Month: April 2005 Page 1 of 2

Quality Corners had is having its most profitable month ever this April. We have could very double our sales next month while we increasing our margins. Our margins are increasing now because we are getting economies of scale in general and more fully automated processes in particular. Grandpa Milo called last night and said that if this thing lasts, it something for which we should be very thankful. He said things like this only happen once a lifetime. In that light, I realize I need to be a good steward and hold to the truth that all things belong to the Lord. We are in a very good neighborhood for Kelly and Christian right now. We have a wonderful house. We have a great Sunday morning meeting, we are a close enough to my family that we can visit, but not so close that we have any issues. We are in a relatively homeschool friendly state even though it is way, way too liberal. I think God has put us in a fine place to raise our children. Even though I have had the wrong priorities about money and place, he has graciously changed those priorities toward ones that are in line with his own heart; ones that will bring contentment. I am thankful.

Kelly and Christian did a great job in homeschool yesterday. I mowed the lawn last night and we still had time after everything was finished to listen to Adventures in Odyssey on the computer. Christian did his flashcards in under two minutes for the first time! The reports they are doing are really amazing. Kelly’s report on the history of writing and newspapers is almost through the second rewrite. Christian is still handwriting the first draft of his report on the history of aviation from his notecards. For fifth and third grade reports, they are awesome.

We are going to Tony Nelson’s house tonight along with a good sized group of other people. Kelly and Christian will get a chance to play with Lenore, Miles, Neil, Osten, and Phillip (Jay and Karen Nelson’s kids). Then on Saturday, our plan is to spend some time working on Christian’s AM/FM radio kit.

Lorena thinks she did OK on her College Algebra midterm last night. She has been pretty discouraged about this class because it is so difficult. It will be great if she gets a good grade. She is very smart and has studied hard. I think she will do just fine. Hopefully, she will receive the test results tonight. Kelly, Christian, and I went to our Wednesday night Bible study last night in Jefferson at the Myers. On the way to meeting, we ran through the Jack-in-the-Box drive through. The kids shared a Panido ham and turkey sandwich while I got a hamburger. I have to quit eating like that. I left my billfold in the car after meeting, so I guess I will go without lunch today to make up for my gluttony! Lorena and the kids have to go to the Hickenlooper’s house in Jefferson for piano lessons today. That is the opposite direction from Corvallis, so there is not much chance I will be able to get any money or food until I get home.

I spoke with the CNC router guys again today about the machine they are building for us. Supposedly, I am going to get an email with an image of it today so that I can look at it and it can ship out to us. I hope it does not take too much longer.

We are going to Tony and Martha’s house tomorrow night for dinner.

On Thursday I have to fly to San Jose to visit a company named Western Digital for ATS. This is the first time I will be away long enough that the kids will have to do two days worth of work before I do the correction. It was bound to happen pretty soon. I am amazed that it took so long. I really think it will go OK. Our system works fairly smoothly and the kids have not trouble getting the work finished. We will probably have to do something over the weekend, but it should not be too bad. Lorena has her first math mid-term tonight so I should get off a little early to get the plans made up for them. We have our Wednesday night Bible study tonight, too, so our schedule might be just a little tight.

I DON’T HAVE TO GO!!! We figure a way how to engineer a possible solution without the aid of vision. It could be a real coup for us. We will get the part in from San Jose tomorrow which will give us a chance to do some engineering while holding the part rather than just looking at pictures.

Kelly and Christian had their last swimming lesson of this session today. They will have one more session between now and the end of the school year. Neither Kelly nor Christian passed on to the next level, but both of them are very close. Christian is on level six and Kelly is on level 9. The highest level is ten before they go into life saving. I hope there is some way I can keep Kelly interested and continuing to take level ten until they have both completed that level. At any rate, Kelly will have level ten for next year and I expect Christian will move quickly now through levels seven eight and nine.

I did not get home from work yesterday until about 6:30 PM. When I got there the kids were playing. Kelly had done just about all of her work, but there were a bunch of things Christian had not finished. It was a little frustrating for all of us. We ended up not getting to bed until after 10:30 because of all the catchup work we had to do. Even then, we did not quite get it all done. Today, I really hope we can do better. The kids do not have piano lessons, swimming class, play groups, or anything else so they should be able to get it all done. The only thing we have on the docket is Lorena’s math class this afternoon.

