Month: October 2006

Homeschool day 31 of 180

The family went to the aquarium at Newport on Saturday. It was, as usual, just great. After the aquarium, hung out on Nye Beach for an hour or so, then had lunch and made it back to Albany before 5:00. It was very nice. The weather was great, we talked and laughed with each other, saw some cool things, and just generally had a relaxing time. We have decided that we will take Lorena’s parents and brothers with their families their when they come to visit. It was that good!

Anyway, here’s my question: With one of my math problems, I had to use a protractor tofind 50* to make the angled part of a rhombus, but I did not have one, so I made a 0* angle from the line I started with, then, from the same point, then I drew a 90* angle straight down, each of them being 3 cm long. Then I drew a line across from the tips of the other two lines, found the middle of the 4 cm line, and drew it to the point where the other two lines started. If I am correct that line was 45*. Then I took the remaning 5*, and divided them into 2, which eaquled 0.6 . After that I measured down 0.6 cm from the intersection between the 4 cm line and the 45* line, which gave me *50. I was wondering if this was correct for future reference.

Homeschool day 30 or 180

Yesterday was an amazingly productive day. The kids did almost all of their homeschool on time with few errors. Lorena did some stellar work on the bonus room and studied her calculas. I made two fairly large breakthroughs on my program to inspect rosettes and enjoyed a very real sense of accomplishment. It was another good day. I think maybe some of this had to do with trying to focus a little more on living in the present. We are in the middle of a very busy time in our lives right now. This would normally create a lot of unnecessary stress in my life. It surely seems to be helpful to attitude to just concentrate on and enjoy what needs to get done now. That is almost a platitude, but it seems to work. The really grand part of this is that, as my spirit improves, so does life in our family.

Homeschool day 29 of 180

Mondays and Wednesdays are very busy in the Chapman household this term. In the morning, the kids go to swimming lessons, in the afternoon, Lorena goes to her calculas class, then on Monday evenings Lorena and Christian go to their cubscout den meeting, and on Wednesday evenings we go to our weekly bible study. Yesterday was particularly busy. Between when I got home from work and started in on the homeschool, Spencer Cannon called. He wanted to know if it would be a good day for him to come over to mow the lawn. I told him come on over. His dad, Mike, brings him and then sits in his pick-up and reads the newspaper while Spencer mows the lawn. I did not have too much time and barely got the homeschool work finished (kind of), but Mike and I have such a good time just hanging out and talking that I could not resist going out and shooting the breeze with him for awhile (note to us: We need to have Mike, Rhonda, and family over SOON!). They stuck around a little while extra because the talk was interesting and we had to wait for Lorena to come home to pay Spencer because I could not find the checkbook.

Then just as we got in the house after Lorena wrote Spencer a check, Nancy R. called and said the meeting would be at their house tonight because of a series of unfortunate events at Steve and Elena’s house. Mark and Nancy’s house is further from us than Steve and Elena’s so we had to leave for meeting earlier than usual to get there on time. Nobody had eaten anything since lunch time and there was not really any time to fix anything so we drove through the drive-through at Jack-In-the-Box. We were running late, but got into a grand conversation with the Mexican kid working the window at Jack-in-the-Box about his very good English skills, his plans to go to Oregon State to study Mechanical Engineering, and his upbringing in Oaxaca and Mexico City. We got to meeting on time and is was one of those really awesome meetings because it was out of the usual and the workers just happened to be there. We stuck around and talked to everyone for at least 45 minutes after meeting.

All in all, it was a very satisfying day.

Question of the day: I am reading in Leviticus right now. It surely seems that Lev 19:28 could apply to tatoos. Could that be possible? It says, “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. “

Homeschool day 28 of 180

Jim and JoAnn just got back from visiting Washington D.C. with Dean and Phyllis Sartain. It sounds like they had a great time. Our whole family is quite envious because they actually got to see George W. Bush get into his helicopter! You can read about it in JoAnn’s blog comment here. There certainly is a big hole in our little Sunday morning meeting when they are gone. She was right that we really need to take the kids to Washington D.C. to see the sights soon. Also, we need to go down to Mexico City and see the sights there, too. They are both amazing cities that have seen lots of bloody battles and have centuries of history of which our family is a product.

