The Pitter Patter of... Oh, That's Just Disgusting

A little postcard from the vacation Ron and I recently took in Boyne City, Michigan

We've hiked in the Rocky Mountains, we've hiked in the Yorkshire Moors, we've hiked in Zion Canyon. So you would think that hiking in the northern Michigan woods might seem dull and unremarkable by comparison. But if you think that, as we foolishly did, you would not have counted on...

Night of the Living Caterpillars... mwah ha ha ha ha!

Actually, it was the afternoon. We hopped out of the car at the trailhead to hike the Jordan River Pathway, a pleasant little wind through the East Jordan River watershed that was recommended to us by the nice lady behind the desk at the lodge. As we started down the trail, we heard an odd popping noise. "I wonder what that is?" I remarked cheerfully to Ron, our junior naturalist curiosity fully engaged. Then, we saw a charming little caterpillar on the trail. Awwww... isn't that cute?

Then we saw more, hanging out on some low-growing leaves. Well, there sure are some caterpillars around! And look at all those caterpillar tents in the trees! Golly!

We hiked on.

Then we realized, as we hiked deeper in, that caterpillars were everywhere. On the leaves, on the trail, even hanging over the trail from little silken threads. They were writhing in large moving groups on branches crossing the trail. They were congregating slimily on certain trees, heading from one place to another on a caterpillar parkway. And from up above they were... they were dropping on us! Gross! Could that be what that plopping noise is?! Caterpillars falling onto the forest floor? Eeeuuuw!

We hiked faster. We hiked very very fast. I kept my hooded sweatshirt over my head in order to prevent ploppage in my hair. When we stopped for lunch, I did not sit down. I would have sat on caterpillars. I would have had them in my shorts.

We managed to survive about a seven-mile, extremely brisk hike. Before we got into the car, we performed one last inspection for unwelcome stowaways.

When we got back to the condo, we showered thoroughly (eesh!) and then, in true junior naturalist style, we googled "tent caterpillars" on the web.

Guess what. Yeah, apparently northern Michigan is in the midst of a huge forest tent caterpillar infestation. These outbreaks occur every 10-15 years and last 2-5 seasons. Not only that, but we hit the woods (of course) just as the little buggers were finishing their eating cycle, just as they were about as big and busy and numerous as they could possibly be. Next week will be better as all 3.5 trillion caterpillars--that's my personal estimate on the population--will be turning into moths. (Note to self: no hiking at night with flashlights until the first frost.)

There's more. According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, that plopping sound we heard was not what we thought it was...

"Anyone who has been in the woods during a FTC [forest tent caterpillar] outbreak knows not to eat an open faced peanut butter sandwich there. It might sound like rain but it's really insect frass."

You don't know what the word "frass" means? Neither did we. You know, English is an amazing language. We have a special word for caterpillar excrement!

That's right. We spent our afternoon hiking through the woods during a once-in-a-decade caterpillar poop storm.

The good news: "This frass serves as fertilizer just like any other manure." Oh yay. Caterpillar poop helps the ecosystem. It's the circle of life. That totally makes up for the nightmares I'm going to have this week.

We spent the rest of our vacation lounging by the condo pool. We decided we like our nature better on TV.

UPDATE: A little entymological etymology on the word "frass."

Happy Trails

One would think that after making four trips back and forth to California in the past few years, we might head out in some other direction for a summer odyssey, but... no. We've just returned from the wild west yet again. Not all the way to Cali this time, but still far enough and long enough to explain the posting drought since July 4.

Before hopping in the van for the frontier, we spent a fun weekend with Ron's family out at Lake Michigan. The lake was swimmable (or, for our hardy Pipster, surfable), but for the wimpier women, hey, the hot tub is always fabulous.

One evening we gathered on the beach for the traditional bonfire/s'mores combination. I think we've had s'mores about twenty times this summer. At some point, ya know, s'nuff.

Sunsets like this, though, we could handle every night.
Then after a brief pause for a week of soccer camp (Mia) and string camp (Jacob) and blessed freedom from siblings (Philip), it was time to cram into the minivan for hours of family togetherness on the way to: Colorado.

