Now that Bryan is within a pound of his final goal of 60 lbs. weight loss, I have decided to put a picture of him up to show what a marvelous change has taken place. As for me, I am hoping to get to my goal by the end of the year!
April 26, 2004 – Joining HSLDA and a birthday party for Tim
April 28, 2004 (No. 1) – Projects for Christian
I just visited a very interesting website that I found while visiting the Uncommon Descent blog. William Dembski had posted a link to something called The Crash Course at a guy name Chris Martenson’s website. The guy seems a seems to be a little bit out of the mainstream, but the material on his site was pretty interesting and I am not unsympathetic to his leanings. The thing that caused Dembski to post the link was the way “The Crash Course” was presented on the site. I, too, was very, very impressed with his Crash Course. He has something to say and he has built an attractive, almost addictive, way of saying it. I am a little agnostic about the material, but the way he presented it was absolutely stellar. At the very beginning of the crash course, he says the course is a work in process. He asks for input about how he can improve the course. I was motivated to want to make a course like that on something about which I am passionate. The course was not flash, but it presented some material that could have been quite complicated in a straightforward, engaging, and non-threatening manner. More courses, presented in this way would be a very helpful tool for those who have something to say.
The posts are little bit out of order! I am just posting them they way they show up in the database.
April 19, 2004 – Stuff for the closet ($)
April 27, 2004 – Piano Lessons
Lorena wanted me to put up some pictures for her family to see. We like to read aloud together in the evening on the screen porch. Christian and Kelly usually work on their drawings. We look out onto the big trees behind the house. It is quite a nice view with both deciduous and evergreen trees. The weather is just perfect for eating and sitting on the back porch right now.
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We know we have hit the big time now. Our buddy Troy sent us an image of his email. I am sharing it with you here. Please not that Betty Blonde is just over Dilbert in the hierarchy! Quite exciting, don’t you think, to be rubbing shoulders with such greatness? I would think that is worthy of a “woo-hoo!” I kind of blew it on the mailing this morning by sending an email that was not properly encoded to display the image, so I had to send out a second. I hope you will all forgive me for that. I am just getting the hang of using the email list manager.
Lorena and I have been doing some talking and some introspecting about what we are going to do over the next few years. It has been very good for us. I really love my work here in North Carolina. I have always loved my work, but I do not know if I have ever either contributed as much or enjoyed my role more than in my current position. The really neat part about it is that they product we are making not only is groundbreaking, but it will have a positive impact on society by preventing problems from occur far more often than they should today. Still, we miss family and friends in other places and the kids will be needing to go to college before too long, maybe in someplace other than North Carolina. God has his hand in all of this. We think there is a way we can meet all of those needs that is both fun and exciting.
April 22, 2004 – Back home from South Carolina
April 23, 2004 – RealScience-4-Kids arrived
First things first! This weekend is the first weekend where I finished the weekend at under 190 lbs. Woo-hoo! I am losing at a rate of a little under five pounds per month. Some tell me that losing weight at that rate is optimal because when you lose rate a lot faster than that, it is harder to keep off. All right. I can buy into that. Still, it tells me a couple of other things. The bad news first. After looking at my weight chart, I can see that I make good progress during the week, then blow it on the weekend. That tells me that I am not nearly so disciplined as I would like to think. The good news is that, because of Bryan, Lyle, and the chart, I have stuck to this thing better than in the past. The upshot is that tenacity, returning to good eating habits after having blown it, and low intensity exercise (I am currently walking four miles per day) works better for me over the long haul than any kind of fad dieting or intense exercise plan. I do plan to return to weight lifting as soon as time permits, but that is because I like it and it is good for long-term health, not because it will help me lose weight.
When I posted my old blog post from April 16, 2004, it got me to thinking about doing a homeschool family business again. The purpose of the homeschool business is to teach the kids responsibility, to earn some money for college, and to teach the kids about how to keep books and run a small business. Raymond Moore and Dorothy Moore highly recommend starting such a business in their stellar book The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook, subtitled “A Creative and Stress-free Approach to Homeschooling”. We have talked about this a lot over the years, but have never really done much about it because we have been so focused on academics. Lorena is fundamentally more entrepreneurial than I and would be great at doing this if I helped with the bookkeeping and some of the logistics. Lorena just loves to make and sell things and she is a very hard and dedicated worker. The old blog post is a timely reminder that I need to refocus on this part of our homeschool education. I think Audrey and her family are particularly good at this, so we might consult them if we come up with a good idea. I will post our thoughts and efforts on this as we move through this school year.
