Month: August 2007 Page 1 of 2

The last I heard from Bryan was that he was at -12 in our diet competition.  I was at about that at one time, too, but with the move, I did not take any time to think about dieting.  Now that I have been here for several months and with homeschool’s start returning us to a routine, I am back in the fight.  I am now at -6.  Hopefully Bryan, who is at convention, will gain a few pounds over the next couple of days so we can turn this back into more of a two-sided contest again.  Lorena has signed us up at a gym and I hope to start working out there tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

It looks like I kind of blew it.  I thought we were supposed to go to one of our annual church conventions this weekend, but it turns out that it is not until next weekend and then another one two weeks after that.  That will be great because, now Christian and I can go back to work on our hovercraft.  We are also thinking of making a carpet covered cat tower.  That should be a lot of fun.

In the meantime, check out Christian’s latest post at his Nerd-How blog.  It is really quite cool.  Eventually it will have a video.  I walked through some of the posts for the first time and it is getting WAY cool.  There are some cool listings of some cool topics on the bottom right of the page.  He has to make sure as much of his stuff appears on the main page as possible.  I do not know what that is not happening right now, but when he gets that worked out, he will have the start to a truly amazing blog.  Especially for an eleven year old.

We got up at a little before six this morning to see an eclipse of the moon.  It was very cool, but it went down behind a house before it started coming out of the eclipse, so we missed that.  School is going very, very well.  This year we seem to be a lot more organized than in years past.  The kids are getting up at 6:00 am, so they are starting about an hour and a half earlier than last year.  They are finishing up by 12:30 or 1:00 everyday, even when they have guitar or piano.  Lorena, Kelly, and Christian went down to our club last night to work out for the first time.  There was not much for Christian to do until Lorena and Kelly finished being on the machines because you have to be thirteen to work on the equipment.  After they finished working on the machines, Kelly and Christian swam laps for awhile.  It was great, but we are going to have to figure out a way to keep Christian for sitting around doing nothing while Lorena and Kelly work out.

I got stuck at the computer all weekend this weekend.  We are getting ready to start using the programs I have written since I started my job here in North Carolina, to replace what was there previously, so there is a good amount of pressure to get things right.  There will be a big test of the software in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, Lorena took Kelly, Christian, and Kasey all to Denton to help get ready for our church convention.  The kids met a bunch of new kids and Lorena had a good long talk with our very good friend, Terrie.  We have decided that we really need to get together with them as much as we can while we are here in North Carolina.  She has an amazing attitude of kindness and a desire to do the right thing for her kids.  We are looking forward to spending some time with them at the two upcoming conventions here in North Carolina, too.

Now that we are getting up at 6:00 am to read the bible in the morning, Kelly and Christian are finishing all their school work by 12:30 or 1:00 in the afternoon.  I hope that means they will be able to check out the YMCA today.  The one thing they are currently missing is hard exercise.  I believe hard exercise even helps them study better.  They were in tennis one day per week, but we decided that was just not going to be enough, so we are going to get a membership at some place where they can do an aerobics class, swimming, lifesaving, or some other such thing that gets their heart rate up.  Lorena has identified a YMCA and a club that would both be good.  The club is halfway between my work and home, so it might be close enough for me to work out at lunch time.  On the other hand, the YMCA might be more kid oriented and cheaper.  Lorena is going to look at both and decide.

While hurricane Dean is having its way with the Yucatan peninsula, we were experiencing quite a little storm in North Carolina.  The large shade tree in our neighbors yard was split in half and blown over in the wind.  It rained some, but not enough to make for the dearth of water here in North Carolina.  Meanwhile, our household has been suffering through summer colds and sore throats.  It looks like we are getting to the end of it all now though.  Kelly had her first piano lesson with her new teacher and it looks like she is going to do well under her tutelage.  The first piece of music she brought home was Menuet by J.S. Bach.  Way cool.

We got off to a great start in homeschool today.  I think we are going to particularly enjoy the “reading aloud” parts of this years program which include Christian’s history books for his two year survey of world history and a book on logic called Fallacy Detective.  We had to recalibrate a couple of things and we will have to order a few more materials, but all-in-all it was a good start.  Lorena got the kids lined up with a new Orthodontist yesterday and Kelly goes to her first piano lesson with her new teacher today so everyone is getting out of the house quite a bit, too.

