Digital Cowboy

I’m currently fighting yet another legal battle. This time it’s in two states, a thousand miles apart, to get my children back from a kidnapper.  I offered visitation to which my children’s mother was not entitled and then gave her gas money to get home because she “didn’t budget for the horrible gas mileage” she got on her trip to get them.  (I’ve had custody for nearly four years and she’s never paid a dime in child support, by the way.)

My reward was that I was served with papers 8 hours before I was to leave to drive 1000 miles to get my children.  The papers informed me that I no longer had custody of my daughters.  A Georgia judge that has never met me, my children or their mother gave her the benefit of the doubt when her newest attorney alleged a whole slew of things she has tried – and failed twice – to convince a Texas court that I’m doing… or not doing.  She has no evidence and thus presented no evidence.

What she’s done is a violation of Federal law – forum shopping across state lines.  She could do time for it.  I pray that doesn’t happen.  I wish her well, to say the least.

But, it’s not just me.  I have a friend that has been attacked over the legal custody of his daughter.  In his case, he was never married to her mother and she surrendered custody – in writing – in the hospital at the child’s birth.  The child is now seven years old and her “mother” has never been anything but an occasional visitor in her life.  The child has been raised by her father who places her above every other priority in his life.

Yet another acquaintance – a single father in my church – has recently been accused of horrible things by his recently teenaged daughter.  The girl has been a rebellious child for the last year or so to the point of being violent towards him.  The child’s mother is a known prostitute and drug dealer. She lives with drug dealers.  With one call to Child Protective Services, she temporarily over-rode court orders and terminated his parental rights (temporarily).  When CPS started investigating, they discovered multiple warrants for arrest for the mother and others living in her house.  With the children.  There is also great natural evidence that the teenage daughter’s story is fabricated.

But he is still fighting to exonerate himself and get his children back.  He’s considered guilty until proven innocent.  Because it’s all for THE CHILDREN!

A caring friend recently asked me if she and the rest of The Body of Christ had been, and were, letting “you” down.  By “you” she meant single fathers.

I responded, “I don’t think so, but I’ve never thought about it in those terms.  I can tell you this:  Being a single father is a far, far more difficult experience than being a single mother.  I never whine about it and I’m only talking about it now because you asked me.  But the fact is that everyone respects and admires the struggle of a single mother.  Everyone feels sorry for her and has sympathy.  Single fathers are looked upon by most of our society as freaks at best and perverts at worst.  We’re always suspects and we’re always vulnerable to wild allegations from any source.”

I’m not interested here in pointing fingers or going on a rant.  But I want to say that the tables have been turned by feminism (defined properly here as:  anyone with a uterus shall be permitted anything her emotions or hormones dictate but shall never have responsibility for anything) and it’s not a good thing for THE CHILDREN!!!!!  I only appeal to that because it’s true and nobody gives a damn about men.

When I was growing up in the 70′s it seemed that most divorces were because selfish men left their families. That was probably true – then – and certainly awful.  But now feminism has turned the tables completely.

Women have become selfish.  (I think they call it “empowered.”)  ”No fault” divorces are now initiated by women more often than men, by a large margin.  (There’s no such thing as a “no-fault divorce.”  If you’re initiating it without a reason, YOU are at fault.)  Both the society and the courts generally justify the childishness of these women while at the same time both of the former are still stuck in the prejudice of the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s.  As a result, we have an entire generation of men that are doing their best to raise children alone.  Yet they are viewed as undeserving victors when they get custody and then they are under constant scrutiny, always vulnerable to as little as a phone call or a court filing to upset their lives and the lives of the children for which they are working so hard to provide stability.

I’m not optimistic that government will ever fix this.  It’s never done anything else worth while.  So maybe my friend was on to something.

Maybe The Body of Christ needs to be more aware and attentive to this.

There’s definitely a need.

My two beautiful little redneck girls and I went to the Major League of Monster Trucks event last Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway. I didn’t especially want to but we made a deal and they earned it. I’ve always found monster trucks to be fascinating… for about 15 minutes at a time. I was not willing to make the drive or spend the money for that reason, except that they were excited and wanted to go. So they earned it and we went.

I enjoyed it far more than I expected. If you’ve never done this and have the slightest interest, DO IT! Just GO. Those trucks, in real life, that close, are absolutely amazing. I found myself sitting there feeling like a little boy, giggling and thinking to myself, “Only in America! This is why the terrorists hate us!” Then I would giggle some more after each time that thought went through my head.

It’s the sort of thing that a thinking man looks at – in the midst of enjoying it – and says to himself, “Why?!?! This is ridiculous.” The answer of course, is “Because WE CAN!”

I think there’s a deeper lesson in there, certainly for me and I think probably for many people. I don’t have to justify what I find amusing. Or fun. Or pleasurable. It does not make me some knuckle-dragging, mouth-breather if I enjoy a display of redneck engineering. Furthermore, it most certainly is a display of great engineering. Those who would dismiss “those rednecks” have very much underestimated them.

Yes it’s silly. But not nearly as silly as “modern art.” Monster trucks – for that matter NASCAR – are amazing displays of the extremes possible with very practical mechanical engineering. Most art is worthless for anything except basic snobbishness. On that basis, I would argue that NASCAR and monster trucks are both far more useful and valuable than “art” and the ignorant ones are those who invest their time and energy into vacuous pursuits that serve no purpose except to make themselves falsely feel superior.

In fact, I would go a step further and say that anyone who does not see a monster truck as practical – and amazing – applied art is fundamentally ignorant and lacking a basic understanding of how the world works.

It is nothing short of amazing to see an 8-ton-plus vehicle using ~1500 horsepower to launch 30 or 40 feet into the air.

