Tag: Sunday School

See You In (my) Church

When I went to Sunday school many, many years ago, they taught us the little ditty “Here Is The Church” (… here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people). You’d make a church with your hands pressed together as you sang, raising the steeple by extending and touching the tips of your pointer fingers. Today, sixty-odd years later, those same hands will build a cathedral – Notre-Dame de Paris. Granted my church is made from LEGO blocks and the entire model will be smaller than a cornerstone of the real Notre-Dame, but at least the steeple is made from more than fingers.

So then, “Here Is The Cathedral”… in its purchased form. The cardboard box you see is not what I would call huge, but it’s an ample residence for 4,383 plastic pieces. These pieces dwell in thirty-four separate plastic bag communities, just begging to be liberated.  Buried underneath all these subdivisions (in the crypt, if you will) is the brick of an instruction manual, a veritable phone book of almost 300 pages. C’mon, you didn’t think we’d raise this cathedral in a single blog post, did you?

Mr. Instruction Manual could be called the mayor of this manufactured mess. He guides me on who gets together with who, when they get together, how they get together, and what it’s all supposed to look like as I go.  Mr. Manual has pages and pages of impressive illustrations (like this one), but also some LOL ones (like the one below). I mean, check out the upper left corner.  Am I really supposed to vigorously shake the bag out like that? The tiny residents will go running in all directions! We’re trying to create order from chaos here, people, not the other way around.

I expect all of the same challenges I encountered when I built the LEGO Grand Piano. I’ll think pieces are missing until somehow they appear right in front of me. I’ll connect pieces incorrectly and have to backtrack several steps to get them right. I’ll be left with extra pieces every now and then, and forever wonder if they were really “extra” or perhaps “overlooked”.  And I’ll police plastic piles around the meager real estate of my home office desk.  Maybe I require a shepherd’s crook or a bullhorn?  I mean, it’s me versus 4,383 others so you can see how one or two of them are bound to escape.

Here’s a thoughtful aspect of LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris, and oh-so appealing to the architect in me. The model will be built in the same chronological order as the original was (instead of, say, from the ground up). The first twenty years of Notre-Dame’s construction produced only the rounded east end you see here, which served by itself as a functioning church. The next twenty years generated the full footprint but without the roof, towers, and other noteworthy exterior elements.  The final sixty years brought everything across the finish line.  So I’ll be building the LEGO model in the same order, only in a hundred days (or less) instead of a hundred years.

10,000 piece tower

Before I snap Piece 1 onto Piece 2, let me dress down my many thousands of new plastic friends.  Together they comprise nowhere near the largest of the LEGO sets.  A model of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle is over 6,000 pieces.  The LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon is over 7,500 pieces.  LEGO Titanic (er, before it sank): 9,000 pieces.  And standing regally at the top of the LEGO podium (and just a twenty-minute bus ride from Notre-Dame de Paris): the Eiffel Tower, the only LEGO model to exceed 10,000 pieces.  To each of these top-tens I say non.  Notre-Dame will be challenge enough for this builder/blogger.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #1

Now that we’ve had the prelude (so to speak) it’s time for the church service to begin!  Bag #1 – of 34 bags of pieces – houses the first 100 or so of the little guys.  LEGO thoughtfully opted for a sub-community in Bag #1 for the tiniest of residents (some of which are just begging for tweezers).

chaos

Mr. Instruction Manual (who is multilingual by the way; he speaks English, French, and Spanish), warns me to “… avoid danger of suffocation by keeping this bag away from babies and children!”  Mr. Manual also wants me to know my thousand of pieces were manufactured in five different countries: Denmark (of course), Mexico, Hungary, China, and the Czech Republic.

danger

It’s fair to say I haven’t stood in the LEGO “pulpit” for awhile.  I snapped pieces together incorrectly at least three times today.  I also thought I was missing pieces twice, and I fretted over the fact I ended up with two leftovers.  Let’s hope our church service is smoother next week!  In the meantime, here is the build of Bag #1.  Not much to look at but at least it’s the foundation of the east end of the Cathedral.  In 1163 Pope Alexander III oversaw the first stone being set in place.  In 2025 nobody saw me do the same.

order

Bag #: 1

Running build time: 25:38. 

Total leftover pieces: 2

Sweeter Than Honey

We all have favorite name-brand products, and crackers are no exception. I grew up on Nabisco’s Wheat Thins. Years later I developed a taste for the more sophisticated shredded-wheat Triscuit. When I first met my wife, she introduced me to Kellogg’s buttery Club Crackers. Each of these products is a little different (and today we prefer healthier versions of all three). But I think most would agree, there’s nothing quite like the taste of a graham cracker.

As I put graham crackers under the spotlight today I wonder what comes to your mind first.  For me, it’s two things.  First, I’m taken back to childhood mornings at Sunday school, where the preferred snack was honey graham crackers and pineapple juice.  I can’t think of another time or place where I ever had that combination of foods.  Maybe the sugar overload was a strategy to keep us awake during the Bible stories?  Second, I endlessly debate whether a graham is a cracker or a cookie.  If you’re at all familiar with the ingredients, grahams lean towards “cookie”.  They’re called a cracker, they look like a cracker, but nine out of ten stores stock them in the cookie aisle.