Along the way, we visited many old friends. It turns out we are lucky enough to have friends, if not in every port, then at least in a good number of Midwestern towns, including St. Charles, Illinois; Bloomington, Minnesota; Willmar, Minnesota; Sioux Center, Iowa; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

While staying with our friends the Kleinhuizens, the children discovered all the fun things other kids get to do and they don't, such as tubing and fishing (though Jacob found that the infamous "grass bass" was a more common catch than the elusive walleye).

In Sioux Center, Ron got a chance to golf with old friends Todd and Curtis (can you tell the golf course is carved out of the cornfields of the midwest?).

In South Dakota, we visited old friends Dawn and Andrew, whose precious daughter Althea took a shine to Jacob.
At last, we arrived at our destination, Snow Mountain Ranch, where we got to hang out with the Calvin students on staff there this summer and serve as their official professors-in-residence-of-the-week. Besides running around the ranch indulging in camp-style fun, we took a hike one day in Rocky Mountain National Park, and marveled, once again, at how close to the sky one can feel at 12,000 feet above sea level.
After our week at SMR, we zinged home to our little tiny baby puppy Maizey, only to find that somehow, in our absence, she had become... a DOG. We're grateful to the two Calvin students who house-and-dog sat for us, but also suspicious: steroids maybe??
So much for another westward odyssey. We're pretty good at it now. But next year, maybe we'll head east. Crabcakes, anyone?

The Pitter-Patter of Little Paws

It's been a whole week now and we're still giddy with the excitement of adding a new member to the Rienstra family: an adorable little canine fuzz-ball. Yep, last Monday we adopted a puppy.

She is a yellow Lab on the mom's side, and on the dad's side... well, let's just say there's a suspicion a Retriever was involved, but as sometimes happens with these situations, no one's entirely sure. Whatever stock she's from, she's loaded up with the "cute" gene.

Though I was initially lobbying for some clever/geeky professor-type name (Ophelia or Egeria or something like that), wiser family members insisted on something plainer. After much palavering, we settled on Maizey, not after the illustrated mouse, but as a nod to our alma mater.

So far she's super sweet and gentle, at least most of the time. She does have what we call her "crazy Maizey" moments, especially late at night, when she bounces around, chewing anything small, clamping onto loose socks and thrashing them into submission. But as a typical puppy, she also has her "lazy Maizey" times when she curls up in her crate -- or in someone's lap -- and nods off after a loving look and a little lick on the cheek.

We don't have much animal experience, but we've puppy-proofed the house, are reading lots of relevant books, and projecting our best calm-assertive energy.

Welcome to the pack, Maizey!

A Weekend Snapshot

This past weekend, Deb and I temporarily experienced an alternative universe. We handed over our usual life to my good friend, one-time student and mentee, and present Teaching Assistant, Rachel Klompmaker. Rachel climbed in the mini-van and took over. Here's what her weekend looked like:

Friday night involved two soccer practices, two trips to the mall, and a late dinner of frozen pizza. Saturday began bright and early with a soccer game for Pip at 8:40, then a brief break before the afternoon madness: Jacob's game at 2:50, Mia's first game at 4:00 and her second at 7:30. Then Mia went to a high school dance with some friends. Sunday morning meant getting everyone to church, working around Rachel's early morning rehearsal for her own role in the service.

All in all, a pretty normal weekend at our house. Rachel found it pretty exhausting, although it must be said that she was doing this as a single, hardcore soccer mom, whereas we usually (but not always!) have two parental units to spread the love/load around.

Meanwhile, Deb and I lived the life of carefree, big-city, no-kids adults. Friday afternoon, we jumped into our hot little sports car (well, it's a GEO Prizm, but hey, we can pretend) and took off for the Windy City. Car wash: $4.00. Full tank of gas: $33.74. Three hours in the car with just the two of us actually able to sustain an adult conversation for the first time in weeks: priceless.

