Year: 2008 Page 7 of 15

This weekend looks like it is going to be a programming weekend. We have gotten a good start on school, but we have too many upcoming events (read expenses) to stray too far from home, so we have decided to just stick close to home for the whole weekend, go to the library, cook something interesting (Kelly and Christian, you be thinking about that), and just be together. I want to get Christian set up to start programming in C++. At the same time, I want to continue work on a couple of my programming projects. The most pressing project now is the one I am writing in python to help me manage Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic strip a little more automatically. In addition to that, I have need to get some code written to automatically read the data coming in from the Garmin GPS to the volcano computer. Both of them are pretty fun. I would like to take a long walk this weekend, too. I have started to plateau again on the diet thing which is not any fun at all. Still, when I hear those bagels calling my name, it is hard to resist, so my strategy this weekend is to keep as busy as possible, drink some of the great coffee Lorena makes for me and stay away from those evil, simple carbohydrates.

Last night, I sat with Lorena and showed her how to scan an image into our Linux computer from the HP Printer/Copier/Scanner using GIMP and XSane. It was a lot of fun. I am going to give her some more lessons on how to work with GIMP. We decided it would be great if I could help her to learn how to do some other stuff, too. We are paying a lot of attention to budgeting these days, so I think it might be a great thing for the entire family to spend some time learning OpenOffice.org calc. I had talked with Ruthie about this earlier and have decided it might be a good idea to walk through the excellent tutorials at LearnOpenOffice.org. We will probably start that this weekend, too.

Special note: Betty Blonde is going to black and white next week. I had mentioned this earlier, but the day has now come. The reason is that Kelly’s homeschool is taking too much time for her to be able to get everything done. Something had to be dropped. She is getting faster at drawing the comic and our hope is that she will be able to add a colored weekend strip after we are sure she has her schoolwork under control. Right now, there are now weekend strips.

May 12, 2004 – Flatland
May 12, 2004 – Working on the yard

There must be something in the water up there in Canada that turns conservative journalists into humorous, intelligent, writing machines. Or maybe it is just that they work really hard at it. Denyse O’Leary is joining Mark Steyn as one of our very favorite writers. She is prolific, funny, and a grandma to boot. I do not know how she finds all the stuff she finds, but it is interesting and written with such good humor that it is sometimes hard to tell that she is at war with the materialist left. Mindful Hack and Post-Darwinist are two of her blogs that we read. She is also a contributor at Uncommon Descent and she writes books.

I think she wrote this recent post on Mindful Hack with our little family in mind. We work very hard, sometimes successfully, at avoiding some of the pitfalls common to many homeschoolers. Some of us tend to believe our children are smarter than other children, but we think it is OK to believe that because we are so humble about it. It turns out that ability to perform well on those things that measure academic success are probably more attributable to hard work than to raw intelligence. Grandma was right all along, smart may help, but hard work and discipline are essential.

When I returned home from work last night, I read some to the kids in our book on worldviews, we ate dinner, and were getting ready to go to our Wednesday night bible study when I got a call from my boss. We are getting ready for the launch of our flagship product. My work is integral to the proper function of the machine. We are in the middle of that age old battle between marketing, engineering, and the bean counters. So, I did something I really hate to do. I sent Lorena and the kids on to the bible study, then went back into work. Many on the engineering team are very tired and maybe a little discouraged, but we made a big breakthrough on my part of the equipment last night. Our product is great. This is one of those good kinds of products that will make a real contribution to society if we execute our jobs well and the product works as planned. It is of general interest, so I will describe it in some detail along with a little bit about my contribution to it when it is released. As an exercise in the modeling of responsibility and the joy of work–I really do love my job–it was probably not a bad exercise to go into work last night, but I very much hate to miss meeting.

May 10, 2004 – Depoe Bay Photos
May 11, 2004 – Pinhole cameras

Today I must write a post about an article that I have read in the past week.

Tuesday before last, my beloved piano teacher gave me an inspirational article to read. She tends to be a bit feel-good, mushy at times, so I just put it in the inside of my piano notebook and forgot about it. Yesterday I remembered it just in time, and sped-read it on the way to my lesson. Mrs. B likes to quiz her students on such things, and I had to be prepared.

It was about Billy Mills, the Native American man who famously won the 10,000 Meter Run in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It was really quite a nice article. Mr. Mills told about a time when his father took him fishing soon after the death of his mother. Mills was angry inside, and his dad knew it, so he told Mills that he needed to have a dream, or set a goal instead of keeping all that anger inside. He also told Mills that his creator gave him his life as a gift and the way that he lived his life was a gift back to his creator. Shortly thereafter, Mills’ father died, and he took to running. At first Mills wasn’t fast, but he really enjoyed the sport so he kept at it and got faster and faster. At one point in his life, he was considering suicide, but he remembered what his father had told him, and pushed on to achieve his goal. In 1964 he qualified for the U.S. Track and Field team and the rest is history.

