Do you ever feel that you are leading in uncharted territory? Pastor and consultant Tod Bolsinger draws on decades of expertise guiding churches and organizations in this expanded practical leadership resource, offering illuminating insights and practical tools to help you reimagine what effective church leadership looks like in our rapidly changing world.
The chief attraction that inspired Thoreau to make this canoe trip was the primitiveness of the region. Here was a vast tract of almost virgin woodland, peopled only with a few loggers and pioneer farmers, Indians, and wild animals. No one could have been better fitted than Thoreau to enjoy such a region and to transmit his enjoyment of it to others. For though he was a person of culture and refinement, with a college education, and had for an intimate friend so rare a man as Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was half wild in many of his tastes and impatient of the restraints and artificiality of the ordinary social life of the towns and cities. He liked especially the companionship of men who were in close contact with nature, and in this book we find him deeply interested in his Indian guide and lingering fondly over the man's characteristics and casual remarks. The Indian retained many of his aboriginal instincts and ways, though his tribe was in most respects civilized. His home was in an Indian village on an island in the Penobscot River at Oldtown, a few miles above Bangor. Thoreau was one of the world's greatest nature writers, and as the years pass, his fame steadily increases. He was a careful and accurate observer, more at home in the fields and woods than in village and town, and with a gift of piquant originality in recording his impressions. The play of his imagination is keen and nimble, yet his fancy is so well balanced by his native common sense that it does not run away with him. There is never any doubt about his genuineness, or that what he states is free from bias and romantic exaggeration.
Within about seventy-five miles of downtown Houston, some 1,500 miles of rivers, creeks, lakes, bayous, and bays await discovery. Canoeing and Kayaking Houston Waterways, by longtime paddler Natalie Wiest, is the perfect companion for anyone who wants to experience Houston’s well-watered landscape from the seat of a kayak or canoe. Before introducing readers to the quiet, green world that lies within and around the heart of the city, Wiest gives some pointers on water safety (including swimming and boating); on weather, flood stages, and legal access; and on an often unseen but always present paddling companion—alligators. She also provides a gear checklist for a day trip, a brief guide to boats and paddles, and a “sampler” list of easy places to paddle for true beginners. Presented in nine chapters, each organized around a river system or coastal basin and comprising a “suite” of paddling trips, the excursions described by Wiest offer a general description of the destination, directions (both driving and paddling), and details about the paddling conditions and access sites, which are all publicly owned or managed. Each chapter lists mileages, USGS gauging station numbers, and GIS locations when applicable. Also including ninety color photos and more than thirty detailed maps, Canoeing and Kayaking Houston Waterways offers both novice and experienced paddlers a helpful and enjoyable reference for experiencing nature at water level, in and around Houston. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.
Parks and Recreation actor and Making It co-host Nick Offerman shares his humorous fulminations on life, manliness, meat, and much more in this New York Times bestseller. Growing a perfect moustache, grilling red meat, wooing a woman—who better to deliver this tutelage than the always charming, always manly Nick Offerman, best known as Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson? Combining his trademark comic voice and very real expertise in woodworking—he runs his own woodshop—Paddle Your Own Canoe features tales from Offerman’s childhood in small-town Minooka, Illinois—“I grew up literally in the middle of a cornfield”—to his theater days in Chicago, beginnings as a carpenter/actor and the hilarious and magnificent seduction of his now-wife Megan Mullally. It also offers hard-bitten battle strategies in the arenas of manliness, love, style, religion, woodworking, and outdoor recreation, among many other savory entrees. A mix of amusing anecdotes, opinionated lessons and rants, sprinkled with offbeat gaiety, Paddle Your Own Canoe will not only tickle readers pink but may also rouse them to put down their smart phones, study a few sycamore leaves, and maybe even hand craft (and paddle) their own canoes.
Back in print: A revised second edition of a classic how-to book on canoe building. The new edition is updated to include advances in glues and techniques since the original was published, as well as five new canoe plans, builder tips and paddle carving.
The beauty of this book is that the construction bugs have already been worked out of the designs. Plans, step-by-step instructions, material lists photographs and detailed diagrams.
In 1930 two novice paddlers?Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port?launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay?with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. ?Praise for Canoeing with the Cree ?"Canoeing with the Cree is an all-time favorite of mine." ?Ann Bancroft, Arctic explorer and co-author of No Horizon Is So Far ?"Two high school graduates make an amazing journey . . . showing indomitable courage that carried them through to their destination. Humor and a spirit of adventure made a grand, good time of it, in spite of storms, rapids, long portages and silent wildernesses." ?Library Journal.
