Year: 2004 Page 4 of 8

I cannot believe my weight is really continuing to drop. It is coming off slow, but I am down from my high of about 200 lbs. to around 185. If I stay the course, I think I have a good chance of getting down to 170 lbs. before Thanksgiving. After that, I am going to have to reevaluate a little to see if I want to try and drop some more or stay where I am. The key is continuing to work out as often as possible and to not be a complete glutton at night when I get home. I really do pretty good at work now if I just eat a rice bowl at Safeway.

We are dying for Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita to get here. The kids are having a ball this summer playing and swimming with Hannah, Haley, and Jacob. Our neighbors, Gary and Tina have company over with kids, too. Tina’s sister is a homeschooler from Ketchican, Alaska. She has a six year old daughter that fits right in to the gang. They have about a month more to enjoy it and then it is back to the books!

Lauro and Conchita rode the bus from Monterrey to Houston last night, so Lorena should be able to talk to them at Blanca’s house sometime today. Lorena saw some of Nancy Garrett’s pictures of Tony and Martha’s wedding at gospel meeting last night. It sounds and looked like it was quite a nice wedding. I am still working a ton of hours, so will keep these posts short for the time being.

This morning I got on the scales and found that I weighed only 187 lbs. I have been doing my exercise only two to three times per week and eating only a couple of meals per day. It seems that when I have a snack after I get home from work and then have dinner, too, the best I can do is break even. So, if I eat a rice bowl for lunch and a good health dinner at night, followed by forty minutes on the Nordic Track, my weight moves down. I need to have a little more will power!

Only a week until Lauro and Conchita arrive. Lorena is really getting the house fixed up quite nicely. It looks like we will have to wait at least another week before Dad gets here to do the patio as his helper Cayatano has to stay with his wife who is not well and about to have a baby.

A brief update of Quality Corners is probably in order in that there is not much going on right now in the Chapman household other than waiting for Grandpa Lauro, Grandma Conchita, and Cousin Hectorin to show up. The kids are swimming, reading, writing, doing artsy kinds of things and generally just playing this summer. The only thing with any level of rigor is cleaning the bonus room and doing their fifteen minutes per day on Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor.

Quality Corners has been heating up a little. Really our sales have dropped off some, but we have been developing equipment to make corners more efficiently and to make different kinds of corners — ones without legs and 1-1/2 inch radius corners. Now that we have some additional capacity, we need to kick our sales into high gear. We can make rosettes and plinth blocks much more efficiently now so we think we can win some new business with them. In addition, we are continually improving our corner manufacturing.

Our biggest issue right now is finding a way to prevent Ron from having to work so hard. To do that, we are going to drop some product lines and get someone trained for supervision. After that, we need to put processes in place to make the manufacturing flow more efficient. Finally, and most importantly in the long run, we need to drive up sales. If we can double our sales or even a little more than double sales, we will be making super profits and the business will be to the point where we canget what we want out of it.

This weekend we went to a baptism, Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah came for a short visit, and we went to meeting. It was all quite relaxing after having worked for so many hours over the last couple of weeks. Tony and Martha got married on Friday and went on their honeymoon cruise to around the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. Everyone seemed to be pleased with the whole affair.

Over the last little while, Kelly, Christian, Lorena and I have gone into the Baja Fresh Mexican restaurant in Corvallis after Sunday Morning meeting for lunch then popped into the Borders bookstore to read for an hour or so. It is nice because it gives us time to talk to each other at the restaurant and we all love reading.

I finally bought our curricula from Sonlight on Saturday. I got Christian the third grade curriculum for advanced readers and Kelly the normal fifth grade curriculum. I got them both Singapore math for their grades. We need to really clean up and organize the bonus room so that we will be ready to start school after Labor Day. The time is getting close.

I am stilling putting in a ton of hours at work with little time to do much else, so until I finish that up, my postingins here will be a little slow. Hopefully, I will be able to clean things up before the weekend, but who knows. I did get the chance to finish moving the dirt for our patio planter and put summer fertilizer and bug killer on the lawn (I hope that helps!).

We got our overpayment of property tax money back that was paid into escrow when we bought our house. That will come in very handy in helping us pay for the rest of the concrete for our patio and help buy our homeschool curricula for the year. I am hoping to do the homeschool purchasing next week at the latest.

Tony and Martha are getting married today, so we are looking forward to calling some of the family in Houston tomorrow to see how the wedding went. That also means that Grandpa Lauro, Grandma Conchita, and Cousin Hectorin will be here soon. The kids are looking forward to that as they get browner and browner from playing and swimming in the sun.

