Lizzie, Dan, and their boys made this cool birthday video for me. They sang "Happy Birthday" to me in Arabic.
Kate and Clayton came over to our home on Pioneer Day (24 July) to make covered wagons and play with the kids.
Backyard fun.
Douglas, Penny, and Diana sitting in Grandpa's chair. Grandma took the kids for a couple of days last week.
Making cookies
Penny in the swing
Douglas still fits in Grandma's swing . . . barely!
"Cheese" for Grandma!
Douglas and Diana
I finished reading this book today. It is one of the best books I have ever read. Here are a few of my favorite parts:
He [George Carver] had no use for the word "about," and told them so. A thing was either right or wrong, sufficient or insufficient. "You did not have to come all the way here to know that jumping about four feet across a five-foot ditch will only earn you a mud bath."
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Through its known record of 3000 years in all the earth's sub-tropical lands, the peanut has been variously called the ground pea, pindar, monkey nut, goober nut and ground nut. It came to North America in the slave ships of the eighteenth century--goober is one of the few African words still retained in the English language--and this is one of history's special ironies: brought to the New World by the slave traders because it was the cheapest of all foods for the millions of Negroes needed to serve the cotton empire, the peanut, 150 years later, became the instrument by which cotton's economic deathlock on slavery's heirs was finally broken.
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God was ever part of his sense and sum of things, ever his motivating force. When a young visitor from the North saw the stacks of mail on his desk, he kindly said, "You are surely making a great contribution to your race, Professor."
To which Carver replied, "My son, I am only God's helper in this work. And I am certain He has not had in mind any particular race, but the needs of all humanity."
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At the hotel, the doorman refused to let him in. "Sorry, old uncle," he said amiably. "There's no colored allowed in here."
Carver set his cases down on the sidewalk, trembling with fatigue and frustration. There was no point in arguing, he knew. Still, it took him some little time to remember his own axiom, that flinging hatred back at ignorance was an exercise in uselessness and sterility.
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How could they know God? someone once asked. Would they ever see him?
"What are you studying?" Carver came back.
"Electricity."
"Have you ever seen electricity?"
"No, it's . . ."
"But when you make the proper contact, when you fulfill the laws of your trade, you can make a bulb light up, can't you, because the electricity is always there."
"Yes," the boy conceded.
"Well, God is always there, too--just waiting for you to make contact. He is all around you, in all the little things you look at but don't really see."
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"You must not let the haters of this world divert you from the path of your own duty. For the time will come when the haters will have been consumed by their own hatred, and the ignorant will have learned the truth. And then, if you are prepared for it, you will walk the earth as free men, the equal of any other man."
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