The Newfangled Four - A Spoonful of Sugar (parody) [from Mary Poppins]

I  found this the other day on YouTube while looking up prune videos.  Not sure why it would come up there, but I am glad it did.  

This video resonated in me for multiple reasons: 1. I have had multiple family members over the years who have participated in singing groups.  My first trip on an airplane was because my Mom's Sweet Adeline's group was going to sing in Washington D.C. and families were allowed to come with.  Both my sisters have been in Sweet Adeline's as well. I also have several family members who have been in Barber Shop Quartets.  2) I love parodies, write them myself, and love to see them performed.  3) Since the time my youngest daughter was in 4th grade started performing in speech contests, my wife and I have been volunteer judges in them. This performance is a send-up of judging rubrics, especially for judging barber shop quartets, but I found it matched up to speech judging in a most delightful way.

 

Extra Bonus Video: Judges by The Fabulous Bentley Brothers from Jelly Telly which was Phil Vischer's follow up to Veggie Tales.  And, yes the Bentley Brothers are Rhett & Link.  

Team Saturdazzle: The One That Got Post Dated

I had big plans for the Team Saturdazzle segment in 2025.

First, I was going to post content for the segment to be published each Saturday of the new year.

Then, I would attempt to generate a little readership for it by linking it through the blogosphere via other established blogs , memes, and various Social networking sites.

After a while, I would gauge interest in making it one of those segments that others could link their content to.

All these plans were contingent on stringing a number of Weekly Saturdazzle posts together.

the Jan 5th edition went fine, in the sense that there was a Jan 5th edition. I had a few ideas for this edition. 

One idea came to me when I took my waiting with my Mom on one of her recent doctor appointments. She kept on talking about going to get cookies. My Mom often brings cookies up to her room which she gets from the dining room at the place where she and my Dad stay. Instead of eating her desserts in the dining room she brings them up to her room and puts them in her refrigerator aka the place where desserts go to die.

This was made on Christmas by my youngest daughter and my Mom. Left to 
 my mom’s devices it would have stayed in her fridge until the 15th anniversary of Covid.

As my Mom kept on talking about cookies, I thought that it might be cool to bring my daughters over there on Saturday and do some baking.  My parents have been living in  a senior living facility for the past few years where there meals are served to them.  While they have an oven and stove int heir apartment neither one of them is really able to use it anymore.  I thought it would be nice to have the sweet smell of baked goods wafting through their kitchen.

Due to being triple and quadruple booked for most of the weekend, we did not get over there on Saturday.  This was actually a good thing as it gave me a moment in the madness of a weekend with little sleep to rest a while.  We rescheduled the baking for Sunday when a number of us visit my folks anyway, which seemed like a good solution.  

The only problem was that the baking expedition was going to be the main point of my Saturdazzle feauture and now I would need to write about something else.  Then I remembered technology.  Blogger allows me to predate my posts and it also allows me for some reason to post date them.  So here's what I did, I went baking on Sunday am blogging about it now and back dating the post so it looks like it appeared on Saturday.  This was if and when I build a following with Saturdazzle, and the Saturdazzled (tm) pending are looking for back issues there will be continuity that it gets posted each Saturday.

Here are the pics from our multi generational cookie day

Gather the ingredients at home

Assembling The Troops



Giving the aged sharp objects

Giving the aged with sharp objects supervision

Obligatory Baking Picture (OBP) #1

   

OBP #2

OBP #3

Finished Product: Happy Parents

Overall the event was highly successful.  My Dad kept on saying he didn't remember the last time someone came over to bake for him.  We left a good amount of cookies in a tupperware on the table and took the rest home so none would be subjected to the refrigerator where desserts go to die. 

The first comment of the year

To many.  comments are the currency of the blogging world.  To some, it's page views, but having someone stop by and write about your content is a gratifying thing.  I blog for me.  I would like to have a large readership, but it doesn't matter that I don't have much of one.  

I post on other people's blogs and participate in their blogging events in part so either people will see and comment on my blog.  But even when they don't I still like to post content here and comment on their content there.  

SO it wasn't surprising on January 8th that I still did not have one single comment on any of my posts since last year.  I was glad that I got 3 comments in somewhat rapid succession the next day.  I work both my jobs in Wednesday and and in between them I stopped at McDonalsd for a snack knowing I wouldn't be eating dinner until 9:30.  I got one of my favorite snacks, a deconstructed root beer float.  That's my name for an ice cream cone and a glass of root beer,

While eating it, I remembered there is a way to post my content by sending an e-mail and did that.  I posted it on here, and linked it to the Wordless Wednesday page of Comedy Plus. On Thursday Morning I received this nice comment from Sandee the proprietor of Comedy Plus.  I received two more a few minutes later from another one of my posts.

Well that's it for this weeks installment of Team Saturdazzle.  Next time I hope to actually release it on Satuday and not fix it in post.  

Jimmy Carter's eulogy for Gerald Ford

I scheduled thispost to coincide with the beginning of President Carter's National Funeral Service. Jimmy Carter gave a Eulogy at President Ford's Funeral service. It is eloquent, homespun, and humorous. In that it embodied many of the traits of both Presidents.

