Year: 2007 Page 6 of 15

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.

This weekend we have nothing big planned.  Lorena and I want to start an exercise program and we have a potluck between meetings on Sunday, but other than that, we do not have much to do.  The good part about that is that I really do not want to do much.  I think breakfast at Biscuitville and a visit to the Holly Springs Public Library would be nice.  I hope the Palm TX PDA Christian got with his summer money (that he very deservedly earned) comes by Friday so he can play with it.  Maybe we can work on setting him up to program it, too.  We need to find a good C++ or BASIC development environment to run on either Windows or Linux.  The main thing is for him to keep going on his already great start at programming.  I think we have a variety of options, but we will have to check them out.  The other thing we want to do is draw a little.  The only thing we need to accomplish before we start the next drawing is to get Kelly to finish her drawing of Merle so we can all start off fresh together on a new subject with no one being left behind.  Beyond all that, my main goal for the weekend is just to goof off a little, maybe going to a museum or something like that if it is not too much effort.

On another note, it is Grandpa Milo’s 78th birthday today.  Hard to imagine.  He is very healthy and planning to come out here to look at lumber in the next few weeks for our little Quality Corners business.

After getting out to North Carolina, we had a struggle finding Kelly a piano teacher.  We found one who is very nice and seems to be very good, but when we spoke with Kelly’s old teacher, we found this teacher was one who would be absolutely great with students who had just started up to about syllabus level 6.  Neither Lorena nor I are competent to find a piano teacher of the right level of ability and attitude for Kelly.  Jill let us know that we should not under appreciate Kelly’s talent, she has a good work ethic, and we should find her the very best teacher possible.  Then she offered to find one for us, so she has been talking to a bunch of teachers in the area.  The one she thought was best is going to hear Kelly play this afternoon, Jill is going to talk to one other on the telephone, then we are going to make our decision.  It is a very exciting time as Kelly gets to move on to another level of piano skill.  It would have been neat for her to be able to do that with Jill, but this will be good, too, and we certainly plan to stay in touch with Jill as Kelly proceeds.

There are a couple of fun new hardware offerings that I find very interesting.  The first is a $199 Linux Laptop from Asus featuring an Intel microprocessor.  The second is a Linux based smart phone.  Both of them would be killer low end Linux based vision systems.  Hmmm….

Lorena thinks she has found the neighborhood where she wants to live.  It is in Holly Springs.  Yes, that is in the town with the small, but very cool library.  It is quite a ways from work, but not so bad we would not live there just because I had to drive twenty-five minutes each way.  Actually, I think that would give me a great opportunity to learn some new things.  I have been inspired to get some more books on tape ever since I listened to The Truth About Muhammad by Robert Spencer on my first trip from Oregon to North Carolina in my Toyota Tundra.  It was an amazingly educational book, that was well written and fun to read.  I also listened to a book, How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, that I probably never would have read because of time constraints, but that has intrigued me ever since I saw it at Borders.  It was also a great, educational listen.  I really think I am going to order something from the Teaching Company for my current fifteen minute ride to work from our rental house.

P.S.  If you did not yet guess who the guy is in the drawing in the previous post, you will get two more chances.  Kelly and Christian’s efforts should both be up sometime this week.

The title of this post says it all.  How much better does it get than this?  The chair is a stuffed easy chair on rollers with a shelf for books below the seat and a small table for setting your coffee, taking notes, or typing on your computer.  We asked the librarian where they got the chairs and she told us they got them from a company in Raleigh.  They would be perfect for our bonus room for homeschooling and the like.  I think there is definitely a business in this kind of chair, but with a few modifications.  Bryan, are you listening.  I am serious.  It could start out as a business selling to homeschoolers over the internet.

I am an Oregonian.  It feels a little odd, but quite a little good to have burnt our bridges.  We now have no home to which we can go back in Oregon.  My family and many friends are there, but we are North Carolinians now for awhile.  Only God knows what he has for us next, but it feels good to be here now.  We want to be in a house of our own soon, but even renting the house next to Kelly’s new, but very good little friend Kasey feels quite good.  Last night we did some drawing, read aloud a little from one of next year’s homeschool books, and worked on math.  I got a little more impatient than I should with some of the math and we forgot to turn on the music, but, all in all, it felt like a regular night at home–something we have not felt for quite some time.  We still do not have the question of music teachers settled, but there is still time this summer to get that worked out, look for a house, and just enjoy not having to deal with unnecessary challenges from which God was gracious to remove us.

