It's a lot more productive to be mindful of what you as an individual can do to be worthy to meet your God, regardless of when that time comes.



Some limitations on my analysis. First, it's limited to EF5 tornadoes. In understanding the overall trend of destruction by tornado, we'd need to include all tornadoes. From what I've presented, we really can't determine if there has been an uptick in, say, EF4 tornadoes. Professionally, I'd be surprised if there was.

Second, the data don't actually follow a Poisson distribution, making the model I built somewhat biased. The figure below illustrates how the data are distributed...more of a zero-inflated Poisson distribution (such distributions have more 0 counts than we would expect and more counts in the right tail than we would expect if adhering to a Poisson distribution). Indeed, the data are much too overdispersed to be modeled particularly well by poisson regression, and zero-inflated adjustments would be most appropriate. At the same time, such methods aren't likely to change the conclusions.

More like us than we're comfortable to admit

In all of this post-bin Laden coverage I've been reading countless articles investigating countless viewpoints of the events. Like most people, I imagine I'm looking for something that justifies--or at least explains--how I feel. And I think I found it.

I came across this excerpt of Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World written by Bin Laden's first wife and one of their sons. There were a few segments in this brief excerpt that stood out to me.

Since the time I could observe and reason, I have mainly known my father to be composed, no matter what might be happening. That’s because he believes that everything of earthly life is in the hands of God. It is difficult, therefore, for me to imagine that he became so excited when my mother told him I was about to be born that he momentarily misplaced his keys.

After a frantic search, I’m told he settled my mother hastily in the car before spinning off at a reckless speed. Luckily he had recently purchased a new automobile, the latest Mercedes, because on that day he tested all its working parts. I’ve been told it was golden in color, something so beautiful that I imagine the vehicle as a golden carriage tearing through the wide palm-tree-lined boulevards of Jeddah, Saudia Arabia.

Never did I hear my father raise his voice in anger to my mother. He always seemed very satisfied with her. In fact, when I was very small, there were times that he and my mother secluded themselves in their bedroom, not to be seen by the family for several days, so I know that my father enjoyed my mother’s company.

This one stood out to me because of how I've reacted to such reports from church leaders about their own spouses. It's difficult for me to imagine a man never raising his voice. Now take a man that we've painted to be the very embodiment of evil, rivaled perhaps only by Adolf Hitler (level of evil may itself be only a matter of legend) and imagine him never raising his voice in anger to his wife.

You might have guessed by now that my father was not an affectionate man. He never cuddled with me or my brothers. I tried to force him to show affection, and was told that I made a pest of myself. When he was home, I remained near, pulling attention-gaining pranks as frequently as I dared. Nothing sparked his fatherly warmth. In fact, my annoying behavior encouraged him to start carrying his signature cane. As time passed, he began caning me and my brothers for the slightest infraction.

Thankfully, my father had a different attitude when it came to the females in our family. I never heard him shout at his mother, his sisters, my mother, or my sisters. I never saw him strike a woman. He reserved all the harsh treatment for his sons.

My father relented when it came to football—or soccer, as Americas call it. When he brought a ball home, I remember the shock of seeing him smile sweetly when he saw how excited his sons became at the sight of it. He confessed that he had a fondness for playing soccer and would participate in the sport when he had time.

So he wasn't gentle with everyone, and was notably harsh on his sons. Somehow, at least to me, these last two passages are especially poignant indicators that he had all of the complexities of humanity that we are familiar with. Harsh and demanding of his sons, gentle with the women in his life. Yet unable to resist the joy of seeing his sons excited to play soccer. Even for Osama, some things are just too good to pass up.

I wrote the other day (or was it yesterday) that I couldn't help but feel that he was more human than we let on. I think I found my confirmation. He was human, and he was complex, and he was more like us than I imagine most people are willing to admit. It's a lot easier to stomach and celebrate the death of a person when we convince ourselves of his uni-dimensional wickedness.

