Day: August 18, 2008

Today is the first day of school and, while I am excited to start the new year, I am also sad that my summer vacation is over. )c:

One of the biggest highlights of the year was my experience on the YMCA swim-team. I made lots of friends and also improved my swimming skills. The swim meets were really fun, and so were the regular practices. I was surprised to have brought home some first place ribbons also.

Swimming in the pool just for fun was great, also. There is a great, new, high water-slide. Mom gets scared when we go down it because she says we will fall off on the turns, so we are not allowed to ride it very often. The new facilities here are also all nice and clean, so that is good.

I did a lot of things outside of the YMCA. Mom and I painted my room. We decided to paint just one wall and chose a really bright [but dark] blue color that showed through partly to the yellowish color the wall used to be painted. It didn’t turn out that well, so now we are going to repaint it some shade of green and change the bedspreads before we get too deep into the school year.

Dad bought a new riding mower for our lawn that I love to drive. We have a huge back yard, so it is very helpful when cutting the lawn.

Another thing I started this summer was a ‘graphic novel’. While Kelly draws her world-famous Betty Blonde dailies, I work on a strip with a much longer story line about the same characters on one big adventure together. I hope to finish drawing the strip by the end of the semester. It will take a number of weeks after that to scan it all in and publish it.

This is the first of the tri-weekly essays that I am going to write on the family blog throughout the school year.

Last week, Dad informed me that I was a deprived child. Why? I had never before written the imperative essay on what I did during my summer vacation. Every well-educated child must at one point in his or her life compose this all important article. So here goes!

What I did During my Summer Vacation
By Kelly J. Chapman

A few weeks before school let out for the summer, mom signed Christian and I up for swim-team. We, alas, were not looking forward to being thrown into a frigid pool with twenty sarcastic kids and a swim coach bearing a strong inward resemblance to Hitler. Our doubtful mindset was not unjust. We had tried swim-team before in Oregon. Lets just say it was less than thrilling.

Two and a half months later I have proof of a wonderful swim-team experience: 20 new e-mails in my address book, a worn out green and black swimsuit, and a half dozen pink 6th place ribbons hanging in my room. We had a blast!

I could go on and on about what we did at the swim meets and all the friends that we made, but that would probably not be very interesting, so I’ll tell y’all about the small part of my summer that didn’t involve swimming.

If you look at the blue sidebar on the left of your screen, you will see the proof of my summer art project. Since mid-July I have been drawing Betty Blonde comic strips. Sometimes it’s really hard to think of new jokes or story-lines, but I always have Christian to help me. He is currently drawing his own Betty Blonde graphic novel as a matter of fact! We have so much fun thinking of new characters and stories together. A lot of our summer was spent studying comic books and books about comic books and brainstorming Betty Blonde.

The other things I did aren’t very interesting but anyway:
I ate fudgesicles.
I e-mailed my friends.
I watched Micheal Phelps swim.
I sang really loud all the time.
I listened to Delilah on the radio at night.
I learned how to play the Pink Panther theme on the piano. (Score!!!! I’ve been wanting to learn that forever!)
I struggled with my chlorine-soaked hair.
I listened to Dad read aloud the big worldviews book and the green logic book.
I slept in a lot.

And that’s about it! I had a fantastic, lazy summer. Now I’m completely ready for the new school year and conventions!

Last night, Kelly said, “I am really nervous about my first day of high school.”

We all laughed heartily. Today, the kids are starting into their fifth straight year of homeschool. It has been a great run so far and this year is especially good. Oh, we did our normal, beginning of the year lost book thing–I ordered C++ Primer Plus and and a new CLEP preparation book we are going to try and a book that has been lost. I got quite frustrated, lectured about responsibility, and am thinking about a suitable response. After two weeks of robust preparation, one would think these things would be identified sooner than the night before the start of school. It is not like I am immune to this sort of thing. As I backed the Tundra out of the driveway this morning, Lorena came running out of the garage waving her arms. I had left the cans of soup that I had purchased for lunch sitting in the mini-van.

Speaking of cans of soup, I majorly fell off the wagon on my diet again. I am all the way up to 190 pounds after being below 185 for a couple of days in a row. After our regular Saturday visit to the Holly Springs Library, we went to a potluck for our friend Amy who is moving off to Charlotte with her three daughters. We will miss them, but now have an excuse to get up there on a weekend. I hope they make it down to see us, too. On Sunday, we just had to try out the new Mexican Restaurant in the Beaver Creek Mall after meeting. The rest of the time, all we did was work on homeschool kinds of things and read–munching away on stuff the whole time. For some reason, I had a wild craving for summer sausage, sharp cheddar cheese, and Triscuits. That could not have helped. Nevertheless, it was a very nice weekend.

April 30, 2004 – Collaborating with Nina
April 30, 2004 – Business, Finances, and Robots