Month: March 2005

The day before Kelly’s birthday, Christian started on a project to build a piñata for her. The piñata did not dry in time for the party, but it has turned into quite a good little art project. I am completely amazed on how well it is turning out in as much as he had NO help at all from Lorena, Kelly, or I. He found the project in a book, bugged us until we let him do it, then went to work. It is coming out great as can be seen below:

Christian making his piñata

I also took some pictures of Kelly, now officially age eleven, and put them up in the photo gallery here.

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We had our last neighborhood bible study last night. The topic was problem resolution. We particularly enjoyed having our neighbor Hank Whitsit there. We are very sad that he and his wife are moving across town. After the study, everyone stayed for chips, salsa, cake, and cookies. We found that there will be only two more Sunday evening gospel meetings and then the Lyle Waldo will be leaving to help Dave Nealon for the rest of the year and Joe Layman will be going to help at the convention grounds and then on to Canadian and other conventions until next fall. That is a pretty long dry spell. We will really miss them.

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Kelly and Christian started back into homeschool again yesterday. We are up to speed and running fine. Kelly called her friend, Skyler from last year at government school and it turns out that she is now doing homeschool, too. It is too bad Kelly did not invite her to her party. I am sure she would have enjoyed being with the other girls very much. Kelly invited her to the homeschool play group, so hopefully they will get together again soon.

We have our last meeting tonight. We are going to have salsa and chips after the meeting. Tony and Martha are coming over after the meeting for the express purpose of just eating the salsa and chips. We might have some cake, too. Martha told Lorena she has a little something for Kelly for her birthday. I have posted photos of Rigo and Minita’s last trip to San Luis Potosi. They are nice. You can look at them here.

Kelly had two great parties. The first one, we had at our house in Albany with four girls from Kelly’s homeschool play group. They are absolutely super kids. It is truly amazing how sweet were these girls. Kelly says it is the best birthday party she has ever had and I believe her!

Kelly shows her prowess with a stick of bubble gum

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Today is Kelly’s big birthday party. Four of the girls from her homeschool play group are coming over to our house for several hours of fun, frolic, and food. They are going to paint and hide Easter eggs, draw, eat, and, if the weather permits, roller blade. It should be a lot of fun. I should be able to report back on either Sunday night or Monday morning with photos and stories. By then, we will have also gone to the family birthday party at Aunt Julia’s house, too.

On another note, Al Rizos sent me a great photo from last years ski trip. I thought I would post it here.

For a couple more days, our baby girl is still just ten years old. I took a couple of pictures of her and put them in the album here.

Life is very good. The kids are having a good spring break even though most of yesterday was spent running around to Jefferson for piano lessons, to Salem to pick up some stuff at a store, to another store to buy new thongs, etc., etc. Tomorrow is Kelly’s big birthday party at the house with all of her little homeschool buddies. I guess there will be four girls there along with Kelly and Christian.

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We had a super meeting last night. Andrew and Rhonda came over with Joe and Lyle. Andrew is studying at pharmacy school, but will only be here for three or four more months. Nice folks. Heather and Clinton Eblen came over along with Clinton’s girlfriend. Also, Lorena’s cousin Martha Nelson and her husband Tony came along. Our dear neighbor Hank Whitsit came, too. We had just a super little Bible study on “children and correction.” We read the references together that Joe had given us earlier, then talked about them. It was a wonderful study. The kids were both very good and very humble. They both read and Kelly even brought up a thought. Next week will be the last study, so we are going to have chips, guacamole, and salsa.

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I have booted my system to Knoppix 3.8, a Linux live boot disk and am accessing the internet and writing this post using just that (not Windows). It is pretty amazing. Lately my work has been changing a lot. I am really not sure what is going to happen here. I think we might lose a lot of people to attrition based on unhappiness with the changes and, if we do not start getting more work, we might lose some to layoffs. I hope one of them is not me.

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I am feeling like an old man. Toward the end of work on Friday, I was walking between buildings when I sprained my ankle. It hurt like only a sprained ankle can hurt. I had a pretty bad attitude all weekend long, slept crooked or something and ended up with a sharp pain in my neck, back, and shoulder. Based on my attitude and actions during the whole weekend, I pretty much deserved that whole deal. Life goes on.