We were fortunate in that even though it was quite crowded already when we got there and we had to sit way off from the center of the grandstands, we got seats in the second row. Then, after the event began, the kids were allowed to move down into the unoccupied seats that had been reserved for the handicapped. So I watched from row two and my girls were in row 0 – in front of the front row, right at the fence.

Being off-center turned out to be a blessing. When they got ready for the Freestyle round – the best part – they brought out a giant forklift and started moving vans and a bus to set up… RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. A large portion of the big action in the Freestyle competition happened directly in front of us and only about 50 feet away.

I put a few pictures up. The first page of thumbnails is all mainly pics of my kids with the trucks. The second page is purely monster truck action. The first 6 pics are not of a “real” monster truck. It’s a truck we parked near in the parking lot. In the pictures you’ll notice Texas plates on it. It’s street legal. In Texas anyway.

(There are a few pics in the gallery that have boldface titles underneath. Those pics all have description text if you click on them to view the larger version.)

Behold the power of a catchy jingle. This is an accurate recreation of what I listened to tried to block out for about 15 solid minutes recently during breakfast.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon on a number of other occasions since, as well. I’m sure the Vonage marketing droids would be thrilled.

My five year old has recently taken to coming into my office while I’m working or reading online and reading “over my shoulder.” (She actually stands next to me between me and the monitor; she’s a little short to literally read over my shoulder.) A few days ago she did this while I was working. I happened to be at the jQuery web site reading the developer documentation for a plugin to that excellent Javascript library. She understood none of it but, much like her Dad, it’s unnatural to her that words within her range of vision should not be read.

So without missing a beat, she just started reading out loud, “Using jQuery.extend to extend jQuery itself. In the above section, we checked if any options are given before we applied jQuery.extend(settings, options). The reason for this: If you specify only one parameter, the jQuery object itself is extended with the given object.”

She never so much as struggled with any of it, reading it almost as quickly as I do. (As an excuse, I’ll say that I read it slower than I could because I’m trying to actually comprehend it and she’s not. So there! Thfffttt!) She even correctly read the oddities in the first line, a section header, as “using jay-query dot extend to extend jay-query.”

No matter how many times I see her do these things, I still find it amazing.

That night, I was reading Opinion Journal’s “Best of the Web” while the kids were getting ready for bed. She came in and again automatically began reading. This time, I decided to record it for those who don’t have the opportunity to witness firsthand what home education can do.

That was completely impromptu. She had no preparation and had never seen the text before. The SMOG calculator says that the column she was reading is at grade level 13+ and the section she reads in the recording above is nearly grade level 12. You can hear me helping her some in the audio but what you hear is all the assistance I gave her. I was not helping her in any silent way.

Granted, the SMOG rating is the grade level at which one understands everything they have read and I’m sure she didn’t understand what she read. Then again, I’m not sure anyone including Dubya understands the current Iraq policy. (HA! couldn’t resist!) Anyway, I suspect that is what the ignorant/evil critics of phonics are getting at when they say comprehension suffers – it’s because phonics allows one to read way beyond their level of understanding. Help me understand how that’s a bad thing.

She had real trouble with the words “Rwanda,” “Sunnis,” “ideological” and “Shias.” My guess would be that many high school graduates in this country would as well. Other words, such as “century” and “nonstrategy,” she had to work at but she got them on her own. (It should be noted that “nonstrategy” isn’t actually a word either.)

She made a few mistakes, too. But as someone that has seen her do this frequently, I can also say she wasn’t in her top form when I recorded her. It was past her bedtime and she was very tired.

This child is not yet six years old and would be two months into kindergarten if we had not chosen to educate her at home. Incidentally, my older daughter can read just as well but usually doesn’t. She’s an artist and not as interested in reading so she tends to get in a hurry and guess at the words instead of actually reading them.

Many of you have asked how life on the ranch is going. It couldn’t be better and it’s been quite busy lately. In fact, I have some big news to report. As of Sunday afternoon, I now have a bonafide rodeo champeen living at my house! My oldest daughter Katelyn took first place in the mutton bustin’ competition Sunday. She was the only competitor that wasn’t afraid at all. Some of the kids chickened out completely once the sheep was brought out and the ones that did ride required a lot of coaxing to get them on. They also all cried when they fell off.

Not my cowgirl! Monty, the cowboy running the event, told me later, “She was the only brave one and she was fearless. She hopped on, grabbed hold and when she looked up at me she had that look in her eyes that I see with the ropers when they’re ready to have the gate tripped – ‘Let’s get it on!’” (I have another picture of her where you can see that laser focus while she’s riding but I didn’t post it here because it’s hard to see unless it’s at full resolution.)

She rode for well over 10 seconds and she was the only one that didn’t get “bucked.” When she hopped off and came back to me she said, “Daddy, I could’ve gone longer but they told me to get off.” I said, “That’s fine, Sweetheart. That’s like makin’ the whistle at a bull ride!” “Well, can I go again?” Monty told me later that he told her to get off because the sheep was tiring out and it looked like she could ride all day.

Besides the trophy she won, the event payout was a big ol’ bag of candy and this was the real deal – in a rodeo arena with a crowd of spectators cheering. She even got to pick up her winnings at the pay window just like the cowboys do when they win the ropings. The trophy says “Mutton Busting – 1st Place 2006 – Covenant Ranch.”

Now she’s bugging me about building her a trophy shelf in her room. She’s certain that this is just the first of many rodeo trophies she’s going to win. She’s probably right. She’s also trying to use this new status as leverage around the house – “Well, Daddy, I am a rodeo champion!”

“Uh-huh. Get your room cleaned up, rodeo champion.”