The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
It’s Day 4 of our Delaware Fun-A-Day and these One Piece designs are complicated! I’m already behind on daily builds. I also have to scale down the size of each build to fit our ultimate display space.
I’m staying with a nautical theme with this private island getaway.
Chubby Usopp may be my favorite part of this build, and I had nothing to do with it. Westen (14) is our character master and engineered an amazing overweight slingshot sniper.
Usopp is trapped on Boin (pronounced Bow-in) Archipelago where food is plentiful. It’s a strange place for many reasons. It’s not an archipelago, but a series of carnivorous plants that lure creatures in with delicious food, fatten them up, and eat them.
The island is full of different forests so I used my imagination to come up with some perilous areas.
The inner and outer arms move like mouth parts to pour prey into the ring of teeth at the center.
I hope I don’t take so much time on each of these builds!
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I haven’t read the manga, nor watched the anime, so I’m relying on the Netflix series and Isaac’s deep knowledge to fuel these One Piece builds.
Sanji is my favorite character in the Netflix series. In the anime, he’s a childish pervert and terribly unlikable. In the live-action translation, he’s comfortable in his skin and a gentleman to ladies, if only in affectation.
This island is the unnamed rock he lands on after the pirate chef Zeff and he lose their ships in a storm.
Zeff plays the villian and Sanji is just a boy who was working in his ship’s galley. Zeff unfairly splits the rations and commands the child to stay on the other side of the rock until one of them spots a passing ship.
An incredible amount of time passes before Sanji is out of food and charges across the rock, demanding more food. He discovers that Zeff’s sack is still full…of treasure. When he asks how Zeff stayed alive without food all this time, the camera pans to Zeff’s severed leg and a makeshift kitchen smeared with blood.
After Zeff’s sacrifice, the two become lifelong friends and the elder mentors the boy into a great chef.
This build was a lot of fun. Working with a limited pallet of mostly grey is difficult and I had to create exposed studs on all sides of the rocky mushroom.
There are some great details I hope you can see in person at the Delaware Fun-A-Day show in November.
Today is the first day of our third time participating in Delaware Fun-A-Day.
Disclosure: The links below are affiliate links, meaning I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase, with no additional cost to you.
We’re bulding Lego scultpures and leaning into a One Piece theme.
I warmed up with a set I bought myself to kick off the month. This otter habitat got its hooks in me when I saw the new otter figures. It was a perfect build to get me going as One Piece is full of islands and ships and aquatic creatures.
My younger son has read over 100 volumes of the One Piece manga. We recently watched the Netflix live action version and I was taken with some of the designs. I started picking Isaac’s mind about the many islands, ships, fortresses, and creatures that exist in tis fictional world. He was more than happy to find innumerable references from the anime and manga. He’s going to be my guide as I try to cobble together our version of the One Piece universe.
It’s nearing midnight now and my first island is coming along slowly. It is a large mushroom of rock in an unflinching sea.
I’m publishing now to get the post done for today. I will share the finished island tomorrow.
WARNING: I include graphic images in this post to make clear the extreme nature of the discussed material.
My 12-year-old son discovered the following book in the New Juvenile display in the entrance way of Appoquinimink Community Library. This is the listing from the Delaware Library Catalog:
It is labeled for placement in adult collections. At the very least, the library should have recognized this as material to be handled with extra care and not featured among children’s books. At worst, it may be an attempt to introduce children to images they are not yet prepared to process.
My trust in Delaware libraries has withered in recent years. I do not assume that this was purely a mistake. I do not believe they have enough concern for local families to protect children from inappropriate material. I do not believe they respect parents’ choices in how they raise their children.
I held onto the book as long as I could, but I returned it today.
I will complete a Request for Reconsideration Form and hope that Appoquinimink can find a better use of this shelf space. I will also request that an additional level of security is placed on materials that the library’s own system labels as pornographic.
As this book will be returning to the stacks this week, I will use this post to make local parents aware that we must keep a close eye on the activities at our libraries. Their actions betray their words when it comes to serving Delaware families.
These images are not the worst I could have shared; but frankly, I was embarrassed to publish the most grotesque depictions.
I haven’t been taking time to play with Lego and it shows.
For the month of October, I’ll be working with my sons and other homeschoolers to build 31 distinct sculptures.
This will be our third time participating in Delaware Fun-A-Day and I’m excited to see what we come up with.
There is a battle in a local school over reading material that has been summarily removed from a classroom.
If there is an assumption that children have freedom in government buildings, the fight is useless. If there is an assumption that government employees should be trusted with children, then I cannot join the fight.
I’m in a similar conflict with the local libraries and I don’t know how to proceed. How does one demand accountability from a fundamentally dishonest system?
My father taught me how to debate and I have taught my sons.
Although most people are terrible at debating, it is an overrated skill.
What I am striving to teach myself and model for my sons is Listening.
Debating is about power, whether subtle persuasion or overt rhetorical dominance. Listening is about love. What stands out in the Gospel is how Jesus listened and responded to people. I learned too late in life that listening might be the most powerful form of love. In the least, it is a way we can love those who are strangers to us, whether they be foreign in ideology, culture, or any rooted identity.
You make more friends with listening. You learn more. Through this seemingly simple act, you can model the way you live and really persuade people that you are doing something they want a piece of. That’s the persuasion I want to excercise in the world. A persuasion of the heart, so that the person I deeply disagree with walks away from our conversation and proceeds to listen to someone they disagree with. We can all keep disagreeing, but I doubt we’ll enter greater conflict after we’ve listened to one another.
On the practical end, Yes, I would start with the New Testament. Watch Jesus with strangers, enemies, and his closest companions. He is the same Listener to them all.
Next, Iove Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan. Fridman has many guests he disagrees with and handles them with loving grace. Rogan has less challenging guests, but he is an impeccable listener. I believe it is why he is so popular. This skill is as rare as diamonds.
All that said, I still have a blood thirsty debater thrashing around inside me. The most civil and informative debate venue I know is The Soho Forum. Scott Horton recently destroyed Bill Kristol on American military interventions and it was delicious, especially since I formerly held Kristol’s position, until my transformation into a loving, listening, follower of Christ began.
We are out living life every day.
The boys visited went to our new studio, By Her Hand Tattoos, this morning and learned about how to behave in front of a client. They began to learn, at least.
Then we left for a park day meet up with friends.
Shortly after arriving, a young man just out of college approached our group looking for a cameraman for a Youtube video. I volunteered my elder son, who jumped at the opportunity. They proceeded to run all over the skate park with chalk while performing goofy tricks and engaging the other home educated children.
These are the kinds of interactions that can only happen outside the school framework. This is why we’re out here, to meet and learn from the people in our community.
Facilitating art-making is becoming a passion. It was a joy to help our friends with their creations during our Lego Unschool Club.
After, I happily received messages from friends who wish to support our tattoo business enterprise in material ways.
I can feel the momentum building as the pieces come together.