The very good thing that happened yesterday was that the FM radio Christian and I are going to put together this summer came in the mail yesterday. It looks pretty complicated, but I bet we learn something. The instructions on how to put the kit together are written in the form of lessons on how an FM radio works. It is a great concept and I hope it works well for people our age.

I did not get to talk to Ron last night about what is going on at Quality Corners. Grandpa Milo is heading over to Idaho today to pour a couple of concrete slabs; one to support the new blower system and one to support the screw compressor that we own. He is driving over with Del and Alice Weber because Del is going to help them install a machine transition the he and Grandpa Milo built. My CNC router has not yet arrived. I am getting a little frustrated with the whole deal. I am going to start calling them every day until the router arrives.

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The following is an image of Christian’s and Kelly’s last chemistry experiment from RealScience-4-Kids. They set the experiment up on Saturday, the day before the picture was taken. In this picture, they are sitting waiting for breakfast on Sunday morning (note the bible in front of Kelly she is reading to get ready for Sunday morning meeting. After meeting, the kids took down the chromatography stripes for analysis and recording in their experiment log.

Lorena’s Aunt Mina came over for dinner on Sunday after meeting along with Tony and Martha. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah came along, too. After we ate a wonderful dinner, Kelly and Christian both played the piano for us and quoted their verses. Kelly has memorized Psalm 91 in both English and Spanish while Christian has done the same with Psalm 8. I am going to have to record their verses and their music on the camcorder while they are still well practiced.

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Estamos muy animados tener a Mina aqui en Los Estados Unidos. Especialmente porque ya puede decir que ha estado en la tierra prometida de Oregon!!!

Este noche, Lorena habia planeado tener una fiesta de algo se llama Pampered Chef. Es una junta que es MUY de la moda aqui en Los Estados Unidos ahorita. Todas las senoras se junta para chismear, reir, comer, y hablar de comida. Esta bien padre. Mina vino con Marta para ver los implementos que esta vendiendo una de la Senoras que esta involucrado en eso se llama Sandra Ramey. Sandra tiene una hija que es sierva, una hija viviendo en Nuevo Zelandia con su esposo de alli, y un hijo que esta en el naval trabajando un submarinos contra del terrorismo bajo del mar. Son muy buena honda. Es una de las familias con larga historia como entregados aqui en este parte de Los Estados Unidos. Voy a poner mas fotos y cuentos cuando los tengo!!!

We went over to Heather Eblen’s house last Sunday for lunch after the fellowship meeting on Sunday morning. Heather’s computer is on its last legs. It is about 13 years old and loaded with memory, but just does not have enough juice in the processor to run Windows XP. The IT department where I work throws away old computers they cannot use and that are not powerful enough to donate to schools. I asked them for one and they were happy to give it to me. I will load it up with Ubuntu Linux and get it onto their cable modem today and tomorrow. All Heather really does is email, websurfing, and letter writing. This will be great for that. She will have plenty of memory to everything she needs to do. Right now, I think there is 128 megabytes of memory, but I think she has 256 on her computer at home, so all I will have to do is trade the memory out and she will be off and running.

Sandra Ramey will be coming over tonight to lead a Pampered Chef party that we will host at our house. Our neighbors across the street, Gina (the mother of Hannah, Jacob, and Halley) along with Alexa who owns a couple local rental stores, Martha and her mother Mina, and Lorena will all attend. They have such a great time together and Pampered Chef really does have some cool stuff. Christian and I are going to hang out in the bonus room and play FreeCiv on our little two computer network if we can figure out how to get the computers to talk to each other.

Donna Floyd’s mother Selma Sterling died a couple of days ago, so I called Al and Michele (granddaughter) Rizos and Ron and Donna. We had a great talk on the phone. Donna has been a real pillar in dealing with her mother and in speaking with Donna, it sounds like Ron was a super help, too. I hope this frees Ron and Donna up enough that they can come up and visit us now. It would have been great to have them with us this year at the ski trip.

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Lorena just called and told me that Kelly had received a “Superior” grade at her recent piano adjudication. Mrs. (Jill) Hickenlooper, the kids teacher, told us that it was really a high honor that she had received because the adjudicator in this case was a very strict, award winning pianst from the University of Oregon. Christian did great, too. He received an “Excellent” grade and Mrs. Hickenlooper expressed her enthusiasm for how well he has been doing lately. Now, Kelly and Jill are planning to perform a Concerto at a big event in Corvallis in the autumn. We are all quite excited about it.