Working for a technology startup can have its challenges.  There are lots of insecurities associated with the business aspects of a startup, but it is certainly invigorating to work at the edge of what is possible in your chosen professional field.  I do not think I have ever enjoyed a job so much.  I am senior enough in my career to be given ownership of an element of the product we are developing that is critical to its success.  It is a hard problem that I cannot solve on my own, but I have access to some very smart people to help me.  I think one of the things I like best about being a senior engineer in this domain is that I know when I need help from someone else and I am not too insecure in my knowledge to ask for it.  Who knows how it will turn out.  My technology is not the only critical element of the system.  Even if I succeed beyond my wildest expectations, the product could fail.  All I know is that it is pretty wonderful to be at this point in my career and to not only love my work, but to be valued by my co-workers and management.

Last night, Kelly and I made great progress on her math.  We are currently two-thirds of the way through elementary algebra.  We are going a little faster than would normal in a government school because of the efficiencies inherent in the homeschool process more than anything else.  We have quite a few corrections left over from last year that I did not get to because of the move, but were are rapidly working through them and should pretty far ahead of the game by the time official homeschool starts in mid-August.  Tomorrow night I am going to try to do the same thing with Christian.  He is two-thirds of the way through pre-algebra and is in about the same position as Kelly relative to our plan.  The only other thing we have to do is put the final touches on the annual research reports from last year that we were unable to finish, again, due to the move.

This morning, we are going to run down to a local bank at about 11:00 so a notary public can watch us sign away our house.  We are sad to leave it because we had such good times there, but it is a big relief to have it out of the way, too.  If we can get the documents overnighted back to Oregon tonight, the house is still on schedule to close tomorrow.

We have a lot of people to thank for helping us get our house in Oregon sold after our move to North Carolina.  Janet and Norm, Rhonda, Mike and Spencer, Ryan and Jeannie, Jim and JoAnn, Mark P., and others.  We surely have appreciated all the help and the reminder that we are part of family that is much bigger than us.  Many times you don’t really know the things you will really miss about a place until you have left.  Believe it or not, one of the biggies for me is the vigor with which people some people say “Amen” in Albany.  I think it said something good about the place.  Maybe that is just my tradition, but it is certainly one that I like.  If all goes well, we should close on the house on Thursday.  Lorena and I signed the last addendum this morning, the house is in escrow, and the documents should be available very soon.

Last night we drove out about forty minutes to a little town called Algier to have a Spanish language bible study with three of our ministers, some folks from Panama, some folks from Mexico, and some Spanish speaking gringos.  One of our ministers is an eighty year old man named Robert.  He is a native North Carolinian who has been in the ministry since 1953, but is working in North Carolina for the first time.  This is his second year since returning.  He has an accent and a humble, kind, fun-loving attitude that the whole family just loves.  Before we went, the ministers came over to our house for a dinner of shredded beef tacos with very hot salsa, black beans, and white rice.  For dessert, we had Amish friendship cake for which Lorena got the recipe and a starter from Kasey’s grandmother.  Food does not really get much better than that.  It is why Bryan is still beating me like a drum in our weight loss competition.

All that being said, I am finally ready for a weigh-in again on Friday.  Will you remember to send your lbs on Friday, Bryan?

Well, we have been having discussion after discussion about how Kelly, Christian, and I are going to do our homeschool thing while Lorena gets back into the community college.  We have pretty much decided that Lorena will wait until winter term before going back.  As for the homeschool schedule, we have come up with one, but it is not nearly as fun as last year.  First off, I will not be able to use my very cool comparison bars for percent complete between our school and the local government school because the government schools are year round schools with odd times off.  The second thing that makes it less fun is that, here in Wake County the schools are in session 180 days, just like we are so we do not have the ten day advantage over the 170 day government schools in Oregon.

At any rate, we have the school year lined up so that we can catch the two local conventions, in September, take a good two weeks off at Christmas time, take our trip to Puerto Vallarta with all the Pedrazas, along with my brother, his wife, Grandpa Milo, and Grandma Sarah.  Finally, we have a week long educational spring break set up for March on the Outer Banks here in North Carolina.  We will be able to go to the Wright Museum and the Lost Colony there, hang out on the beach, and generally just relax a little.  It will probably be too cold to swim, but it should be a very good time.  Our friends, the Larsons, are planning to join us along with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah.  We are hoping for a Sushi cooking lesson from Grandpa Milo while we are there.

Today, though, the kids are going to start doing a lesson a day to get a little bit ahead on their math.  Our goal for this year is for Kelly to finish Algebra II and Christian to finish Algebra I.  We are on schedule for that, but we have decided to start a little early to give us some leeway in case we get behind a little, so that we can have a fighting chance of meeting that goal.  It is a good week to start because Kelly’s next door neighbor friend, Kasey is gone all week and the kids are worried about getting bored.