I have been working so much lately, that there is really not that much to report. I was at ATS from 7:00 to 9:00 yesterday, so I did not even get to unload the dirt from the pickup that Lorena had purchased earlier in the day. Kelly and Christian went with Lorena to rotate the tires and change the oil in the pickup followed by a trip to by dirt and fertilizer.

Dad went to the doctor yesterday to have his knee examined. The good news is there will be no knee replacement. The bad news is there he has some arthritis in the knee and there will need to some be minor microsurgery to remove some cartilage. Dad is driving over to Idaho today to take the new machine. When I talked to Ron last night, he mentioned that the orders we have been receiving from Millsource in Phoenix for Home Depot have been increasing greatly. We should be getting some big orders from Orepac too, now that we can make the universal corners cheaply and can produce 1-1/2 inch radius corners.

Dad’s idea to make a general 3/4 inch radius corner machine similar to the universal corner machine has us all inspired. We will cut our wood costs in half and our labor costs by two thirds. The machine makes parts smooth enough that they might not need to be sanded and it makes than at a rate of fifteen parts per minute instead of three parts per minute like the older machines. We are hoping to be able to get the Sauder business by driving our cost and prices down while we maintain our margins.

We got the great news last night that the youngest Ramsdell boy professed at Salmon Arm, B.C. Convention. We meet with the Ramsdell family for Wednesday night bible study and do a lot of things with them. Leah Ramsdell wrote us a note to let us know! Last night I mowed the lawn and did my exercise so my weight is down to 189 lbs!

Tonight I am planning to finish moving dirt into the patio planter and put some fertilizer on the lawn before I do my exercise. Lorena is going to pick up the dirt and fertilizer when she goes to rotate the tires and change the oil on the pickup. I forgot and took the pickup to work today, so I will have to take it home at lunch time so she can do that.

Grandpa Milo is going to find out today if he needs knee replacement surgery. Tomorrow, he is going to run the new Universal Corner shaper machine he and Del Weber made over to Idaho to install in Quality Corners. He believes we can make a machine for general corners based on the universal machine that will drive a TON of cost of the manufacturing. We want to raise the price a little on corners with legs and leave the price of the corners without legs where the the old corners were. We can save a lot of money on both labor and materials. It will allow us to lower our prices to win additional marketshare and even improve our margins.

Even though I was able to get the dirt Lorena brought to the house unloaded into our patio planter, nothing else got done on the lawn because I spent the entire weekend working at ATS programming serial port drivers using QNX. It was very interesting, but no fun to spend the weekend away from the kids. We DID buy new cell phones for Lorena and I.

While we were buying our cell phones, we saw a sign that advertised phone calling to Monterrey, Mexico for only 2.9 cents per minute. We bought $50 worth of calls and then found that the price had dropped to only 2.5 cents per minute. Amazing. That is really going to change our lives because we can now talk to Lorena’s parents Lauro and Conchita as much as we want. We made calls to Dayana, Conchita, and Jorge over the weekend. It was great to let Lorena talk for an hour and not worry our bug her about how much it cost.

The kids are having a great summer swimming and playing around our new neighborhood. They gathered sticks for a craft project on Sunday afternoon. There is a new little girl with whom they have become friends that they meet at meeting. Her name is Crystal and she goes to meeting with Cal and Lily. Her great uncle is a guy named John who takes his great nephew to another meeting, but he is older and does not feel he can handle two kids, so Cal and Lily help him out by taking Crystal. We really need to invite Crystal over to play soon as she is a sweet girl and just loves Kelly.

Joe Layman and Kevin Wilson came to our house for lunch yesterday. Joe gave us a bottle of “Ring of Fire” jabanero salsa. It is absolutely excellent. Lorena made us a great lunch of chicken sandwiches. After lunch, I took the mini-van to work and left the pickup so Lorena could pick up a load of dirt to fill in our patio planter area. Then, I ended up working until 9:30 pm and had to take the mini-van to work again this morning and leave Lorena with no way to get around because I did not have time to unload it. Christian and Kelly are going to put another layer of paver bricks in our planter today to make it a little higher. That will be good work for him.

Kelly was on the front page of the Albany, Oregon Democrat-Herald newspaper today. I will let the article speak for itself. The photo was the above the fold main color photo for the newspaper. It was great! The size of the photo was about six inches by eight inches.

The photo

The text

Yesterday afternoon, Kelly competed in a talent show at the Albany Library and won! There were 13 kids competing in all and the competition was quite stiff. Of course Kelly played the piano. Christian took a great video of her efforts. There was one boy who ten pepperocini peppers in his math, all at the same time, and then ate them. Another boy stood on his head in a chair and then blew bubbles while he was upside down. The second and third place winners were both singers and there were two other piano players.