I contemplated these things as I walked to scouts last night, wondering how a man can become what he became. How did he go from the well respected and liked human calculator to the man with a $25 million bounty? What I ultimately settled on (admittedly, without any evidence) is that he chose to blame all the world's problems on one thing and obsessed over it. He entered a rabbit hole and kept sliding down, never taking off the blinders to see the nuance and complexity of human existence. The solution to every problem was adherence to his particular brand and interpretation of religion. Once far enough into the rabbit hole, it's hard to get out.

Then it really hit me--I'm not that much different. I haven't written much on this blog, but if you've ever talked to me about religion and the church, you're probably familiar with my accusations that the church culture is a barrier to progress in the church and for its members. Anytime I find something I don't like about how the church or my congregation functions, I blame it on the church culture. In my opinion, it was church culture that would destroy the church if its ridiculous traditions weren't broken.

Talk about a wake up call. I was reminded of something as I walked: there's only one thing that can destroy the church. And that one thing is the failure of its members to recognize and accept the healing power of the Atonement of Christ in their lives.

Time for me to come up out of my rabbit hole.

I'm not celebrating

Call me crazy, but I actually have really mixed feelings about the killing of Bin Laden. And I'm not comfortable celebrating the violent death of another human.

My wife told me the news last night while I was laying down with my sick daughter, trying to cool down the room and keep her head elevated so that she could breathe well enough to stop coughing and get a good night's sleep. Now, I can't help but wonder if we'd be this happy about his death if the media had ever played clips showing him playing with his grandchildren, or propping his own child to a position in which he could sleep.

Say what you will about whether or not he ever would have done such a thing, but the point still stands: the man was a human being and, by my beliefs, a fellow son of God. His death is a tragedy.

Even more tragic, however, is the fact that the necessity of his death existed (yes, I am admitting that it needed to be done). So for me, the victory is bittersweet--a tragic end to a tragedy of human existence.

On a happier note, many heartfelt thanks to those men and women who take on these challenges. Their work is precisely why I can let my sick daughter become my only care in the world--even when such big and important news is taking place. For that, I cannot thank them enough.

Cleveland Area Scout Backpacking

My scoutmaster put together this website as part of his Wood Badge ticket (Wood Badge is advanced scout leader training for adults). I've been to a few of the places he has listed, and hope to go to more over the years. Even if you're not into backpacking, these are some really great trails for day hiking. Plus, we want to inflate the site visits and push the site up in the search rankings so it can be of more help to scouters in the area.

Cleveland Area Scout Backpacking

Best Way to Start the Day

I opened my e-mail at work this morning and found this:

hi there
i really appreciate you posting the code for making/reporting Bland-Altman plots here:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-July/166921.html

i think this is the best procedure that i found for this task in R

Nothing like starting your day to a dose of praise!

Concerning Religious Instruction on Marriage

It happens from time to time at my church that the leadership feels the need to teach a lesson on some topic of common importance. Past lessons have included topics such as managing finances, preparing for emergency situations, and raising children. Sunday's topic happened to be on marriage. For instruction, we were shown a video of a talk given to students at Brigham Young University given by Richard G. Scott. You can read the transcript or view the video.

I'm not necessarily opposed to instruction about marriage. In fact, I got a lot of indirect instruction on marriage as I studied interpersonal communication in college. Personally, I think a lot of people - myself included - would benefit a great deal from quality instruction about marriage. Unfortunately, what we got was of the "This is what works in my marriage, and so you should do it too." (I won't go into much on the Q&A with the 'recently married couple'--because, as we all know, recently married couples have the clearest view on how to manage a successful marriage.

One of the first things that strikes me as wrong about the message given is in how to deal with disagreements. During the Q&A, Elder Scott asks how they reconcile disagreements.

Elder Scott: Do you make the vital decisions together? How do you do that?

Ben: We do. We have had a lot of opportunities since we’ve been sealed to talk and discuss things that are coming up in both of our futures. Sometimes we may not totally agree, and that is something that is great for us because then we know that we can rely on Heavenly Father. That is something that we both always agree on.

