We had a great evening yesterday with the Steljis family over from Charlotte. It turns out we read the same kinds of books and have a lot in common. The kids played games, carved pumpkins, rode the hovercraft, and generally just had a great time. It was a beautiful fall evening for that sort of thing–not so hot that it was uncomfortable to be outside, but warm enough to get by with just a sweater. We are very much looking forward to Thanksgiving with them later this month. Our friend Warren should be there, too!
Month: October 2007 Page 1 of 2
Our good friends from the Charlotte area are coming for a visit. John and Terrie and their three kids. It should be a lot of fun. Kelly and Christian want to go ice skating or something like that, but it will all be decided when the everyone is together. I know the boys want to try out the hovercraft and Christian will want to show everyone his new cat tower project. I hope to get there in time to have dinner with everyone before the return home. We are very much looking forward to having them.
Last night Kelly and Christian left a Harvest package on our neighbor, Kasey’s front door step. They got much joy out of doing that. We also found that our bible study is going to be switched from Wednesday night to Thursday night, so we they will be able to be with Kasey for their big party. I need to remind them to let Kasey now they will be there!
We fouled up pretty bad on the Sunday, but other than that, we had a very nice weekend! We arrived at the Sunday morning fellowship meeting at 10:15, but no one was there. Lorena told me she had received a call from one of our friends to let us know that the time was changing this weekend. We just assumed that we were an hour early, so we went down to MacDonald’s and ate one of those little apple pies, waited for an hour and went back to meeting. When we got there, we could see we had missed the meeting!!! So we went home and had our own little Bible study… it is never as good when it works out that way, but that is how it happened. We will be ready for next weekend. Especially with an extra hour of sleep.
Christian and I worked on our big cat tower project. It is VERY, VERY cool. We have the first two steps up to the tower wrapped with rope and bolted to the base. The next step will be to get the other three steps done and then start in on the main tower. Christian is going to document the whole thing on his NerdHow blog.
Last night Kelly and I spent a few minutes together to help her get the hang of her knitting a little better. It is not that difficult to knit, but is difficult to knit well until you have practiced a little. She and I are going to sit together about fifteen minutes per night while she gets the hang of it. We kind of gave up on the fuzzy yarn for awhile, but it is pretty hard to work with while we are learning. In the meantime, Christian is trying to figure out how to pearl. It looks like we are in for a rainy weekend, so it will be the perfect time to keep banging away at our knitting.
Last night we did another chapter in our Fallacy Detective book. It really is turning into a pretty good book now that we have gotten past the introduction. There appeared to be a little bit of that insecure homeschool attitude thing going on there that we fight so hard against in our own homeschool program. So far, we have been through red herrings, ad hominem attacks, and genetic fallacies. We certainly are learning the fallacies and the practice sections at the end of each chapter reinforce what we learned before.
Yesterday the kids finished their homework by about 2:00 PM. Then, while Christian was at his guitar lessons, Lorena bought a bunch of knitting supplies. Christian is pretty much the veteran knitter in the crew as he did a scarf when we last went through a knitting phase that spanned our Sherwood and Albany houses. Kelly is coming on fast now. She cast on a scarf and is knitting like a mad woman. Kelly got some VERY cool fuzzy yarn that will make an awesome scarf. Christian is still deciding what he wants to make. He has black yarn and is thinking of a ribbed sweater vest. I think he will have to learn some new techniques to be able to do that. Lorena is going to give it a go, too. If I were not totally tied up with my KamVu project, I would be WAY into this right now. I really plan to get back to knitting as soon as I can. Kelly and Christian both still have the scarves I knit for them. There was a major feeling of accomplishment with all that. I am very much looking forward to seeing all three of their efforts.
Our Wednesday night bible study is in Revelation. It is very, very interesting. I had always known that in the early chapters, Jesus gave advise to the churches in Asia. I even knew that he praised the churches for a number of things, but had something against most of the churches. I even remember what some of those things were: not losing one’s first love, not being lukewarm, etc. It was very interesting when I read the second chapter to review some of those things he praised the churches for hating. Also, it was interesting how he castigated them for NOT hating some things. The specifics of those things was very interesting. It really is good to hate for the right reasons.
Yesterday, my buddy John gave us a VERY cool soda bottle. It has a marble in the top and has a very cool motif. Ours was a nice pink color. I took it home to Christian to see whether he could figure out how to open it, but when Lorena and Kelly saw it, it looked so cool they did not want to wreck it. Is that not how it always works. Boys ARE different from girls.
Very, very cool, but Mom would kill us if we tried it. Click here.
We had a very nice weekend even though I had to work during much of it. On Saturday the kids went about an hour North of where we live to a get-together. Kelly and Christian both did something they had never done before. They rode four-wheelers and had just a great time.
I am still at it. I got up at 4:Something this morning to come in with the idea that if I can get enough done, maybe I will be able to have half a day with the kids tomorrow morning. We are making good progress, but the deadlines are arriving fast. The only alternative is to work hard and enjoy the challenge.
I am going to be stuck (I say stuck, but I love my work) working some long hours over the next week or so. We are trying to get our machine to work at a certain level, we have a very tight schedule, and there is just a lot to do. I might be a little sparse in my posting for awhile, but I will try to hit the high points. I think, I will be back on track in early November.
