This is my last day of work at Rudolph (ex-August Technology). I have about a week of vacation to go with this, but will have my exit interview today. I do not know how much posting I will be able to do between now and when we get back to Oregon, but probably not much. Tonight we have Kelly’s birthday party at Craig and Rene Parish’s house. Tomorrow we have Ken Beckman, Irene Bement, and two other ladies over for lunch followed by Byron Stevens wedding. Sunday we have special meeting. After special meeting on Sunday, we will load up the truck to be ready to drive to Oregon on Monday morning. We will be very busy, but life is really quite good for us now. We are excited about our new friends here in Texas and we are excited to be going home to Oregon, too. We surely plan to go to Texas for convention now. We very much hope some of our friends from here in Texas will visit us in Oregon. They have all been great.
Year: 2006 Page 12 of 15
We went to our Spanish language special meeting last night at Geily and Ruby Gomez’ home. We had an absolutely wonderful time. We met and talked to Rhonda Stidolph for the first time. She gave us a great picture of her and her brother Lowell shortly before he died. We have really loved going to that meeting and getting to know Jose and Conchita, Geily and Ruby, Jesse and Alfredo, and all the others. We will miss them very, very much. We hope that some of them come on up to Oregon to visit us soon.
We will start packing our things away today to get ready to make the drive to Oregon. Lorena got a bunch of plastic boxes with lids to preven stuff from getting wet. I got a GPS navigation system and a pair of walkie-talkies to make the trip a little easier. I think we will wait until Saturday to start putting stuff in the car, but I will try to help with the packing tonight. I also need to get a tarp and some hold-downs to cover stuff and keep it in place in the pickup on the way back.
Lorena will get some boxes today and make arrangements to get all of our utilities turned off in Texas. I will start working on getting or utilities turned back on in Oregon. It is going to be a very busy week, but by this time on Thursday of next week, we should be able to start settling in again. We will go to the Spanish special meeting here in Mesquite tonight. Tomorrow, Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita will head back to Mexico. I am really glad for the time Lorena and the kids are able to have with them.
I got back late last night from quite a nice trip to San Francisco to meet with a big pharmaceutical project they want my company to perform for them. It will be really nice to be going back to work for ATS. Lorena and the kids had a super time going to the Firewheel mall in Garland with Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita. We are going to be extremely busy over the next few days getting ready to drive back to Oregon, going to special meetings, and having Kelly’s birthday party, so posting might continue to be a little light.
Lorena and the kids stayed with the David and Rebekah Larson last night after the day at Lake Texhoma. They will go back to the lake again today. Everyone had a fabulous time. Lorena will come home tonight before it gets to late. I hope there will be some pictures, but it sounds like everyone is having too much fun to even think about that. Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita came up from Monterrey to San Antonio with Tia Irma y Tio Juan last night. They will continue on up to Dallas to Beto and Denise’s new house today. Tomorrow, Beto and his brother-in-law Jobo are going to roast a pig in a pit for a big party tomorrow. It will be great to see everyone. Then on Sunday, we will go to the Spanish Sunday morning meeting. It should be a super time. I have to by a camper shell for the pickup tomorrow so that we can keep our stuff dry on the way home. I hope I can find a cheap one.
Lorena, Kelly, and Christian are all heading to Lake Texhoma with their friends for a couple of days. They will spend today and tomorrow at the lake, but they will come back to the Larson’s house to spend the night in between. I am sure they will have an absolutely great time. I hope they get some really great pictures to post here. As I have noted earlier, we have postponed homeschool for a couple of days and will finish this week’s work next week.
Today Mom and Christian and I are going camping with some of the friends. We can’t wait. There’s a lake, a big screen television, pool tables, hiking trails, and cabins. Poor, poor Dad. He has to be all alone in this dark and dreary apartment while we are having fun. We’ll write more when we come back.
