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!

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah called tonight to tell us they are coming for Kelly’s graduation.  Kelly will be graduating from both Wake Technical Comminity College with an Associate of Science college transfer degree and from the Chapman Family Homeschool with a high school diploma.  I think this would have been the first graduation my parents have ever missed.  To say my mother values education would be a wild understatement.  She was the first person in her family of many generations to get a bachelors degree.  Three of her four kids have Masters degrees and all of us have Bachelors degrees.  She has gone out of her way to be at every graduation of her children and her grandchildren.  Kelly and Christian will be the last ones to graduate and, even though they were here not too long ago, I cannot say I am surprised she is coming.  I am thankful for that.

Christian has enough hours to graduate from Community College, too, but he is missing a class in Ethics.  That is OK, because we have decided to graduate the kids chronologically anyway.  We will graduate Christian from high school in a couple of years when he is the right age.  If he plays his cards right, he can graduate with his Bachelors degree the same time he graduates from high school.

Dad has always been very supportive of our education in every way possible, but that is was a big deal for Mom made it a big deal for all us kids and we are the better for.  We are thankful you are coming Dad and Mom.

We went out and bought a grill today at Lowe’s. It is a nice one. We are getting ready for Kelly’s graduation party. Christian has promised to become the grill master, but I do not know if Lorena will let him near it. She likes it a LOT.