Month: October 2013

Categories
Archery Notweet

An Impromptu Archery Equipment Lesson

The limbs for my riser arrived yesterday and I’ll admit to being excited about the prospect. For one, having the limbs would officially make the bow mine, instead of half borrowed. I’d been using my neighbor’s limbs in the interim. Also, these limbs are longer and more appropriate for someone with my draw length and finally, they’re a tad bit heavier in draw weight.

So after about a half-hour of setup time, I marched outside and took my first shot and exclaimed “OUCH!!” Didn’t see that coming. At least the shot hit the target with a satisfying THOCK.

On the release, the string had smacked me on the bony part of my wrist just below the thumb. Right where my arm guard wasn’t covering because I’d never been struck that far low on my wrist before by the string. In fact, since I’d started shooting more regularly, I hadn’t been striking my arm much at all anymore. To do so on the first shot with the new limbs was disappointing.

I fired a second shot. I figured it was a one-off. Alas, no. My new bow gave me the exact same treatment as on the previous shot. In fact, that would be the treatment I’d get on every shot I took with it. I ultimately slid the wrist guard down to over that spot. The pain stopped, but I could still feel the impact.

The short of it, literally, was that my brace height was way to low.

What happened was when we strung up the bow, the neighbor wasn’t sure how many twists it would take to measurably shorten the string. So we started with 10 turns, with little change. Then we went to 20 turns, again with little change. Finally, we stopped at 30 turns because that just seemed like way too many turns. Still, the brace height was only about 7 1/4 inches. He told me that for the longer limbs, I should really be closer to 9. It seemed like it would be impossible to shorten the string almost 2 inches when after 30 turns, we’d barely shortened it a quarter inch.

So after shooting today and continuing to hit my wrist, I basically became desperate. I’d tried various different grips and positions to keep from getting hit and none of them worked. I realized that if I had to tolerate getting hit like that on every shot, I’d drop this new hobby as quickly as I’d picked it up. The bow was almost unshootable.

I took a close look at the setup. When I gripped the bow, the string rested just a few inches above the wrist-hand joint. I also noticed that when nocking an arrow, the fletchings were almost touching the riser. As compared to the previous setup with the neighbor’s medium length limbs, both of those were different- the string rested in the middle of my forearm and the fletchings came no where near the riser when nocked. So I decided to go back to the brace height and resolved myself to twisting that string right up to the point of knotting if I had to.

Before doing so, I did a little investigating and determined that the 9 inch measurement for brace height for a recurve with long limbs was a starting point. It could be decreased or increased around that for tuning purposes. I wasn’t interested in tuning, since I don’t have enough consistency to know the difference anyway. All I wanted was to make sure I was getting it to a reasonable point and hopefully stop the string from striking my arm.

So I unstrung the bow and started twisting. I counted my additional twists at first, but then stopped counting after realizing what mattered was the measurement, not the number of turns. I was able to significantly shorten the string with the twisting without any sign of knotting in the string. The first time I restrung the bow, I could immediately see I’d made a significant change. My measurement confirmed it: I’d increases the brace height to 8 1/2 inches.

Encouraged, I opted to keep going. From this point, I counted 10 turns and immediately noticed I had a hard time getting the string back on to the bow. Once I did and then restrung it, I was astonished to see that the brace height had increased a half-inch! I was now at 9 inches. So this is why I couldn’t find any information about the number of turns earlier- because it’s non-linear. There is an inflection point beyond which individual twists can significantly alter the length of the string, but prior to that point the change is minimal.

After getting a chance to shoot, I was much relieved. I was no longer striking my wrist. In fact, I don’t think I was hitting my forearm at all. The bow seemed significantly quieter as well, with little of the loud THRUM I’d been hearing and had simply assumed was what to expect. Interestingly, the brace height had shortened up to about 8 3/4 inches after shooting, which I wasn’t entirely surprised at. The string is under pretty significant tension after all.

Most importantly, though, it’s shootable.

Categories
Family

Spelling Practice

“SUN,” I say to the lass.

She has a list of words she’s working on for spelling. We were taking a couple of minutes for her to practice them. This week, the letter ‘U’ seems to be the focus, as all the words involve that letter.

