Day: October 27, 2008

As Dad mentioned, I was feeling especially crafty this weekend.  I have rather strange weekends.  They all have a feeling. I have lazy weekends, baking cookies weekends, organizing weekends, e-mail weekends, crabby weekends, reading weekends, swimming weekends… the list goes on and on. 🙂

So I learned how to use the sewing machine – kind of.  I’m still figuring it out, but I’m pretty sure I have the basics.  After seeing Grandma whip up a skirt in two hours, I’ve been really wanting to learn.  I know it’s not an overnight thing though.  The little pillow that I made is definitely proof that sewing takes lots and lots of practice.  I also took pictures of all my projects and artsy stuff, played with my face paint a little, made two comic strips and re-organized my closet and cleaned my room.  It was quite a productive weekend actually.

Now more seriously…

I’ve been thinking about sarcasm a little bit. I suppose it can be funny and all that, but it seems to me that more often it is cruel and cold.  A few weeks ago I read somewhere that sarcasm is a form of weakness.  That thought has been stuck in my head for a while.  Sarcasm was rather a way of life back in the Northwest.  We still encounter it a bit here in the south, but more infrequently. I for one am glad of the fact.  I guess I could elaborate on this subject, but it’s not worth it.

Have a great Monday!

As part of our recovery from vacation plan, we did nothing too strenuous this past weekend. We went to the bookstore on Saturday morning and to meeting on Sunday morning. After meeting we went to a Southwest cuisine place called Moe’s. Kelly did a crafts weekend. She is pretty inspired about sewing right now. Grandma Conchita is a professional seamstress. She made some dresses and skirts for Lorena and Kelly while they were in Mexico. She gave Kelly some sewing tips, so Kelly got out the sewing machine and a book or two, then went to work on her sewing skills. She showed me her practice project yesterday afternoon. It amazes me that kids can learn to teach themselves stuff by reading, watching, and then trying stuff out for themselves. I taught Kelly and Christian some very basic knitting techniques. Kelly got interested, checked out some books from the library, watched and asked questions of some other people, read some magazines, and is now at level of skill to which I never anticipate arriving. I am sure she has a lot more to learn, but the first leap into something like that is the hardest. She is doing it again with the sewing and I am looking forward to watching the process.

Homeschool starts again today. The kids both organized their materials before they left on vacation so our hope is that they can jump back in full speed. I hope the kids will be able to take at least one CLEP test each before the end of the year, but that might be a little aggressive as we are signed up for the ACT on February 7. I am hoping preparation for the CLEP tests will be good practice for taking the ACT. We are going to do an introduction to some of the math and writing materials on the ACT the kids have not yet covered starting tomorrow. It mostly includes some trigonometry and essay writing for Kelly and trigonometry and geometry for Christian.

Update: I forgot to mention that Lorena and I voted on Saturday. You can vote early in North Carolina. It was nice. I like it a lot better than the mail-in thing they have in Oregon.

October 15, 2004 – Meeting night at the Ramsdells
October 18, 2004 – At home weekend