this day only.

Each moment is a special flower that will not bloom again.

Today I plan to attend the Arkansas Governor's conference on Tourism to rally with friends and to support our efforts to stop the unwarranted power line from damaging the beauty of our home.

Ironically, the state law requires the transmission power line applicant to analyze the economic effect of such projects on small local communities, and that is one clause of state law that the Public Service Commission completely ignores. The power company admittedly did no analysis, and has maintained that making this place ugly will have no effect on tourism. The stupidity of that cannot be processed by any reasonable human being, but here we're dealing with agencies and corporations. A license for stupidity goes with that territory.

School boards too, like corporations and agencies, can be out of touch. The following is a thing John Dewey wrote in School and Society, and in it you will find reflected the concepts presented about occupations as taught by Froebel, Cygnaeus, and Salomon.

By occupation is not meant any kind of "busy work" or exercises that may be given to a child in order to keep him out of mischief or idleness when seated at his desk. By occupation I mean a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life. In the University Elementary School these occupations are represented by the shop work with wood and tools; by cooking, sewing, and by the textile work herewith reported upon. The fundamental point in the psychology of an occupation is that it maintains a balance between the intellectual and the practical phases of experience. As an occupation it is active or motor; it finds expression through the physical organs— the eyes, hands, etc. But it also involves continual observation of materials, and continual planning and reflection, in order that the practical or executive side may be successfully carried on. Occupation as thus conceived must, therefore, be carefully distinguished from work which educates primarily for a trade. It differs because its end is in itself; in the growth that comes from the continual interplay of ideas and their embodiment in action, not in external utility.

At the end of the day I hope to proceed with photos for my article for American Woodworker magazine. I took photos of assembling the silverware chest yesterday, and as is usual with glue up operations, getting things just right became of greater importance to me than risking failure while obsessing over photos. I may have missed one that will need to be re-staged. In any case, let this day not catch you with your hands underutilized in learning. When what you've learned is measured by resultant creativity you've expressed real learning...

While in the Bentonville, Arkansas area this afternoon, I drove over with friends to see the size of the power line that AEP/SWEPCO had planned to pass through my small acreage from one end to the other and just 75 feet from my deck. It is enormous. Some may have thought I was joking about the size of it. What you see as small dots of orange are my wife and daughter and friends dwarfed by the monstrous extra high voltage tower. Can you understand why we would fight like cats to keep this unnecessary monstrosity from marring our landscape? On a positive note, in his speech to the tourist convention, the Arkansas governor called us heroes for fighting this thing.

Make, fix, create. Teach others to do so, too.