We got a nice note from JoAnn when she got back from convention.  We were sorry to hear about Elena’s mother passing on, but other than that it sounds like everyone had a great time.  We are looking forward to going to our own conventions now.

One of the first things I thought about this morning was that Jim and JoAnn will be back from Saginaw this morning getting ready to start the new year.  It was great to be able to start the new school year with a convention.  We always tried to get a week or two of homeschool in before convention each year.  Going to convention after the week or two always helped extend out the really fun, “getting started” weeks.  And, with convention, it always helped us have the right motivation for our studies.  I am really very happy for the timing of our conventions here in North Carolina, too.  It is only a week or two later than in Oregon.  This year, it looks like we will get the weekend of Shelby and all of Denton, so it should really work about the same way.

This morning, Lorena and the kids got up at 6:00am because it is the first day of school.  We all sat down and read the bible together over breakfast.  We are starting to settle into more of a routine, so I have dedicated myself to getting back on a diet.  I started this morning.  Bryan, if you read this in Texas, I want you to eat a LOT on the rest of this trip so that we are closer to even on the weight thing.  I am back to exactly zero pounds lost.  I am game to ramp this thing back up, even if you have a twelve pound lead.  Let me know on Friday and I will start posting the weights again!

Tonight, we were invited to dinner with Courtney and Caroline, our old friends from Florida.  Their son Corwin is going back to college in Michigan.  This will be our last chance to see him before he goes.  Their daughter Chevon and some other folks will be their, too, so we are very much looking forward to it.  Then on Saturday, we are going to continue work on our hovercraft.  We have decided that we want to try to get it off the ground (literally) this weekend.  With any luck at all we should be able to do that.

Christian and I have been negotiating hard about how to make our hovercraft.  We want to do something inexpensive and not to difficult to see whether we like it.  At the same time, we want it to be cool.  I have been doing a little more reading and found that starting with a rubber raft is about the easiest way to get started.  I thought that would be a little expensive because it is necessary to buy a raft and cut out the bottom.  Well, this morning, I got to looking around for rubber rafts and found a brand new one for only $17.99.  I think that we really ought to consider buying that raft along with a piece of plywood, some nylon straps and some caulk to get started.  I am hoping Christian could start hand drawing up some sketches of how we could put in a low seat and add a fan for propulsion and a steering wheel with a pulley system leading to vanes behind the fan for steering.  We would probably start with a plastic molded chair like this, from which we could remove the legs and somehow attach it to the plywood platform on top of the raft.  Christian, if you do the sketches, try to make them with the idea that we can follow your sketches to do the actual building.  Draw them so it actually shows how things would work with arrows to indicate motion and maybe even some dimensions.  This could be QUITE fun and interesting…

Last night we got to talking about what a waste it is to spend too much time browsing the internet or playing computer games.  The kids decided that wanted to really work on doing some other things.  Both of the kids have plenty of reading, writing, music, and other things to do beyond homeschool, but Christian and I got to talking about some of the things he really enjoys doing.  One of those things was the construction of a working model of a motor.  I have been wanting to do some kind of a project with Christian.  Not a little project, but a big one that takes us all of one summer or even a year to complete.  After looking around the internet, I found this page.  Two high school kids built a one man hovercraft for around $200 in their garage.  Wow!  That is what I am talking about.  I think that would be awesome.  We even have a pond in the back yard where we could try the thing out.  Well, I started looking around and I found some more projects that looked very cool.  This one was very fun, too.  But this is the one I think we should get after we build a leaf blower one first.

Yesterday, Kelly and Christian both had friends over for most of the day.  Kelly’s friend Megan stayed the night.  Christian’s friend, Connor was gone by the time I got home from work, but Lorena is going to take Connor and his mom with her when she takes Christian to his guitar lesson today.  Some kind of a transition is taking with Christian and the guitar.  Until now, I think he has been establishing a base of knowledge on how to play chords, read music, and that sort of thing, but lately his playing is taking on a quality that is truly a joy to hear.  Really he has only been in guitar for half a year so far, so I am very happy with where these lessons are going.  I was talking to him about it last night and he explained that his three years of piano had helped tremendously.  Lorena talked to a man about giving Kelly and Christian singing lessons starting at the end of September with the idea that they can learn how to sing parts.  I do not know about the kids, but personally, I am very excited about the prospect.

