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So I just filed my taxes with Turbo Tax, and when you’re done, there’s a link to The Tax Rap. It’s a contest to make the best rap video about taxes, and the winner will be announced by Vanilla Ice.
WHAT???
Anyway, I watched a few of the videos, and this one made me laugh. If you want to see a cross-dressing rap video about Turbo Tax, click here.
Today, I filled up my gas tank. I have driven 99.5 miles farther than I am able to drive on an average tank in the same conditions.
A few weeks ago, I read this article about hypermiling, in which people go to insane lengths to squeeze the best possible gas mileage out of their cars. Wayne Gerdes, the guy featured in the article, gets 59 mpg in a Honda Accord. At one point in his daily commute, he exits a freeway going 50 around a 270-degree turn, shuts his engine off, and coasts for over a mile, carefully timing it so he hits two green lights. He keeps the windows up and the A/C off no matter what, wearing an ice vest from his day job at a nuclear power plant to keep cool. This is truly nuts.
But, as luck would have it, I had to fill up my gas tank on the same day that I read that article. So, I decided to make an effort to get the best gas mileage I could out of that tank. Today, my fuel light came on and I filled the tank again, so I’m reporting on the results of this experiment.
I drive a ’97 Honda Civic (standard transmission) to and from work every day, and almost never anywhere else. My daily commute is 20 miles round trip. I’ve been making the same exact commute for months, and I’ve kept track of my mileage with every tank, so I have a good historical data set to compare to.
On the average tank of gas (averaged over my last 20 tanks) driving this commute, I go for 271.14 miles, getting 28.0 miles per gallon. On this tank, I went for 370.7 miles, getting 35.88 miles per gallon, for an improvement of 99.56 miles and 7.88 miles/gallon. At the current gas price here ($2.49/gal), I figure I saved myself about $8.85 on this tank.
So, here’s what I did differently this time:
Also, for the last few days, I turned off my engine if I was going to stop for more than 7 seconds. I have heard various figures for how long you need to be stopped before it makes sense to cut the engine, but Wayne Gerdes says 7 seconds, and I figure if anyone would know the optimal value, it’s him!
The bottom line is, this cost me nothing and had a big impact! I didn’t notice it taking me longer to get to work and back, and it was fun. For the next tank, I’m going to try increasing my tire pressure, tossing all the junk out of my car, going on a diet… okay, maybe not that. My goal is to get 400 miles on one tank.
UPDATE! Your mileage may vary! I can’t believe I didn’t think to say that when I was writing this.
A “mii” is an avatar on the Nintendo Wii. The other night, Colin brought his Wii over, and Karianne made a mii for our friend Barry.
It’s a pretty good match!
And for those of you who just check this blog for baby pictures, here’s one of Kaeta with her new friend Amelia:
On the radio program Issues, Etc., the host occasionally plays a sermon and analyzes it using the following criteria:
In a Christian sermon, Christ should be mentioned! This seems like a no-brainer, and it’s supported by John 15:26: “When the Spirit comes,…He will testify about Me.” So, Spirit-led preaching will testify about Christ.
And Christ should be the subject of the verbs. As they say on Issues, Etc., this is more than just grammar! Christ came, suffered, died and rose. It is He who seeks us, chooses us (John 15:16), and saves us from sin. He didn’t come to rescue us from being stressed out, or to make us feel good about ourselves, or to guilt us into doing good works. That’s what we have Oprah for. If a sermon neglects Christ’s work, it is not truly a Christian sermon, even if it’s preached by a Christian in a Christian church.
Lately I’ve been listening to sermons with these questions in mind, and it’s very eye-opening. So with all that in mind, I thought I’d share this sermon, from a recent episode of Issues, Etc., which I think is good. It’s by Pastor Jonathan Fisk, of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Perryville, New Jersey. If you like it, you might also like his website.
A final thought: I really don’t want to be hypercritical about this. I just think if a sermon focusses on Christ and what He has done for us, people might repent and be saved. If it focusses on some wordly problem (say, how busy we are, and that we need time to ourselves once in a while), that won’t fix the real problem of sin in my life, which is what I most desperately need.
