Year: 2005 Page 3 of 12

We met with a real estate lady last night named Candice Orange. She owns a John L. Scott real estate franchise in Corvallis and sells a lot of houses in our area. We will sign the papers to put our house on the market on Saturday afternoon. We like Candice a lot. She seems to know what she is doing and has sold a lot of houses in our area including several in our exact neighborhood. We will have to do a lot of work to get ready, but she was optimistic that we could sell the house quickly for a good price.

I talked to my boss yesterday about when I will leave my current job at ATS. I am hoping that my last day will be Friday, October 21. I might stay a little longer than that if they really need me, but I think it is best for both of us that we just move on. I had a great talk with, Jim Sheldon, the Vice President of our division as well as a brief discussion with the general manager of this location. Both of them said I was welcome to come back here any time. My boss, Anthony Pettigrew said the same thing. When Jim gets his system into place here, this is going to be an amazing place. I have perdicted before that it will be the biggest business in Corvallis within the next five years if they stay on track. I would love to come back here some day.

We bought a new Toyota Tundras pickup yesterday. The agency drove it up from Grants Pass last night and will put aftermarket cruise control into it around noon today, so we will not be able to get our hands on it until about noon. We are quite excited about the whole deal. Grandpa Milo will get my old pickup as he gave his old pickup to Cayatano, his Mexican worker, whose car had blown up. That was awful nice of him. I will try to put a picture up here if I get a chance. Grandpa Milo’s new (to him) pickup is the one I got for Lorena right after we got married. We are glad it is staying in the family as we have some pretty strong emotional attachments to it.

I received an offer letter from August Technology yesterday for a position as a Senior Software Engineer at their Plano, Texas research and development facility. I accepted the offer and turned in my resignation at ATS Oregon. I have to be in Texas working in thirty days. We will be very, very busy during that time. I mowed the lawn and talked to a real estate agent last night about selling the house for us. I spoke to Mary Simmons, one of our ministers who is currently working with Spanish speakers in the Dallas area earlier today. She was great. We will probably get to go to a Spanish speaking Sunday morning meeting. Mary acted very happy to hear from us. She knows Martha and Tony, too. We certainly hope we can be a help when we get there.

I am planning to buy a new little pickup to drive to Texas as soon as I finish my time at ATS. Lorena will stay in Oregon with the kids until the house gets sold. Our hope is to be able to sell the house before our Puerto Vallarta vacation in early December so that I can fly up from Texas to fly down to Puerto Vallarta with the family. On return from the vacation, we would all drive down to Texas in the minivan together. If we sell the house fairly quickly, Lorena, Kelly, and Christian would stay with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah until Puerto Vallarta. It is all in God’s hands, really.

I received an email last night from my future potential boss. He said that an offer for a job in Dallas should come today as soon as the corporate office decides what kind of housing change package to provide. Of course, Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I are excited to make a decision on all of this, so we can hardly wait. We want to get on with the hard work of selling the house and moving. Or not. As yesterday, I will try to update this post today if and when the offer comes in. I hope it comes quickly because I am being scheduled for a trip to Salt Lake City on Wednesday to discuss a big job we are doing at my current job. It would not make sense for me to go if I have turned in my resignation.

I have noticed that when I changed the gallery, all the pictures in the blog disappeared because the links changed. I was going to go back and fix them all, but I think I will just leave it as it is because all the images are available in the photo gallery anyway. I will add new photos as they accumulate.

This weekend was absolutely packed. On Friday afternoon, I flew out from Eugene to Dallas, Texas, arriving at my hotel a little after midnight. My potential new boss, picked me up at 9:30 on Saturday morning for a four hour interview with himself and the principle software engineer. Then we went to lunch. They seemed like great folks. At the very least, I had a great time meeting them. I am supposed to have an offer in my email before lunch. I will post an update as soon as I make a decision about going. Hopefully that will be later today.

The Lorena and the kids stayed with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah for the weekend and had an absolutely great time. They swam, ate, played games with their aunts and cousins, and generally had an absolutely super time. I am sure we will see them a lot when we are in Dallas. Probably more than we saw them here. They are so busy, we hardly ever see them.