The lass was sitting on the couch. Upon hearing the word she looks up. She sticks her tongue out for a moment, grimaces, says “SUN…. S.” She now puts both arms back against the couch with her hands up by her ears, shifts her weight to the side and flops over so she is lying on her side on the couch. Then she says “U.” Now, she rolls over onto her belly and stretches her arms down by her side while swimmer-kicking on the arm rest with her feet. Finally, she says “N.” She brings her arms up under her chin and props her head up. Her feet are now kicking back on forth in the air behind her head. This all transpires over about 5 seconds.

She’s now looking at me waiting for the next word.

“RULE,” I say.

She starts by face planting into the couch, followed by pushing herself back up into a sitting position. “R,” she says. Her face is contorted with concentration. She flows from a sitting position to draping herself over the arm rest on the couch, her back on the rest as she stares up at the ceiling. Her hands tap-tap-tap against the wall next to the couch. “U,” she says. Now she rolls back over onto her stomach. She is facing away from me, her feet are closest me while her head is on the opposite side of couch. Again, she pushes herself backwards and up into a kneeling position. “L,” comes next. As she’s doing this her hair is flopping from one spot to the next and she starts playing with it. “E,” she finishes. She stops moving, waiting for the next word.

Things continue like this for the next several words. She snakes all over the couch as she spells her words. Eventually, she rolls off the couch and barely seems to notice. For the final few words, she barrel rolls across the floor saying letters as she goes. She pauses her movement after she completes her spelling. She never does work her way back onto the couch.

I was exhausted by the time her spelling practice was done.

Categories
Misc

Fall

This stuff looks nice:

image

But this is the inevitable followup:

image

image

image

Time to get the rake out.

Categories
Family Notweet

Watching The Hobbit

With the boy having finished The Hobbit, he’s been after us to let him watch the movie. The only catch is the Wife and I haven’t pre-screened it yet. We’re doing so now.

I’ve been wondering how the heck they were going to turn a relatively short story into 3 movies. I just didn’t believe the source material was sufficient. I figured maybe the whole story was worth a good 3 hour-epic type format.

We’re about halfway through now and the basic tact has been to extend certain scenes, like the dwarves arrival, for comic relief. They also seem to have added filler material here and there.

Overall, it’s been good and, I think, at it’s best when working straight from the source material. Luckily for the boy, nothing to object to so far.

Categories
Family

DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO PICK UP PEANUTS!?!

We received a couple of packages last night. One of them was filled with packing peanuts, in addition to the stuff we’d ordered. We asked the boy to place the boxes out in the garage, and he did so.

But in the process he managed to spray packing peanuts all over the floor of the garage. In a classic child maneuver, he simply left the mess on the floor of the garage.

The Wife was the first one to call him out and insist he cleanup the mess he made. He did so, but not before vociferously voicing his displeasure at the prospect. He came in several minutes later and went back to more important things, like arranging rubber bands for making bracelets.

Sometime later, I ventured out into the garage. There were still peanuts laying on the floor.

I turned and asked him “I thought you cleaned up the peanuts in the garage?”

“I DID,” he said with just a touch of defensiveness.

“Well, then why are there still peanuts lying on the floor of the garage?”

What followed was something just short of breathtaking.

“WHAT? DO YOU EXPECT ME TO PICK UP EVERY LAST PEANUT OUT THERE?” he yelled. Just a touch defensively. The veins in his neck were sticking out.

“That’s what cleaning up meant, last I checked.”

“HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT?” He was turning red.

“With your hands, maybe?” I suggested. It was hard not to be amused at his tantrum.

“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT IS TO PICK UP PEANUTS?” he bellowed as he stomped off towards the garage.

Well, guess he told me. Incidentally, he managed to pull it off. Somehow.

Categories
Politics

Quick Thoughts on Obamacare Rollout

I had promised myself I wouldn’t post anything about Obamacare simply because evaluating healthcare policy is outside my wheelhouse. That said, the software portion of it is something I find myself interested in. Particularly the aspects related to the design.

With that, obviously the rollout has been less impressive than expected. This article says the President blames high traffic:

President Barack Obama is encouraging consumers not to give up enrolling for insurance under the new health care law.

