Year: 2008 Page 13 of 15

I have a three day weekend starting after work today because we have Good Friday off this year. The kids are going to go ahead and do their homeschool because we are going to be visiting Kitty Hawk for a few days next week and we do not want to get behind. There are lots of exciting things happening in the next couple of weeks, especially our time with our Texas Friends on the Outer Banks. It will be great to compare notes with some other homeschoolers.

It might have seemed like a little thing yesterday that Kelly was able to pass her Freshman English Composition CLEP test, but for our little homeschool it was a pretty big deal. We did not know if she was prepared at the level required to pass the test, so it was quite satisfying that she was able to do as well as she did. The American Council of Education (ACE is the accreditation body for such things) gives recommendations for both the score required on each test to receive credit and the score thresholds for A-C grades. The school where we are currently planning to send her accepts CLEP test credits, but count them as passes that are not used in the calculation of her grade point average. Kelly scored high enough to get an “A” and it would have been nice to get the GPA boost with those credit hours, but we are all very happy with just the credit. More than anything, it gave her (and us) encouragement and confidence to continue on our current homeschool path.

When I was in Junior High School in Klamath Falls, we had quite a good shop class teacher. The things I remember most are the woodwork and leather-craft projects. Last weekend, when I was feeling guilty about having to work so much and trying to think I something all of us could do together as a family, the wallet I made when I was eighth grade came to mind. Christian and I got onto the internet and found a starter kit that includes everything we need to make a wallet, a key chain fob, a coaster, a coin purse, and one other thing which I cannot remember. The kit includes a mallet, leather, designs, instructions, chemicals, lacing and sewing material, and everything else we need to complete our project. I think we are going to try to do that this Saturday as we wait for Kelly’s friend Ethne to get her on Sunday. All of us, especially Lorena, are going to make one of the items. If we like it, we can get some more!

Christian went to the museum this weekend with his friends Hunter and Sterling. He thought the museum was awesome and had an absolutely great time. I would really like to see the thing myself now. Hunter’s mother Lisa stopped in for a cup of coffee just long enough for Kelly to get a chance to play with Hunter’s little sister Emma and to show off their new baby brother. Lorena goes pretty nuts around babies. She was raving about the baby for the rest of the weekend. What a great family. In the mean time, I continued to work through the last outstanding items on my list before the big product trial at my job. It is pretty nerve-wracking right now, but we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Kelly has taken to designing here own embroidery patterns. I think she was just getting sick of waiting for us to take her to the craft store. At any rate, they are very cool. Here are her first two. You can hardly tell her birthday is coming up.

She has promised to make me a “Grandpa Lauro smiley face” embroidery for one of my pull-over sweaters.

Note from Kelly: Thank you cousin Trisha for teaching me how to embroider!!! 🙂

I will probably work this weekend. Fortunately, our friend Hunter’s family has invited Christian to go to the museum with him on Saturday and on Saturday night, the kids have a babysitting job, so they should be fairly well occupied. We are getting to the very end of our preparation for our lastest trial at my work, so hopefully, my slow, short, and unusually uncreative (as opposed to just my normal uncreative) posting will come to an end soon. Christian is really looking forward to his visit to the museum.

One of the things that is really cool about my mom (Grandma Sarah) is that she gets genuinely excited about an educational accomplishment. That is especially true for those that have to do with going to the university. In the spirit of that enthusiasm and to continue the tradition, I am quite happy to make this post. My cousin Trisha has been accepted into graduate school at Southern Oregon University (SOU)!!! Congratulations! Now all you have to do is start planning for your Ph.D. None of that Ed.D. stuff for you. You could come out here close to us to do it! There are lots of good Universities here in North Carolina.

We are going on vacation to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in a about a week and a half. We are all excited to go, but we have too many things to do. I have a big project going on at work that will trial with our customer the first week in April. We have so many orders and new opportunities at Quality Corners right now that Grandpa Milo (age 78) is going to go over to help get some of the new manufacturing processes squared away. Kelly is starting into her CLEP testing. Lorena still has a ton of things she wants to do on the house before the spring. And Christian, being Christian, always has many, many very important and highly technical projects on which he is working. We really do not have time to take this vacation. Nevertheless, we all know that, after the vacation is over, we will realize that we need to do that kind of thing more often and that we can not afford to miss those times that make us realize that busyness can get in the way of realizing what is really important. We are going to get to see the Wright (as in Orville and Wilbur) Museum, visit a Freedom Railroad memorial, go to the Lost Colonies, and spend time with our dear friends from Texas. How much better does it get than that?