Elder Scott: So, if there is a difference of opinion, you then work it out together through prayer with Heavenly Father.

I understand that this is a religious setting and all, and that prayer is going to be a common theme. Yet, somehow this feels like a claim that praying about disagreements will make them go away. In my experience and in my education, I've not seen that to be all that common. More often, I've witnessed that it take a lot of discussion, compromise, and shuffling of priorities to come to an agreement. I've yet to see prayer do anything more than reaffirm a decision after the hard work was already done. I feel that we skip to the affirmation part much too quickly, and never talk about the hard work part. Do we really expect people to learn how to enact those skill without talking about it?

This same point was repeated by Ben's wife, Rebecca, when she said, "I think how you resolve [disagreements] is the important thing--we always agree that we can go to the Lord." Am I crazy for expecting that I can work out my own disagreements with my wife without divine intervention?

One of the other items to jump out at me was Elder Scott's emphasis on doing the little things. He brought up writing notes to each other, and sure, I can see that. It'd probably get on my nerves to find notes in my books and bags all the time, but I'm sure my wife would appreciate it, so it's a suggestion I can take. But when he says, "As a husband, be aware of what you might unconsciously communicate by how you treat your wife in public. As I shake hands with members at the end of a meeting, occasionally I note that a man is in line in front of his wife. That is inappropriate—as a matter of fact, it’s just plain stupid. It is demeaning to her." Well, I don't know how to respond to that one. I don't think I've ever thought for a second about how I might demean my wife by standing in front of her in a line. I'm sure she's never thought of it. To me, it kind of seems like whoever gets there first stands in front and then--this part is really crazy--turns around so he or she can talk to the other. The question that comes naturally to me is if I should act toward my wife based on how Elder Scott perceives my actions, or on how my wife perceives my actions.

The last point I'll bring up isn't one that stuck out to me, but it definitely bothered my wife. It was a gem of a quote in which Elder Scott stated, "There has never been an argument in our home, never an unkind word between us. Now I realize that blessing came because of her. It resulted from her willingness to give, to share, and to never think of herself" (emphasis mine). Understandably, that left my wife feeling like every disagreement we'd ever had was her fault, or at least that she was being accused of this. I feel strongly that this one needed a disclaimer of some sort. I worry for the couples who listen to this talk while contemplating ending their marriages. I can't help but wonder how many women hear that and think to themselves that their turbulent and troubled marriages are a result of their own selfishness.

The thing that really strikes me is that, according to this talk, men express their selfishness by standing in front of women in line, and not opening doors for their wives. Women express their selfishness by creating arguments.

My only comfort this week on this issue has been that the poor teaching about marriage is not unique to my religion. I had a conversation with a coworker in which I brought up Elder Scott's talk and how it seemed to exhibit the attitude of "it worked for me so you should do it, too." My colleague immediately caught on and described the marriage class he had to attend with his catholic wife before getting married. In addition, they had to attend an additional seminar in which two mixed religion (Catholic and Protestant) couples discussed how they made their marriages work. In all the instruction, I'm told, the emphasis was on the fact that what had worked for the people giving the instruction was the only way they'd stay married.

Well, I'm not going to buy into it. I'm a convert to John Gottman's research. You should look up his work. Particularly the research about how successful marriages maintain a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative comments. Try reading about how partners with similar communication styles are far more successful than partners with differing communication styles. Also, read up on how the biggest predictor of marital failure is evidence of contempt in a couple's discussions. I promise, you'll be enlightened. More importantly, you'll see that there is more than one way for a marriage to succeed, and it doesn't have to follow the cliche patterns you learn about in church. It's your marriage. Do what works for you.




Bonus irritation: "Marriage is so wonderful.... You get to know each other very well. In time you begin to think alike and have the same ideas and impressions."

It's amusing to me that one of the first things he lists as a positive characteristic of marriage is one of the things that I dislike the most about marriage.