I am in one of those stages at work where I will have to be burning the midnight oil again for awhile. I really do not mind doing that every now and then–really, I enjoy sinking my teeth into a hard problem. If it stretches out too much, then one burns out, but I am hoping this will not be so bad. I have been working hard on some Open Source programs that are really very rewarding for me. I have done that sort of thing before, but I have never gotten as far as where I am now. It would be great to be able to dedicate more time to this, but it is pretty hard to do when I have so much to do at work coupled with the normal homeschool workload. Nevertheless, it is all very interesting and I plan to keep plugging forward on it. I am still several months away from being able to put even the alpha version of the program out for public consumption, but things are starting to take form. As soon as it is ready, I will let people here know where it is.
We are really starting to ramp up on our homeschool again. Christian finished his last Pre-Algebra homework assignment yesterday and we got everything corrected up. He will be doing some major, end of section testing today, then he will start Elementary Algebra tomorrow. We are all very excited about that. Kelly should be ready to move on from Elementary Algebra to Intermediate Algebra by the end of the week. She will go back to Geometry toward the end of this year, then on to Pre-Calculus in the second half of next year. This is a pretty big deal for us because both of the kids are finishing up a year of material and moving on to new text books. I am very happy with their progress.
We had a great little session last night on logical fallacies. We had previously studied “Red Herrings” and moved on to “Ad Hominem” arguments. What was really great was that, in the end of chapter exercises, both Kelly and Christian were able to identify, not only the Ad Hominem arguments we studied this week, but the Red Herrings we studied several weeks back. We are looking forward to continuing through this book.
We had a nice weekend. Christian and I worked on the computers together on Saturday. We did not get a lot accomplished, but we had a good time being together. Lorena and Kelly went shopping. Then, we had some folks over for dinner after meeting. Lorena cooked a spiral cut ham, green beans, and rice. We had a great time. It was a nice weekend.
The other day, Christian asked me if we could get some knitting materials. We started knitting a couple years ago, but the most we have ever really knitted was a scarf. I made one each for Kelly and Christian. I think it would be kind of cool to try to move on to something else. I do not think we are ready for a stocking cap now, before we move on to slippers, and possibly even a sweater some day. What we really need is a book that shows us how to do pearling as well as knitting. We will try to pick that stuff up on Friday evening to get started this weekend.
Fifteen years ago today, Lorena and I were married at a place called El Tio on Calle Garza Sada in Monterrey, Mexico. It was a great day for us. There were about two hundred fifty people there. Fifty of them were gringos. It was as happy a day as I can remember. Certainly one of the best things I have ever made was to ask Lorena to marry me. God looked out for me in this (and all things). I truly am thankful for my marriage.
A buddy of mine named Jason back in Oregon and I have come up with a great idea for a piece of open source software. We think we can have a lot of fun and maybe even make a medium sized splash in a small pond with our work. I am the technical side of the venture while he is the marketing and business side. We are going to put together product we think has value for a fairly large industry made up of a ton of mom and pop companies. They use technology, but their technology is expensive so they spend all their capital on the equipment that actually does the work that they do and have little left for things like quality control tools. Therefore, they have to go through quite a laborious process to assure quality in their products. We think we can put together a piece of open source software that will allow these people to automate their quality processes. They can use their existing computers, buy a few webcams, combine that with our software, and have a full blown, machine vision based, SPC tool. I am working on it now, but do not expect to have anything to show for my efforts before January.
We took Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah to the airport yesterday. We had an absolutely fabulous time with them while they were here. I will try to put up some pictures tomorrow of the sushi the kids made with Grandpa’s direction. Over the weekend, Lorena and I had some interesting discussions with some of our friends. Some of it was about homeschool, but a lot of it was just about life. We have concluded that it is difficult to please those who are displeased with you, especially if you do not know why they are displeased. That seems particularly true when it comes to homeschool, religion, and tradition. It even gets harder when it comes to morality and raising children. We are really quite happy with the education our children receive. We know that their education is not a traditional American public school education, so except with family and very close, like-minded friends, we rarely speak about the kids educational material and level of study so that we can avoid offending people.
The thing for which we are most grateful is the “socialization” of our kids. We rarely speak about that unless we are forced into a corner. We get forced into a corner more often than I would have imagined when we started homeschool. Some are genuinely interested in the issue because they do not know how homeschool is generally able to produce such well-spoken, confident children. More often, people who have an investment in the traditional system, the government schools, ask questions with an agenda other than that of trying to understand. It is amazing how many of the people who have such an agenda actually work for the government schools as a teacher, aide, or administrator. They all seem to have some horror story about some homeschooler who returned to government school and was socially and academically backwards compared to the other students in the school. The questions and stories are so loaded with rancor, that we choose not to engage. We have read the longitudinal studies on socialization and academic achievement, but you can never win such an argument. The sad part is that such a strategy often leads to increased rancor. We really have no opinion or knowledge about what is best for other people’s children. We just know what has served our own family and children well. We are not trying to convince anyone of the rightness of our homeschool or religion. We just know that it what we are doing is the best we know how to do.
All of the roses and decoration on this cake we had for dinner were done by the kids after Grandpa Milo taught them how to do it. Tonight it will be sushi!!!
One of the roses
The cake
The dinner party