Genesis and the Ice Age

I've had a lecture brewing in my head for a few weeks now, so I figured I'd post it in my blog. I suppose I'll get flamed, because using science to support the Bible is so very taboo these days. But it's got me all excited, so I wanted to post it somewhere.

Okay! Today's topic: Genesis and the ice age.

So Noah built the Ark and everything, and the Flood destroyed the whole world. Or, we might even say that THE WORLD ENDED. Anyway, after the Ark landed on the mountains of Ararat, and Noah and the menagerie disembarked, God promised never again to destroy the Earth with a flood. And he blessed Noah's family and told them to be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the Earth.

This is where it gets interesting.

So in Genesis 10 is the Table of Nations, listing off all the kids and their kids's kids, who went on to fill up all the corners of the world, and interbred until their skin became lighter or darker, forming the different 'races'. (Did you know that the Bible recognizes no races? There are tribes and nations, families and tongues, but only one race. The human race.)

So then we get to Genesis 11.

Gen 11:1-4
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

And yet God had told them to scatter. Wanna see why?

Science tells us that there was this thing called an ice age.



(Actually, scientists like to think there was more than one, but they also assume that the Earth is a lot older than it was. No, there was only one ice age, but even just one can mess up the landscape pretty well.)

The Earth was a lot warmer before the Flood, and there's a lot of theories as to why. Anyway, when THE WORLD ENDED, the atmosphere cooled a lot, while the oceans remained warmer for a while. This caused some really severe freezing at the poles, and the oceans froze and froze until the glaciers came at least as far south as, say, the Great Lakes.

The result of the lower oceans is that all those land bridges were open. Like the one between Australia and the Asian continent, and the one from Russia to Alaska.



So God told Man to get with it and get to all the continents while the ice age was on, before the land bridges closed. And Man was all like, "Nope, gonna stay riiight here!"

Imagine what would have happened if every race in the world was stuck on the European/Asian continent.



But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel -— because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Then we come down to Abram/Abraham pretty quickly. God moved him out of Ur and ("Goin' out West!") to Israel. Or Caanan, as it was then. And we can tell the ice age was still on, because it wasn't all desert.

Like when Abram and Lot had to part ways, and Abram let Lot have first pick.

Gen 13:10-12
Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, toward Zoar. (This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)
So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east. The two men parted company:
Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom.

Know what that area looks like today?



Not much like Eden.

Then in Genesis 14 we come to the five kings who came out to conquer Sodom and Gomorrah. And among the battling, we come to verse 10.

Now the Valley of Siddim was full of tar pits, and when the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some of the men fell into them and the rest fled to the hills.

Tar pits? Wait a minute. Like the ones at LeBrea? I thought there were only tar pits during the ice age!



...oh. Right.

Years and years later, when Israel came out of Egypt and went back to Caanan/Israel, the climate had stabilized into pretty much modern-day, because it was all desert.

Thanks for coming along with me on my little lecture! Science supports the Bible so very well. It's just interpreting the facts through a worldview that gets tricky.

Our favorite breakfast

I've made lots of different sorts of breakfasts. Omelets are usually our favorite, but it takes a while to make everyone an omelet.

Then I discovered Eggs in the Hole, courtesy of Pioneer Woman's cookbook. Alex asks for them every morning now.

Start off by melting some butter in an iron skillet. I didn't get a picture of this part because it hadn't dawned on me to blog about this yet. Use a pretty low temperature.

Use a biscuit cutter to cut holes in slices of bread, and lay the bread in the melted butter.



Break your eggs into the hole.



Let them cook until the whites aren't transparent anymore. I like to put the holes in the pan, too, and I can flip them up and check for brownness. When the holes are brown, the big slices will be, too.

And ... flip!



Let them cook to your preferred state of egg-cooked-ness. I prefer over medium, because then you have some yolk to mix with your butter fried bread. So delicious.

Bar of pain

Ryan was laughing the other morning, and I asked him what was funny. So he showed me the label on the bar of soap.



It's a bar of pain!

Also, here's Alex with the remote controlled car he got for his birthday:



Hope you all have a great weekend!

Fun with buckets

On Monday, it was gorgeous, gorgeous weather. 75 degrees, sunny, clear and beautiful.

The munchkins were bouncing off the walls, so I let them both outside on the grass with a bucket of water and some large spoons for entertainment.



Holly had never been allowed outside like that before. She thought she was in heaven.



Alex discovered the drain in the corner of the sidewalk, and dumped buckets and buckets of water down it. Here he is, carefully ladelling more water down the drain. Lovely, sparkly water.

Here's one of the tea roses that was picked and dunked in the bucket shortly after this photo was taken:



So pletty!

And then Tuesday, the storm front hit.



Frightening clouds! Full of wind and rain and coldness! But hey, the valley's dry, so we need all we can get. :-)

Forts and crock pots

Here's Alex in a fort.

The ingenuity of 3-year olds never ceases to amaze me. Here he's stacked up two diaper boxes as a wall and is using a puzzle as a door. He's ducking out of sight as I snap the picture.