It is hard for the kids to concentrate on homeschool when there is so much stuff going on. There is the day camping trip at Lake Texhoma with all the friends, Kelly’s birthday party at Craig and Rene Parish’s house, Special Meeting in Lewisville, our return to Oregon, Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita’s last visit from Mexico, etc., etc. Yesterday was a day of pretty bad procrastination and, really, the kids are not going to be able to do any more homeschool this week with the camping trip coming up. It is all OK though. We are finishing up on a lot of the material. There will be plenty of time to finish up the rest when we get back to Oregon.
After next week, we will have nine weeks of school left to complete. The government schools in Albany will be letting out after a half a day on June 15th so we should be able to match up to that fairly easily. If we take the first week of April to get back to Oregon, we will have the following schedule to finish up:
- April 10-14
- April 17-21
- April 24-28
- May 1-5
- May 8-12
- May 15-19
- May 22-26
- May 29-June 2
- June 5-9
- June 12-16 Special math work week
My 12th birthday is coming up. We are going to move to Oregon around that time so the friends here are going to have a little celebration for Pam Nerple and I. We have the exact same birthdays. A strange coincedence. Today I went to the Orthodontist here for the last time. The first time that I went we brought Grandpa Lauro with us but he stayed in the car. Then, I met one of the helpers whose name was Rosie. She was from the town where Grandpa Lauro is from but I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought that that was interesting so I told Mom. She told me that Grandpa was from that town near Monterrey. Today I saw Rosie but I wasn’t able to ask her anything. She went up front where Mom was sitting and Mom asked her what her last name was and who her relatives were. It turned out that she was my Grandpa’s cousin by blood! Another strange coincedence.
We are going to miss Texas and the friends here very much. We are going day camping with the friends at the end of the week and to Special Meetings the week after that, so we will get to see them a little bit more before go. Before we know it we’ll be in Oregon. Of course we can’t wait to go, but we had a wonderful time here. We should definitely keep in touch.
We have been having a little bit of a struggle deciding where we should live when we return to Albany. We can leave our current house on the market and buy something else when the house sells or take the house off the market and plan on staying in it for several more years. If we stay in the house, we want to buy another, bigger piece of property as soon as possible that we can build something on in a few years. The kids like our neighborhood, so our inclination is to stay there and buy an additional piece of property.
If we do that, we will also want to make some improvements on both the house and the lawn. We do not think we will be able to do everything we want, but the idea is to add French doors out to the lawn from the dining room, add a rap around porch, put in hardwood floors, and rearrange the whole down stairs. Currently we have a fairly small dining/living room on one end of the house and a small family room on the other. The kitchen is not laid out as well as we would like either. We want to find out whether it is possible to combine the dining/living room with the family room and move the kitchen around so that it makes more sense for the way we live.
Update: Here is the list of things we think we might want do to the house in a remodel. It will almost certainly be too expensive to do all of this, but it is a list with which we can start:
- Fence for the back and side yard
- French doors leading out to the side yard from the current living room
- A master bathroom window that opens to let the cool air flow through
- A rap-around porch (possibly with a balcony leading from the upstairs bedroom with French doors and a window from that open out from the master bedroom onto the balcony
- New clothes washer and dryer
- Remodel of the first floor to move the kitchen to one end of the house so we can have the area currently being used as the dining/living room be combined with the area being used as the family room
- Cermic tile floors for the downstairs
- Granite counter tops for the kitchen
- New refrigerator and stove (SubZero and Viking)
- A roof over the parking spot beside the house
- Built-in book shelves for the bonus room
- A bathroom and closet for the bonus room
We are going to drive back to Oregon. I am going to have to buy an inexpensive camper shell for the pickup that we can use to keep our things out of the wind and the weather on the trip back. We do not know yet which route we will take. I would really like to start back on March 28, but we will have to wait and see if we are able to get everything packed and ready to go by then. That is the Tuesday after Special Meeting here in Lewisville, Texas. We will have very busy days.