Once in the city, we met up with my brother and sister and their respective spouses in downtown Chicago where three of them work at Double-click/Performics, soon to be part of the Google Empire. We toured that particular iteration of Cubicle World and then went to a fabulous Chinese dinner. We aspired to big city night life: lingering over dinner talking about politics, Lost, careers, etc. We did, of course, discuss our children and their many exploits and accomplishments. One can't leave it all behind...

The next day I had a meeting of the Liturgical Conference Board (the ostensible purpose of our visit). Meanwhile Deb... well, Deb pretty much slept in, had breakfast, worked out, and read a little bit. No responsibilities, no logistics, no schedule: nice.

That evening and the next morning involved even more eating out, at a Greek restaurant (opa!) and a classic diner. And then,


it was back to our regular lives. Sigh. Still, it's good to visit another universe once in a while.

Premiere!

Don't miss it -- tomorrow night (that's Friday, January 19) is the premiere of my baby sister's new TV show, Ms. Adventure! It's on at 9:00 p.m. on Animal Planet. Since we don't have cable, we're going to a big party my folks are hosting to celebrate.

We've been watching rough cuts of the episodes as she sends them to us, and the show is funny and informative and just plain entertaining. Be sure to check it out!

Own the Groove

As I mentioned in the last post, Deb got me a wonderful Christmas present this year: a beautiful djembe drum. It's hewn from a solid piece of Indonesian mahogany, and has great decorative carvings on the side. Deb got it from a far off (and far out) guy in California who spends his days surfing and tending to his, er…., exotic herb garden. But he also plays and skins and tunes and sells drums. And he carves messages into the bottom of them.


One could reasonably wonder: On what occasions could a pastor and Ph.D. student in worship possibly make use of a drum? More than you'd think, as it turns out:

1) I played in a drum circle on New Year's Eve at the home of our good friends the Keeleys. Around the hour of our arbitrarily designated transition moment from one year to the next (because of small children we don't wait for midnight), we made a small drum circle -- me and Bob and Bryan and Meredith's boyfriend Calvin, and whoever else picked up some sort of percussive noise-maker. The movie here is from early in the night; later on Bob found a great groove in 5/4 and we worked that for a while. It's a much better way to spend New Year's Eve than getting smashed on champagne and kissing whoever happens to be close by at midnight.



2) Then this past Sunday I played in our church, for the first time as designated percussionist. I've played guitar and clarinet and recorder before, but this was quite different. While everyone else was trying to hit or tune the right notes, worrying about the key modulation on verse four, or just finding their place on the page -- I sat there with an empty music stand at my side, and a drum in my lap, trying to find the groove. I'm not so worried about owning it just yet. Just trying to find it.

A djembe is great to play because it's so versatile, with both a deep, resonant boom when struck in the middle, a sharp snap when struck towards the edge of the drumhead, and lots of other sonic possibilities in between. Helping me find the groove Sunday was my colleague Greg Scheer, the music pastor at our church. Like me, he enjoys inventing the fun onomatopoeic words percussionists use to describe the sounds we want to produce. The shaker, for example, makes a "shukka shukka" sound. And, as he told me Sunday, when you use nylon brushes on the djembe, sliding and slapping them on the drum head, you might be looking for a groove that sounds like this: "whooka sh-sh thuuk thuuk, whooka sh-sh thuuk thuuk." (This phrase © 2007 Greg Scheer Music, ASCAP).

3) It turns out Greg is also the leader of our church's drum circle, which meets this week Thursday night. I can't wait. Now, I know all the jokes about drum circles and male bonding. After all, I went to grad school in the 90s. I know about Robert Bly and feminist backlash, the myth of Iron John (or Iron Ron) and the news stories that tell, in a chuckling sort of way, about male-bonding retreats: gangs of sweaty and hairy men, dragging their sons into the woods at astrologically propitious times to howl at the moon, tell stories of the hunt, and bang on goat-skin drums. But Greg tells me the church drum circle is not like that. Our drum skins are sheep, not goat.

Anyway how cool is it that our church has a drum circle? We are about as far from "alt" worship as you can find, but the last time I did a drum circle in church was in L.A., at a very emerging congregation called "Tribe." One of the unique things about Tribe is that when they worship on Sunday evenings, everyone gathers in a large circle in a dimly candle-lit room, and grabs a drum. (The worship leader is a professional percussionist).