Christian is going to do a science experiment at today’s talent show. It is an EXCELLENT experiment that he came up with himself. He will explain and make a water thermometer out of a vinegar bottle, a cork, and a straw. He came up with it all by himself. I am really amazed that he gets so much out of reading his science books.

We went to the Marion County Fair on Saturday to see Jordan Ramsdell play his fiddle in a talent show. He did great, getting third place and $100. The two people ahead of him were pretty pathetic and there was at least one girl after him that should have won, but got nothing at all. I thought is was a pretty good view into popular culture and political correctness in America.

Kelly is going to play three songs on her piano at a talent show at the Albany Library this morning. She will be playing Arabesque, Fur Elise, and Linus and Lucy. She is really getting to be a super piano player and she loves to do it so that makes us quite happy.

We took my second cousin, Tim Meekum to gospel meeting on Sunday afternoon. We were all happy to have some time with him again. After meeting, Jim and Joann Waldo invited us to their place for brownies and ice cream. Joe Layman and Kevin Wilson were there with us, too. It was good to be with them a little. There will be three weeks of gospel meeting on Wednesdays and Sundays at the Electrical Union hall in Tangent until they go to convention.

I have pretty much figured out what I am going to buy from Sonlight for the kids homeschool next year. I will get Kelly the Comprehensive package for fifth grade with Singapore Math levels 4b/5a. For Christian, I will get the Advanced reader Core package with Singapore Math levels 2b/3a. I might have to add something to the package, but that should be a good place to start. We can make adjustments as needed.

On the spur of the moment Saturday morning, Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I decided to put a few things in the mini-van and go to the beach at Newport. It was a great idea. The weather was great. We spent a couple of hours just hanging out on the beach, looking at stuff in tidepools, playing in the waves, and getting some fresh air. After that, we went into town to Mo’s to get some clam chowder. It was ok clam chowder, but I think Lorena’s and Dad and Mom’s are both much, much better. I have placed some pictures at the end of this post of our trip.

After we ate, we decided to take a stroll and look at some of the shops along the bayfront by Mo’s. Lorena found some cool pottery and some ideas for a water display at our house that would be very fun to try to make. I think I will start looking for some parts with the idea of deciding whether I believe I could do something like that. We found a place that gives ocean tours for homeschool groups at a discount rate. The regular rate is not that much higher. I really think that is something that would be great to do next fall as we are getting started to get the kids excited about the ocean (as if they need any more excitement). We will also visit the Hatfield Marine Sciences Research Center. We have all seen the Newport Aquarium about three times and it is good, but it will be good to give it a rest to try something new once. They are right beside each other in Newport so they are easily accessible as a day trip.

Progress

Yesterday, Christian and I started in on learning multiplication using the “Moore Formula” method that we used with Kelly. He did just great. Actually, we started with that method and then as Kelly got competent enough, we moved over to the use of flash cards. That is probably what we will do with Christian, depending on how comfortable he feels with the “Moore Formula” method.

Beach Trip Pictures

I sold all my ESI stock the other day and today, I decided to use the money to buy Merit Medical Stock. We will have to see how it does over the next few months. Today, I am going to go to the Sonlight website to download all the testing materials I can find so that I can determine which curricula to buy for Kelly and Christian. On Saturday, we are planning to go to the Marion County Fair in Salem to see Jordan compete in the talent show there. He is going to play three fiddle tunes. We will probably watch some of the animal auction, too. It should be fun!

Yesterday, I burnt my bridges with MEI up in Seattle. I had a discussion with our new boss, Jim Sheldon at ATS Oregon. He convinced me that changes to the company were going to take place rapidly, there is a place for me in Oregon, in Tucson, or even in Mexico, and that we could find me a great career path. He is a dynamic guy and I believed him. In addition, he is making some adjustments to my compensation the will lessen the pain of not having taken the position MEI offered.

Lorena really did not want to go. She loves her house and the neighborhood and she was not looking forward to selling the house, packing, and moving. We are just getting the house in shape so that it is a comfortable place to live. Add that to the fact that we would have had to double our mortgage and it takes a lot of the pain out of staying in Albany. At our bible study last night, everyone gave us hugs when we told them we are staying. Kelly is going to stay overnight with Skyler tomorrow night. Homeschooling is harder in Washington than Oregon. There are lots of reasons for staying.

I taught Lorena, Kelly, and Christian how to eat with chopsticks while we were sitting at the Washington Square Mall this weekend. It was great! Here is a picture of Christian using chopsticks to eat Top Ramen and a picture of Kelly with our little kitty, Kiwi.