He says sign-up problems have been caused by a website overwhelmed by high traffic. The president says officials are working “around the clock” to reduce waiting times.

Also, Ezra Klein is saying similar things and is not pleased. He does offer a silver lining regarding the overwhelmed servers:

The good news for Obamacare is that lots of people want to sign up. Lots and lots of people. Many more, in fact, than anyone expected. The bad news is that the Obama administration’s online insurance marketplace — which serves 34 states — can’t handle the success.

“The amount of demand is really driving the issues,” a senior administration official told me. “But we’re adding capacity every hour.”

Megan McArdle is a little more circumspect on the high demand theory.

I don’t know anything about the software or design of the system. Never the less, I have several questions related to the high demand problem. First, what kind of load was the system designed to handle? Do we know anything about the designers and their experience with such systems? I’ve seen the claim that the government is adding “capacity by the hour.” The government is in shutdown, so who is doing that? I assume they are considered “essential personnel”? How are they adding capacity by the hour? Are they throwing more servers at it? Better connectivity? In McArdle’s articles, she hints that the servers are getting millions of visitors. For a sense of scale, Google gets roughly 5 million search requests per day. It was claimed there are 47 million uninsured in the US, what percentage of those were estimated to enroll? What kind of equipment is being used and what’s the server platform?

Instapundit has a link worth reading. It also gives rise to other questions. Like, how capable is this system of withstanding various known cyber attacks like denial of service attacks? How tested is the system against garbage input? My understanding is a fair amount of personal information is requested during the signup. How secure is all that information?

Categories
Family

The Irrational Child Mind

The boy and I went on a grocery store run to pick up some items for dinner tonight. Along the way he asked me what I was planning to make. I told him it was a sausage dish that I’ve made before to great reviews from the lass and the boy. He was immediately disappointed.

I was confused at his reaction since I was sure that he like this dish. When I gave him the full details, he sighed in relief and said “I thought you were going to make the other sausage dish with the sweet sauce.”

He was referring to another sausage concoction I make with peppers and a sweet onion. I basically cook the peppers and onion down into a juice and the result has a sweet flavor to it. I asked him what he didn’t like about it and he replied “It’s too sweet.”

“What do you mean it’s too sweet? So is candy too sweet?” I asked.

He answered in earnest “Candy isn’t sweet. It’s got sugar in it.”

Dumbfounded, I asked for clarification. “You mean sugar isn’t sweet?”

“No, it’s just sugar,” he answered. “It’s not sweet like that sausage stuff you make.”

I had to stop there for fear that he might be contagious. This is the sort of stuff parents have to deal with all the time.

Categories
Politics

My Only Post About the Shutdown

I tweeted this yesterday and the more I thought about it, I figured I’d extend things a bit. Ross Douthat penned a very nice article explaining what I think has to be considered the source of right wing anger. In it, he summarizes the “ascendant” conservative movement which began with President Reagan and supposedly continued until President George W. Bush supposedly ruined everything.

What Douthat basically states is that there was never a conservative takeover of politics in this country. Perhaps in the sense that more conservative politicians were elected, but not in the sense of governing and policy. He points out that even during Reagan’s hay day, the federal government never, not once, got smaller in absolute terms. No departments were closed, nothing lost funding. In fact, it was well nigh impossible to actually reduce funding to anything because even a reduction in the growth of a program was painted as a “Draconian cut” that would put Grandma in the poor house while some opulent businessman smoked 100 dollar bills in a hot tub while sucking down martini’s.

In fact, the only “success” that conservatives ever achieved was on taxes and welfare reform.

As a result, the very term “conservative” is now awash in confusion. Is a conservative someone that wants to preserve the status quo? Someone that wants to reduce the size and reach of government? Someone that wants to keep progressives from running amok? Someone to vote for other than another Democrat? Someone who wants to blowup the US government? Someone that wants to return to the days of Jim Crow?

I’ve seen all of these definitions applied to the “conservatives” since I started reading blogs and generally became more politically aware. It always depends on whose doing the arguing and what they are arguing about. In general, the more left we go on the political axis, the cruder and meaner the implied definition of “conservative” becomes.

So at this point, I’ve come to the only reasonable conclusion about my own politics: I am a radical. I want to reduce the absolute size of government. I’d like to see whole departments shuttered or dramatically scaled back.

