No longer just fare for spare bulletin space, the tix saga has graduated to professional size paper. I’m sure this will be a relief for pastors everywhere concerned about how much of their message is being absorbed and retained.
Here’s the latest on the tix front
After the service this past Sunday, I found this bulletin on which creative notes had been taken. Based on the skill level, I would suspect that it was done by a 9 year old boy. It’s very likely that I could be the Dad in question referenced in some of the drawings, but I guess you’ll never know for sure. I’ve changed some things on the bulletin so as to protect the innocent.
On our second full day in Calgary, we went on a family trip out to Kananskis. The day started off overcast and foggy, but cleared up somewhat by the time we made it into the mountains. We each took a bunch of pictures. This is the story of one of the pictures that I posted on Instagram.
One of the pictures that I took was of the Upper Kananaskis Lake, with Lori and some of the kids on the shoreline at the bottom of the picture. Here is the picture in question.
Trying to do something slightly different, I cropped it into a short but wide picture.
Unfortunately, when displaying it on Instagram it was readjusted to a standard picture format, cutting out the people on the edges of the picture. Instagram has an associated app called LayOut which allows you to combine multiple pictures into one image. My first attempt was to combine the footer (cropped image as above) with part of the original picture. Here is the result.
I wasn’t quite happy with that picture, so I took a look at some of the other ones taken on the trip. Here is the one that I ended up using.
I then cropped the mountain fog photo and dropped it into the top photo frame, resulting in the following picture. It struck me that the resulting picture actually looked like one picture rather than a conglomerate of two different pictures. Since most people likely use Instagram on a smartphone, they likely wouldn’t notice the really flat far lake shore, nor notice that the trees at the waters edge appear rather suddenly. I decided to go ahead and post it. I’m not sure that anyone noticed, not surprising given the large numbers of pictures on Instagram that people flip through on a regular basis. Well, it makes an interesting hubcrate post, anyway.
Preamble 1: It’s been over a year since I posted anything on the hubcrate.com site. In the meantime, I’ve posted on Instagram, but find that although it’s easy to post, it’s a bit constricting (particularly in telling the story around the pictures). So, I (Ben Huber) am likely going to post here and on Instragram (with a link to the corresponding hubcrate post).
Preamble 2: We recently returned from our big event of the year; the Sept 22nd wedding of Rett and Elselijn. (Sidenote, Rett now spells his name as Rhett, but I know him as Rett so will likely continue referring to him as such. Besides, there’s still a lot of people, including some of my nieces and nephews, who refer to me as Benje, a name I haven’t gone by for a long time). I’m going to do a series of posts about our experiences in Calgary in September 2018, preparing for and participating in Rett & Elselijn’s wedding.
In talking with R&E about wedding preparation, they indicated that one of the things they wanted to do at the wedding reception was a game of Musical Hats. This is similar to the game Musical Chairs, but done with hats. A number of people sit in a circle, each with a hat. One person loses their hat and the music starts. The person without a hat takes the hat from the person sitting in front of them. Then the next person without a hat needs to acquire one. On things go in a sedate (or not) fashion until the music stops, and the person without a hat leaves the game, taking their chair with them. Another hat is removed and the next round begins.
On one of our first days in Calgary, Davison and I volunteered to go on a hat buying trip. We were attempting to purchase 15 hats, each hopefully unique and unusual. Rett already had one hat that we were going to use (a red one that said “Make America Great Again”, you may have seen people wearing them), but there were a lot to buy. I was concerned that we’d be spending quite a bit of money and having troubles finding unique ones. We went to two thrift stores and in short order had purchased 18 hats (yes, we lost count). Here are pictures of three of the hat that we found. You’ll be seeing some additional ones in a future post.
Yesterday, Davison was convinced that a young neighborhood lad (and good friend of Brock) had pocketed and walked off with one of the really cool minifigs from his latest Lego set. He was contemplating a plan of going over to said miscreant’s house to play, and while there he would case the joint for the missing minifigure.
By way of background, the bedtime book that I’ve been reading to the boys has been “Anne of Green Gables”. During this particular counselling session with Davison on the appropriate way of handling the situation, we reminded Davison of the amethyst brooch and shawl incident in the Anne of Green Gables story, where Marilla could not find her amethyst brooch and accused Anne of stealing it. Our point being that it is easy to jump to conclusions when dealing with other people’s motives and actions, and possibly being wrong in our over-reactions. Upon being reminded of such, Davison’s response was “Dad, I’m not going to find the Lego minifigure stuck in my shawl.” The decision was made to let the incident go without trying to confront the neighborhood lego pocketer.
A couple of hours later, Davison came downstairs and was chuckling. Upon being asked, he told us that he had found the missing stormtrooper, The really funny part was that the stormtrooper had somehow got tangled up in the corner of a dress-up shawl that was hanging out of a not-quite-closed drawer in the playroom.
We’re not sure how the story resolution could have been any more perfect, but were quite happy that a big scene was not part of it.
Well, it’s Tuesday evening in Houston and I thought that I would provide an additional update. Things were fairly dry today, we actually had a blue sky and sunshine late this afternoon. My measure on the amount of rainfall that we received in total is in the 38 to 39 inches range. Lori and I took a short trip yesterday up to the Sprouts grocery store for eggs and milk. On the way Lori took some pictures of the flooding that we observed. I’ve marked up a flood plain map to give you an idea of what we saw. The green star is where our home is approximately located, a pretty good distance from the designated floodplain areas.
Heading north on Hiway 249 on our way to the grocery store, we passed the local Lowe’s hardware store on our right. It is the #4 red star on the map. It looked like it had 1 to 2 feet of water covering the parking lot and the lower part of the store. Sorry, no picture on that one.
Coming home, Lori took some pictures of what we saw.
Just to put things in context, here is the YWCA facility in happier times:
And here are a couple of updated pictures around our place – the detention pond (currently empty), and a view of our house across the green space, again without all of the water.
Texas is currently experiencing Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey which hit the coast near Rockport and is now dumping a lot of rain elsewhere, including Houston. Our house and neighborhood have traditionally handled flooding fairly well, but Harvey is really dumping a lot of rain. At this point (Sunday afternoon), we’re in pretty good shape. Here are some pictures of what is going on.
I’ve been working on a new theme for the hubcrate.com site, and went looking for some sample content. The second directory that I hit had a lot of great pictures taken back in 2009. I don’t know who was taking pictures (usually it’s me), but it appears to be someone who was in cahoots with Daelynn. I suspect Danaya or Rett neither of whom appeared in the pictures.
I’m not trying to draw attention away from baby Alex (who is really cute), but was perusing some old pictures and thought some people (like Elissa who we hadn’t met yet) might like to see some more pictures of Brock from way back when. Plus I need to get in the habit of posting on hubcrate.com again, so here’s some content.
I’m playing around with a new theme for the www.hubcrate.com site. This is a test post on it – but as a bonus to you, the reader, here are some pictures of Baby Brock (all the way from 2009).
From the picture, it looks like Brock had dropped his toy, a jar lid apparently.
Ben