The Power of One
Someone told me today that in order to understand the power of one, you need to be trapped in a dark room with a mosquito.
Hmm, Ping and I experienced that just last night. We went to bed at midnight and got up at 3:00. But we got almost no sleep during those three hours because of the mosquito who joined us in the room. As is typical, Ping suffered the bite, but I only suffered the buzzing in my ear. Regardless, Ping turned on the light and we did the best we could.
Cici and I miss Ping already. She is high over the Pacific now, about 5.5 hours into that leg of her flight from Chicago to Hong Kong. But she still has 10 hours to go on that leg of her trip. If you have never done it, you can board the plane, eat the first meal, watch a movie, go to sleep, and when you wake up, you still have a lifetime left on the flight.
We have one final exam left, but Cici is not feeling too well right now so I have her sleeping while I cook dinner. I think more than anything she is just a little sleep deprived. I know I am always bragging about this child, but I have to say one more thing about her. I had no idea she has the kind of talent for drawing that she showed me today. She somewhat bashfully showed me what she had drawn and turned in as a theology project. She received a 100 on it, and I can certainly see why. It truly looks like it was done by a professional artist.
Even the way she signed her name at the bottom, Angela, is a work of art. I will frame this, but she insists that I not hang it in our office. I have her permission to hang it in our home office, though, and I suspect I will carry the framed drawing with me to meetings from time to time.
Maybe you should take art class in school, I suggested. No, she said, I don't like art classes. But I do like to draw.
Hmm, Ping and I experienced that just last night. We went to bed at midnight and got up at 3:00. But we got almost no sleep during those three hours because of the mosquito who joined us in the room. As is typical, Ping suffered the bite, but I only suffered the buzzing in my ear. Regardless, Ping turned on the light and we did the best we could.
Cici and I miss Ping already. She is high over the Pacific now, about 5.5 hours into that leg of her flight from Chicago to Hong Kong. But she still has 10 hours to go on that leg of her trip. If you have never done it, you can board the plane, eat the first meal, watch a movie, go to sleep, and when you wake up, you still have a lifetime left on the flight.
We have one final exam left, but Cici is not feeling too well right now so I have her sleeping while I cook dinner. I think more than anything she is just a little sleep deprived. I know I am always bragging about this child, but I have to say one more thing about her. I had no idea she has the kind of talent for drawing that she showed me today. She somewhat bashfully showed me what she had drawn and turned in as a theology project. She received a 100 on it, and I can certainly see why. It truly looks like it was done by a professional artist.
Even the way she signed her name at the bottom, Angela, is a work of art. I will frame this, but she insists that I not hang it in our office. I have her permission to hang it in our home office, though, and I suspect I will carry the framed drawing with me to meetings from time to time.
Maybe you should take art class in school, I suggested. No, she said, I don't like art classes. But I do like to draw.
If you like to draw, taking an art class can be a bad idea. If you are good, taking an art class can be a bad idea. If you are gifted, taking an art class can be a terrible idea.
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I hadn't really thought about it, but you make a good point, Smitty. If she just develops her talent naturally, she will at least do it as she enjoys it, which may keep her interested.
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I have to agree. I have a friend who's daughter seems to have a natural talent for drawing. She took and art class in high school, and it was devastating. Fortunately, she recovered, and is back doing art the way she wants. She has even been commissioned to do art work for a comic. A natural artist is very creative, and art classes seem to want to make everyone the same. Definitely skip the art classes.
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Sounds like we have a consensus building. No art classes for Cici! She doesn't really want to take the webmaster class either, so we need to come up with a different elective.
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May I humbly suggest something just totally for fun? Like wood shop, or something just on a whim? Nothing like being well rounded and having skills not expected of you
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Not a bad idea Craig, if they don't have a jointer there.
Our shop class had a machine that is called a jointer. For the benefit of anyone who doesn't know what a jointer is and does, it has a metal wheel with multiple blades, the purpose of which is to trim or even resize wood. You can take a two by six and make it a two by four, for example.
You can also resize a finger or worse in the blink of an eye.
So when Cici picked up my right hand one day so she could touch where the tip of my finger isn't, I told her it was eaten by a jointer. I had turned off the machine after using it. It seemed dangerous to me to leave that wheel spinning with its sharp blades ready to attack anything that came near them even as the speed of the wheel was reducing.
So in my childish innocence, I thought I would use a two by four to stop the wheel from spinning, thereby eliminating the danger. What I didn't foresee was that the blades would bite on the wood, catch it, and jerk my hand into the path of the still spinning blades. It reshaped my index finger when it removed the fingernail and part of the finger. It resized my middle finger when it turned the tip into chopped liver. All the doctor could do was use the remaining bottom skin to turn it up over the now shortened finger and create a make do end of my finger.
I showed my hand to our shop teacher. When they revived him from his fainting spell, he drove me to the emergency room.
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