The new homeschool schedule seems to have worked very well. On Friday, the kids focused on their work hard in the morning. If it were not for the fact that they were a little bit behind because of procrastination earlier in the week, both Kelly and Christian would have finished everything before lunch. Actually, I think they felt pretty good about their work and, inspite of my bad attitude, that led into a pretty good weekend for them…

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Last night when I got home, the kids told me that they had not yet finished their homeschool work. This has been happening a little too frequently over the last several weeks. The work the kids do is fine, but they have not been completing everything. For a period of about a month this winter, I was giving them pretty heavy loads, so we could get ahead enough for everyone to leave for Mexico over the Memorial Day weekend. That got changed when we found that Lorena could not take her math final at the community college until the second week in June. After that, I backed off so the kids work load is really pretty light compared to what they were doing previously. Nevertheless, they have not been completing all the work by the time I get home at between 4:15 and 4:30 in the afternoon…

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Our little company, Quality Corners is doing well right now. We are getting more business little by little, we should have neither short nor long term debt other than month to month operating costs in a little over a year, and we are continuously improving our processes to improve quality and reduces costs. We have one machine that will eliminate two people from one of our lower margin products so that we can move them over to start working on one of our areas of increased business while at the same time increasing the margin and the throughput of our lowest margin product. That is a machine that automatically edge routs the MDF rosettes we manufacture. Our fourth round corner shaper…

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Only Joe Layman, Lyle Waldo, and our family showed up at our bible study last night. It was pretty sad. We were hoping more people from the neighborhood would show, but all we got was us. It was still a super study on “Fathers and Husbands”. It is great to get a sense for what the workers go through every meeting and even better to see the selfless attitude of our workers. I think about those who have been trying to share the gospel for many, many years and cannot even get a hearing. Nevertheless, it is God’s work we are doing and not our own. I am particularily appreciative of the way Lorena invites people. She is fearless and truly a wonderful partner in this life.

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The kids did great in homeschool yesterday. Christian broke the two minute barrier yesterday for the first time on his flash cards. He did 1:08 seconds on the hard side and 0:48 seconds on the easier one. We were very excited about that. Kelly is working on the rough draft of her report on newspapers. She has almost four hand written pages right now. The original goal was for her to write a five page report. I am not sure how her written pages will convert to typed pages, but it is looking quite good. She should put the final touches on her outline today.

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We had another super weekend. We went to lunch on Saturday morning, bought and flew some kites on Saturday afternoon, and saw a beautiful meteor fall to the earth a little before 8:00 on Saturday evening. We went to Baja Fresh, the only place that is even remotely worthwhile in Corvallis, after meeting on Sunday and took my cousin, Tim Meekum to meeting on Sunday evening. God is truly good. I also took what I think is a great picture of Christian

I got the pictures of the ski trip and some images Minita sent us of the belts Tonio made for everyone up in the gallery, too.

For the last two days, Christian has been doing extra pages in his math. So far, I think he has done an extra week. Day before yesterday, he also did about four extra pages in Easy Grammar. He is going to finish those two items up for the year in just a few more weeks. Kelly is also doing great and should finish her math and grammar about the same time as Christian. Both of them should finish up on this years Spelling Power a little bit early, too. We got an email telling us that we can take our standardized tests this year at Santiam Christian School. The tests take place over three days. It will be very nice to see how they do.

Christian did an amazing job yesterday on his homeschool. He did about three extra days each of both Easy Grammar and Singapore Math. He got a little frustrated because he had to make more correction than usual commensurate with the extra amount of work he did. Both Kelly and Christian are doing a good job this year. We are in the home stretch now with only ten weeks to go. We should start finishing up Easy Grammar over the next three or four weeks and then Singapore Math a couple of weeks after that. The last part of the schedule will be pretty leisurely going into the summer. Our schedule should be as follows:

Lorena does not get out of school until the second week in June and we will not go to Mexico until the last week in June, so the kids should have about a month of just free time before they start in on their Spanish studies.

Kelly’s letter to the editor got published!

Our bible study was great last night. Not very many people showed up, but there were more than I expected. Our neighbors Hank and Sue were there. We are very sorry that they are going to move away from here in the next month or so. The people who bought their place own a Tom’s Garden Store in Albany. We have heard they have two childern in their teens. Everyone seems to think they are very nice people. Maybe we can get some help dealing with all the clover in our yard.

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Last night, Lorena went around the neighborhood and invited everyone to our house for a bible study tonight. Our workers, Joe Layman and Lyle Waldo are coming over to lead the meeting. I hope some people show up. Later this week, we will put a small ad in the newspaper inviting people to come and join us. I am not sure that will work either. Lorena is so good at inviting people. She has absolutely no fear and I appreciate her very much for that. We got off to a little bit of a rocky start on the homeschool again, but I think we are up and going now.

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We had a marvelous skiing trip with the Rizos family at Mt. Bachelor last week. I will post some pictures to the gallery later this week if I have time, but probably on the weekend. Everyone skied including the Dads and Moms. We stayed at Eagle Crest, a fabulous resort outside of Redmond. Dave and Glad Christie came and stayed with us for two nights early in the week. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah came and stayed with us for a couple of nights at the end of the week and then stayed on through Saturday and Sunday to relax, go to meeting, clean up, and check out on Monday. The highlight of the trip was our bible study on I Corinthians 8 with Grandpa, Grandma, and all the kids on Saturday morning.

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