The reasons for this are difficult to put into a blog post that won’t become a book. I’ll start with this: it is not because I am a racist homophobe that wants elderly people to suffer. It is not because I am a mean-spirited jackass that doesn’t want people to get health care or help when they don’t have a job. It is not because I want to see taxes eliminated, the federal government abolished or any of the other caricatures of “conservatives” that are routinely deployed.

It is because, speaking in broad strokes, I believe that less government is better for the country. I think less control and rules leads to more flexibility and robustness in the population which translates into a healthier overall country. I think less government means the people of the country will be better able to weather downturns of all sorts because they will by definition be more resourceful. Will people all make the same choices that policy makers would prefer? No, and that’s a feature not a bug in my opinion.

Based on my observations of politics over the past decade-and-a-half, I’ve concluded that we are on a path to the politicization of everything. And I do mean everything. We are slowly watching the attempted conversion of our economy from a free-market model to a “command-and-control” model. Lawmakers routinely pass tax breaks, refunds, incentives and laws benefiting preferred interest groups or campaign supporters. We are constantly talking about “what the government should do” to improve the economy: infrastructure programs? helicopter dumps of cash? implementing large healthcare policies? student loans? business loans? business grants? state funds? more taxes? less taxes? I think many of the current fights regarding healthcare are a foreshadowing of healthcare arguments to come when talking about what should and should not be covered and who should and should not qualify and who should and should not pay.

We are at the point where the assumption anymore is that the government needs to do something, somewhere, all the time. The thought that a given problem should be allowed to resolve itself or that people should be allowed to resolve the problem or situation is never broached anymore. More succinctly, government involvement is never questioned anymore, only assumed. It is my opinion that this is a completely unhealthy attitude. It stunts initiative, free-thinking and problem-solving because who wants to do something when it’s a certainty that the government will step in?

All of these thoughts are incomplete, but I wanted to try and keep this post a manageable length. So I’ll wrap things up by circling back to the shutdown. I understand all the arguments against it and the wisdom of the approach and in my more politically congenial moods I agree with them. I’ll even grant that I don’t really know what the endgame is. But I can’t help but feel that having the government shutdown and having people experience that life continues without it is worth something. So from that perspective, I’d like to consider it a good thing.

Categories
Family

Let There Be Light!

The boy came home from school today and, as has been his wont, got started immediately on his homework.

I finished up some impromptu archery lessons with the neighbor and returned to make sure the lass was all set for her soccer practice. While tending to her, the boy started whining about not understanding his homework.

I was more focused on his sister than him at that moment, so I dismissively asked him if he had read the instructions. He said he had and proceeded to read them to me. It was a 1 sentence instruction telling him to fill in a multiplication table. For some reason that still escapes me, that operation just wouldn’t compute.

He began getting overly excited. I ignored him. Shortly thereafter, the lass was off to her soccer practice so I turned more of my attention to the boy. He was still frustrated. This is still a problem for him- he gets so frustrated with something that he essentially locks up. He refuses to calm down and think things through, refuses to try coming at things from a different angle, refuses anything other than someone fixing his problem for him. One of these days, I, or the Wife- whomever draws the short straw, will have to just let him flounder about until he unlocks himself or explodes.

Today was not that day.

I worked him through to the point where he understood he had to fill in the multiplication table. Initially, he was pleased with understanding. His face then fell. He was staring at 100 little squares that all required numbers in them, and he had to fill them in. I left him like that for a moment to go take care of a few other things. When I returned, he was balling on his homework.

There was a brief instant where I was ready to lay into him for making things more difficult on himself. What good was sitting there balling on his homework going to do?

Fortunately, I course corrected and calmly suggested he walk away from his homework and calm down a bit. Naturally, him being completely around-the-bend irrational, refused. He got up to go blow his nose, though, and I seized my opportunity. I walked over, picked up his homework papers and put them in a cabinet far out of his reach.

And just like that, he went from miserable to mad. If he had been a cartoon, he would have changed colors from a sky blue shade to a crimson red. Maybe he would have gotten the volcanic-eruption treatment out the top of his head. I would have been Woody Woodpecker, laughing. Then, I would have pecked him in the head and flitted off in the direction of…

Ahem…sorry.

