Turn... Turn... Turn

This weekend I took some time to make a few pens to sell in the annual DTS craft fair. It was good to pull out the tools and put metal to wood and make something again. I tried to be a little more creative than usual and came up with some of the most unique pens I have made so far. I think they "turned" out pretty good.

This was also a good escape from the usual homework that I am usually busy with. It also gave me some time to spend with Caleb. He enjoys watching me and playing with the sawdust that accumulates around the workbench. While the lathe is turning, he sits in his chair and watches from a safe distance. He also wears a pair of safety goggles that actually end up protecting most of his face. In a couple of years he'll be ready to try some woodworking too. I think that this is something that he would get a lot out of later on.

I've been putting a lot of time into different projects for school too. My internship is going great. I'm working on some upgrades to one of the supplemental course materials CDs for one of the Greek courses I took this time last year. Hopefully it will make the CD easier to use for students that take this class in the future. The other big project I'm working on is a collation of a 10th to 12th century Greek Manuscript. I was able to help with photographing this 800-1000 year-old document last summer. It is a Byzantine manuscript of Luke's Gospel written on vellum parchment. I'm using the photographs of the manuscript to study by so that the original doesn't have to be handled. As an added bonus, the photos are 11 megapixels so zooming in makes reading it much easier, like using a magnifying glass. It's interesting to look at photographs of ancient manuscripts in a book but it's a real treat to actually see and hold the actual document that a scribe penned so long ago.

A Word for Today
collation - the process of attempting to reconstruct a Biblical text by compiling and comparing variant readings in ancient hand-written manuscripts. In collating a manuscript, comparisons of the hand-written text is carefully compared to a standard Greek text and variants in the manuscript are carefully noted.