JoAnn made a particularly insightful statement about the friendliness of the people in Washington D.C. I had that same experience when I went there. In fact, I was kind of shocked coming back to Oregon and finding that the culture was really quite aloof. I think that is less true once you get out of the Willamette Valley, but it saddened me. We were reminded of all this again when we went to Texas for six months. The good part of all that, though was that it has made us even more appreciative of the warmness of our friends here and throughout the world.

Everytime I start having doubts about our homeschool, I get confirmation that we are doing the right thing. This time it is a blog post at World Magazine‘s website.

Homeschool day 27 of 180

I am a part owner in a small wood parts manufacturing business in Idaho called Quality Corners. Mostly, we manufacture small wood millwork parts such as rosettes, plinth blocks, and round base corners for houses. It is definitely a low-tech manufacturing operation. Our biggest competition is from China. Initially, we were only able to compete by offering to ship small quantities of our products on short notice–something that is very difficult to do from China. Our price was higher, but for rush orders, it made sense to buy from us. Then, by improving our automation, we were able to offer a price that attracted a large customer very close to us in Idaho. It made sense for a couple of reasons. Our customer’s trucks drove by our factory several times per day so we did not have to charge for shipping. In addition, the order sizes increased sufficiently that our costs were reduced due to economy of scale efficiency improvements.

Now, it is about a year later and we are working on ways to attract other customers. We have spoken with several other of our customers and found that we do not have to go much lower to be able to win their business. We have a reputation for great quality and on time delivery. All of the individual steps in the part machining process are automated, but we mostly finish the and package the parts by hand. Currently, we are building an automated finish line and semi-automated packaging line. When those machines are finished we plan to tie all of the individual elements of the process into a continuous flow manufacturing line that will drive the cost low enough that China will have little or no labor advantage. We hope this will allow us to win more market share and grow our business.

Our customers have identified several items they say they would love to buy from us for the right price, but that they are currently buying in China. Our plan is to consolidate our position with our current product lines before we try take on these new items. The new items will require larger capital outlays than we have taken on in the past, but with the experience we have at controlling our growth to this point will serve us well with these new and bigger opportunities.

I was reading in Matthew 24 today and I was wondering whether Jesus was referring to 70 AD or the coming of Christ in the future? Today we go to piano lessons and tommorow there is meeting, swimming, and Mom’s calculus class. I think that Mrs. Waldo came back from her trip to Washington D.C. and hopefully she will tell us all about it tommorow night! Mom is doing quite well in her class, and Christian is doing wonderfully in Cub Scouts. Maybe Dad will post up his uniform photo today. I had better get back to work!

Homeschool day 26 of 180

One thing I love and envy very much about my wife is that she is much better at living in the present than I. I am always focusing on some goal that is some place in the future. Jesus, in his “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 6:24 says “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” I love that verse, but struggle greatly with its implementation in my own life. It is funny because, in looking back over the last year, one of the great highlights was sitting down each night during the summer to listen to classical music and draw with Christian and Kelly. There was really no end goal in all of that other than spending some time with the kids. I think we need to find something exactly like that for during the school year. Not only for the kids sake, but for my own.

The reason I started thinking about this is that our homeschool can get too serious. It got to thinking about what I could do to get back to the enjoyment of learning. When I am enjoying myself, the kids really enjoy themselves more, too. Really, the quality of their homeschool life very much depends on my attitude as much as anything else. If I am busy thinking about what to do about the future or my own goals, our day-to-day homeschool efforts suffer. That is also true for my projects. If I think too much about something that will not happen for months or years, I will not get anything done today. Today I want to live in the moment. Hopefully, the whole family will benefit from that.