I spent a hard day programming at work yesterday.  Then, when I got home, the kids were mostly playing together, so I took the time to do some Linux program.  I was able to get a bunch of my vision libraries to build as shared libraries for use in Linux.  The next step is to make these libraries callable from Mono C#.

I spent most of the weekend preparing to start homeschool next week.  I am pretty much done.  I will try to post a PDF file of the first or second week’s schedule tomorrow, so you can see how we do it.  I just use and OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, but have gone from doing an individual sheet per day to one sheet per week.  It holds all the same information, but we hope it will cut down on the amount of clutter we are generating for the kid’s notebooks.  It is going to be a great year.

The big new thing we are going to try to do is read through Susan Rice Bauer’s Story of the World four book series together over the next two years.  The Sonlight program includes a book called the Book of Time that is really just a spiral bound drawing book with pages marked from 5000 B.C. to present.  The idea is that, as the student studies each era, they will draw and write something in their book that will help them remember something about the era.  Kelly just finished a two year survey of the history of the world, filling one of those books with her drawings.  She really loved it and I was pretty envious, so we decided that, as Christian goes through the next two years, I will read the history books to Kelly and Christian while they draw in their Book of Time books.  We have two, brand new, Books of Time.  Kelly does not mind that she is going through all this again because she had so much fun last time.  The only bad part about that is that I will not be getting any of the novels unless I read them to myself.

I will write more about some of the things we are doing.

One of the main tools I use to do my job is Microsoft Visual Studio to develop C++ programs.  I am working on an Open Source project with some buddies.  It really kind of defeats the spirit of open source to do development using closed source tools like those available from Microsoft, so i have decided to make the leap (for my home projects) to the Eclipse CDT tool that is sponsored by IBM.  It is not as capable as Microsoft’s tools yet, but it appears to be moving very fast.  I am going to try to do an easy little program first before I jump into the main project.  This is fun stuff for me, but I do not have that much time for it with homeschool, work, and other responsibilities.  I will try to post a little on how it is going for me here.

We have decided to run up to the workday to help get ready for our annual church convention at a little town called Shelby.  Shelby is a little over three hours from where we live, but an old friend who lives a little over half way there asked us to stay with her.  She married a fellow from North Carolina, but had gone out to Oregon last year to one of our conventions there with their three children.  We had gotten reacquainted even though we had no idea at the time that we would be moving east.  Terrie’s kids are close in age to Kelly and Christian so we are very much looking forward to having some time with them as we help out at the convention grounds.  We are going to try to get to the workday at the other convention in Denton, too.  Denton is a lot closer to where we live–only about an hour and a half away.

We had a wonderful evening last night.  Mostly we just sat around and talked.  We had no homeschool or anything else to worry about so we just relaxed and talked.  Christian and I got into a discussion about what might be a good project for us to work on together.  We definitely want to continue with our art–with an emphasis on drawing and pottery, but Christian and I talked about doing a guy thing.  The two things that came to mind were either building a wooden sailboat or getting an old car and fixing it up.  A while back, I had told Christian about a car that my friend Marco Ramos had when we were both getting our Masters Degrees in Industrial Engineering at University of Texas at El Paso.  We were both starving students.  Marco had the panache to buy a brand new Yugo.  It was truly a badly made car from Yugoslavia.  My sense is that the car was not really a bad design, it was just not built with too much desire to get it right, what with the nature of communism and all.

One day in a fit of nostalgia, I told Kelly and Christian about a song that got popularized when Rush Limbaugh played it on his talk show.  It was Paul Shanklin’s “In a Yugo” that is truly a classic of its genre.  Be sure check out the YouTube video.

From that moment on, Christian has been enamored with the idea of some day owning a Yugo.  I have to admit that it has some appeal.  In the discussion, I explained what it meant to “blueprint” an engine and how it would be fun to get an old car to rebuild together someday.  He thinks the right car might be a Yugo.