In my first month living in Pittsburgh, I remember driving a carload of friends from school down to the [insert unpronouncable Indian name here] river to go rafting. On the way home, I realized that my fuel gauge was way below “E,” and there were no gas stations along the 50 mile drive back to civilization (Pennsylvania is weird like that… the exits are also like 20 miles apart). But the hills were just right so that I could shift into neutral and coast for a lot of the way home, so I did that, and we got back just fine. It was stressful, but kind of fun!
There’s a whole group of folks who do this all the time, competing to get the best mileage out of their cars. They never run the air conditioners, and they don’t use their brakes if they can help it. They’re called “hypermilers” — Check out this article about them!
The dog came home! His name is Marty, he’s a miniature Schnauzer, and he’s 7 weeks old today. Here’s some video of him from the past couple of days:
We also posted some photos of him here. Kaeta loves playing with him, although she sometimes acts a little jealous of the attention we give him. He’s really laid back, so he plays well with Kaeta and doesn’t seem to mind when she picks him up by the neck and toddles around! And he’s very snuggly, so we think he’s going to fit right in around here.
Today is “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the season of Lent in the church. Fat Tuesday is also called Shrove Tuesday, or (in the UK and Australia) Pancake Day!1 In French or Catholic areas it’s called Mardi Gras, which is French for “Fat Tuesday.”
Apparently in the ancient church, the Lenten fast involved emptying your kitchen of all animal products, which included eggs, milk, and lard. The Tuesday before Lent would be your last chance to eat up those ingredients or else throw them away, so people would make foods like pancakes or doughnuts to use up the fat in their kitchens, hence the name “Fat” Tuesday.
That other name, “Shrove Tuesday,” comes from the word “shrive,” which means “to make confession and receive absolution.” So Mardi Gras was once a day to make confession, rather than a day to remove one’s clothes for beads. Interesting.
For our anniversary, Karianne got me a great book called “Around the Year with the Trapp Family,”2 by Maria von Trapp, in which she chronicles the ways her large Catholic family celebrated the church year.
Okay, so this is Julie Andrews, not Maria von Trapp. Sue me.
In her section on Lent, she mentions that she once wondered why Christians used to fast so much more rigorously during Lent. Actually, I’ll just quote from the book:
When I inquired once why the law of fast and abstinence is so much more lenient for us than it was for previous generations, I was told that modern man is much too frail to undergo the awful rigors of the ancient practice. After all, have we not experienced two world wars in our generation which have weakened our constitutions? That seemed to make perfect sense to me until just recently. I got infected by a neighbor of ours in Stowe with the popular preoccupation of which is the best diet. Together we searched through a library of books, one more interesting than the other, the sum total of all them most confusing and astounding, however. Among other things I learned that almost all the ancient and modern sages of the science of “how to live longer and look younger” (they all boast of a tradition going back into the gray dawn of time with the yogis of India) agree on several points: (1) We are all over-eating–we should eat much less. (2) We are all eating too much meat, which sours our system, and we absolutely have to abstain from meat for longer or shorter periods every year. (3) If we could adapt ourselves to a diet of raw vegetables and fruit and whole-wheat bread, that would be the ideal. (4) And now I could hardly believe my eyes when I read, not once, but in several places, that it would do simply miracles for our constitution if we only would let ourselves be persuaded to undergo a period of complete fast. (One authority suggests three days, others a week, ten days, up to thirty, forty, and even sixty days!)
I cannot help but think sadly: Woe if the Church ever had dared to make such a law or even give only a slight hint in the direction of undergoing a complete fast–for the love of God! Obviously, modern man, after all, is not too frail to undergo the awful rigors of ancient fast and abstinence. The constitution of man seems not to have changed at all, then. What has changed are the motives. While the early Christians abstained from food and drink and meat and eggs out of a great sense of sorrow for their sins, and for love of God took upon themselves these inconveniences, modern man has as motive the “body beautiful,” the “girlish figure,” the “how to look younger and live longer” motive.