On another note, Grandpa Milo just called from a beach in Hawaii. He was sitting there thinking about how to make the trim saws at Quality Corners go a little faster. Unbelieveable.

Yesterday I downloaded the newly released version of a program called FreeCiv. It is a strategy game Christian likes to play on the computer. With the new release, I found versions for both Windows and Linux. FreeCiv is a game you can either play by yourself on a single computer or on a network against other players. I knew there were games out there it was possible to play using both Linux and Windows computers across a network, but never had the inclination to try them because they usually cost quite a bit of money. In this case, though, we have a whole evening to burn because Lorena and Kelly are going to be giving a Pampered Chef party for Sandra Ramey at our house on Friday night. We got FreeCiv going on our Windows computer yesterday afternoon. We tried to install it on the Linux box, too, but I downloaded files I could not figure out how to install. So I will download the right files today and try again tonight. That should be fun.

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Kelly finished her spelling for the year by finishing the “I” list in Spelling Power. According to the test I gave her after she completed the list, she is now spelling at a grade level of 11.7. Christian is still a couple of weeks away from finishing his list. I am just going to continue through the lists until both of the kids have finished them all. Kelly only has levels “J” and “K” left while Christian will have “H” through K still to go.

Yesterday, both of the kids got almost all of their work completely finished up. After I got home they cleaned up the bonus room and organized their work for me to correct while I was mowing the lawn. Both Kelly and Christian worked hard yesterday and were able to get back on schedule so they are not spending so much time and frustration just trying to get caught back up. If they stick with it today, I think they will be in very good shape through the rest of the year as there are quite a few things that are falling off the list of things they need to complete. I have backed off a little on Kelly’s math at least until the teacher’s manual arrives that I had to order last week. I probably will not do that so much with Christian.

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I thought this was a great picture of Christian demonstrating the crystal radio we finished building last Friday while Kelly was off at her friend Skyler’s birthday party.

We got the kit from The Xtal Set Society. The radio worked great. We had to hook it to the tubing coming out of the hot water heater for a ground and a long extension cord that we ran out into the yard for an antenna, but we got a very strong signal from a local AM radio station. Very impressive. This is actually the second crystal radio we have built. The first one was one of the ones that uses a coil wrapped around a toilet paper tube for tuning. This kit was really more of a soldering lesson than a crystal radio lesson, but it went great. I showed Christian how to solder a part and then handled a couple of the harder joints for him, but he soldered most of it by himself. He read the instructions, populated the board, trimmed the leads, and all that other stuff, too. What a great product. We had such a good time, we have purchased an AM/FM radio kit from another company that is quite a bit more complicated. We are going to put it together this summer.

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Lauro, Jr. sent us a couple of great photographs of Kelly and Christian’s cousins, Dayanita and Laurito. I loved the one of Laurito appreciating his birthday cake! That is Dayanita playing with the doll off to the right.

We had quite a nice weekend. On Friday night and Saturday, we really did not do much. I played around with Ubuntu Linux on the home school computer while the kids played and read. On Saturday, I bought a webcam for the the computer and it worked just great. I will be able to work way better now on my Linux machine vision project although I think it will be slow going for awhile because I have so many other things on my plate.

As a summer project, the kids and I have decided to do a short claymation. Christian has been reminding me to buy modeling clay so they can design the characters. I will pick that up today at Staples during my lunch if they have that sort of thing. I think I remember seeing it there, but I could be wrong.

Lorena planted tulip and daffodil bulbs both in front of the house and in the planter in our back patio. As you can see, they are fabulous!

There are more pictures over in the gallery here.

Christian’s crystal radio set came yesterday so Christian and I started putting it together last night. I taught Christian how to solder and he did a great job. We got a great little kit from the Xtal Set Society. It features a printed circuit board with wide solder pads that are not too close to each other for people who have never soldered before. I will try to get some pictures of Christian and I working on it to post in the gallery next week. We might have broken the diode when we bent the leads, but it should not be too hard to get another one. For $14.95, the kit was a real buy. We might try another, more difficult one later on.

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Lorena took Kelly and Christian to swimming class yesterday. Then in the evening, we went to our Wednesday night bible study out in Jefferson at Steve and Elena Meyer’s home. There was time and to spare for both of the kids to get all of the homeschool finished, but Kelly has gotten a little behind again. I think it is procrastination more than anything. There are so many good things to read in the house, she tends to go off in a direction other than her programmed work. She loves the materials she is studying, but she loves a lot of other stuff, too. She should get back on track by the end of the week. We will remind her where she needs to focus. Tonight, Kelly will be going to a birthday party for her friend Skyler. It will be interesting to her what she has to say when she gets home.

