I called my dad who lives in Oklahoma, and explained to him that I would have called earlier except that having no kids I was able to sleep in until 11a.m. My dad has a great sense of humor. 

My wife and I are both 40 years old, and with no kids we are met with a variety of responses when people learn about our Double-Income No Kids status. We've lived in metros such as Los Angeles, but mostly in small towns such as San Luis Obispo or Visalia where we currently reside. The reaction is the same regardless of demographic: some feel sorry for us (which we find rather an odd reaction), some have actually asked us what's wrong (again, we don't quite understand that), and some (more than not) have said they love their kids, but wouldn't do it again. It's this 3rd response which always surprises us most. It's also the most common response, which is a bit disturbing.

Without exception we always find ourselves in the position of having to explain why we don't have kids, and most of the time it's nothing more than a passing subject in conversation with new friends who are simply getting to know me or my wife. At first there is a bit of surprise, some interest, and then it passes into the background. Often it becomes the subject of good-natured jokes and the banter is terrific among friends. But with family, this can actually get very uncomfortable, and in our late 20's even became an "off limits" topic during family gatherings because the women in our family (mothers in particular) decided there must be something wrong. Like peer pressure to conform, the family unit can be relentless in its demands, and resourceful in the variety of psychological tactics used to exert such pressure. Thankfully, at 40 years old, this has ceased to be a topic of interest within the family.

Our response, which has never changed, is one of open honesty. We just shrug our shoulders and explain that having kids has never been something we've felt compelled to do. It's just not something we have ever felt tied to any sort of feeling of fulfillment. If pressed further we repeat the answer. What more can we do? There really isn't any more to it than that. Some have finally realized that our world view and their world view are not the same and the things they require to be happy are not the same as ours. Hard to imagine I guess.

As is often the case with people who live outside the normative curve, I have no opinion about people who choose to have kids. If I were gay it might be the case that I wouldn't have an opinion about people that are straight. It's just not something that occurs to me to have an opinion about. However, I do have some strong feelings about the subject of having kids, and raising them, in general. And here they are:

1. Judging by the behavior of many parents, I don't believe their kids stand a chance.
2. Judging by the behavior of many kids, I don't think their parents stand a chance.
3. Most people shouldn't be allowed to have kids, and most kids deserve better than the parents they got.
4. Most kids want to please their parents and other adults. The rest are sociopaths that eventually go to work for the IRS.
5. In the age of the internet and cell phones, grounding a child for bad behavior is as useless as the UN imposing sanctions on a country for bad behavior.
6. Most kids think their parents are idiots whose opinions don't matter, but will pay close attention and take it to heart if their parents think the same of them.
7. Teaching a kid how to fight doesn't mean they will go out and pick fights, any more than sex education will promote promiscuity, or driver's education will cause car accidents.
8. There are bad kids. Kids that are just mean, nasty, cruel, and hateful by nature. If your kid is one of these, fix this situation soon or society will end up doing it for you. Consider the odds of ignoring the problem turning out well for everyone involved and act accordingly.
9 My wife is a fantastic gardener. In fact she is a genius in my opinion. In my many years of not raising kids I have come to believe that if parents tended their children like my wife tends her garden, society as a whole would be better for it. Sometimes you have to nip things in the bud, sometimes you have to give up and change your approach. But you must always commit to helping that garden grow. You must not get into gardening unless you can be sure it will be a labor of love, and you must not rely on someone else to do the hardest work for you.
10. Those who wish they never had kids probably have kids who wish they never had parents.

Happy Father's Day.

Recently we had a violent storm roll through. 60mph gusts with hail and fork lightning is not a big deal in Oklahoma, but here in our little anti-burgh it is definitely not common. I thought it would be fun to go outside and try to capture it with my camera. Turns out it had the same idea about me and got way too close for comfort. The glare where you can't see anything is a single angry bolt that overexposed. And there's it's little brother that showed up about 5 seconds later, seen in the next picture. Thing is, I didn't capture the really big bolts, which were being hurled around like the gods playing a drunken game of lawn darts.

 
I thought it was interesting the way the underside of the clouds is illuminated here, but found it more interesting that I continued to behave like an idiot and stand outside photographing this insanity. I learned something about myself, which is that my self-preservation instinct apparently is not as strong as I would like to believe.

Just saw a TV ad for steak at WalMart. Really? Would YOU be the first in line for that?

The Kepler Telescope is now awake and peering deep into its designated star field. The target area has been carefully selected and will hopefully be a target rich environment. It will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.

The mission's first finds are expected to be large, gas planets situated close to their stars. Such discoveries could be announced as early as next year.

"...in the meantime i want you to write a list of those events past and present which might logically be termed NOT God's will. "

The above was a request by a respected mentor and friend in response to my previous post "Is it still God's Will?"  To discover what something is, it is prudent to determine what it is not. A good approach, but as I worked through the list below I found it surprisingly difficult to decide. I decided to let free form thinking take control...not analyze my gut reaction too much and just see where my first reactive, automatic thoughts take me. So this list will be just the highlights, the teardrops in in the ocean.

Things I say are not God's will:

PAST:
1.The publication of The Secret and the spiritual exploitation it represents through its deceptions as to what constitutes true science.
2. The editorial liberties that have been taken with the Bible, to the point where "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not actually the correct context, according to one who is more in the know than I, and that apparently the original spirit of the law here was "Thou Shall Not Murder", which of course excludes actions taken in self defense and war (depending of course on which side of the gun you are on).
3. The things I said to myself today when Kevin's wife e-mailed me a picture of the memorial bench that will be placed next to Kevin's grave.
4. The Crusades.
5. The failure of His chosen people to "finish the job" as it were in the book of Numbers.