Maybe he is right, but there is something to be said for taking the route one of my best buds took when he was in high school in the late 70’s.  The gas crisis was going on so everyone wanted a car that did not use too much gas.  Bryan did the calculations and decide that it would be less expensive to buy the biggest Sedan de Ville he could find, because you could get them so cheap at the time.  It took years before the savings derived from using less gas in a small car could make up for the cheaper purchase price.  I was always envious that he had thought of the idea first.  It definitely had style to tool into school in a brand new looking Cadillac and park it in the middle of all of the old rusted out VW Rabbits and Datsuns that everyone else drove.  They were safer, too.

Christian, it is going to be a tough decision.

It is a funny deal.  Last night I was contacted by a large drug discovery company that is putting a new facility into Hillsboro, Oregon.  They are looking for a couple of Senior Vision Engineers.  I am very happy where I am and do not have a whole lot of interest in going back to Oregon, but it was nice to be able to pass the opportunity along to a couple of buddies who might be very interested.  It never hurts to network in an industry like this.  It is truly a small world.

I had a long and very interesting discussion on the telephone about homeschool Saturday night with a woman I have never met in person.  She is a friend of a friend who has pulled her two daughters from a “Classical Christian” school because it is too rigid.  Her plan, for various reasons, is to put the oldest daughter into government school and homeschool the younger one.  Her reasons for pulling her kids from the private school ring very true to me.  One of the things about which I was most worried when we went back to homeschooling three and a half years ago was whether Kelly and Christian were going to have a childhood.  I had no qualms at all about removing them from the toxic environment of the government school system controlled by union thugs and graduates of the abysmal teacher education programs here in the United States.  We were very happy to get them away from the negative socialization endemic in the government school systems.  We have always understood that a superior academic education was possible, even probable, in a homeschool setting.  The problem was how to provide a nurturing environment that allowed the kids to excel both socially and academically. 

Our problem with “Classical Education” has not been so much the theory behind it, rather it has been the rigidity by which it is often practiced both in homeschool and private school settings.  The end product of such systems seemed to be little lawyers.  While that may be a fine end for many, we did not want that for our children.  Couple that with a parent’s valid desire that their children excel and you get a system that pushes children into learning things they can handle on a mechanical level, but with which they struggle spiritually.  An example of that was what I feel was a mistake we made early on with our oldest daughter when we started homeschooling her in the first grade.  Kelly was an early reader, so one of the books we have her to read was Little Women.  It is a fine book.  Kelly could understand the words and the sentences, but many of the concepts that had to do with some very adult struggles during the Civil War were impossible for her, at that stage, to understand.  The book was not enjoyable for her at all.

In the end, it is I who learned the lesson.  We made fundamental changes to the way we did things by slowing the program down so that the kids could get more enjoyment out of the materials with which they were engaged.  We feel like they actually started to learn more when the learning became more enjoyable and understandable to them.  They are still ahead of the game with good performances on nationally standardized tests, but we are not planning to graduate them early because we enjoy having them with us so much.  In addition, our goals for their homeschool education have changed so they have more to do with humility and kindness than with academic achievement.  Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail, but the funny deal, is that the academic achievement seems to come more easily when the primary goals are spiritual rather than academic.

We have all of our books.  We have teachers for guitar, piano, and tennis.  The computers are all up and running.  There is no excuse now not to start in on homeschool planning.  I need to get the lesson plan put together for the first week of school.  It is just a matter, now of jumping in and doing it.  I have even put our year long schedule into my Thunderbird calendar.  I will try to post it here in OpenOffice.org (and possibly) Word format.

Day 166 of 1000

We love North Carolina, but they are WAY out of their depth when it comes to organizing and/or participating in a running event, they need to send the organizers and participants out to Oregon to see how it is done.  That being said, the kids had fun and raised money for a good charity, which was the purpose of the race.  Still, people here really need to lighten up, have a good time, get into the event.  Still, the kids got their doughnuts (I refuse to use the word donut as if it is a real word), t-shirts, and bib.  I was particularly proud of Kelly.  She hollered encouragement and winked at every cute guy in a gladiator suit that ran buy.