Sketches

When your train is cancelled, it's amazing how much work you can fit on the back of two receipts 😄

 

New project coming soon...

Maturity

It's a joy to see someone that is young enough to be your daughter (just), having matured to the extent that you are going to them for wisdom in a situation. And you can see where they're ahead of you, and you need to catch up.

Amazon Bible review

 At first I thought - is this an elaborate metaphor?

Amazon Customer

3.0 out of 5 stars Fine but...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 December 2015

Verified Purchase

Nice product, nice to handle and clean however I do find that I have to cut the lemon, cross on the top to help break the back of it to enable me to get juice out easier. Requires strength to use, as one would expect. As for any claims about it being the best lemon squeezer I don't agree I think I'll be going back to my traditional lemon squeezer. I could of course be using it incorrectly.

Ahhhh... I see what's happened :-D 

Oddly, underneath it says "One person found this helpful"

Lord, help me to love

Help me to be patient,
Help me to be kind.

Don't let me envy,
Don't let me be boastful,
Don't let me be arrogant,
Don't let me be rude,
Don't let me be self-seeking,
Don't let me be irritable,
Don't let me keep a record of wrongs.

Don't let me find joy in unrighteousness
Help me to rejoice in the truth.

Help me to bear all things
Help me to believe all things
Help me to hope all things,
Help me to endure all things.

Help my love to never fail

Amen

(With apologies to the apostle Paul - 1 Corinthians 13v4-8)

Wow these things are hard!

A problem with Sunday School materials

I recently had to send this message out to the other leaders in my class, to make them aware of an issue with the Sunday School materials we are currently using (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty). Actually, it's a problem with many different Sunday School materials.

"Hi Explorers' leaders. Just thought I should flag up an issue to look out for with the [Sunday School] materials.

There is often a problem that it assumes the children are believers. We should never assume that!

So instead of saying, for example "the Holy Spirit is with you" - it's much better to say, "If you belong to Jesus/Jesus has forgiven you/you believe in Jesus (or similar) the Holy Spirit is with you."

You don't need to labour the point, but just make sure you're not making statements or false promises that may not be true of the children."

Bearing in mind these are evangelical SS materials, this is quite concerning.

How many times have we heard a testimony from someone who realised at the age of 9, or 15, or 21, that they had just been assuming they were a Christian, and had never believed for themselves? Never mind those we know who were brought up in church but never come to faith?

Of course, for children brought up in a Christian family, this may be a subtle, gradual thing. Not everyone has a crisis conversion. But children need to know that salvation is by faith - not by having Christian parents or being in my Sunday School class.

Down arrow

I used the down arrow on my keyboard today.

This may not seem particularly unusual, but I have only just replaced the keyboard I spilt Irn Bru on in 2013.

The down arrow hasn't worked since then.

Sometimes I would turn the whole page upside down and use the up arrow instead, though that's often not possible.

Keyboards are not expensive.

I am an idiot. 😆

Hobbits

Some pictures I did a loooong time ago!

I appear to have misinterpreted the description slightly, and made the soles of their feet hairy instead of the tops 🤦‍♀️. Otoh, I have given them "thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly)", unlike the film-makers...

 

I think the one in the black suit was meant to be Bilbo, but then I drew a whole family. Not sure if they're meant to be modern-day hobbits, or it's unintentional anachronism.

 

 

 

And here's one I did much more recently!

Blind ballot

The lady I clean for is blind 👩‍🦯, and I thought I'd show you how we did her postal vote 🗳️, in case the info was useful to anyone else!

 

I put a paperclip between each box. Then I read out all the options, numbering them as I went: "Number 1 - Conservative. Number 2 - Labour" etc... 22 options for the list vote 😆

Then she counted down the paperclips, put her cross under the one she wanted, took off all the paperclips and put the ballot paper in the envelope. 

 

(The white paper is a test run we did to check the crosses would consistently land in the right place).

 

 

The difference

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - CS Lewis

"His name unfortunately was Eustace Scrubb, but he wasn't a bad sort."

The Silver Chair - CS Lewis

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!"

2 Corinthians 5v17

Same problem over 100 years later

"But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease."

~ GK Chesterton

Women's work

Google's doodle today is for International Women's Day.

It shows a series of women's arms doing various things: writing, science, being an artist, winning the Nobel prize*, voting, singing, typing, making a political speech, climbing a mountain, conducting an orchestra, getting a degree, making a film, being a judge, astronaut, pilot, animator, footballer, photographer, architect, etc...

I'm glad that women have so many opportunities today.

But I was disappointed that, in all the pictures, there was not a single domestic thing represented. No cooking. No cleaning. No childcare.

Are women not worth celebrating when they're doing stereotypically 'feminine' things? The things that no-one will particularly notice, or applaud them for?

"Honour her for all that her hands have done,
    and let her works bring her praise at the city gate."

Proverbs 31v31 (emphasis mine)

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*At least, some medal like that

Unusual sky

 

It was better in real life

Etymological Coincidence 🤔

I naturally assumed that the words emoticon :-) and emoji ☺️ came from the same roots.

BUT according to the Oxford English Dictionary, emoticon is a "blend of emotion and icon"

Emoji, on the other hand, is Japanese, "from e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’"

Some coincidence! :-o 😯

Space

I thought I needed to do some art just for the sake of it - not for anything at all.
Came across a photo of a painting I did in school, so I thought I'd see if I could do it better now.😁

I've changed as little as possible, but I have made it a flat plain, because that's how it was meant to be. My teacher got me to add the hills to show distance, but now that I'm grown up I can do it how I want! ('Can' as in allowed to, but also as in am able to.)

It's not easy to do a picture with dark sky during daytime - presumably meaning there is very little atmosphere. I'm really not sure how that would affect the lighting, particularly the aerial perspective.

Done in Clip Studio. I think my settings may have been a bit wrong, because the paint never dried, which was interesting to work with...

Not going to get a job as a concept artist any time soon, but it was fun!

 

Many books*

These were all piled up beside my bed. Maybe I should put them back on their shelves

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*Also a few DVDs

An easy way to write profound (?) music

 This is a fun toy.

With a bit of trial you could actually get something reasonable sounding - but even a quick play sounds not bad.

'Help'

If you want to help someone, it's a good idea to check if what you are planning to do will actually be helpful to them.

Otherwise, you may put them in the awkward position of having things made more difficult and stressful, but having to be grateful for it.

Unhelpful technical help

 "Browsers want you to think (rightly!) that site owners who can’t be bothered using HTTPS (it’s free in many cases) aren’t worth your time and certainly not your money."

WordPress 'support' article

If your article also explained how I could implement this in my site, it would be helpful. Maybe it's not always laziness, but lack of technical know-how.

On a similar note, it's amazing how many 'how-to' articles go: "It's really simple - all you need to do is copy this bit of code into the blah-blah-blah file gobbledygook xyz folder mumbo-jumbo" [location unspecified]

[Edit: I got it done, and it was extremely easy (simply moving a slider from off to on). What was not easy was finding out that that was what I had to do.]

I still don't have enough S's

The magnetic letters I have been using for Sunday School are the ones I had when I was wee.

I bought some extras recently, but it's still not enough!

 Well, it'll amuse the children.