4 day old papillon puppy in a shoe video - Stills set to old "Armour Hot Dogs" radio commercial

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I recently came across a treasure trove of stills and video I shot of our most recent Papillon puppy, Ambrose. I may have posted some of this material earlier but now I have much better editing software.

The radio commercial is from the "Old Time Radio" collection at Archive.org - Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

The video is likewise.

Can't get any salt- use a torch to melt the ice! - Dealing with ice without resorting to violence

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With much of the country socked in by major storms, salt has been hard to hard to find. Heavy hand tools are an effective way to deal with the ice, but they are hard work, and aren't ideal for those who are disabled to use. This video shows an effective and fun alternative to beating at the ice with a sledgehammer- using a propane torch to melt ice.

Obviously: Be safe, sane, sober (durrr!)

This was the most fun video to shoot since before my atraumatic femur fracture, it hearkens back to "splitting wood while balancing on a bongo board." So yes, even after fibromyalgia's soaked my body in pain, osteoporosis has rendered my bones brittle, and TIAs have taken away my steadiness, I still have fun with life.

Poetry: Pain is NOT my enemy | Pain is NOW my enemy | Evil is my enemy (the most personal, profound poetry I've posted)

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I composed this poem about 10 months ago, but I kept it to myself until now because it is so deeply, INTENSELY personal. Its like an MRI of my soul!

I decided to post it because I've found that direct discourse is utterly inadequate to describe what my life has become. I also thought it might help give voice to what other sufferers experience, and those to whom I've shown it have confirmed that it is quite apt of their experience as well.

I posted it as an image not text because when I composed it, I "saw" the white space, the indentations... they were there from the start. More, the poems on the left and the right HAVE to be right next to each other, in apposition. (That is why they are in inverse color.) While they are seemingly opposite in meaning, both are true.

So I will never post a pure text version of this, though I did have hopes to do a video of it. My recent computer crash and the horrible weather here have sapped my energy to the point where that's now nothing but a fond hope.

I've written other poetry which is also deeply personal and is similarly intense which I do intend to post in due time.

Of interest to fellow artists... it was hard to find software which would present the text and photos as I wanted to. Photo editing software failed, pretty spectacularly. I wound up using Open Office, the superb open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Just my experience in using it for this poem has convinced me to switch to it. I got it into image format by printing to PDF and then doing a screen capture of it. The final step was cropping it. (So I could have posted it as a .PDF were that allowed on the blogs and facebook.)

Word Pictures 2010 as 5x7s

Oy... why is it that CVS and Walgreen's insist on cropping every photo, and don't give you the option to opt out? Because of that, I needed to create versions of all my Word Pictures so far in 5x7 format such that the butchers at the pharmacy photo counters can't chop them.

I didn't do my monochrome images, and a few of my color ones which were variations of a theme aren't included either.

Still, this does serve as a nice overview of the project so far, and a handy quick reference. I'm not putting the large Multiply thumbnails in this post because you've seen all these before, but here are the smaller ImageShack ones.

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1 Peter 4:12-13 - The Fiery Trial - sharing suffering and glory with Christ (Word Picture)

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Most "Word Pictures" I do because someone else requested them, or because of an event in someone else's life. This one sprang from one in my own.

A few weeks back, my dear wife was in the hospital getting treated for her migraines (she'd spent the previous 3 weeks never getting below "8" on the pain scale.) My mother was visiting family. I was home alone.

The fibromyalgia pain hit me harder than any pain had since I was walking along and my femur snapped. Even for someone accustomed to pain, this was INCREDIBLE.

I took all the meds I could, talked to my wife on the phone as long as I could, brought in Ambrose the Papillon. All through those dark, scary, lonely hours I kept thinking of this verse and its sister in chapter 1 (verses 6 & 7), and I kept thinking to myself Either this is true and its what is going on, or I have died and gone to hell.

Its hard for those of us who live in suffering to find meaning in it, much less hope or proof of God's love. This is one of the texts which most speaks to us in such times.

While my suffering was physical, it need not be for this text and this Word Picture to be applicable. I've known emotional and spiritual suffering of equal intensity to my current physical suffering. (I greatly prefer physical suffering to the other kinds!)

The 4x6 and other standards

This is now the 2nd Word Picture I've done which is standardized to print correctly at 4x6 without cropping issues. Since the original image was a stitched together panorama, this took more math than I thought I'd ever do in my life!

Similarly, it features the smaller file size and standardized credits information first seen in the Psa 46 Word Picture. The credits are differently placed in this one because the source was a panorama not a still picture.

The life of an icicle - set to Vivaldi's "Winter" (Video)

This is the first "art for art's sake" video I've done in a long time. I enjoyed doing it. If you enjoy watching it, that's a bonus.

The original video was an hour long. Except for the 10 seconds at the start and finish I sped it up almost 10x.

Note especially the water running along the large icicle on the left, and most of the way through the video the little icicle forming in the upper right.