Though there is a bit of an electronic keyboard providing some harmonic structure, it is the rhythm that channels and focuses the congregation's energy Godward as they drum and sing their praise and prayers and Psalms during the first 20 minutes of worship. It's visceral and different, and exactly right for this congregation. I don't know if I could do it every week, but it was pretty great a few times last year.

So thanks to Deb, I now own the drum. And thanks to Bob and Greg and others, I may someday own the groove. Right now, I'm enjoying just leasing it.

Assault on Par

The 7th Annual Worship Wonk Invitational -- a regular golf outing I take with a handful of good friends and liturgical geeks -- was, as usual, a fabulous success. You can read more about it here.

The one thing Mary forgot to mention in her post is the score of the game. Yes, we were playing best ball, and so were not playing to compete with one another. But at least three of us are fierce competitors; and so our goal was to beat -- or at least make a serious run -- at par. On a day when the heat index was in the triple digits, I feel like we did pretty well, then, to end up at one over for the day.

Of course, while keeping score, I did note whose shot we played for each stroke of our glorious 73. In this way, there is some comparison that can be made between our team's individual players. Who had the most stokes deemed "best" as we played? Who had the most putts? The most of our drives? The most of our chip shots?

I won't reveal the results here. Suffice to say that my most significant contribution to our effort was as the cameraman.

Everything changes, everything stays the same...

While taking a tour of Yellowstone's "Thermal Features," our guide was keen to let us know that the park is constantly changing due to alteration in the volcanic plumbing below the surface (he must have said this no less than 17thousand times).

But it seemed to me that nothing has changed in decades and decades. Just like every other American family's trip to Yellowstone National Park for the past umpteen years, ours included the following:

1. Old Faithful doing its faithful thing


2. Complacent Bison blocking traffic

3. Purple Mountain Majesty

4. Scuzzy campers enjoying sticky s'mores

The Learning Never Stops...

Things we Learned at Yosemite National Park:

1) We like waterfalls and trees and mountains WAY better than cactus and rock formations and carved-out canyons. (That's our evening picnic site there to the left).

2) The trail to the Vernal Falls is called the "Mist" trail for a very good reason.

3) When they label a trail "Moderate" difficulty, what they mean is "You will probably survive, if you can avoid the bears and the slippery drop offs into the raging river surging through the vast chasm below." Oh yes. And the "two hour" time estimate? Ha. Fortunately, we're not in any kind of hurry.

Next up: Yellowstone - where the water goes up instead of down.

The side-effects of teaching Homiletics

I've been teaching homiletics at Fuller for a couple years now, and it's one of the most enjoyable things I do here. I was reminded of this again last night as I heard students in my Wednesday night class preach two outstanding sermons - one written under some personal duress. Both sermons were thoughtful, practical, honest; they stayed close to the text, and were filled with carefully considered, imagination-shaping language. And then the students had some insightful things to say in critique of their own (and each others') work as we discussed the sermons in the second part of class. More often than not, this is my experience here, and it gives me hope for the church.

Hope which is not always confirmed in my Sunday sojourns to various SoCal churches. Not so many weeks ago our family went to a culturally significant megachurch. Much of the service was quite good (and as a bonus, we heard one of my favorite gospel singing groups, Take Six). While the sermon itself (the primary pastor was not preaching) was well-delivered, I was troubled by the persistent transactional language used to describe our relationship with God. We give our lives to God (by saying the Jesus prayer), and God gives us eternal life. The pastor very much wanted, at the close of his message, to seal the deal. It's salvation as understood by a community shaped by consumerist values.

