Writing (General)

We spent yesterday visiting a number of sugar houses in the area for the open house weekend. I was browsing the Bennington Banner this morning and found they had a picture of the place we visited yesterday. It was quite an operation.

The owner works in the construction industry, but apparently does maple syrup on the side in the winter. He has quite a bit of land with over 600 taps. While driving on the narrow dirt track know as Maple Hill Road, you can seen tons of tubes running down the hillside into holding tanks. While traditional tapping is done with a spout and a bucket, the latest trend is to run lines. It makes collecting the sap a whole lot easier. I recorded a short video of one of these lines. With the sound on you can hear the sap flowing. View the video.

The sap is then put into this huge evaporator machine. There basically is a rather large warming tank that gets the sap hot. The sap will start out clear and does not have any flavor that can be distinguished. Once the sap is warmed up, it is sent into several hot tanks that look like larger versions of the vats you would use for french fries. The picture here is of the evaporating end of the machine where the fire burns the hottest.

Continue reading Sugar Shack Journal

We took several outings to Merck Forest this past week to Merck Forest(www.merckforest.com, but their web site is out of commission right now). it’s a wonderful place with a great mission. They protect tons of land for hiking and camping, as well as operating a sustainable farm with organic methods. Here’s what you can see at Merck.

One of my favorite writing prompts is eavesdropping on conversations and pulling a line or two out of context. These lines become the starting point my writing. I typically give myself 15-20 minutes, but will keep going if I’m having a good time with it. Here are a few gems that I heard recently:

“He’s religious but sensible.”

“There were dead cattle on the road, no one would talk to us, and we couldn’t get a ride. We had to ride a bus back and he was furious.”

I wrote something based on the first one at inamirrordimly.

I have decided to launch the Bethany Network, which can be found under the heading on this site: Bethany Net. Here’s a short introduction to this new kind of non-profit:

The Bethany Network

Promoting spiritual and physical wholeness.

• Partnering with non-profits who provide essential social services. When we address physical needs, we open the door for spiritual healing to occur.
• Providing free and lot cost administrative support such as creating flyers, newsletters, and web content.
• Providing tips and reviews of books, software, movies and other products relevant to non-profit organizations.

Recharge, refocus, refresh

The Bethany Network is a different kind of non-profit. Working from the grass roots up, the Bethany Network seeks to support non-profits on a shoe-string through networking and an open source approach.

Read more about the Bethany Network and its services.

A friend from my high school days has started her own edited service. She’s been all over the US working in a wide variety of jobs and has a solid editorial background. The company is called Red Ink Revisions.

It’s worth visiting the web site just to see the top notch job done by Red Frog Design.

Myself and roughly 150 people enjoyed an afternoon with former ambassador and CPA director Paul “Jerry” Bremmer. The event was held at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt that was just voted the top bookseller by Publisher’s Weekly. Quite an accomplishment for a small-town store.

Bremmer gave about an hour long talk on his new book, My Year in Iraq. I took very thorough notes which I will soon share below. But first, a few thoughts. Bremmer was thrown into a caldron that was ripe with failure. When you think of home many Bush appointees have failed, need I mention “Brownie” and the Katrina fiasco, it is amazing that Bremmer is not made into a scapegoat. He in fact conveyed a sense of compassion for Iraq, admitted some of his mistakes, and mentioned some issues where he differs from the White House (though he did toe the party line mostly). He opened the floor for questions and did answer, albeit simplistically at times, the hard questions tossed at him.

I came away from the talk with a favorable impression of Bremmer. It seems that he did the best he could with the situation. Of course he chose the statistics to whip out, so who knows if there are some negative numbers to throw against him. But nevertheless, it does not seem like he made things worse in Iraq and that he often made things better.

What I found most interesting was his compassion for the people who have endured and continue to endure so much. He mentioned that the whole nation may be suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is something that I find fascinating and is worth exploring. It may be a huge part of the recovery process for a nation that was broken over a 40 year period.

Without further ado, my notes:

Continue reading Paul Bremmer at the Northshire Bookstore

It all began when I was reading Jordon Cooper’s blog one day. He was talking about not being interested in blogging while at work. He only carried his Moleskine notebook with him to take notes and write out ideas.

It intrigued me. I looked into the moleskine web site and found that this notebook used by the likes of Hemingway and Picasso had vanished in the 20th Century and has recently been brought back by a Spanish company. It looked really neat and right up my alley, but wasn’t quite right for me at the time.

Continue reading My Manic Moleskine Search

I’m probably a few days off, but about a year ago from today, theologian Stan Grenz quietly passed away. Grenz was very influential on many young theologians (including myself) who were trying to make sense of theology in a postmodern context. He put into words what many of us felt. He provided categories, the very building blocks we have been using to form theology in today’s context. While I’m not particularly interested in posting here on religious topics, I will include them when I’ve published something along those lines. That’s the case here.
The Princeton Theology Review has been accepting papers over the past few months related to Stan Grenz and his influence on the world of theology. I submitted my own paper yesterday.
As a little teaser, I thought that I would share my introduction paragraph to give an idea of where I took this paper. I’ll try to post a link to the issue with these papers when it is released. It should be a great read. Here’s a peek at my article:

Continue reading My Article to the Princeton Theology Review

I am a firm believer that the way to make a mark in today’s culture is to collaborate on projects within a community and offer up your product free of charge. Instead of charging for your services or products, make them available for wider use. This will invite others to improve the product, recommend it to others, and spread it quickly. If your goal is to offer something that will be the best of its kind and will help as many people as possible, sharing is the way to go. One area of the non-profit world where this is very true is in churches.

Read what Bob has to say:

“One of the beautiful things about the age we’re living in is the unlimited potential to share. Where sermons and art and music used to take years to circumnavigate the globe, now, they take less than seconds. We have the ability to share what we create in our local Christian communities with the larger Christian community and with the world. But not many of us do it.”

Continue reading Free is the Future

Stuck in a rut or trying to innovate? Perhaps a personal coach is worth considering. The Rutland Herald reports:

“With so many of us overwhelmed in our jobs or relationships, the concept of having a personal coach has appeal. Once reserved for executives, personal coaches are trickling down to the average American worker struggling to build a small business, get out of a dating rut, restore balance to their lives or find an alternate to retirement.”

While a personal coach may not be the best long-term financial paln, I think that it would be helpful to have an outside perspective for important transitions and the vision process.

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