April 16, 2004 – Homeschool business?
April 22, 2004 – Trip to South Carolina
We went to the Holly Springs public library this morning, to drink coffee, browse, and work on the computer. We met a really nice kid there. He must have been sixteen or seventeen years old and had been homeschooled his whole life. I did not know that I was in such a precarious situation. I evaluated the situation, took a picture with my cellphone, and got out of there.
The kids have been enjoying their summer very much. The swim team was very good for them; they made lots of friends and got lots of exercise. They still go down to the YMCA every morning so Lorena can use the exercise equipment while the kids swim some laps, go down the water slide, and hang out with their friends. Kelly and Christian both started their comic strip authoring careers. Kelly slowed down a little on the piano (although she did not stop) while Christian kept plugging away. Right now they are working on a piece for piano and guitar they can play together the music for which their friend Sara pointed them on the internet. Kelly did some reading and Christian did some IT servicing of his computer. They both continue to blog–Kelly mostly doing social networking while Christian worked on his (high technical) how-to’s at his NerdHow blog. All that is starting to come to an end now. There is only one more week of summer before we jump back into homeschool.
Homeschool will start a week or two early this year. I say that, but it seems like we start a week or two early just about every year so that we can have time during the normal government school year to visit Mexico, go skiing, and other stuff like that. The kids are tasked to empty the homeschool bookshelf in the bonus room and load it up with all their books for the new school year. This weekend, on the way home from the Holly Springs library, we will go to Target to buy notebooks, pencils, and other supplies. We really love to do that. I have the schedules pretty well under control for both of the kids, but I am planning a couple of hours to refine them, get them printed out, go over them with the kids, and get the first couple of weeks into their notebooks.
I just got a really nice note in the form of a comment from another homeschooling father who keeps a very extensive blog called Every Good Path on homeschooling and some other stuff. Thanks, Ruthie! Percentage-wise, there are not so many of us as homeschooling seems to be mostly a mother managed thing. I will put him on our blogroll. He gave me a link to something I have been wanting to do for a long time! It is a bible reading list that is in chronological order. As soon as I finish my current pass through the bible, I think we will try to do a family read through the bible using Mark’s list.
April 14, 2004 (no. 2) – Tentative Schedule
April 15, 2004 – Closet preparation
There are a few interesting tech things going on right now and I just thought I would list them.
When I got to my computer this morning, I reminder email to do a homeschool update was waiting for me. I try to do one once per month after the year has started, but since we still have a couple of weeks of summer vacation, I will hold off writing the August homeschool update until my next reminder at the beginning of September.
I grew up in a track and field family in a track and field state. Grandpa Milo’s cousin was a middle distance runner in the Rome and Tokyo Olympic games and held several American records. We lived very close to Eugene, Oregon, arguably the center of the world for track and field. I have seen world record’s broken on the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. Two of my favorites were when John Smith broke the world record in the 440 yard dash at an AAU National Track and Field Championships in the early 1970’s. As he walked back in front of the bleachers, John Smith lifted his arm to wave to the crowd. My cousin Neil and I appeared in the Oregonian newspaper the next day right under his armpit. We felt famous. Another favorite was when Dave Wottle ran in a mile race against Steve Prefontaine in a Twilight meet. It was a a highly emotional race that Wottle won with his signature kick at the end while the crowd went wild in a way that I have never seen at a track meet in any other place than Hayward field. I love watching a track meet more than any other type of sporting event. I think a lot of it has to do with where I grew up.
Still, when we moved to Klamath Falls, a small town in southern Oregon, my brother and I started going to baseball games. During the time we lived in Klamath, both the American Legion World Series and the Babe Ruth World Series were hosted there. For me, baseball is less about the game than it is about the chance (read excuse) to hang out with friends on a sunny afternoon, eat peanuts and talk about life. Some of my very best memories of times I spent with my big brother, Doug, were at those baseball games. We went to basketball and football games, too, but it was just not the same. It did not get much more satisfying than when we could talk Dad and Mom into running by the Artic Circle drive-in to pick up a bucket of chicken to eat at a night game under the lights at Kiger Stadium.
I think I got to reminiscing about this since we moved here to North Carolina. For the two years before we got here, my alma mater, Oregon State beat University of North Carolina for the NCAA Division I national championship in baseball. The coach at Oregon State is from my home town of Newberg and went to high school with one of my little sisters, so I feel like I have a little bit of a connection. This year, Christian and I went to watch UNC play against Florida State. It was just like I remembered. With the Olympics coming up juxtaposed and the baseball season in full swing, some great memories of my youth returned to mind.
