Leah–the Leah in the Bible, as in the sister of Rachel–could not see well. Somehow I missed this, and I’ve paid attention to that story in the Bible for nearly my whole life, since Leah’s sister is Rachel, and a person takes note when a Bible character shares her name. Well, at least this person does, anyway. I’ve always felt bad for Rachel and Leah, especially Leah. I read this passage in a lot of different translations trying to figure out exactly what was up with Leah’s eyes, and none of the translations are very specific, but all of them hint that because of it she wasn’t very desirable. Rachel and Leah lived in such difficult circumstances and battled such jealousy and deceit. There are so many difficult, unhealthy relationships in that Bible story, and learning that Leah had weak/soft/delicate/dull eyes made me sympathize even more with her.
I learned that the phrase “under God” was added to the pledge of Allegiance during the cold war to distinguish the American pledge from that of a communist country. I found that VERY interesting.
I learned how generational Chinese family names work. Some new friends of ours are Asian, and the “founder” of their family laid out the last name for the generations of their family for 900 years (or maybe it was 900 generations?). Talk about having a vision for your family. Every generation the last name changes. I think a generation is defined as a specific number of years in this case. Members of the family, no matter where they live in the world all share the same last name if they were born in that generation.
After our encounter with bears in the woods, I read up on what to do if you encounter a bear by surprise. Plan A: calmly get away before the bear starts snorting and hissing. Plan B: if it’s a black bear, stand tall and be fierce. If’ it’s a grizzly bear you might be better off playing dead. Preventative plan: stay away from bears in the woods.
I learned that YaYa can jump out of bed in her pajamas and make it to the bus in 8 minutes flat. One day all of us overslept by an hour and forty minutes. She still made the bus, but school had already started for everyone else.
I learned about Singapore, how it was colonized, what languages are spoken there, and what the economy of the country is based upon (finance and education). Our Asian friends used to live in Singapore, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I knew absolutely NOTHING about Singapore. I couldn’t have found it on a map if I tried, and so I did some reading, and now I know a little more.
Finally, finally I have learned how to clone something out of a photograph using content fill. Wooohoo! It’s so easy, I can’t believe I didn’t make myself learn it before. Every once in awhile there’s just that one, little distracting thing in a photograph that drives a person crazy because it distracts from what you want the photograph to be about, but you couldn’t fix it while you were capturing the image. I’m really a realist, a documentarian when it comes to photography. I edit lightly, and I like it that way. I don’t want to fix things that make a photograph seem real, but sometimes there’s just that bothersome little thing that I want to do away with.
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