"Well this sucks." I thought to myself as we stood at the now closed office. My parents smiled and looked at me. They were visiting me from Chicago. It was the first time they came since I moved to L.A. I considered driving down to the other place where you can get a ride out to Catalina Island, but by the time we got there, it would still take a couple hours to get to the island. "It's cold out anyway," I argued to myself in my head.
"Let's go check out the Queen Mary." I said to my parents. That was a close one. The only other thing I could think of besides Disney and Universal Studios, was a drive up the PCH. And that wouldn't take up enough time.

Queen Mary facts:

The ship was bigger than any other boat. It's over a thousand feet long and 80,000 tons. In 1943 it crossed the Atlantic with 16,683 people on board. I would think that a boat that big wouldn't go that fast.

The ship was faster than any other craft on the water. At the time it could go 28.5 knots. In WWII it was commissioned as a Naval Ship. It was called "The Grey Ghost." It was equipped with a battery of guns. They were never fired. When the ship was in trouble, they just sped up and outran the enemy.

The ship was the most powerful ocean liner ever built. It had 160,000 horsepower. That's a lot by any standard.

But what really impressed me was the rudder. It's 140 tons of steel. It's huge.
It's amazing that this ocean liner was built in the 30's. I understood how they sped up. I saw that the captain yelled into tubes to communicate to with the engine room telling them how much coal to shovel. But how did they turn this huge rudder? That's when I remembered the trim tab. It's a little piece (by comparison) on the rudder. The captain can turn this just a bit to create water pressure on the rudder. This in turn moves the rudder and the rudder controls the ocean liner. The rudder is a small part of the boat (140 tons out of 80,000 tons) But the trim tab is just a fraction of that.
Sometimes I think that there is no way one small change can make a difference. But just like that trim tab, often it just takes a small difference to affect the entire vessel. This is true in people too. It just takes a small change in your life to get your vessel to make a turn. And who knows, maybe you could influence the 80,000 tons of the rest of us as well.

"I don't want to go to camp," the boy tells his father. His Father is perplexed.
"Son," he says "going to camp is just like a caterpillar going into a cocoon. You enter it a creepy crawler and you emerge a beautiful butterfly. There is a cocoon in the back yard, you'll see."
The boy agreed to watch the cocoon and his father hoped it would open before his son left for camp. Over the next few weeks, the father talked to his son about the importance of change and metamorphosis.
The dad nervously checked the cocoon. His son's scheduled departure loomed just a few hours away. And then he saw it; the cocoon split! Charging up the stairs he glowed as he knew his plan worked. "Check out the cocoon!" he cried. His son ran out to see it. "It hasn't made much progress," thought the father. They both sat for what seemed like hours in anticipation. The cocoon started to shake. An amazing wing exploded from it's shell. "Just in time," thought the father. Then it happened. The bus arrived. The dad reached in his pocket and took out his knife. "I'll just help him out a little bit," he told his son. From the cocoon emerged what would have been a butterfly. One gorgeous wing, and one mangaled mess with a fat slug in the middle.

The final part of a butterfly's metamorphosis is breaking out of its cocoon. The struggle against the walls of its shelter is what creates the wings of the butterfly. It has to flex and strain those muscles to get the blood flowing through the wings. Otherwise, it just comes out limp and ugly.