Last night, Lorena, the kids, and I all talked about our time here in Texas and how great it has been. We also talked about what we ought to do in light of my work situation, Lorena’s family in Mexico, and my family in Oregon. The situation is a little different than we expected. That is not bad, but it has made us think about all of our options and responsibilities. I am truly glad that I have such a great family that is so supportive. We will go where God leads and be happy to do it.
Update: We have decided to move back to Oregon. They want me to come back to work at the earliest possible date. They will probably want me to stop in Livermore with the family on the drive back, and stay there a week while I take on a project they are working on feverishly. It should be fun and interesting. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian are all very excited as am I.
Lorena was very excited yesterday because she was able to call and talk to Vanessa Batista. Vanessa is her very dear Puerto Rican friend from our days in South Florida. Now that we all live in Texas, we are going to plan to get together. It turns out that Carlos and Vanessa take their kids skiing (and snowboarding) just like us. That is even more reason to be sad that we did not get to go to the mountain this year. It is getting toward the time to plan for next year again. I just dropped brother Doug a line to have him help us get that set up. He is the absolute champion of that.
There might be some people out there who have no trouble at all learning mathematics, but I am not one of them. Don’t get me wrong; I love math and spend a lot of time with it in in my work. Like most people, though, to really grasp the concepts of almost all levels of math, I have to study it and work a lot of problems. Some of the problems take a long time. Last night, Kelly and I spent about an hour working a bunch of her math problems. She is doing really well, but she was very frustrated last night with the time it took to get everything done. I do not blame her. She has a super attitude and it makes me feel bad when she has those kinds of frustrations. It made me think about what it is that we are trying to accomplish with the math that we are studying. There are really a three things we are trying to do. First, there is a certain amount of arithmetic necessary to do things like balance check books, make recipes, and that sort of thing. After that, and also very important, there is the math needed for the pursuit of an academic discipline. Even the social “sciences” require an understanding of math and statistics that is much more sophisticated than the arithmetic required for day to day life. Finally, there is value in learning the discipline required to understand math.
We had a discussion with Kelly’s cousin Julia about mathematics about a month ago. Julia had a lot of credibility in confirming a point that I had tried to make several times with both Christian and Kelly. Julia is a sophomore at Darmouth right now. She explained what a great advantage it was for her to have much of the math she will need for her degree already behind her. We will have to work pretty hard to meet our goals, but right now we are on course to get both the kids through a year of calculas by the end of their sophomore year of high school. Julia told Kelly that the more math she has out of the way when she gets to college, the more she will be able to concentrate on the subjects she really wants to pursue. It is also true that she will be able to bring her math skills to bear on those same subject even thought might be only a peripheral advantage.
At any rate, both Kelly and Christian are doing great with their math, we are on course with our plan, and the work load is not so onerous that they will get discouraged. I am going to reevaluate the work load this weekend as I do some restructuring of their entire schedule. Lorena and I both are really very pleased with their progress.
Lorena and I had a discussion last night about how the kids are doing with their homeschool. They understand the material very well and are learning a lot. One thing we thought might help improve both their enjoyment of homeschool and their free time is some fairly minor modifications in the way we organize the work for them. Since they arrived in Texas, we have given them a list of what they need to get done in the morning, a list of what they need to get done in the afternoon, and a list of what I will do with them at night. Of course, some of the stuff is more fun than other of the stuff and some is harder and some is easier. We talked with both Kelly and Christian and between us all, we decided it might be a help to put down the order in which the work should be completed. Each one of the kids sat with me and looked at today’s work. We decided what should be done in each section of the day and then put each section in order, too. I think that is going to work out quite well. If it does, I will set up next weeks schedule by the order and time it should be accomplished during the day rather than by subject areas. The rest of the week will be a good experiment to see if that is a good idea.
Uncle Lynn with Lynncito and Lynncitos new baby brother
He does not have a name yet, but he is a substantial little guy. He weighed in at over nine pounds. Rosalinda told me that they think his first name will be Neri. Neri is Papa Lynn’s middle name and the name of the first Mexican astronaut, Neri Bela. I really like that name a lot. We are very excited to see little Neri and are planning a trip to Mexico as soon as school lets out in June.