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I cannot believe I did not remember to write in my blog yesterday. That is the first day in a long, long time. Everything seems to be going well. The biggest new thing is that we got our biggest order ever at Quality Corners. One of our biggest customers has given us a verbal commitment for 63,000 rosettes per week. That is a lot of rosettes for us and we will have to run a couple of shifts. Hopefully, I will be able to add even more to that when the CNC router we ordered has arrived.

Kelly and Christian had their piano adjudication at the annual Fall Festival in Salem. It sounds like it went quite well. Mrs. Hickenlooper (Jill) said she saw that the ajudicator had given Christian and “excellent”. She did not see Kelly’s result, but Lorena said that the adjudicator singled her out for praise for the Sonatina she played. They are doing well and enjoying their playing very much. We enjoy it, too. I am going to try to get full video of their spring recital to share with whomever wants to see it.

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Lorena got Kelly some new clothes with her birthday money and a new shirt for Christian. When they got dressed for meeting on Sunday, they looked so nice, we thought it would be good to take a few pictures. I put some of the pictures here, but thought one might look nice in my blog post, too.

This weekend was a little bit of a catch-up weekend although we did not really even get to much of that. Both of the kids are a little behind on a few things, but not too bad. Mostly, I want them to get caught up on a great little book titled Calico Bush they are reading aloud together. Other than that, they only need to do an experiment from RealScience-4-Kids and they are good to go. I had it in my head that we would stop with our math after finishing their current books in the Singapore Math series, but both of the kids want to press on ahead. The kids were a little bit starved for math having gotten such little good instruction in the local government schools. When they both finish their current books in the next week or two, they will have done the equivalent of a year and a half of work. We will still have about six weeks left, so that should take us through about half of one more book. They are really getting a solid grounding in the fundamentals and moving consistently ahead with lots of review, too. It will give them a good jump on their program going into the next year. Kelly will be in sixth grade next year and should be well into eighth grade math by the end of next year. Christian will be in fourth grade next year and should be well into sixth grade math by the end of next year.

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The kids were scheduled to take their standardized tests next week, but then we found out that we cannot take the tests due to a prior conflict. They are also scheduled to play in the piano festival. I decided to go ahead and reschedule the testing rather than the festival because there will be additional testing later in the year. That means the kids will only have to miss one of their swimming lessons next week, too. After today, there will only be seven weeks of school left for the year. Both Kelly and Christian have finished their Easy Grammar program. The next thing we will finish will be Spelling Power for Kelly. That will probably happen some time next week. Christian has quite a bit more spelling than Kelly, so he will not finish for another four or five weeks.

I left my cell phone at home today. We have to go over to Dean Sartain’s (our accountant) office to sign our tax forms today, so when Lorena comes over, she will bring my phone. I will be able to go and have lunch with the family. Then, Lorena is going to drop gifts off with Martha as Tony and Martha are flying Mexico this week and has room to take a few things to Lorena’s family for her. Today, Kelly is going to invite her friend Skyler from last year at government school to go to the home school play day. This will be the first time Kelly has gotten together with her home school buddies since the big party so it will be good to get a report on that.

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Now that Joe and Lyle are heading off, we have started our Wednesday night bible studies again as the gospel meetings have been shut down until this fall. We went out to Steve and Elena Meyers house in Jefferson. It was a really good study on judging and judgement from Matthew 7.

After I order Christian’s crystal radio kit yesteday, I got to thinking it would be a great thing to go ahead and get a subscription to Popular Science magazine, too. It is pretty goofy on some of its thinking on evolution, but it is generally a pretty good magazine on what is going on in the world of science explained in a popular (not too complicated) way. I think both Kelly and Christian will enjoy it a lot.

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Kelly got caught up on all her reading yesterday, but got behind in a couple of other things. They did experiment #4 in their RealScience-4-Kids, but did not answer the questions after the experiment. It was an absolutely great experiment on bases and acids using paper treated with juice created by boiling a red cabbage as pH strips. The next experiment will use the same juice. Then, they did not do their reading out loud in Christian’s book, Calico Bush. They really should be able to get all caught up over the next few days. It looks like Kelly will be finishing her Spelling Power toward the end of next week or the week after. Christian will take another three or four weeks.

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