In other news, I've been merrily cooking recipes from A Year of Slow Cooking. So far none of her recipes have disappointed!

I started off with Green Pepper Chicken. The picture looks revolting, but my experience with diced green chilies is that anything involving them is delicious. And it was. It smelled like heavenly enchiladas while it was cooking, and the chicken was tender enough to shred, rather than chop up.

Next I tried a beans recipe. Cowboy Beans, actually. She recommends soaking the pintos overnight, but I hadn't picked out a beans recipe until that morning, so I just dumped them in there dry and cooked them on high for 8 hours. They came out nice and soft when we sat down to eat them, and yes indeed, the flavor was wonderful and tangy.

Tomorrow I plan on making Salsa Chicken and Black Bean Soup, because I can dump it all in the pot and forget about it all day long. And I can soak the beans overnight, since I know what I'm making. And it has black beans. I love black beans!

Theme post: Blue

Today's theme post: the color blue! Which happens to be my favorite color of all time.

First off, the munchkins in a (mostly) blue fort.



They were under a blue blanket and blue chair against a blue box. I was really trying to get a picture of Holly's fat legs sticking out from under the blanket, because it looked hilarious, but she popped out when she heard me turn on my camera.



Some fabulous blueish purplish bearded irises that I admire when we go for walks.



That one mountain above Palm Springs that always seems to have snow on it. I don't know what it's called.



Mountains somewhere out in Arizona. I watch them go by and fantasize that they're actually ruined cities that just look like mountains.



And a funny-looking diseased violet and white iris that is nonetheless kind of pretty.

Theme post: Yellow

Another theme post, this time in Yellow.

First off, a yellow rose.



Unfortunately, as I realized once I reviewed this on the computer, direct sunlight on a yellow rose does not for good contrast make.

It might as well look like this.



Presenting the rare Sun Rose, which actually emits sunlight from its petals! Found only in the rainforests of Brazil, where botanists find it in the dead of night by its sunny glow.

Next up:



Oh, ye lowly bananas. How tempted I was to airbrush thee.

Mom and Meg, you may want to look away from my next yellow entry.

I'm warning you.

Click Back on your browser or something.

Okay, here it is:



The other yellow thing was my cockatiel, Rocky. Unfortunately, the light coming in was very cool and made his neon-yellow face not so yellow.

So I added a nice yellow filter.



Listening to another bird singing.



Being calm. And yellow. With silly clown cheeks.

Creative children

This weekend I made lasagna. But I'd forgotten to buy sauce, so I had to make sauce from scratch. And I forgot to cook the noodles until the last minute. (Boy, I'm a model of efficiency!) Anyway, it took me an hour and a half to make lasagna.

The kids love it when I'm busy in the kitchen.



Alex assembled this table and chairs all by himself. I had provided him with plates and wondered what he was up to. It was so cute that I had to get a picture.

I also provided them with some pots and pans. Little did I know what Holly would do with them.





Maybe she's thinking about pot-ty training?

And here's one of Alex being silly, for good measure.

Theme post: Warm

I've seen some bloggers who theme posts around certain colors, so I'm going to try it. Except my overall theme was more "warm" than anything, since the kiddos rarely color-coordinate with anything. :-)

First, Holly in her plastic chair, which she climbed into all by herself, with her book.



Alex, eating cake.



Because ... um ... it was 2 PM and he wanted some? :-)

A pink rose with yellow lining. This was taken in the shade, so the colors aren't quite right.



Then there's these fabulous white-and-red roses up by the apartment office. As far as I know, it's the only bush with this color in the whole complex.



The petals are white underneath and red on top. I might try for a non-full-sun shot of them later, since the translucence of the petals doesn't show off the white properly.



These roses are so gorgeous, they make even my novice photography skills look awesome. I hardly had to tweak their colors in Photoshop at all.

Easter eggs

The kids got to hunt Easter eggs at their grandma's! Alex, Jack and Tyler, that is. Holly's too little.



Alex races Jack and Tyler to the swing set, where most of the eggs seem to have been deposited.



Jackpot!



Alex looks around thoughtfully, completely missing the eggs in the next swing. It's funny how little kids notice some things and totally miss others.

Arizona trip

On Wednesday we took off to Arizona for four days.

This happened to coincide with a big storm. Storms over the Grapevine are ooooh so fun.



We fought the storm down past Valencia and Magic Mountain. (This was not a day to visit the coasters.)



We didn't outrun the storm until we hit Arizona.



I even noticed interesting cloud shapes.



Then we arrived, and stayed with my husband's paternal grandmother.



The kids bonded to her real quick. Also, Alex was entranced by her grandfather clock. He learned quickly that it chimed at the half hour and the top of the hour, and where the hands had to be in order for that to happen. We got used to him announcing, "Bong in two minutes!"



We also visited my husband's maternal grandmother.



One of his aunts was there, who was quite willing to sit on the floor and play with her grand-niece and nephew.




Alex and Holly really liked the balcony. Me, not so much. "You might fall off and DIE!"



On the way home, I snapped pictures of wildflowers.