Whistling Badger Blog

AGE 4 July 18, 2013 Guy at the restaurant: Are you going to be a musician when you grow up? KT: No, I just wanna be a normal people when I grow up. July 18, 2013 On the trail Tuesday, with no context or preamble: I bet a forest fire would take out a mosquito. August 30, 2013 · Katie is performing a medical procedure on one of her princess dolls, using the tiny blow dryer from her dollhouse bathroom set. She is very intense about it. "I'm giving Jasmine some very special soap medicine. It hurts way more than a LOBSTER! But it's the ONLY WAY!" Dean Lehmkuhler: "On a scale from 0 to LOBSTER, how bad is your pain?" September 16, 2013 · You know it is a wet September in Wyoming when there are shore birds in the yard! We spotted this flock of snipe (the real kind, not the kind you send kids out to hunt) in the yard Sunday morning. I saw four; Katie saw "about a hundred." And she thought they were kingfishers, which resulted in some fun exp...

Katie has been part of our world for the better part of ten years now.  I know everyone thinks their kids are amazing, but...well, mine really is.  She is not without fault, of course, but I know her to be kind, obedient, humble, confident, and about as smart as any kid could possibly need to be.  She is also one of the happiest, most imaginative, most oddly insightful kids I've ever known. And yes, she still does that fluttery, Monty-Python-face thing when she's really happy about something or her imagination is working overtime. She also has a gift for words.  As a young child, she would play with words and ideas almost the way she played with toys:  Arranging them, making them into new forms, trying things out to see how they worked.  Sarah and I have collected some (not nearly enough) of her funny and odd little sayings on Facebook through the years.  Now at last I have collected them in one place. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:...

I have been learning a lot of new skills lately:  Nixtamalizing corn from the garden, sewing, leatherworking, and this one:  Building arrows from scratch.  This is a store-bought sitka spruce shaft with store-bought feathers, but it has something I've never tried before:  A self-nock.  That means the little notch that goes on the string is carved into the wood itself, rather than a little piece of plastic glued on the end. I carved it out perpendicular to the grain with 4 mini-hacksaw blades taped together; finished with a 1/8" file and 140 grit sand paper.  Wrapped with silk thread coated in Duco. I am having a devil of a time getting the cuts dead center on the shaft.  I've been practicing on some old, broken POC shafts.  This is the first one I've tried that might actually shoot.  I plan on giving it a try tomorrow once the glue is all cured up.  I hope I've done it right.  I'm guessing an exploding arrow coming out of a 60...

I often hear people say that God answers prayers one of four ways:  Yes; No; Wait; and I've got something better. That sounds nice, and contains some truth, but scripture doesn't really articulate it that way. A while back, while struggling with the fact that so many sincere prayers seem to go unanswered, I did some very deep study on what the New Testament actually promises about prayer.  I did a lot of digging i nto the Greek, and found some very important nuances I had not noticed before. I did not find what I wanted to find, but I did come to a much more difficult yet more satisfying understanding that I believe might just be worth sharing. This is just a quick survey, not a full-blown study; I am just going to share some conclusions without really going into how I reached those conclusions, because I know how busy you are. To greatly oversimplify, the New Testament teaches that God answers prayer one of three ways: 1.  Yes.  I'll give this to yo...

His name was Lon.  Looking back, he was a rather pathetic fifth grader with a big mouth who got a feeling of power by terrorizing younger kids.  But at the time, he was the Lord of the Neighborhood.  His word was law, and usually, his word was something frightening and humiliating.  He was a Big Kid.  And he had two big, dumb buddies to back him up. My dad didn't know about Lon when we made Jack O' Lantern Man.  It was just a fun thing to do:  Stuff a set of his coveralls, set the resulting body in a lawn chair, and put a pumpkin on top for a head.  It was my dad's creativity and love of taking things a step further that made him prop the old car speaker up behind Jack's head, with a wire hooked in that led up to a microphone in our upstairs window.  We could sit up there, in the dark, and give Jack a voice.  To the little ones, his voice was friendly and happy.  To the bigger kids, the ones who enjoy being scared just a bit, his ...