Month: May 2008

Our friend Rebekah sent us some great pictures from Kitty Hawk. I would love to go there again soon. I was thinking today that aviation has come a long way, but the principles of flight are still the same. Bryan’s son Brad is now doing graduate work in Aeronautical Engineering at UT Austin. I wonder if Bryan remembers when he and I took his hang glider to Grandma Knight’s place and actually got the thing off the ground. It was pretty exciting and pretty scary, too. Hey, Bryan, do you have any of the old pictures you took from that day?

This is a life size reenactment of the famous photograph of the first flight on which people can climb. It was very cool because you get a real sense for the setting and the aircraft. It was fun and interesting for us — it must have been an amazing event for the Wright brothers and their party.

This is a picture of the boys beside a working replica of the original Wright flyer. We had just listened to a twenty minute talk about the plane and its development by a member of the park service.

The guys had a great time just hanging out together for a few days.

We went to a special meeting of our church this weekend. Every time we go to one of those we realize how many people are out there that we would like to get to know better. The Triangle here in North Carolina is an amazing cultural melting pot. We saw at least seven or eight couples and families that we feel like we need to invite over for dinner. We are still very new here. I have been here for eleven months while Lorena and the kids have been here just ten. The people are nice. We love our new house. We are very happy to be here. Still, it takes time to get an understanding of the culture of a place. It takes years to build relationships. People have a history with each other, some good and some bad. I think it is important for us, having newly arrived, to try to understand and fit into the culture as best as possible. It is great to have the opportunity to make new friends and learn all kinds of new ways of living and thinking. It is also easy to say the wrong thing and hurt peoples feelings either through pride or ignorance. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong, but we keep trying. That is all we can do. It is a good thing people around here are gracious.

Special note: Marilyn asked me about a link to the air car we discussed earlier in our blog. Here is the Popular Mechanics article on the car. I think most have already seen this, but it is the latest I have. I hope they pass the information back this way if they find anything new!

My wife, Lorena is a great cook. She is very dedicated to making good meals. She makes great salsa to go with her tacos, burritos, and all the other staple Mexican foods. She loves to make Mediterranean salads with extra virgin olive oil, fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, etc. She makes some great pasta salads, too, but we have backed off on that a lot since I have been on a weight loss kick. She loves to grill beef, fish, pork, shish kabobs and Portobello mushrooms. She almost always puts throws some whole onions on the grill with whatever she is cooking.

The kids like to cook, too. It is funny that they really have not cooked so much with Lorena as they have learned on their own by experimenting, using cookbooks, and by working with some of our relatives, particularly Grandpa Milo and Aunt Julia. There were a good number of sessions that included the cooking of pizza, pork loin roasts, salads, chicken ala King, and a variety of other items. In fact, that is still one of the main things Grandpa Milo does with the kids when he visits us or when they visit him.

Quite awhile ago, I think Christian would have been eight and Kelly would have been nine or ten, I decided I was going to learn how to cook omelette’s the way Grandpa Milo made them when I was a little boy. He made his omelette’s very thin and filled them with small pieces of ham, cheese, sausage, scallions, etc. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that. There were many failures, some of them even embarrassing failures involving invited dinner guests, but I eventually got it figured out. They are especially good with some of Lorena’s pico de gallo. Then in a series of Saturdays over a period of a couple of months when we lived in Albany, I taught the kids how to make these omelette’s. Both of the kids can do really well with them, but it has become a specialty of Christian’s.

This year, along with her knitting, Kelly has gotten onto an extended cooking kick. I think it might have started with one of the stints with Grandpa Milo, but it has gone way past that now. She regularly bakes cookies and has started in on to pies and tarts. Of course, that is all a bad thing for my diet, but I cannot say that I have not enjoyed it immensely. When she started on the tarts, she got out our copy of the Joy of Cooking and went to work. She peeled the apples and got all the ingredients ready, then got the idea that she really did not like the recipe as it was, so she wanted to make some changes. I advised her to first make the recipe exactly as it appears in the book, then the next time she makes tarts, she can make some changes, see how it comes out, make some more changes the next time, and keep going like that until she has it exactly like she likes it.

That was a stellar plan. She made the first batch. They were not exactly like she liked them, but she learned a little bit better what she did not like. When she made the second batch, we were in somewhat of a hurry, so she did not change the recipe much, but she made them in a pie dish (a very large tart) rather than the cupcake pan that she had used previously. She is on a quest now to find just the right filling to put in with the apples because the eggs in the current recipe give neither the texture nor the taste she wants. I am hoping she will find this soon in another cookbook or through experimentation. I am also encouraging her to do cherry tarts. Aunt Julia, when she was Kelly’s age, made cherry tarts and I have been a fan ever since.

We drove over to the town of Wendell last night after work for a special meeting of our church the community center there. It was very nice and after the meeting, we were invited to a friend’s house to hear some stories about Peru from Kenion, one of our ministers. It was all quite uplifting and very good for the kids, but we ended up not getting home until about midnight. There was another family there who have their kids in the government schools, so we were all complaining about the difficulty of getting up early after a late night on a school day. Some expressed a little bit of surprise that it was an issue with homeschool families such as us. I am not really sure how other homeschool families organize their days, but we have found that if we do not plan the well, there is no way to accomplish everything. That is especially true at this time of year. The kids are well into their annual research reports. Standardized test come around at about the same time as do some special efforts we make to assure we are finishing the year up well in math and science, so a late night during the week can often mean significant extra work in the evening or on the weekend. That all being said, this late night was well worth it both in terms of education and inspiration.

The good news for the kids, though, is that we have a finite finish date. When we finish for the summer, we are truly finished. Before the end of the year, we pick one area on which the kids will work during the summer. We try to never picked a subject or a project because the kids are behind it. We have always picked something which would allow the kids to get further ahead than normal and/or learn something special or new. Mavis Beacon typing was one of the first things we did during the summer. It was a bit tedious for them at first. Then, as they got better, people started commenting on their typing skills and they actually looked forward to the chance to get better. We started our Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad drawing program with the idea that it would be a summer homeschool material, but it was way too much fun, so we quit calling it school. We still do it during the summer (with different books), but it does not count as their summer material. We have not really settled on what we will do this year, but I am leaning toward Spanish because I want the kids to finish their second year of Rosetta Stone so they can take the CLEP test and move on to French.

I hope to be able to post the annual research reports at the same time I write the May, 2008 Homeschool update.