Year: 2006 Page 13 of 15

Lorena’s cousin Beto and his wife Denise

Christian with Beto and Denise’s daughter Dayana

We are going into a three day weekend. I think I will go ahead and have the kids continue to do their homeschool. I will try to work on a few projects around the house. It would also be nice to be able to go somewhere like a museum, but I have to get my taxes done and rework the Quality Corners website, so we will have to wait and see. We will have quite a busy weekend. Tonight, Beto and his wife, Denise, and their baby Dayana are coming over for dinner. Who knows when they will get there, but it should be very nice. Then, on Saturday, Valentine, Blanca, and Lili are going to drive up from Houston to Joel and Susana’s house, so we will meet them over there. Finally, on Sunday we will pick up Lavan Jampa to take to meeting for the last time. We are planning to go out for some Indian food after meeting then bring him back to our apartment after that. Hopefully, Monday will be a fairly lazy day. I believe the kids will still have their swimming lesson, so that should give me some time to work on my projects.

August Technology, the company for which I work just got purchased by a Rudolph Technology.  They are going to move us from the rented building we currently occupy to another building they own.  We August Technology Texas employees are going over to our new office this afternoon to have lunch with the Rudolph engineers and listen to the official announcement via WebEx and phone conference.  From what I have heard the place is very nice.  It is right across the street from UT Dallas, there are lots of restaurants around, and they have safer places to walk than where we are currently located.  It is a little further from our apartment, so I will not be able to go home for lunch so easily.  Maybe it will help me rethink where we will buy our house, too.  I hate the thought of switching meetings.

We all ran down to Panda Express to have our Valentine’s Day dinner rather than have Lorena cook at home last night.  It was really nice, but we had to work fast when we got home to catch up on our homeschool.  I looked at the Math the kids are doing a little more closely and found that I was a little off, so I adjusted our chart.  It looks like we will be able to slow down a little by the end of next year.  The idea is that if I get the kids a year ahead of the program, then they will be able to finish first year calculus by the end of their sophomore year in high school.  After that, they can take the same class again for credit at the community college their junior year in high school.  They will be well prepared for the math part of the SAT their senior and can even take differential equations and linear algebra if they are so inclined.

Christian started into the second half of the fifth grade math program this week. He seems to be doing well with it. It will be interesting to see how he does when we get to some of the story problems that require logic that is not as obvious as some of the previous work he has done. At this rate, we should be through fifth grade this year. There is really a good chance that he will get started into the sixth grade math program before the year is out. Kelly will finish the entire primary math program today or tomorrow, so we will be moving into Junior High School Math toward the end of the week. I want to get them through the calculas at home and then have them take it for college credit at the community college as the will give them the advantage of having on of their harder subjects out of the way before they start into college full time. The way the program is going, we will have one more year for Kelly and two more years for Christian at our current rapid pace. After that we will slow down and take it one year at a time so we can enjoy it a little more and concentrate on really getting them a good understanding. Of course all of this planning depends on circumstances and the will of God. That being said, our current math trajectory is the following:

Christian
Grade 5: Through 6th grade – Singapore Primary Math 5B, 6A, and 6B
Grade 6: Through 7th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 1
Grade 7: Through 8th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 2
Grade 8: Through 9th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 3
Grade 9: Through 10th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 4
Grade 10:Through 11th grade – Saxon Calculus
Grade 11:Calculus at the community college
Grade 12:Differential equations and linear algebra at the community college

Kelly
Grade 7: Through 8th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 2
Grade 8: Through 9th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 3
Grade 9: Through 10th grade – Singapore New Elementary Math 4
Grade 10:Through 11th grade – Saxon Calculus
Grade 11:Calculus at the community college
Grade 12:Differential equations and linear algebra at the community college

We had a pretty quiet Friday night and Saturday, but on Sunday, we had a VERY full day. We picked up Lavan to take to meeting with us on Sunday morning. Then, we went to have lunch at David and Rebekah Larson’s house in McKinney. We had a wonderful lunch and the kids played like maniacs for three hours until gospel meeting. After gospel meeting, we took the Larson’s home, then ran down to a place called the Plano Tavern for supper with a group of about forty of the friends. It was an absolutely great time. The Hockersmiths, the Lacocks, the Sorensons, the Swansons, and a bunch of others were there.

Lorena’s sister-in-law, Rosalinda, just sent us some pictures that Grandpa Lauro had taken when he was up here visiting us.  Some of the one’s we enjoyed the most were of the Larson family who invited us to dinner and then played their violins for us.

Twin violins

I have not written much on our Wednesday night bible study group. I thought I should comment on it a little today. It is an exceptional group. Last night we had a birthday party after meeting for Rene Parish. It turns out that once per month, we have a birthday party, complete with cake and presents, for everyone in the meeting who has a birthday during that month. It is a lot of fun. It is obvious that everyone in the meeting cares about each other and takes responsibility for being there. Dale Sorenson is currently working in Ft. Worth. Every Wednesday, he has to drive all the way across Dallas in the worst traffic of the day to get home, barely in time to turn around and come half way back to come to meeting. I think he has missed meeting only once since we have been here and that was for special circumstances. The meetings themselves are pretty exceptional, too. People obviously make an effort in their preparations.