Wordless Wednesday: Deconstructed Rootbeer Float

For More Wordless Wednesday at Comedy Plus, click here.

Weekly Writer's Workshop: For God So Hugged The World

Here are the prompts for this week’s Writer’s Workshop:

1.  Write a post based on the word hugging. 
2. Write a post in exactly 13 sentences. 
3. How do you cope with days where you’re stuck in the house due to bad weather? 
4. What are your favorite food items to order online? 
5. If evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe were discovered, would it alter your core beliefs or sense of self? 
6. List your five most recent favorite things.

I am combining 2 prompts today, #1 and #5.  It's not exactly one from column A and one from column B, but it gets the job done.

For God So Hugged The World

John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (NIV)

My older sister asked me once what  John 3:16 meant.  So, I told her what the verse said, and her reaction was, "That has nothing to do with football"

I saw my sister right after Christmas as I was at the wedding of my oldest niece, her daughter.  There was an hour or so between the end of the wedding and the reception.  So my family being who we are, took a side trip to a local library between gigs.  While we were there my daughter Lucy emerged triumphantly from the lobby to say that she had found a 1984 Thesaurus in the free stuff bin,  She spent the next few days of the trip regaling us with synonyms from the book.  I have asked her to read me the synonyms for hug. Here goes: embrace, hold, clasp, press to the bosom, hold close, clutch, squeeze, cuddle, snuggle, nestle, and (wait for it) cling together.

As I contemplated the meaning of John 3:16, especially what it meant for God to so love the world, I thought of hugs.  I thought of a child who seemingly gave up on physical expressions of love to their parents initiating a hug with me for no particular reason.  I thought of how hugs show one's love for another but also leave room for a reply. 

 I thought of Jesus in that sense as a hug from God.  To put it back in the context of John 3:16,  our sins had separated us from God.  We were on a path to perishing without a chance to have that relationship mended. God reached out to us, extending his Son as a way to eternal life.  We must reach back to God completing that hug by accepting Jesus as the only way to God.  

This brings me rather clumsily to prompt 5: If evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe were discovered, would it alter your core beliefs or sense of self? 

My short answer is no.  My core beliefs and my sense of self,  emanate from my understanding of biblical Christianity.  Larry Norman a pioneer of Jesus Music broached the subject in the bridge of his song U.F.O.

And if there's life on other planets 

Then I'm sure that He must know 

And He's been there once already 

And has died to save their souls.

Those lyrics have always resonated with me. I have never meant much of a subscriber to the notion of life on other planets.  I like the science-fiction element of extraterrestrial life but that's where it ends. However farfetched I might find it, if confronted with proof that there is life on other planets, I would lean in on Norman's thought process.  To extend my previous thoughts on John 3:16, I can imagine the Lord of the Universe loving other intelligent life so much that he would reach out and hug them through the person of his Son as well.  

Just like I don't jettison my faith when difficult times come my way, I plan to always trust in God no matter what other things may come to challenge my world view.  

A Snapshot of the pioneering christian rock musician Larry Norman taken following concert in Defiance, Ohio on October 20, 2001.

By Ekiledal - http://upload.wikimedia.org/, Public Domain, Link

Thanks to John Holton of The Sound of One Hand Typing for this week's prompts.  To participate more in this Week workshop click here.

16th Blogoversary Post

 16 years ago, George W. Bush was in the final days of his Presidency, Illinois Senator Barack Obama was about to become the 44th President of the U.S., the Chicago Cubs were nine months away from going 100 years without winning a World Series and a little blog called Home School Dad published it's first post, Why We Homeschool.

That little blog still exists, in fact, you are reading it.  Its name has changed since then and may change again, as I mentioned in my last post.

In the inaugural post, I answered the title question with 2 pictures and 7 words.  The words were: Three precious reasons: Lucy, Emma, and Charlie, and the pictures were of the aforementioned children. The post did not go into further detail but one of the main reasons why we home-educated our children was part of a concerted effort to build into our children a Godly character.  

Those reasons are all now adults and the youngest is 5 years removed from her last homeschooling, unless you count her Freshman year of high school where she was having school at home because of COVID. At the moment, all 3 of our children are at home until the youngest goes back to Champaign later this month.  

In the past few months, I have had sufficient opportunity to evaluate the character development of all our kids.  Each of my children has talked with me or my wife or both of us recently about individual issues they are going through.  I'd detail them here, but it wouldn't make it through the vetting process.  They are handling these issues in a mature and Godly fashion.  After we talked to one of them yesterday my wife reminded me that their response was a specific answer to prayer she had sent to our church just a few months ago.  I can also see the beginning of adult friendships taking place between them.  We just came back from a trip out East to a family wedding and most of the family squabbling was relegated to me and one of my siblings who accompanied us on the trip.  

I don't look back at our home school adventure as a qualified success.  However, on the 16th anniversary of this blog, I am glad to look back and see that God has at least used it to help meet some of  our purposes for it.