Month: September 2008

Last night Mom, Dad, Christian and I sat down to watch the Republican National Convention speeches. It is awesome what they can do with technology these days! The speeches were streaming live online for our viewing pleasure. I am very interested in politics (more than I should be at times I think) but I don’t know too much about them because I’m just a freshman. So don’t expect any profound or original thoughts from me, and if I say anything incredibly ignorant, just remember that it isn’t me. It’s hormones*. 🙂 However, here is my humble opinion of the matter:

I thought the whole thing was simply fantastic. The real highlight of the evening for me was Fred Thompson, one of the few people who didn’t seem to be highly dependent on the teleprompters. He told the story of John McCain’s POW experience marvelously. Some people may think that Senator McCain is playing the Vietnam card too much, but it is my belief that his war experience shows a lot of good things about his character.

Of course it was a treat to get to hear President Bush and the first lady speak. Because of the potential emergency of Hurricane Gustav, the president was not able to come to the convention. He gave his speech over some video talking doohickey. Technology is marvelous. There were also plenty of inspiring stories of bravery, strength, and selflessness. It was really great to watch.

What I really can’t wait to hear is Governor Sarah Palin’s speech. I am so psyched about her!!! I sincerely hope that she and McCain win.

*One of the advantages to being a teenager: everything can be blamed on hormones.

I am letting the kids sleep in until 7:30 this morning because we stayed up last night to watch the speeches at the Republican National Convention on the internet. We very much enjoyed, not only the speeches, but the whole ambiance of the convention with its theme of service. We made it through Fred Thompson, before we sent the kids off to bed. It was neat this morning to find that the very next of the posts from my old blog was about Christian’s famous second grade speech. It really was an awesome thing for a second grader. You can read about it here.

Yesterday, Kelly called me from the Trader Joe’s grocery store in Cary. She had gotten talking to a girl who works their as a cashier to help pay for her college education. The girl asked Kelly and Christian whether or not they had started back to school. When she found they were homeschooled she told Kelly she had been homeschooled through junior high school, but returned to government school for high school. She said is was so bad she only lasted a week. She begged her parents to take her out, so they put her into a private Christian high school. She went on to say that she started taking classes at the community college so that she earned an associate degree there at the same time she got her high school diploma. We were all inspired by the story. Kelly is looking forward to talking to her again when they go back to Trader Joe’s.

This all reminded me of why we decided to leave the government schools again and return to homeschool. We were living in Albany, Oregon at the time. We are still very grateful to the school system there because if they would not have been so monumentally bad, both academically and in the way they hardened the spirits of their students, we might never have left. I keep many, many pages of handwritten notes in our files that describe my conversations with the principal and with Kelly’s teacher with regard to all this. Some day, I plan to write those up and post them here. It has been over four years since that happened and I still get exercised over the whole thing, so I probably should wait a couple more years before I do that.

June 4, 2004 – Tony and Martha visit
June 7, 2004 – A quiet weekend

My buddy Brett was right again. He recommended that we not miss seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The exhibit tied right into the reading Kelly, Christian, and I are doing on worldviews. In fact, one of the scholars we heard quoted in the exhibit (William F. Albright) was quoted in our worldview reading for the day of our visit. The exhibit was very well done. It was truly an incredible opportunity to have access to them. After all those years reading Biblical Archaeological Review, it was very gratifying to see some of the objects about which so much has been written. In addition to the scrolls themselves, we were especially fascinated by the textiles, the ossuaries, oil lamps, an ink well, and many other artifacts.

We found that the museum is will exhibit a history of chocolate next – with samples! We bought a year membership in the museum and plan to go back often. We took a couple other pictures at the museum along with a third of Lorena, Christian, and Kelly standing in front of the North Carolina Museum of History that is right across the street. The history museum looks great, too and we plan to go there soon. The middle picture does not do justice to the beauty of the butterflies we saw in the Museum of Natural Sciences, but we liked the picture anyway. This was the highlight of the weekend.

You can click on the images to make them larger

On another topic, I made great progress on my Python program to take the images I scan for each of the four panels of Kelly’s comic, resize them, add drop shadows and titles, create a thumbnail and save all of that to the disk. I used it for the last three comics she did and it worked great. It is still a command line program, but it saved me a ton of time. The next step is to create a GUI for it and then add scanner/webcam support. I have some additional ideas I would like to add, but I they are too far off in the future to mention right now.

June 2, 2004 – Back to work
June 3, 2004 – A job opportunity in Seattle