Lorena and are never too excited for the kids to be away, but we are looking forward to a week alone while the kids head to California.  They think it is a vacation for them, but really, it is a vacation for us.

This is a first.  Lorena, Kelly, and Christian are doing last minute shopping for the kids trip to California.  The GaugeCam team is mostly out of town.  That leaves me on my own, so I decided to come down to the Hill Library at NCSU to work on the GaugeCam project.  The library is mostly empty as all the students are off on summer break.  This is the first time I came on my own.  It is really very nice.  I have my cup of McDonalds coffee and am all set for 3-4 hours of programming.  I expect to do this more now that the (home) “school is out for ever“.

College notes:  Kelly has enrolled in all her classes but one for fall semester.  She will take one online class at the community college.  Christian passed a placement test for chemistry (passed), but has to wait for his high school and second year college classes to matriculate before he can register.  He has one more test on Monday that will let him avoid taking the bonehead computer class and get into a programming class (C++, Java, or Matlab).

Thanks Troy, Youngin, and Lucia!  It is a great thing that red is a thinning color!

Cinco de Mayo de 2012–A stellar day!

Today is Kelly’s last day of homeschool and community college.  I dropped her off for her last final in Geology at the Wake Technical Community College Main Campus.  Her formal graduation from both will occur tomorrow.  Christian’s last day of homeschool and community college will be on Monday, but we will not have his formal high school graduation until he is the right age in a couple of years.  Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah are here from Oregon to go to the ceremony and we have a potluck planned for all our local friends tomorrow afternoon.  I will turn in our graduation notice to the State of North Carolina early next week.

Homeschool has been a good great run for us.  I think it was a great gift to our kids, but maybe even a greater gift to Lorena and I.  I believe the homeschool meme, “Quality Time IS Quantity Time” is true.  That is what homeschool gave to us as parents a TON of time with our children and we would not give it up for the world.  This whole blog has been about why that was true for us.  This is a moment of great joy and melancholy.

Wow.  We are one fourth of the way through our one thousand day push.  We are all the way up to finals week in the kids last semester of community college.  It seems pretty amazing.  I continue to work hard on GaugeCam–we are getting close to some big stuff.  We have improved dramatically over the last couple of months.  You can see our live camera in the North Carolina Tidal Marsh here.  We are not as robust as we want to be in our algorithms yet, but we are getting much, much better.  We believe we are almost as good as competing technologies right now and should pass them up in terms of our ability to automatically measure water levels at very remote sites within the next month or two.  We should be able to build and deliver our first commercial beta cameras before the end of the summer.

Kelly, Lorena, and I have another project we want to pursue that has to do with coffee.  That’s right I said COFFEE!  It is a commercial venture that involves coffee!!! How much better does it get than that.  We will tell you more when we know more ourselves.

I talked to my friend and ex-business partner Ron Voorhees on the phone last night.  He is doing great.  Too great.  We always have lots of things to talk about–business, politics, sports, religion, and, best of all, he lets me brag about my kids and I love to hear about his amazingly atheletic grandkids.  Well, we got on the subject of health.  Ron has always been in better shape than me, but he told me back in February he was just not feeling so good so he decided to go on a health kick.  He has been working out hard and eating healthy foods since then–no sodas, lots of nuts, fruits, vegetables, very little read meat, lots of fish and chicken.  He does a few vitamins and he works out every day.  The upshot is that he has lost weight that he probably did not even need to lose, he feels great, and is in the best shape in years.  I have been half heartedly trying to do that myself here for about the same amount of time.  In spite of the fact that I am getting regular exercise, I am not going down because I eat like a pig (and enjoy that VERY much).  Well, I have decided I need to get back in the saddle.  I will start posting my weight again in May!