On another note, Quality Corners lost its bid to win some new business with Orepac in Phoenix. It really would have been nice to have a good chunk of new business from them, but it sounds like they are getting their product from a local supplier who does not pay a whole lot of attention to quality so the price is pretty low. It is not the kind of business we like, but it was still disappointing. I think we should offer one of our current distributors for the area a great price on our specially manufactured cheap base corners and try to win some of that business away from them at the end user level.

Christian and Kelly are going to their second day of swimming lessons today.  It is good to have them in something where they get a little more exercise.  They have not been getting much since we moved into our apartment.  They put both of them in level 3/4 of a six level program.  That is a little bit lower than they might have been in Oregon, but I really think it is all right.  At this point, we have them in swimming more for the exercise than for the technique.  I would like them to continue in swimming lessons for a year or two more so that they are very, very comfortable in the water.  That is one of the best gifts Grandma Sarah gave to us kids.  All of us became good swimmers and have enjoyed it all our lives.  Actually, it would be a good thing for me to start swimming as evercise.  I think I will check that out.

Quality Corners needs to decide whether we should put a manufacturing facility in North Carolina next to one of our larger customers.  There is a very good opportunity there.  The idea is that our customer would supply us with raw materials.  We would machine, assemble and package them into into finished product and send them back to the customer ready to ship to large national home improvement chains. The advantages in setting up an operation that way are the lower end cost for our customer based on their ability to provide inexpensive raw materials, fast lead times and reduced inventory due to the close proximity to the customer, and a closer relationship with our customer.  There also might be an opportunity to work the customer to win new business not currently available to them based on restricitions placed on them by their current customers.

The difficult part of this is that I am the logical person to go set up and run that operation.  We will have to think about how to do that without uprooting the family too much again.  My first thought is to get an apartment in North Carolina and keep our house in Texas.  We will have to have some discussions about how we can maintain some continuity.  Maybe it will work out best just to go ahead and make the move, but that would get us far away from Lorena’s family again and North Carolina gets pretty cold in the winter so it would not be that great a place for my folks to winter.  God has his hand in all this.  In the end, he will work it all out.

We went to the library on Saturday morning and were able to get a library card to check out books.  The last time we went, we did not have a utility receipt with our apartment address, so they would not give us a card.  Five books is the first time limit for check out, so we did not get as many books as ususal, but both of the kids were able to get a book they can use to start on their big research reports.  Christian also got a book on plants and Kelly got a reading book.  After the library, we went to a nursery in Plano.  It was a nice little nursery, but not so satisfying after having lived in Oregon for so long.  Christian got all the materials he needed to do some cuttings:  Potting soil, root hormone, and some containers.  When we got back to the apartment, he went out and took some cuttings of what I think was some kind of cedar.  He planted them and we are going to see what happens.

On Sunday, we went to pick up Lavan Jampa for meeting.  After meeting, we meet our workers, Marilyn Frye and Andrea Jensen and another man with whom we meet on Sunday morning named John.  He is a nephew of Ulrich Eberhart and a cousin to Rob Eberhart.  Ulrich is the man who came from Germany as a young man not to long after World War II and worked for my father in his sawmill in Cottage Grove.  Uncle Ron sponsered him to come over.   He is married to a woman Dad knew as a little girl when he was in basic training for the Army in Alabama in around 1948.

After lunch, we went and hung out in a big mall in Frisco to watch the iceskaters and do some window shopping with Lavan until meeting started.  After meeting we talked to Ron Lacock.  He had invited Lavan to lunch last week and while they were having lunch, Ross Perot came by, so Lavan was able to meet him.

This post will be a bit of a departure from what we normal discuss in this blog.  Ron Voorhees, my dad, and I own a small business in Oregon called Quality Corners.  We manufacture specialty millwork products including rosettes, plinth blocks, round base corners and that sort of thing.  We need a way to inspect all of those charts, but because we are competing directly with China, we cannot pay very much for our solution.  I have to come up with an automatic inspection system to assure that the end products going to the customers are as perfect as we can possibly make them.  My idea is to come up with an inexpensive, Linux based visual inspection system, possibly using a webcam to capture the images.  After I finish my stock analysis program, that is what I believe I will develop next.

Last night I uploaded a picture of our friend Lavan Jampa from Bangalore.  Here it is:

Lavan Jampa from Bangalore, India with Christian, Lorena, and Kelly

I also put up a couple pictures of the family and our meeting here.

Last night, Marilyn Frye and Andrea Jensen (our ministers) came over for dinner at our apartment along with Lorena’s cousin Beto.  We had a great time.  Lorena cooked a super chicken dinner, the kids quoted their verses and we had a nice bible study.  Beto’s wife is down in Mexico because they have a four year old nephew down there who is on life support and will probably not live much longer.  We really hope that Beto will start coming over more often.  Our friend Lavan Jampa from Bangalore was supposed to come over, too, but had to work late.  We hope he will be able to come at a later date.