Bryan, I think you should spot me a few pounds. Kelly has been on this big baking kick (it was oatmeal cookies last night). I think there is a strong case that can be made that I am at a severe disadvantage! I am finally going the right direction again after a weekend long gorging binge, but who knows how long that will last.

Last night Kelly baked again. This time, she made cookies with apricot and raspberry fillings (not together–the different fillings were in different cookies). She has promised me that she is going to make me a batch of moist and chewy oatmeal, raisin cookies. I can hardly wait. She has been baking bread just about every other day, too. It is really handy to use the bread machine, but I am trying to convince her to take the bread out of the bread machine before the last step so it can rise for the last time and be cooked in a regular bread pan. That is about as good as it gets. Kelly and Lorena are plotting to try some whole grain/multi-grain bread next. That sounds super, too. The problem is that it is WAY fattening.

Things are still crazy at work, but last night Christian and I were able to spend about an hour together working on math. It was great. I am going to make a priority of doing that every night with both Kelly and Christian. We need to keep reading on our books together, too. It just makes life in the family better when our priorities are for preferring each other!

I worked through most of the weekend because we are coming up on a big and important milestone at work. We were able to go to the bookstore for a few hours on Saturday and to meeting on Sunday, of course. We got a few new books, too.

Last night I had a very interesting talk with a friend of mine in Oregon named Jason. It was about some work we are doing together to get a business started. Jason is a vendor with whom I have worked for seven or eight years. He helped me get the job I had previous to this one. I bought a lot of equipment from him. He is giving me some advice on some open source software I am writing and I am helping some of his customers with their machine vision programming needs. He is a great salesman in the field within which I work and I am hoping to do some kind of business with him some day before too long. The reason we want to do business together is that we have compatibles strengths, but more importantly, we know who we are not, if that makes any sense. Neither of us are CEO types. We do not have any illusions of grandeur about being the head of a big company. Jason wants to sell and take care of his customers. I want to develop technology and take care of my customers. We think we have some ideas about a business model that will allow us to do what we do well, while minimizing the impact our lack of desire to run a big company.

The idea is not that complicated. There is a lot of machine vision consulting opportunities out there. Some time after the next two or three years when I have finished my commitment with my current employer, we are going to try to have everything in place to start a consulting company. I have several friends around the country who work in this same field who would love to do part or full time consulting work. With machine vision, it is often the case that machine vision is required for a machine to function, but does not do the real work of the machine. That means that the machine vision guy is needed either as a consultant, or if we are fortunate, as a minor equity partner in the development of new technology. That is all. Jason finds those kinds of opportunities all the time (as do I). I love to work in the application of machine vision to solve new classes of problems. It seems like there should be a business model in there somewhere for a two many consulting and technology development company.

Check out my buddy Eric’s interesting and very cerebral blog here.

Update on our old customer from this post: We got our first big order from them yesterday.

My brother just sent me this quote:

I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means “put down.” — Bob Newhart

The biggest and best thing that has been happening lately in our homeschool is that Lorena has been doing a bunch of the math correction for the last couple of weeks since I have had quite a heavy load at work. In addition, the kids have gotten a running start on Rosetta Stone Spanish II. They are really much more practiced at using Rosetta Stone than before. We are hoping to get through it fairly quickly so they can go on to a third language. Usually we have done one minor subject during the summers on something for which the accomplishment was very useful. For about four years, that something was typing. Now both the kids are proficient typists so I think Spanish will be a good replacement. The plan is to do one year of Rosetta Stone Spanish to give them a start in a second romance language, then go on to something harder–maybe Russian or Mandarin. I think next summer (not the coming one) will be a good time for them to spend a couple of months in Mexico with their grandparents. They will be old enough and nothing helps a language like immersion. It would also be nice to visit our friends in Quebec City for one of our church conventions so they could get a chance to try out some French.

Everything else is going well.The kids are on track with all their Sonlight books, Math, Science, and all the other regular subjects. We are still needing to get a few old things completed before we can go on to the new things we have prepared to start that I listed last month. Those new things are really great and we are chomping at the bit to get to them, but we really need to finish those other things well, first.

Kelly is almost ready to take here first CLEP test. I am hoping she will be able to do that sometime in March. I will report that as soon as it happens.