We had a great weekend. Kelly spent Friday night with her friend Ethne Sorenson over in Rockwall while Lorena, Christian, and I stayed home. We decided to get Christian a model to build as we all get a little stir crazy in the apartment if there is nothing to do. He chose a model of the Cutty Sark, a very famous sailing ship. We got all the glue and paint, too, so he got a good start on it. He is following all the instructions and doing a great job. This is his third or fourth model, so his skills are getting much better.
We went to dinner at Ryan and Kari Enge’s house on Sunday afternoon. Kelly and Christian have been big fans of Tin Tin for a long time. I told them about the comic books, Asterix and Obelix, but Kari had some of them so they were able to read them for the first time. We had quite a nice afternoon.
I worked late last night, so we had to work pretty hard to get all the homework corrected when I got home. The kids had gotten just about everything finished, so it was not, too bad. One of my buddies at work went over to the place where we will be moving in a couple of weeks to look around. He took a movie of my new office. It has windows on two sides and a door. Amazing. I have always lived in Dilbert style cube cities so this will be a great new change. When Lorena and the kids and I drove by the builiding last week, we noticed there are a good number of stores to which I will be able to walk at lunch time. I really like to get some exercise at lunch, but it is almost impossible to do that where we are now without getting hit by a car. We have no big plans for the weekend other than that we are going over to the house of some of our friends after Sunday morning meeting for lunch. They are a very nice couple named Ryan and Kari Enge. Ryan is an engineer at Hewlett Packard and Kari teaches English as a second language to elementary age children. It should be really nice to get to know them a little better. We are looking forward to being at the Spanish language meeting again after having been gone from there for a month to be able to take our Indian friend, Lavan Jampa to English language meetings that he could understand. We still miss Lavan.
Yesterday was the last day of swimming lessons for Christian and Kelly. The lessons really were not so great here, so we have decided to go ahead and put them on the swim team. It is only two days per week during the winter and that way, they will get a lot more exercise. As soon as the five day per week practices start later in the spring, we will get them into something else until the program goes back to two days per week in the fall. Other than that, the only thing going on is that Lorena and the kids will get together with Lisa, Eliana, and Elliot Paek and another mother and homeschools at the Library in Plano. After meeting at the library, they will have some lunch together before the go home.
Unas fotos nuevos del guapismo primo Lynncito! Gracias Tia Rosalinda.
The kids worked hard yesterday and got everything done without a battle. Both Christian and Kelly are coming to the end of both their Easy Grammar and their Spelling Power for the year. They are about finished with their Wordly Wise, too, but I went ahead and got them some new books because they really want to move ahead with their vocabulary work. I think a little of that was motivated by the fact that some of the other homeschool kids were doing Wordly Wise books that were pretty advanced. The books are not too onerous in terms of the amount of work required per day and they do a pretty good job of teaching vocabulary. The only real downside to them is they have a hard left-wing agenda in some of their text. Kelly and Christian are really pretty good now about picking up on that sort of thing. It gives us an opportunity to discuss why it is so important to get all the facts and present them truthfully rather than preach a position based on incomplete and even wrong information.
Al, Michele, Anthony, Nathan, and Olivia are all up on Mount Bachelor skiing this week. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah, David and Gladys Christie, Ron and Donna Floyd, Luis, Susan, and Brett Rodriguez, and the Douma family who go go to meeting with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah will all be up there for the week. We are all quite sad we could not be there, too, but we knew we had the choice of moving to Texas or not going skiing. We could not do both. We made the right decision. Who knows whether Lavan Jampa would have been able to get to meeting or Beto, Denise, and their family, either. Nevertheless, we are going to do the best we can to make sure we can go next year. In the meantime, Al Rizos has invited us to San Diego this summer for a week to got to surfing camp. We will try to do that, too. Christian made the comment that the skiing is great, but the time spent with all of their friends is be best part about being there. We all agreed with him.