I refused to give him his homework sheet back until he’d calmed down. He slowly came to grips with the fact that I was serious and started looking for other things to do. Eventually, he started playing with a piece of wire and battery. Then, he started asking me questions about what he could hook it up to. He got an idea and went and grabbed a light bulb. Guess you could say a light turned on!

I agreed to help him hook it up, even though I knew it wouldn’t work. It was a lamp battery that required AC current so there was no way a battery, probably mostly drained, would work.

When it didn’t work, I explained the problem to him. He then went rummaging around in the kitchen and found a flashlight bulb. Now he was in business. After a little bit of finagling, we managed to connect the battery and sure enough, the bulb glowed a bit. It also confirmed my suspicions about the battery’s status.

That led the boy into a quest to create a flashlight. He came up with somewhat workable contraption involving a D cell, some tape, a piece of wire and the bulb. He didn’t like that he had to manually hold the bulb against the battery. Happy, but not satisfied, he asked me if I had any ideas.

I did. I told him to go get me a hanger. It had to be a metal wire hanger, I specified. One that didn’t have any clothes on it.

When he came back with the hanger, I first verified that he hadn’t ripped his sister’s clothes off of it moments earlier. I then proceeded to cut a section of it off. I stripped the plastic coating off it on both ends, then wrapped one end around the bulb. Finally, I bent what remained into a rough handle shape that clipped on to the other end of the battery and voila:

We had a flashlight. My siblings will likely recognize this as a little project our Grandfather introduced to us many years ago. It had the same effect on the boy today as it did on us back then. He was delighted and hooked at the simplicity. Shortly thereafter, the hanger was chopped to ribbons as he worked on his own variations.

Here’s a low-power version he managed on his own:

He even came up with a 2-D cell design, with a little help from me.

Somewhere along the way, I took his homework out of the cabinet and placed it out for him to complete. When he finally remembered that he had homework to do, he was astonished to find that I’d put it out for him. He’d been so engrossed in his engineering, that he’d completely missed that I’d returned it to him.

He even managed to complete it without anymore tears.

Categories
Family

The Lass Seems to be Turning the Corner

Last week, I worked with the lass on her homework packet. She chose to start at the beginning (perfectly reasonable) which involved writing a paragraph. The assignment was to write a “story” about a bike.

Things started off rough, and went downhill from there. The back of the page, where she thought she had to write the story, didn’t have enough space for a story. She wrote a single sentence and thought she’d finished because she wouldn’t be able to fit more. After that, the weeping started and she didn’t know how to write a story about a “stupid bike.”

Rather than fight her and force her to finish, I steered her towards the rest of the homework. She gradually settled down as the rest consisted of fill-in-the-blank type questions, spelling practice and some math. By the time we’d finished, she only had the bike story to work on and I chose not to push her on that for the rest of the evening. Instead, I tried to give her some ideas to think about. She still had most of the week to figure it out.

The Wife was able to get her to complete the paragraph the next day. Her spelling practice continued and there were no more emotional outbursts over homework for the rest of the week.

We also met with her teacher towards the end of the week to discuss her difficulties. We were most concerned with her attitude towards reading. Reading has been a chore for her and she’s been very resistant to it in any form. She doesn’t want to leave the comfort of her picture books and his suggestion was to not force the issue. We even came up with a ploy to offer to let her read to kindergartners. The Wife and I figured it would appeal to her Mother-hen streak.

Yesterday, she received her latest homework packet and she worked on it without issue. She hasn’t completed it yet because it’s a big packet this week, but she’s completed most of it. There is another writing assignment in it as well. Amusingly, this time the teacher provided a separate page for the paragraph with plenty of space to write her story.

Also, she was excited to tell the Wife that her teacher had asked her if she would like to read to the kindergartners. There was little doubt as to her enthusiasm for the opportunity and she even told the Wife how much she “likes to read.” The Wife did a good job of sounding surprised at such a revelation.

So her current status is a marked improvement in her homework attitude. I suspect there will be future bumps along the way because when it comes to children, nothing comes easy. The fact that she’s on more favorable footing though, is a welcome relief. Now it’s just a matter of helping her build momentum to keep it that way..