My friend said onions are the only food that can make you cry. So I threw a coconut at his face.

(thank you, Emma!)

The right tool can be surprisingly effective. 

This morning I used O'Reilly's free tool loan program to bring home an official harmonic balancer puller. I spent more time cleaning out the threads on the balancer so I could use the tool than actually getting it off. 

But now I'm at something of a standstill. I can't do too much more until I pull the engine and that can't happen for another week. I'll rent the engine hoist to get it out, and then put it on a stand that a guy at church is going to lend me. He'll bring it to church next Sunday. 

I did some reading over the weekend on the dash controls - their location and function - and got into the cab for just the second or third time to see what's there and what's missing. The choke knob didn't look right so I gave it a closer inspection and discovered somebody came up with a solution to a missing knob...by gluing a Budweiser beer cap in its place. 

I may try to do a bit better. 

In our adult class yesterday I had them get into groups of six to work through some discussion questions, the first of which was an Agree/Disagree: "America has been uniquely blessed by God." After their allotted time I asked for their response; each group was supposed to reach consensus on a single answer. 

We had a great discussion.

They all seemed to agree that the word "uniquely" was too ambiguous. (Yep, did that on purpose.) Some pointed out that if "uniquely" meant nothing more than "different from any other nation" they'd easily agree. America has been blessed with a number of unique features: the Grand Canyon, the Black Hills, the Rockies.... And that's just west of the Mississippi. Add in our abundance of natural resources and that one is easy.

One person asked if there was a country with no real blessings of that sort, a nation that pretty much got the shaft in the natural features and resources departments. There wasn't time to work that one; we had more questions for them to work through. But it got me to thinking, and by lunch I decided the answer is yes.

Israel.

There's a Jewish saying: "When he made the world God gave Arabs the oil and Jews the rocks.

They have two bodies of water and one of them is called The Dead Sea. The other, the Sea of Galilee, has been so over-fished that about the only thing it's good for is tour boats for Christian tourists from Oklahoma. In between them is the Jordan River, which for decades has been a mere trickle of polluted sludge. Israel's Mediterranean coastline is flat, straight, and boring. If you look at a map of Israel you'll notice it has this funny looking point at the bottom. That's the only way the U.N. could come up with to give them a decent deep water port. 

It makes the term "Promised Land" seem like God's bad joke.