Graham cracker or “graham cookie”?

It’s appropriate my first memory of graham crackers is at church.  They’re named after Sylvester Graham, a nineteenth-century preacher whose constant message was temperance.  In Graham’s time, temperance was a movement against the consumption of alcoholic beverages, but also encouraged what may have been the first vegetarian diet.  Wheat was its cornerstone, and wheat (flour) is the primary ingredient in graham crackers.  To be clear, Sylvester didn’t invent the graham cracker (we’re not sure who did) but his preaching inspired its name.

“Blackstrap” molasses

The sweet ingredient in graham crackers used to be molasses, one of my favorite items in the pantry.  Inevitably, molasses gave way to processed sugar.  But as I discovered recently, honey is a key ingredient in today’s best-tasting grahams.

For you, maybe graham crackers taste best in s’mores (which I wrote about in Toasty of the Town), or the crust of a cheesecake, or even Moon Pies for you baby boomers.  But for me, grahams taste best all by themselves.  They play like a “cheat” to the more sugary options out there, and I can pretend I’m just snacking on a “cracker”.

I keep a stash of grahams in my office drawer to satisfy my occasional sweet tooth.  I only need a couple of the 2″x 5″s and I’m back on track.  The other day however, I pulled open the drawer to nothing but crumbs.  Horrors!  Grahams have been my go-to since the beginning of Lent because I’ve given up chocolate and “sweets”.  So I quickly added them to my store list and vowed to shop later in the day.

But as so often has been the case during the pandemic, I immediately paused and thought, “Wait a minute. Why buy graham crackers?  Maybe I can make them from scratch?“

Here then, I present what is the best graham cracker recipe I’ve ever tried.  (Okay, it’s the only recipe I’ve ever tried but it doesn’t matter; I don’t need another one.)  Gemma’s Bigger Bolder Baking takes grahams to a way higher rung on the cookie ladder (including a helpful video if you’re baking-challenged like me).  I’ve eaten a million Honey-Maids yet it took me sixty years to realize grahams can be SO… MUCH… BETTER.  Why?  Because these contain a lot more of the good stuff and a lot less of the nasty chemical flavorings and preservatives.

You should expect these homemade grahams to taste better when you see the ingredients.  The ratio of flour to brown sugar is 2:1 (emphasis on the “1”).  Now add another 1/3 cup of honey.  That’s a lot of “sweet” for a cracker, er, cookie that looks like a thin cardboard rectangle.  But I’m talking delicious with a capital “D”.  Think chewy instead of crunchy, with a rich “graham” flavor lingering much longer than store brands.  They’re almost too good to be called a graham.

My grahams

Okay, let’s close the box on graham crackers with a quick review:

  1. They were invented as an alternative to unfavorable indulgences.
  2. They’re a cookie by definition but a cracker by name.
  3. They make you want to try Moon Pies (if you haven’t already).
  4. They satisfy a craving for sweets without being “a sweet” (disregard earlier comment about brown sugar and honey).
  5. They are unquestionably better made from scratch than store-bought.
Yum!

If I haven’t sold you on how much better the humble graham cracker can be, consider this.  They’re simple to make and you already have all of the ingredients you need.  So, what are you waiting for?  Go bake some crackers, Graham!

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

——————–

Lego Grand Piano – Update #10

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

We worked entirely underneath the piano today, with the instrument flipped onto its back. Bag #10 – of 21 bags of pieces – contained an intimidating pile of tiny parts. I didn’t realize what I was even building until somewhat magically, pedals, legs, and castors appeared before my eyes.  That’s right folks, this baby-baby grand now rolls.

I also took a deep breath and tackled the “loose piece” I’ve mentioned with the last two builds.  Sparing you the heart-stopping details, let’s just admit I installed a tiny piece ninety degrees wrong.  Correcting meant removing all the piano strings and working in a deep, dark corner, with the assistance of an X-Acto knife, eyeglass screwdriver, and pliers.  Like I’ve said before, don’t get any part of this performance wrong.  It’ll cost you later. Dearly.

Elevated!

Running Build Time: 8.1 hours.  Musical accompaniment: Satie’s Gymnopidies 1, 2, and 3 (a deliberate choice to soothe me while I repositioned the loose piece). Leftover pieces: 3

Conductor’s Note: The tiny pedal to the right is called the “damper”. It’s used to sustain the notes you play after you take your hands off the keys.  Remarkably, the Lego Grand Piano has the same mechanical action you’d find with this pedal in a real piano.  Sit down at a keyboard some time, press the right pedal with your foot, and (with the piano lid raised) you’ll see just how many moving parts it takes to sustain notes.  You’ll find those same moving parts in the Lego Grand Piano.