Lent is well known as a time to give something up, but Maria von Trapp also mentions another tradition that perhaps even better calls to mind the origins of Lent: a tradition of study. In the early church, the period leading up to Easter was a time of instruction for catechumens (new church members). Since the church was an underground organization, becoming a member involved intense scrutiny, culminating in a series of examinations right before baptism at Easter. (Candidates fasted in preparation for this, hence the tradition of the Lenten fast.)3
To echo that period of instruction, von Trapp suggests a Lenten reading program, where everyone in the family reads something for the mind, something for the heart, and something for the soul. For the mind, she suggests doing some serious research (into church history, the sacraments, Christian ethics, etc.); for the soul, reading the writings of the saints (e.g., St. Augustine); and for the heart, reading a biography of a saint (canonized or not). Here’s something she says about such biographies, just because I thought it was funny:
But it has to be a well-written biography, that is, a book showing a human being in the round, with all his shortcomings that had to be overcome by faithful cooperation with grace–and not the old-fashioned hagiography in sugar-candy style with its doubtful statements, carefully stressing that the saint is born a full-fledged saint by describing how the holy baby refused his mother’s breast every Saturday in honor of the Blessed Mother (and, of course, the first words of these remarkable beings invariably must be a piously lisped “Jesus and Mary”).
Lent is pointless if it doesn’t point us to Christ. The point of a period of instruction is not to get smarter but to have a Biblical faith. The point of fasting is not to lose weight, but to focus on Christ. Without these devotional meanings, human traditions are worthless and their benefit is lost.
Well, those are just some thoughts about Lent. I’ll close with a thought from Pastor Paul McCain, who considers Lent the real “40 Days of Purpose”:
What is my purpose? What is yours? We could list any number of things we are doing that are part of our chosen purposes, or that we believe give our life purpose. But they are not our purpose.
A beautiful portion of Luther’s Small Catechism puts it this way: “That I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom.”
And that I, and you, may be His own, our Lord took the road that led to the cross and open tomb. There on that cross was shed the blood of the sacrifice for the sins of the world, the sacrifice that makes atonenement for us. The blood was shed by the One who is my substitute, whose death is made my death, whose life is made my life.
That I may be His own, He was sent into this world of darkness as the light that brings light to all men. That I may be His own, by His Gospel, the Holy Spirit called me to faith, washing me in Holy Baptism, creating in me a new spirit. And so for all who are called according to His good purpose.
His purpose is our purpose. May God bless your forty days of purpose during Holy Lent.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrove_Tuesday
2 The complete text of “Around the Year with the Trapp Family” is available here.
3 The Christian Year, by Edward T. Horn, III. 1957 by Fortress Press.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I estimate I had only completed around 3 crossword puzzles in my life. I don’t know why, I just never thought I could do them. But then my friend Johnathan, inspired by the movie “Word Play” (a documentary about crossword enthusiasts), decided to make his own crossword. I worked it (with some help from Karianne and my parents) pretty quickly, and since then I’ve worked at least one almost every day.
So tonight I decided to try to make my own. There are many rules for how to properly make a crossword puzzle, and while I didn’t follow them all, I did my best. This puzzle is about 60% letters (it should be around 84%) and not all letters are in both a horizontal and vertical word. But it is mostly symmetrical!
I started with a kid-related theme in mind (hence, the puzzle is called “Child’s Play”), but making squares of interlocking words was hard enough without that, so any theme-related words are purely vestigial at this point.
Here is a link to the puzzle as a Microsoft Word doc. If you decide to work it, please let me know what you think!
***UPDATE*** Johnathan the voracious cruciverbalist pointed out that one of my words was missing its clue! Rather than re-numbering everything, I added it in as 50 Down, and I marked it in red in the file to make it easier to find. Thanks, J!
Warning to sensitive readers: Extreme Mushiness!
Happy Valentine’s Day, Shmoop 🙂
Okay, so the cat (er, dog?) is out of the bag. Meet the new Kurth! Isn’t he adorable? He will be coming home with us in a few weeks, but for now he is still too little to leave his momma. These pictures were taken last weekend when we first met him. We’ll post more pictures as we get them. Any ideas of what we should name this little guy?