Several years back, my Dad wrote what has become one of the definitive books on hostage negotiation and crisis management. He and Wayman Mullins, his co-author, have been sponsoring an annual hostage negotiation conference and competition for several years now, which has been hosted at the University at which Wayman teaches and where I now work.

Yesterday, I had the singularly enjoyable opportunity to sit in on one of my Dad’s sessions, where he was teaching on specific issues a negotiator faces when dealing with adolescents, the elderly, gang members, and policemen. He did a great job making the subject accessible and interesting, even to someone like me who is not trained in that field. Further, it was a treat for me to be able to be involved in and supportive of the work that he’s spent so much of the last several decades doing and to see what kind of respect he has earned in that community. I consider the visit a small measure of payback for all the times he has come to see me play music!

Further, Dad retired from the police department at the end of last year. We were all glad to see that chapter come to a close; though he’s been able to do a lot of good work there, it has often been only by doing continuous battle with various frustrating political factions. Now he’s starting in earnest on pursuing some independent work, and has a number of very interesting leads, among them a five-day contract monitoring the stability of contestants on a reality television show in the northeast. He’s under nondisclosure on this, so details are few right now, but I think it’s safe to say that his career is going to make even better cocktail party conversation a year from now.

A few amusing little passages from an email I received today on a teambuilding workshop:

“This workshop has been a positive experience for individuals, offices, work groups, or teams.”

But they’re not telling us which one.

“Learn to identify and manage dysfunctional group behavior
in order to discover the synergistic results of collaboration.”

Wow! The synergistic results of collaboration! I presume we’ll further be leveraging our capabilities by empowering goal-oriented out-of-the-box thinking and further improving our Total Quality as well.

Come to think of it, I may just go to this workshop and play Buzzword Bingo.

An interesting quote from The Cloister Walk:

The liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw makes a valuable distinction between theology and liturgy: theology is prose, she says, but liturgy is poetry. “If faith is about facts,” she writes, “then we line up the children and make them memorize questions and answers…But if we are dealing with poetry instead of prose…then we do not teach answers to questions. We memorize not answers but the chants of the ordinary; we explain liturgical action…we immerse people in worship so that they, too, become part of the metaphoric exchange.”

Interesting thoughts. The evangelical tradition of Christianity in which I’ve spent the majority of my life seems to revolve first around believing certain tenets, and second around convincing other people to do the same. There’s often little room for beauty, gentleness, and patient loving and understanding left there, though those virtues are espoused in the Bible quite strongly. Balancing this prose of belief with the poetry of practice in the form of liturgy, participation in what Lewis calls “The Great Dance”, seems a much richer and more complete approach to faith.

I’m back to work today after a week and a half of idling, partying, helping, and wrestling with kids. Kathy and I both got some reading in, caught up with a number of friends with whom we hadn’t spent enough time lately, and generally enjoyed the luxury of ignoring our to-do lists.

One interesting experiment we’ve tried recently is this: when we have family dinners, nobody serves herself, but must instead rely on those around her to fulfill her needs. The idea occurred to me while reading about Benedictine communities in Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk, and has gone over pretty well. (Emily was a bit concerned that Liam would be dishing out her food the first night, as he evidently had a big booger hanging out of his nose at the start of dinner.) It has been an interesting and humbling exercise to have to rely on each other in that way, and a treat for us to see the children willingly meeting each other’s needs instead of thinking only about themselves and what they want.

For the first time in several years, I’ve managed to get it together to write up a Christmas letter. Of course, it was finished mere moments ago, so you, gentle reader, will be among the first to see it — our technologically backward friends will have to wait for us to come to terms with our printer and the postal service. Please enjoy our Christmastide Letter 2004.

Jason links to a fascinating article on the modern tendency to make a religion of work and business and heresy of idleness. The essay ties into a lot of themes in things I’ve been reading and watching, and quite piqued my interest.

Ironically, I’m too busy at the moment to write up my thoughts properly, but hope to come back to this in more detail soon.

Liam has been complaining for a while that he didn’t find Kindergarten very challenging. These complaints culminated in a meltdown the other day before class, shouting to Kathy he didn’t want to go, and that it was too boring, and he didn’t like it there. His teacher eventually came outside where he was bawling, and talked with him and Kathy, and decided to have him tested out for accelerated reading and math programs.

Today he took those tests, and we found out that he’s reading comfortably at a third grade level, and his math skills are nearly as far along. Poor little guy; it’s no wonder he’s been bored silly! The teachers are setting him up for self-paced work now, which I think will keep him much more engaged.

A few minutes after putting Liam to bed the other night, a plaintive wail escaped his room:

“Daddy? DADDY! My Elvis doesn’t feel good.”

“Your what, Liam?”

“My Elvis! It hurts!”

“What’s your Elvis?”

“You know, my Elvis bone.”

“You mean this down here?”

“Yes, my Elvis!”

“Liam, I think you misunderstood the word. That’s your pelvis. Well, let’s wait a few minutes and see if it feels better.”

Five minutes later

“Liam, how’s your Elvis feeling?”

“DADDY! It’s my pelvis. And it’s feeling better”

I’m not sure how to wax enthusiastic about this without it getting really geeky, but here it goes.

The ZigBee Alliance is a group collaborating on extremely low-power, low-bandwidth, dynamic networking standards. Where you’ll see this appearing first is likely in Home Automation applications, where you’ll be able to control your theormostat from your cell phone or have your TV mute itself with the phone rings. I had a pretty extensive home automation system set up before we moved to San Marcos, but had become frustrated enough with the slow speed and unreliability of the X-10 technology that my system was based on that I was never able to muster enthusiasm to get back into it in the new house.

Beyond home automation, this appears to be an excellent platform for building mesh-networked sensor arrays, and for building management and industrial automation. Potentially very cool stuff.

Oh, drat. I went and got geeky after all.

This past Saturday, Daniel and I went to see Doug Burr play at Flipnotics in Austin. Daniel discovered Doug’s music a few months back through Paste Music, and lent me the album shortly thereafter. It has haunted my CD player regularly since then, its “concept gospel” sound making it one of my favorite discs of recent memory.

I jumped at the chance to see Doug in person when Daniel mentioned he was coming to town. Flipnotics is a pretty small place, with seating for probably 30 people or so, which meant we got a great view of the goings-on. The show was great, and included most of the album’s songs and several new ones that hadn’t been recorded yet. Doug manned the guitar and harmonica, while Todd Pertll (whose surname really needs more vowels) played banjo and pedal steel guitar. Todd’s steel playing bears special mention, as he accomplished much more with the already versatile instrument than I’ve seen done before, using an effects processor to vary the sound, loops to create persistent harmonic underlays, and an E-Bow to create a sustained continuous sound. Great fun to watch and listen to.

To top it off, we got to visit with both Todd & Doug for a few minutes after the show, both of whom turn out to be genuinely nice guys. We talked music a bit, complimented them on the album, discussed Denton and Dallas, talked a bit about the challenges of balancing music with the demands of family life, and promised to drag along a few more friends the next time we came out to see them.

So check out the photos, buy the album or go see a show!