Up until the last few weeks, I worked with a very intelligent Chinese lady named Ya. She has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and did much to make the machine on which we are all working succeed. She is married to a man who works in New York, so when she got a job offer up there, she took the job. We were very sorry to see her go because, beside being very smart, she was very nice and a fun person with whom to work. The person who took her place is one of Ya’s friends from college. She is another Chinese lady with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Her name is Yuting and she is also very smart, nice, and fun. She has a beautiful little daughter and a husband who recently traveled to China on business. When he returned, he brought back a commemorative paper lantern made for the 2008 Olympic games which will be in Beijing later this summer. Christian, Lorena, and I had a great time putting it together last night. Christian is going to hang it in his room. Thank you, Yuting!

Chinese lantern from the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah took Lorena, Kelly, and Christian to the Macaroni Grill for a birthday dinner for Kelly last night. I had to work, so I did not get to go. They had a great time. When they got home, we all sat around the island in the kitchen and had a nice talk. The talk covered a wide range of topics. One of those topics was how important it is to enjoy one’s age, whatever it is. I harp on that to Lorena and the kids all the time. It does not good to worry or complain about your age or what you might have missed in life.

I guess I most have gotten that viewpoint from Grandma Sarah because, without prompting, she said, “I don’t ever want to go back. I don’t want to be 17. I don’t want to be 50. I want to be what I am right now.”

She is 77. She and Grandpa Milo are enjoying their lives very much right now. They have a little rental place in Portland close to all of their kids except us. With us, they have a place they can go to get out of the rain. They are close to lots of good restaurants and lots of close friends. They travel a lot. Dad can work on our little business (Quality Corners) whenever he wants. Life is good for them. Being alive at any age is good if you let it be. It is a choice and a big waste not to choose happiness.

One of my favorite quotes is one made by Victor Frankl who was a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He said, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

It is true.

Update: Grandpa Milo called and said he is going to cook one more time again tonight with the kids. We are looking to one more gourmet meal before they return to Oregon tomorrow morning! Pictures tomorrow if I am not too stuffed and sleepy to take them.

We enjoyed one of the best weekends we have had in a long time. I had to work most of the day on Saturday, but was able to get a lot accomplished. Kelly played at here adjudicated recital on Saturday and Christian was able to get the home computers set up so he could access them via his Palm TX PDA over the internet from anywhere in the world. He is not going to enable it quite yet because he needs to make sure the systems are secure, but it was quite an undertaking and an accomplishment. You can see from the pictures in the post below that we ate quite well over the weekend. I hope we get to have at least one more of Grandpa Milo’s gourmet meals before they leave on Wednesday morning. On Sunday, Grandpa Milo made a fruit plate that featured the apple carved like a bird on top of a stack of pineapple and other fruits. Christian hung out with his friends Hunter and Sterling while Kelly was able to spend some time with her friend Megan. Now that we are getting more settled in our new digs, we are going to have to find a way to spend some more time with them.

On Sunday evening, I played a very interesting debate between one of my favorite authors and scholars named William Lane Craig and a very liberal Christian “scholar” named John Dominic Crossan. It was neat, because I had forgotten that the debate moderator was the recently deceased William F. Buckley, Jr. Crossan worked really hard to find a way to not believe in the resurrection of Christ. The debate demonstrates why he did not succeed. You can listen to it here.

Tonight we are going to our friends, Lester and Ester’s house for dinner with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. Tomorrow, Lorena goes to a baby shower while the rest of us will take Kelly to a piano recital. We were going to have someone over for dinner in the evening, but I think that will just be too much. On Sunday, we have a big potluck after meeting. Sometime during the weekend, I want to take Dad and Mom to the Holly Springs library to drink coffee and read books. Grandpa Milo thinks we should plant 100 trees in our backyard, so he is going to a nursery to find out what trees work best. He thinks he can send them out from Oregon cheaper than we can get them here. I hope he is right. It would be great to have a hundred trees in our back yard. We might put some in the front and on the side, too. Grandpa Milo has already had a ton of great ideas about what we ought to do with our backyard and patio. I need to make sure we get his ideas on a patio before he goes.

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah arrived here from Oregon yesterday. I went to the airport to pick up them after work. It is great to finally have them here in our new house. They arrived just a little before the Wednesday night bible study started, so we just ran home airport and had some snacks while we waited for Lorena and the kids to get home from the meeting. The weather has been phenomenal here all winter long. We have had some cold snaps and even a little snow, but I can not remember any time when we had more than two or three days of cold or rainy weather between days with 70 degree weather. Then the Oregonians arrived. It rained and was cold for two days before they got here. It was 27 degrees when they arrived at the airport and 23 degrees on the way in to work. The forecast does not look great.

