I remember those last few weeks before the end of the school year when no one really wanted to be inside studying. The weather was too nice to be closed up in a classroom and we had been studying for a long, long time. We are in those days now. There is a little difference in that our classes are a lot more interesting than those of the government school and the materials are certainly better, but we have been studying for a long, long time. The kids are looking forward to finishing up so they can start their summer of swimming, reading whatever they want, playing with the neighbor kids, and regularly complaining of boredom. The upside to our finish date is that we will be finishing a couple of weeks ahead of the government school kids. We tried to take off the same number of days as they, but they took off so many that we just could not keep up. We started earlier than they, too. In one sense it will not be so good because the kids will be off for quite awhile with only themselves for companions until the other kids get home in the evening.
Like the last couple of summers, our only summer education tasks will be fifteen minutes piano and fifteen minutes of Mavis Beacon per day. We call it Marvis Blinkin’ from when the kids were very little and thought that was hilariously funny. There will be some other projects we will do like plant gardens and build radios, but they will be in no way mandatory. The kids will want to join the library reading program again this summer. This year is especially good because it includes the writing of book reports. Both of the kids love that sort of thing. The one down side to the summer is that we will probably be out of town during the annual library talent show that Kelly won last year. Such is life. I might have her write a letter to the editor of the Democrat Herald saying how sorry she was to have to miss the show, because she is visiting her Grandmother in Mexico. She can tell them she will be looking forward in the newspaper to see how it went and who wins.
I was talking to my boss, Jerry Entrikin, yesterday. He owns a car wash. We work talking about the possibility of putting a camera up at his carwash to read license plates so he could keep track of the times any given car goes through and when they go through. I think I am going to try to write that piece of software for him using Linux. It would be really fun and I could get going on something that could turn into a business. I think I will write it first using the Gnome desktop libraries, but eventually it will need to be an embedded system.