PRESENT
1. The use of Marriage as a foundation for a tax code, or worse.

2. The prayer chain e-mails I get that perpetuate the belief that if 1 prayer is good 1,000 are better. As if getting God's attention is a numbers game.

3. My growing belief that God may have taken Kevin to Him in order to test Katherine and Kevin's twin brother Kendall to prep them for something even worse yet to come. I'm probably just paranoid.

4. Joel Olsteen. Sorry, but God is not a cuddly kitten and no, things are not going to be alright if you "just believe". In fact, Christ is pretty clear in the book of Mark that more likely is just the opposite. I believe the man's good intentions could do more harm than good in the long run to Christianity.

5. Giving in to contempt and becoming jaded, instead of trying to see if this situation might be a way to reach a greater understanding of faith.

Ok, that's the list. Perhaps the following thought could be tabled for now, but at some point I need to come back to it as it seems relevant to the question, "What is NOT God's Will?" The thought is this:

I believe the Bible is where God's nature is to be found, but still God did create all of this. Does that make it logical to conclude that by observing the universe around us we are, in some way, seeing into the mind of God? Could not then the sight of a baby seal getting beat to death against a sandy shore by a killer whale be construed as an unfiltered if not ominous communication? Not sure if the concepts that built this thought logically belong together. Just following my gut as promised.

With the sudden death of a very close friend recently, Kevin Wood, only 33, from unknown and immediate causes, a lot of things went through my mind. When we found out he was an organ donor and his bone marrow was a match that saved the lives of 12 children and that his eyes returned site to another, we firmly believed that whatever caused it was clearly God's will. It was so sudden, he literally dropped dead right in front of two paramedics at Taco Bell.

But now we know what happened and it really stings. My friend was mis-diagnosed back in November when he visited his doctor for chest pain and shortness of breath. I believe he had a fever at the time as well. Regardless, the doctor in question treated him for a lung infection, instead of examining his heart. He died of a viral infection of the heart, and as it turns out this could have been successfully treated with no problem on a regular course of antibiotics.

Now, do we still believe it was God's will? When it was mysterious it was much easier to make the attribution. Perhaps guilty of what civilization has been doing since the beginning of human kind, we attributed the mysterious to God and the known to science. Does God take life in this manner, or is it the natural consequence of the natural order He created...and therefor indirectly still his will (or as some would say, His fault).

I will choose to believe that ultimately it was the will of God. I don't understand it, and I know God owes me no explanation for anything He does. However, that being said I am not OK with it. I am glad these people were helped, even saved their lives, but what of Kevin's  14 year old son, 10 month old daughter and 2 year old daughter? What of his beautiful and fully devoted wife of 4 years whom he, just that morning, had swung around in the kitchen laughing and telling her how much he loved her? No, I'm not fine with this at all.

From Jim Fanson, Kepler, JPL Project Manager :
Kepler's calibration data collection is drawing to a close. Several hundred data sets have been acquired to characterize and map the optical and noise performance of the telescope and the electronics for the focal plane array (the area where light is focused). The data sets are now being analyzed on the ground. Optimally shaped "windows" of pixels will be defined for each of the more than 100,000 target stars and a table of these pixels uploaded to the spacecraft. These are the pixels that will ultimately help the science team find planets -- the pixels will be downlinked to Earth and used to construct light curves, or measurements of brightness over time, for each star.

After science observations begin, the data analysis "pipeline" at the Science Operations Center at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will process the light curves to identify "threshold crossing events," which is the first step in identifying potential transiting planets. Various tests will be applied to these events to weed out false indications. Once confidence is built for candidate transits, observations by ground-based telescopes will be performed to further rule out phenomena that can masquerade as transiting planets.

Close! We have detected the smallest exoplanet in human history...and its been done from ground based observatories. Gliese 581 e has all the right properties that make it an earthlike world candidate, but lets not forget that Venus too has an earth-like mass. Unlike the planets that Kepler will be searching over 3,000 light years away, Gliese 581 e is "only" 20 light years away.

For the full story visit:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517271,00.html

Finally, NASA is learning how to promote the good it does for the rest of us. So often we think of pure science as something that sucks funding away from other social initiatives, failing to follow the thread of how technological advancements make their way into our lives specifically because of things scientists do everyday but we never hear about.

Checkout this cool interactive feature...it's really interesting an LOT of fun.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/nasacity/index2.htm

Difficult to describe how hard that trip was to Spokane. Lots of great friends up there and I must make the trip again soon. Lots of great friends down here and I must make such trips locally soon. I kept expecting him to walk through the door or call on the phone. His little 2 year old daughter kept asking when pappa was coming home. That pulled the rug from under me a few times. God is strong with them though.

The coroner is very dissatisfied with the autopsy. Couldn't find a thing wrong, except for an enlarged heart (Kevin's heart was big, that's not news). But the coroner wasn't really convinced this could have been the root cause. But he did mention that his heart seized and that Kevin never felt a thing.

And then an interesting twist. Kevin was an organ donor, and his bones were so big that they were able to get what they needed to save the lives of 12 people, mostly children, that needed what he had. His corneas helped give back site to someone else. All the pictures of the people he helped are going to be sent to his brother and wife.

I worked on the Flash slideshow for the funeral. I didn't want his brother or close family to have to do that, and besides its something I could contribute. It was good to see him in different situations, always smiling or laughing. It didn't make me sad for the most part, just glad I knew him.

So I left Spokane and said goodbye for the last time to one of my closest friends, like a brother. But for his family I will visit them again, and his daughters I will be sure to tell them as often as possible what a great man their father was, and how lucky to have such a great family they are.