Troubling as that was, it was nothing compared to what we experienced a few weeks ago at a prominent Pasadena church, where I endured 30 minutes of a talk (I can't even call it a sermon) before I did something I've never done before: I walked out right in the middle. It was apparant from the outset that the preacher was going to avoid actually preaching -- he telegraphed his homiletical theology in his preparatory prayer by asking that God bless "this little bit of information to help us live better lives this week." That's what a sermon is? Not the living Word of God? Not the presence of Jesus Christ? Just "a little bit of information?" Anyway, I decided to listen hard for what God wanted to say to me just the same. After a half-hour of scripture-neglecting, simplistic self-help slop, targeted to a very small demographic sliver of those assembled, what God said to me was "you should be pretty angry that my hungry people, who come here to be fed, get this instead." I sat there getting more and more steamed as the preacher kept jabbering on, until I finally realized that sitting there was doing me more spiritual harm than good. So I gathered up the kids (who had completely zoned out), and went to the car. We listened to Prairie Home Companion on the way home. It wasn't church, but it was better for our souls.

(The picture, by the way, is entitled "St. Peter Preaching." Note the two snoozers in the first row, and the fellow in the back whose eyes are lifted to heaven as if to say "Help him, Jesus." Hmmm. Maybe sub-standard preachers (and preachees) are not an altogether new thing.)

Family Fun at the Getty

My mom and Dad arrived in SoCal this week for a family Thanksgiving celebration.

We had a great time yesterday at the Getty museum, enjoying created beauty --

-- created by God, and created by great artists.

The Cheyenne Say...

No doubt the spirits of Native Americans past were getting a good laugh at us this weekend as we set up camp with our thin little tent and summer-weight sleeping bags. "Paleface idiots," they chortled, "don't they realize that at 7000 feet in October, the weather drops below freezing at night?"

After passing a shivery, sleep-deprived first night, we vowed to survive the next night in better shape. If this were a Dr. Quinn episode, we reasoned, the hunky mountain man, Sully, would be muttering something about what the Cheyenne would do in our situation. So we decided to try the ancient Native American fire-heated-rock-in-the-sleeping-bag trick.

Here are some things we discovered:

• If you put eight or nine rocks in the firepit, they won't all heat equally.
• It's a good idea to wrap the rock in a towel before putting it in the sleeping bag.
• If the rock is too hot, however, it will singe the towel and may even start it a-smouldering.
• If this happens, you will wind up with the charred, shredded remains of your teenage mutant ninja turtle towel, and a sense of relief that someone noticed the smell before the children burst into flames.
• If you get the rock temperature right, this solution actually works great and can help keep you warm all night.

So all in all, it was an educational weekend. We learned all kinds of things about sequoias as well as a thing or two about the survival (barely) of the not-quite-fittest.

Daddy, where do guitar picks come from?

Apparently they mine them.

(This post inspired by the family's trip yesterday to the LA Museum of Natural History. Additional picture [and, incidentally, another Deb-posting] on the Theologiggle blog.)

Fall Festival

We Rienstras, for obvious reasons, have a soft spot in our hearts for beasts with the blessing of a big schnoz: Aardvarks, Proboscis Monkeys, and of course, Elephants.

So imagine our delight when we arrived at the church compound yesterday for the annual Fall Festival, and found that instead of pony rides, our 'animal trainer to the stars' friend Glen had brought this wonderful creature for us to enjoy.


(Notice, by the way, the sky. Yes, it was positively dreary in Sun Valley yesterday.)

Burbling Brooks

Today was another fun, though not quite so ambitious, day of hiking. The kids enjoyed a modified version of "Pooh-sticks" in the brook burbling beautifully in the ravine behind our little cottage. In the evening it was a fabulous dinner (pizza from the grocery store), Coldstone ice cream, and baths for everyone.


Oh yes, and then packing. We're off for California tomorrow!

The Rienstras visit the set of Disney's "Phil of the Future"

The kids and JP Manoux, our gracious host


We had a great time this past Friday as my super-cool sister Rachel took our whole family to the set of Disney's "Phil of the Future." They were filming the last scenes of the last episode of Season Two - just before the wrap party. It was great to see all the sets, hob-nob with the stars, be in on the action as the sound guy worked the board, and so on. I think they were most impressed, though, with the spread of food the caterers have available for the cast. Mmmm-mmm. Peanut Butter and Jelly. Just like Dad made for lunch.

Mia and Alyson Michalka

Jacob and the sound guy. Note the similar hair styles.

Phil of the Future