Congratulations!!! We will have to celebrate a little this weekend.
We did not make it yesterday, so I am hoping that, if I work hard, I can finish up to be able to go home from California this evening.
Year: 2007
It looks like it will snow again today in Albany while I spend what I hope to be my last day in California for awhile.
Since we got up, it started to snow very hard outside. After we finished our homeschool, we went outside and built a snowman. But then a few minutes later the sun came out and it melted away half of the snow )-:. we took our snowman and put it in the corner of the fence where it is shady all day, and poured cold water all over it. It got an ice plating, just as we had wanted it to. As it melts it will get a thicker ice plate, and just shrink as opposed to washing away. I want to see if all this actually does work…
Our customer comes in to buy off the automation system we made for them today and tomorrow. They could be very long days, but I hope to be home by tomorrow night.
I will be in California a little longer than originally planned, so my posting will be short until next week. Lorena is going to have Mauricio over tonight for dinner with her other cousins visiting from Mexico and Tony, Martha, and Josh.
There are lots of things to write, but little time for writing, so I am going to make a list:
- I am in California for a few days. I was scheduled to get here late last night, but was asked to catch an earlier flight.
- That caused me to miss our Special Meeting in West Portland.
- Lorena’s cousin Maurico went to meeting with Lorena on Sunday morning, then stayed to hang out with the family for the day. Everyone enjoyed him very, much.
- Christian starts his pre-algebra program today.
- Kelly moves on to Algebra I tomorrow.
- Lorena starts her next calculus class today.
- I made huge progress on my first open source program at the airport.
- There is more but I have to go…
Congratulations to our friend Ethne on being selected as a Student Ambassador. She will be traveling to England and France in June to do all kinds of very cool stuff. Lorena, Kelly, Christian and I all went to see the life size copy of Stonehenge on the Columbia River Gorge a couple of months ago on our way to the Special Meetings in George, Washington, but Ethne gets to go see the REAL THING. WOW! In addition to that, another one of our friends, Idalia Nerpel, made her a quilt that she is raffling off to raise money for the trip. If you want to buy a raffle ticket ($1), let us know and we will help you out with it. Here is the amazing quilt, but this picture does not do it justice:
Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita are going home today. Lorena will drive them to the airport in Portland to leave a little after 2:00 this afternoon. They will fly through Los Angeles to San Antonio, catch a taxi to the bus terminal, and arrive home early tomorrow morning. We have enjoyed them very much. It is pretty hard to stay organized when they are here because everyone enjoys being with them and talking about life, friends and family. It is always very sad to see them go. We are going to try to go to Mexico for a week or so during the early spring, then have Lauro and Conchita come back for convention in August.
Wow! Last night the family went to our special meeting in Lebanon. It was amazing. Vernon Joyce has grown dramatically in the ministry. He spoke of the great joy of being used by God. It was truly helpful. He spoke of joy and peace and hope. He spoke about making right choices. He spoke about how that even if we make wrong choices, we can turn again and make the right choice. It was a vibrant sermon. I think that it was even the more dramatic because I was not expecting it of him. I do not know why I would not expect such a sermon from him. Maybe it because I knew him as a boy and remember him in that context. It was not only the delivery of the sermon, but that it was so positive and hopeful. We need those kinds of sermons. It really reminded me of Howard Mooney. We miss him, but God does raise others, often in unexpected times and places. I love it when I truly feel that it is good to be alive and want to be used by God. Sermons like Vernon’s help me feel that way. But, like he said, it is God’s work.
TEST
Last night I started getting caught up on the homeschool corrections that had gotten ahead of me over Christmas break. Both Kelly and Christian are finishing up large units of work in both grammar and math. The systems we use for each of these subject areas are surprisingly similar in the way the materials are taught. At the end of the unit, there is comprehensive testing and it is starting to get quite complex. The program is solid though, and the kids have systematically improved. It is also interesting to me that the kids generally express their creativity through writing–Christian writes computer programs and claymations, Kelly writes essays, letters, and stories. It is also interesting to me that both of the kids like to write together. In the preparation of their Kaktus Kids magazine, the work closely together. They both write and work on the more technical layout tasks. In addition, they enjoy their annual research report very much, handling the research, writing, and paper preparation with vigor. Kelly and Christian do pretty well in both math and writing, but their interests lean in different directions. It seems to be that way in real life, too. Many of the engineers with whom I work are abysmal writers. Most people I know who write fairly well are bad at math. Of course, there are a few who can do both well, but they are the exception. It does not seem apparent to me why one should not be good at both. We are going to be cognizant of this and work hard so that writing well and doing math well are not mutual exclusive in our homeschool.
We are back at homeschool today. The kids did absolutely zero homeschool during the holidays. The only thing I did was prepare for one additional week for both the kids and order Kelly’s new Algebra curriculum. It was very nice to have the time off. This week will be a fairly normal week for literature, science, and history, but Christian is finishing up his Singapore Math curriculum to move on to Teaching Textbooks Pre-algebra and Kelly is finishing up Pre-algebra to move on to Algebra. We will spend a week or two just making sure we finish the old curricula well before we move on. In the meantime, our Special Meetings are starting this week and will go on for a couple of weeks. We will go to meetings in Lebanon, Portland, and Salem. One of our ministers, the third Joyce boy, Vernon stayed with us last night. It is amazing to see someone younger quite a bit younger than I with whom I grew up so effectively take a position of authority. He is doing very, very well and will be the last speaker at our first meeting in Lebanon. He has turned into a very impressive man. In the middle of all this, I will need to take what I hope will be a short trip to California to finish up a project.
I am looking forward to writing something other than newsy posts in the coming days. I have been working out some topics on homeschool, investing, programming, and maybe even something on business. Happy New Year to all!!!
I think last night was the third time we spent the evening at Gary and Brenda Joyce’s house to bring in the New Year. The first time was in the millennial celebration of 2000. We hit one in-between and now we are all the way up to 2007. I surely hope I get to go to a few more in the coming years. Brenda gave Grandpa Lauro, Grandma Conchita, Lorena, and I a super presentation of their recent trip to Poland and the Czech Republic. This crowd likes to play games and we were kind of worried that Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita would be left out because they do not speak English. The main big game that people played was a charades style game and it was hilarious to watch the Mexicans play because it really did not make any difference whether or not they understood English. It was a hoot.
Charades
The kids had a ball. Brenda had put butcher paper on a big long table in the dining room along with a bunch of cups of crayons on it. When the kids were not scribbling on the table they running around screaming, playing games, or sitting in the Jacuzzi. The Pedginski’s and Seth’s little cousin Jackson’s family, a couple sections of the Dolan clan, the Anderson’s, and the Ellsberry’s were all there. All-in-all, quite a wild crowd.