Christian eating with chopsticks for the very second time

Kelly and Kiwi

Comment from Dave & Gladys

We are SO happy that you are staying here. Wonderful pictures of the kids. They are really growing up fast. Enjoy every moment!

Now I can keep bugging you about computer issues!
Lucky you!!!

We just got home from 4 or 5 days at Pacific City in the motor home with Bob’s kids. It was a lot of fun. Especially for me!

Come see us anytime.

Love ya all,
Dave & Glad

As soon as he heard that I had resigned, Barry Rahimian, the main sales guy at ATS Oregon grabbed me by the arm and took me in to see Jim Sheldon, the new head of the Oregon, California, Arizona, and Asian offices. Jim made a counter offer with a promise to get me involved in sales, management, or some other mechanism to give me a better career path. He is planning on expanding the business down into Mexico and said I could even be involved in that.

Now I have to decide what to do. Even though the offer from Micro Encoder was bigger by far than anything I have ever received before, it would not take that much additional money to make it worth my while to stay here in Oregon. We are much closer to the rest of our family, the cost of living is much lower, we would not have to move, Oregon is way more homeschool friendly than Washington, the drive to work is much, much better, etc. If I have some more money, some more vacation and a career path that allows me to grow and improve my career, I can be quite happy at ATS. One of the biggest things is that Jim Sheldon is a very impressive guy and, after talking to him, I believe he will make this place really happen.

I talked to Lorena about this last night and she is really interested in not having to leave her new house. Although it is not perfect, we really like it there. We have a big yard, a great new patio, a quiet neighborhood, a super Sunday morning meeting. We really have absolutely nothing about which to complain. I am planning to talk to Jim this morning and tell him that I am absolutely game to stick around if he fixes the vacation, salary, and career path elements of my work situation.

After a very good Fourth of July weekend, today is the day I have to tell my boss that I am resigning from ATS. It really is not going to be easy at all. I really love my work at ATS and will miss it very much, but there does not appear to be a great deal of job security in this division. Beyond that, I have a great opportunity up in Washington. So far, everything has opened up in a rather amazing way. I had to be offered a job at MEI twice before I was willing to take it. It just feels wierd telling a good friend that I have to resign. I have only been at ATS one year.

I have some more pictures I want to put up on the web of our wonderful Fourth of July weekend. I will try to get them up in the next day or two. On Friday night, we did our usual at the house, just hanging out, watching a DVD and goofing off mostly. On Saturday, Kelly and Christian had their parade and we went out to dinner. On Sunday after meeting we went to a great little chinese food place for dinner and then went over to shoot off our fireworks at the Ramsdell’s house with the Ramsdells, the Meyers, and Shauna Ramey. They are such hospitable people. Finally, we went up to the Washington Square Mall in Portland on Monday, followed by a visit to my dad and mom. We listened to The Hobbit on the way there and on the way back. We finally got to the part where Bilbo meets Smaug in the evening when we got back home and I was doing my exercises.

Here are some early photos of the parade Kelly and Christian organized. It was GREAT! The music was provide by Hank and Sue Whitsit. I will try to put up more as I get them.

Hank and Sue’s patriotic dog Scotty

A group shot of all the participants

Kelly, Haley, and Scotty

Christian and Jacob

he kids took their final swimming lesson at the Corvallis swimming pool yesterday. The whole environment in that town tends to be very stifling so, even if we stay in Albany, we probably will not return to Corvallis for swimming lessons. Both of the kids did great and are getting to be better swimmers every day.

I mowed the lawn yesterday and it looks great. I hope we get some people coming by over the Fourth of July weekend to look at the house so we can get the thing sold. I am planning to find a real estate agent on Wednesday of next week if we do not have any interest in the house yet. Dad is working on a universal corner machine for Quality Corners, but hopefully he will be able to get that finished so that he can come up to Albany to pour the rest of our patio next week.

The kids played with Hannah, Jacob, and Haley in the swimming pool at their house yesterday after they finished their swimming lesson. The family there purports to be christian, but are somewhat arrogant and do not seem to want to teach their kids how to act appropriately. Oh well, Kelly and Christian need to learn how to deal with people like that. After they finished playing they came back and did their Marvis Beacon practice interspersed with the fifteen minutes I let them have on the Neopets website that they really like.

Lorena cooked up ribs from the half cow that Steve Davison sold to us. We really need to learn how to cook ribs better on our new grill. I suppose I should read up on it a little more. After dinner we all went up stairs. Lorena checked her email, I did 40 minutes on the Nordic Track, and we all listened to The Hobbit for about an hour. It is a great story and I am planning to get the Lord of the Rings trilogy on cassettes after we finish The Hobbit.