On Sunday, Lorena and the kids got up early to came back to Albany to go to Sunday morning meeting with me at Jim and Joann Waldo’s house. Before meeting, Joe Layman called. He and Jay Wicks are going to go to our house to stay with us on Saturday and Sunday this week. It will be great to have some time with Jay before we all head different directions. He will not go back to preach in Africa until this time next year. After Sunday morning meeting, we went to a potluck at the Ramsdell’s house in Jefferson. Then, at gospel meeting, Tom, Stacey, and Seth Pedginski showed up so we went out for ice cream with them. They seem to be doing absolutely great. Seth has really grown up. Both Kelly and Christian rode with them to Baskin Robbins from the meeting and enjoyed their time with him. It is great to get together with the Pedginskis because they are so upbeat about life in general, love to talk about just about anything, and always have some spiritual thoughts, too!

I fly at noon to Dallas, Texas. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian will drive up to Portland to stay with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah on both Friday and Saturday nights. They will drive back down on Sunday morning to go to meeting and the potluck at the Ramsdell’s house. It is always hard to be away from the family, even for a day or two. It is even harder now that I have not had to travel for quite awhile. I am so thankful that I have been able to spend so much one on one time with both Christian and Kelly for homeschool. That Christian has professed and that we are all now serving God is a tremendous blessing. The key now, is that we all remain faithful to the end.

I missed our gospel meeting last night. I think I am coming down with either a bad cold or the flu. Lorena and the kids went to the meeting as usual. When the returned, I was already a sleep so I did not talk to them after the meeting. When I got up to go to work a little after 4:00 this morning, I found a wonderful set of meeting notes waiting for me on the upstairs bannister. Kelly had taken them for me and they were truly amazing. I read through them. It is amazing how much she gets so much of what is said down on paper. It is even more amazing how well she writes as a sixth grader.

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An era is over. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah have moved off of their farm in Newberg to a beautiful two bedroom apartment in Lake Oswego. It is a little bit hard to imagine, but we are all happy for them and believe it was a great move. There are still quite a few things to get moved out of the old place, but the lifestyle change has already started. Lorena is going to meet them over at Newberg on Friday to pick up a few things and that will be it.

I am in a holding pattern right now until I find out a little more about our future this weekend in Dallas. Lorena and I are making contingency plans about logistics, but that is about all the further we can take it until things are a little more solidified.

Lorena went to her accounting class last night so Christian, Kelly, and I were home alone together all evening. The kids are both doing great on their homeschool programs. The Sonlight literature and history programs are absolutely stellar as is the Singapore Math programs. The way we use the two programs continue to evolve. We have made some modifications to the way we are doing the reading part of the Sonlight programs. After reading on any given day, I always had the kids explain to me what they had read, but they are turning into quite good writers. They generally have two books going at a time. One of each of their books is a read aloud book while the other is a book they are supposed to read to themselves. Because all three of us like to read aloud together, we have chosen to read only Christian’s books out loud. That is so that Christian will not have to hear something now from Kelly’s program that he will just have to read again later. We felt like it would be good for the kids to do a little more writing, too, so the kids are writing a synopsis of what they read in their second book for me to review each day. That leaves Kelly’s read aloud book. I am having her give a detailed oral synopsis of what she read. It is all working out quite well.

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I worked all day Saturday, but we had a nice day on Sunday. We went to Conrad Tull’s house for Sunday morning meeting, then to Tangent for gospel meeting at 6:00 in the evening. We were a little bit sad because Tim was sick and could not go along with us. I have a very busy week this week and will fly to Dallas, Texas on Friday night to meet with some people on Saturday. If it all works out, there could be some dramatic changes in the lives of our little family.

Lorena is taking Financial Accounting from Linn-Benton Community college, but the class is in Bexel Hall at Oregon State. That is the main business college building there where I took many of my classes. At any rate she is feeling like quite the college coed these days. She is going to take Managerial Accounting next term and her last math class during spring term. At this rate, she will have here Associate Degree in a couple of years. I am quite proud of her. She started out in very remedial English and has taken all of her English and writing classes except Technical Report writing.