I no longer buy into the theory that the weather in Oregon is nasty because of the topology, climatic conditions, La Niña, El Niño, water currents in the ocean, volcanic activity, etc., etc. I believe the weather is bad in Oregon because that is where Oregonians live. If Oregonians moved to Florida or San Diego, the weather there would turn bad. It is true. If you want to solve the water problem in the Sahara, send some Oregonians to live there. Believe it.

Some of you might know that I have some ownership in a small wood products company in Idaho named Quality Corners. The downturn in the housing industry hit us pretty hard. We lost a big chunk of business when one of our biggest customers decided to start manufacturing some of the items we made for them. The volume of business with our other customers dropped dramatically. We dipped below break even for a month. The weaker businesses in the industry were starting to fold. We were worried.

That was about four months. Grandpa Milo, who is also a part owner, has always said he did not participate in downturns, but that is easier said than done. What should we do? We knew that many of the best companies try to grow their market share during downturns. They do that by both getting new business with their current customers and by finding new customers. We decided that was a great idea, but the question was how to go about it. We had a base of four large customers and fifteen to twenty smaller, but significant customers. We were (and are) on very good terms with all our customers. Even the big customer who had decided to do their own manufacturing was satisfied with our products and especially our service and delivery. So, we decided to start by talking with the big four to find out if there was anything we could do to get more business from them.

First, we approached a customer who had been buying one product line from us for five years that they sold to one of the large national retail chains. We knew they were buying most of the other products that we make from China. We sat down with them and asked them what it would take to win that business. They loved our service, delivery, and even our prices for the products we provided, but did not believe it was possible for us to meet the prices they got from their Chinese suppliers. Still, since they were happy with what we did for them, they let us quote the business. What they did not tell us is that they were very unhappy with the quality, service, lead time, and delivery they were getting from our Chinese competitors. We gave them a quote for one of two product lines.

The funny deal is that our pricing was good enough to win the business on eighty percent of the products. They gave us a second chance at quoting the other twenty percent and we won the business. The margins were very low, but we knew that if we could get close to breaking even on the first couple of orders, we would learn how to make these products faster, cheaper, and with better quality. We would be able to find cheaper material so that by the third or fourth order we would be making OK margins. That is exactly how it appears to be working. We have modified the processes, materials, and suppliers to the point where we are a little better than break even. We have identified a new machine to build and some new material sources that will allow us to push our margins into more of a comfort zone. We have told them that we want to quote on the last product line that is still being manufactured in China as soon as we have the first one under control. They are very, very happy with the reduced lead times, greatly improved quality, and the ability to solve problems by just picking up the phone.

The company that started doing their own manufacturing to replace us did not have the ability or desire to make some of our specialty products, so some of their divisions continued to buy from us. When they made the change to using their own parts, we thanked them for their business over the previous years and told them we would be happy to help them out with these products if they ever got in a bind. Well, yesterday they called and told us they were in a bind. We told them, “No problem, we can help you out. Let us send you a quote for the parts you need.” Then, based on the new knowledge we had accumulated when we were working to compete with China, we sent them a quote for pricing that was 15% lower than the prices we had previously charged them. The division manager was so surprised, he said “Holy, *$@?%&!” Then he told us he was going to talk to upper management about reevaluating their decision to make these products themselves. We do not know what will happen, but we are optimistic.

In addition to these two events, we have been able to get our foot in the door with one new large customer and are in continuing talks with another. We have added two significant new, unique product offerings and are very optimistic about the future. The reality is that, if an upturn comes, we will be double or triple the size of what we were at time we lost the work from the big customer. It is hard work now and we are not making a lot of money, but we are winning market share and positioning ourselves well for the future. It is really quite gratifying.

I am starting to get really busy at work again. It will probably be like this for the next few weeks. We have a big deadline coming up and I want to get my part of the work complete so I can be sure to be free for spring break. With so many hours to work, I did not have time to correct Kelly’s and Christian’s math last night. Lorena did it for me. Kelly and Christian were horrified when they saw that Lorena had marked just about everything they did wrong. It turns out that, in the schools in Lorena’s part of Mexico, correct answers are marked with a check, while incorrect answers are marked with an ‘X‘. That is just WRONG! Everyone knows the correct way to mark a paper is to us a ‘C‘ for problems worked correctly. The check is reserved for those problems with incorrect answers. There is mass rebellion occurring in the household, but Lorena says she is not about to change. If she is going to correct papers she is going to do it her way. She says her way is the right way. If we do not like it we can correct the papers ourselves.