The music is played by the USAF band and is available at musopen.org and archive.org - it is public domain

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

This has nothing to do with suffering or angst or anything related except insofar as it was a distraction from them. Its always good to "stop and smell the roses" but when your life is constant suffering, its VITAL.

Psalm 46:1 - God is our refuge & strength - Sunrise over Lk Michigan | Why this project so consumes & energizes me

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This is both a redo and a return to the roots of the "Word Pictures" project. It also marks something of a new beginning as I've standardized some things about the way I do this, including the proportions of the images and the way I put my credit & contact info in the images.

4x6 printing

The last first- Its been a great frustration to me that my Word Pictures would not print out properly in 4x6 format at CVS or Walgreens, or even on a photo printer unless you adjusted the settings. Since my hope is that people will print these images and give them to shut-ins, people in hospitals, and others suffering, this printing problem was a big deal. 

Math has never been my strong suit, but I finally figured out how to increase the length/height of of the images so that they will print properly without having to manually over ride the default settings. This will make it a lot easier for people to use these for one of my intended purposes.

The way I did this was to create a boilerplate "credits" image to add to each image. So from now on my contact information and the licensing terms of the images will appear in a standardized way. This has the added advantage of being a lot easier for me to do than to find some place in each image to artistically work that information in.

A return to the beginning

This project's roots go back almost a year. I was recovering from having my right femur fixed with a titanium rebar when a dear relative was given 6 weeks to live. I couldn't get out of my house much less go to his deathbed. When I was able to walk etc, I'd used "care cards" which often had a picture with a Bible verse on them in my professional life.  This relative loved the hymn "A mighty fortress" so I decided that its source psalm- Psalm 46- was the Scripture to use. That psalm uses imagery of God's control over nature- roaring waters, mountains, etc- so I wanted a picture which featured nature strongly, but one which would be peaceful and calming to look at. This relative loved Lake Michigan, so I chose this picture of a glorious sunrise over it in Chicago.

This first "Word Picture" was printed at 8x10, so I was able to put the entire Psalm in the black rocks at the bottom.

After I created it, I realized that what I had done to help my relative could be helpful to other people, and began this project.

Most times people use Bible verses in pictures as part of ministry however, they use them in smaller formats. At 5x7 or 4x6, the words became mud. So last summer I tried redoing this using just the first verse of the psalm. That resulted in something which looked "cool" but wasn't really useful... the first half of the verse was in the clouds, and it took great effort to read.

Our own time of need gave birth to this improved version

Last week, my beloved wife entered the hospital because her migraine syndrome was no longer responding to the treatments available out patient. My wife also loves Lake Michigan and Chicago, so this was the natural choice for her. 

However, the earlier version needed to be improved for the full desired effect to be achieved. That is part of why I did this now.

The other thing which fed into working on this project while my wife was in the hospital was that I needed to be immersed in art and Scripture. So when I wasn't visiting her, tending house, or dealing with the ravages of fibromyalgia, I was working on "Word Pictures." Psalm 46:1 went through several "drafts" before this. I also started work on several others you'll see in due time. I've spent a lot of time and energy on this because this project was the only thing in my life compelling enough to distract me from the savage pain running amok in my body or the loneliness in my heart.

Why does this project is so consume & energize me? Romans 8:28 meets Ephesians 2:10

You see, working on this project unites all the strands of my life in a way nothing else does or can.

• My passion for photography & art
• My compassion for the suffering
• My previous pastoral vocation 

With my wife in the hospital and my fibromyalgia hitting me with the worst pain since my leg broke 13 months ago, I really needed this project.

Even when my pain is a little less and my wife's at home, I still very much need an outlet for my photographic & pastoral passions and a distraction from pain. We're both disabled, we're both in pain every day. I need beauty, I need to be doing something which can help others suffering because I'm not able to do so directly and personally.

See what I mean about it uniting the strands of my life? I also like to think that this project is the intersection of two of my favorite verses- Romans 8:28 and Ephesians 2:10

Romans 8:28

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.

Ephesians 2:10

 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.

(Both from the World English Bible - a Public Domain translation I often use or consult in this project. Generally its a very good translation, maintaining much of the "ear feel" of the King James while also balancing more recent scholarship. In most cases, I think its better than "proprietary" translations.)

I've pastored far out in the country and deep in the city, to gunshot victims in trauma bays and the homeless in alleys . These days, its dicey if I can even drive or walk without a cane... couldn't imagine writing a sermon much less delivering it. Yet in making these, I find as much personal and vocational fulfillment as anything else I've done in my life.

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A lot of words for this one picture.  Well, a lot of me went into it, there's a lot of me in this project in general.

While I am currently working on several more Word Pictures, I'm always eager for suggestions. If you have a special need I'd consider it an honor to assist you with it in my small way. You'll see that I have a new email address dedicated to the project. Its a Latin phrase a dear friend suggested for me as fitting for the project. Its not as easy to translate as some, but essentially it means "The work you do which is most true." PERFECT!