I am very much looking forward to the latest version of Ubuntu (5.10) to come out. The prerelease version is already available, but I am going to wait for the release version due to my current massive work load. When it arrives, I want to get the new computer for which we have been planning to go along with it. This time, I am going to set the machine up only for homeschool. We are currently running Fedore Core 4, but Ubuntu just appears to be getting better and better.

Homeschool has been going pretty well lately. The kids have been enjoying their vocabulary program, “Wordly Wise”, but I think we will try to find a different one next year because of some fairly obnoxious left wing political correctness in parts of the material. It would really be OK to a certain extent, but a lot of it does not even appear to be based in reality. At any rate, Kelly and I talk about it. She is pretty good at spotting the nonsense, but it is such a waste of time to have to deal with that kind of thing.

After a long hiatus, I am back. My posting might still be a little spotty because things are still pretty crazy at work. Since I last posted, Lorena has started an accounting class, Kelly and Christian have started their piano, choir, and swimming classes and we celebrated my fiftieth birthday. Over at Quality Corners, we are starting in earnest on our new style decorative rosettes.

Apple rosette

Everyone to whom we have showed these things really loves them, but it is going to take quite an investment to get them into volume production. We really think it might increase our business dramatically.

Our agenda is pretty fixed for the next little while, but some of our projects are changing. The biggest homeschool project is to try to get the new Ubuntu Linux up and going on a new computer as soon as a) the install disks are available in October, and b) we can afford a new computer. The normal stuff includes our bi-annual family week long vacation with Lorena’s family in Mexico in December and our annual week long homeschool ski trip to Mount Bachelor with the Rizos in March.

I am going to be very busy at work for the next month or so, so I expect my blogging to be pretty sparse up until Thanksgiving. Everything is going well in school. Kelly and Christian are both finishing a half year unit (that was partially started last year) and will be moving on to another unit in Singapore Math. Igniting Your Writing and Wordly Wise are the very interesting new sets of materials we are enjoying the most. As always, the Sonlight reading and history are also stellar.

As soon as I am a little bit more confident that I have a stable work situation, Lorena and I will probably buy a cabin in the mountains in Idaho. We do not think that we will really use it very much, but will keep it as an investment. There is one up close to a town called Lowman that is unfinished that we can get for a fairly good price. I am thinking about buying it if I can be sure that I will have work over the next four or five years. Maybe Quality Corners will take off to the point where I can work there.

Christian’s birthday party was quite rambunctous. The party consisted of kids from the neighborhood. All of them are government school kids. As are many parties of homeschool kids, it consisted of a variety of ages from five to eleven, and about half girls and half boys. There was a huge difference in the attitude and respect of these kids and the kids from a very similar party Kelly had on her birthday. The only difference being that there were only homeschoolers at Kelly’s party. It was very much an eye-opener for us.

The big event is on Saturday. Christian’s friend Micah will be coming down from Beaverton. I will try to get some pictures up after the party is over. I will continue to be a little overextended for the next month or two, but should be slowing down come December.

We got a note from Cousin Julia this morning. She is a student (and rugby player — a star I am sure) at Darmouth. She sent a great article from the Dartmouth on homeschoolers getting admitted there. The accommodations Dartmouth makes during admissions for the homeschooler’s is very cool. Hopefully, Kelly and Christian will now be able to write to their cousin on a more regular basis.

I am about to jump into a huge project at work, so my writing will continue to be sparse until I complete it. In the meantime, we are working on getting ready for Christian’s big birthday party on Saturday and we are thinking about getting a vacation home in Idaho as an investment with our college savings. It is very close to a nice fishing river. I will find out more over the next few days.

Well, we had a relatively quiet Labor Day weekend. Christian turned ten on Monday. We went to Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah’s house to celebrate with our entire family. It was quite nice. The real party though, is going to be next Saturday. That is when he will get all his presents and the kids in the neighborhood will be over to party.

The kids are getting into the swing of homeschool now. Yesterday went quite well. We start into a three day weekend tomorrow, but it feels like we are in some kind of a holding pattern. I do not know why. God truly is good to us, but for some reason, it feels like the other shoe is about to drop. I spoke to my cousin Merle for about an hour and a half last night. It was the first time in a long time that I had spoken to him at length. It was great.