April 13, 2004 (no. 1) – In the comments yesterday we discussed math facts. I was EXACTLY in the situation we discussed when I wrote this post!
April 13, 2004 (no. 2)
I worked on Christian’s homeschool schedule for about an hour or so while Lorena and the kids were at Christian’s guitar lesson followed by shopping for new shoes for Christian. I cannot believe it–Christian wears size 7½ now. That is only a half size smaller than me. Lorena got him some running shoes so he could start preparing for a triathlon. After having spent several days getting Kelly’s schedule ready, I decided to change the way we are going to do seventh grade for Christian relative to how we did it for Kelly. There are several reasons. Kelly and Christian are different from each other, Christian is half a year older than Kelly when she started seventh grade, we have learned some new ways of studying that seem to work better for us, etc., etc.
Christian and I looked over the preliminary schedule when I had it pretty well put together. We made some adjustments based on his desire to keep his NerdHow “how-to” blog posting as a non-school activity. Really that is great. He enjoys that and if we turn it into something he has to do, it could be a lot less fun. I have some good writing activities in there already, but I need to add a little more. In addition, I have decided that he will work on the Freshman English Composition CLEP preparation book from the very beginning of the year. A different kind of studying is required to prepare for that CLEP test, so it will be a good English review and a time to practice some new study techniques that will be useful when he gets to college.
Kelly has set up a mailing list for her Betty Blonde comic. If you would like to subscribe to her mailing list, you can click here to do that. Christian is making great progress on his Spike the Cactus comic that uses the same Betty Blonde characters, but from a little different perspective.
This weekend was a nice summer weekend. We went to a friend’s house for a picnic and to swim on Saturday and we went to a potluck after church on Sunday. It was both busy and lazy at the same time. I worked on the homeschool plan during a few free moments. The plan is coming together very nicely. It feels so good to start getting things in place. Mostly, I have worked on Kelly’s plan because it is a lot different than in the past. We talked it over together and believe we have a schedule she will be able to complete every day in four or five hours if she works hard, but that will push her a little bit. We think it is similar in difficulty to what she has done in the past, but the content is different. Kelly’s plan changes have given me some ideas on how to improve Christian’s plan, too. I will start on that plan with some input from Christian starting sometime this week.
This Saturday, I think we will go out and buy school supplies. That is one of our great joys of the year. It is so much find to chose just the right notebooks, pencils, pens, and other materials to be as ready as possible to start school with vigor. We really need to prepare the bonus room, too, by getting all the books organized in the homeschool bookcase, setting up the computer with the latest software, and getting all the furniture back in place that we took downstairs for the summer. It is a little different here in North Carolina than in Oregon. We used the bonus room above the garage in Oregon all year long. Here in North Carolina, it is a lot cooler downstairs in our house during the summer, so we did not use the bonus room very much when the weather turned hot.
We homeschooled Kelly when she was in first grade. We started the kids in the government school when Kelly was in the second grade and Christian was in kindergarten. We started to have some real challenges both with the kids and the system when Kelly entered the fourth grade and Christian entered the second grade. I was blogging about all this at the time it was happening in 2004, but I was using a different set of blog software. When I switched from the old software to the WordPress we use now, I stored the old blog posts in a text file to eventually put back up as part of the new blog. I ran across them yesterday and have started to put them up on the blog as I have time. I will start putting links to a couple of them per day as I get them cleaned up and uploaded to the blog. You can find the first two here:
Last weekend, we were asked where we get our new since we do not have a television and we do not receive a daily newspaper. That is a question that comes up every now and then so I thought I would write a post about what has taken the place of reading the morning newspaper in my life. I get up at 5:30 AM every morning to beat the traffic into work. I leave the house a little before 6:00 and am at my desk at work by 6:20 or so. Before I start work I make a pot of coffee. I have a great job–they provide us as much Starbucks coffee as we can drink every day! Then I sit down to my computer, read a chapter or two in the bible using the e-Sword bible program, record what I read on the blog, post Kelly’s latest Betty Blonde comic, and then settle in to read the news for fifteen or twenty minutes before I start work.
The blogs I read can be broken up into four categories. The categories are Friends and Family, News, Homeschool/Science/Christianity, and Technology. I will not list the Friends and Family blogs because they are probably not of general interest. You might be asking why I include homeschool, science, and Christianity in one category. I do not have an answer for that. That is just the way I do it. If you see something I am obviously missing and that I should be reading, please let me know!
News
Homeschool/Science/Christianity
Technology
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