Mrs. B asked me what I took away from the article. I told her I really liked what Mr. Mills’ dad said to him about dreams and our life being a gift back to our creator. In the end, I didn’t think that it was mushy at all. I thought it was truly inspirational.

I have written about Marvin Olasky, the editor of World Magazine before. Well, a few weeks ago, Kelly sent him an email telling him how much we enjoy reading his articles and little bit herself and her plans. Not only did he take the time to write a very nice personal email back to her, World published part of her letter in the Letters to the Editor section of their magazine. This is the second time Kelly has gotten a letter published there. We were all quite excited. Here it is in all its glory.

Rubix defies Lorena

I read something last night that I thought was quite profound. I do not know whether it is right or not, but I do know that it did me some good to hear it. I have been thinking about it ever since. In an article written by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, Congressional Medal of Honor winner Bud Day told this story about when he and John McCain were in a Vietnamese prison camp together:

Today, Mr. Day, a very active 83, still vividly recalls Mr. McCain’s sermons. “He remembered the Episcopal liturgy,” Mr. Day says, “and sounded like a bona fide preacher.” One of Mr. McCain’s first sermons took as its text Luke 20:25 and Matthew 22:21, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Mr. McCain said he and his fellow prisoners shouldn’t ask God to free them, but to help them become the best people they could be while serving as POWs. It was Caesar who put them in prison and Caesar who would get them out. Their task was to act with honor.

It was kind of a Bridge Over the River Kwai mindset. I am sure that when one is a prisoner of war, the choice to live with honor is a difficult daily choice. It reminded me very much of Victor Frankl’s beliefs about choice and dignity that were an outgrowth of his horrific experience as a Nazi prisoner in World War II. Social slights, the tedium of day to day living, ungrateful bosses seem mighty trivial, especially when we use them as excuses to act badly. No one can take from us our freedom to choose dignity.

May 4, 2004 – Waiting…
May 5, 2004 – Her braces are off!!!

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

On the official last weekend before school starts on August 18, we are planning a fun weekend. I have to do a little bit more work to be ready, but most of the time we are just going to hang out together. Lorena and Christian are desperate for some zpizza, so we are going to do that tonight. Tomorrow we plan to attend a going away picnic for a family who is moving from our area up to Charlotte. We still have to buy a thing or two for homeschool–a C++ programming book for Christian in particular, so we will try to head over to Borders on Sunday after meeting. I always get excited about the start of school and with the changes in schedule, we are really looking forward to something new.

The best part of all this is that we have decided to read as many of Kelly’s novels aloud together as we can squeeze in. We could not wait, so we started that part earlier this week. We spent the entire summer reading a book on worldviews aloud and we are continuing to work through the book on argumentation tools. Even though those books are well written, satisfying reads, and quite enjoyable, they are not as much pure fun as novels. I think the joy we derived from reading about Henry Reed, Homer Price, Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Witch of Blackbird Pond and other very exciting peoples adds to our anticipation. These are stellar books chosen by Sonlight. The first one we chose to read is a Newberry Award winner.

Another thing we have decided we need to do with Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic is revert back to black and white comics now as there is just not enough time for her to both draw and color the comics. I recommended that she cut back to three comics per week, but Kelly wants to continue doing it every day. So, after next week, the comic will be black and white except maybe one day per week when she will do a color one. We have not yet decided whether she will make her Friday comic in color or she will create a sixth cartoon each week which we will post on Saturdays. I voted for Friday because of the heavy school schedule she has this year, but am leaving the decision up to her.

So we have all the pencils, clean, new notebooks, and the schedules in place. Now we just need to really enjoy our last weekend of freedom before we dive back into the joys of learning.

The Wittingshire blog had a great video up today that is a perfect segue into our new homeschool year.

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.

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.

On another note, I have final gotten my weight down over thirty pounds in the weight loss death match! Although Bryan is closing in on sixty pounds and that is where the match ends, I think I am only worth another twenty pounds or so. The really good news about this whole deal is that, mostly because of the silly chart that I know Lyle and Bryan are going to update, I have gotten back on the wagon whenever I fell off. That feels really good.

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.

I am glad they are labeling them now.

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.

• First, Christian has pointed out a great little program named Launchy that does something called “Keystroke Launching”. It is very handy and runs on both Windows and Linux. It is funny how we are using fewer and fewer programs that run in only one of the two environments. Our expectation is moving toward compatibility with both operating systems.
• The volcano computer is moving right along. Evan brought me the GPS which he now has wired so that it can receive power from a USB port while sending positional information from the GPS to a serial port. Very cool. I am working on a code snippet for him that receives the information from the serial port and parses it.
• At the request of our buddy, Troy, we have started using phplist on our website to manage the daily mailings of Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic strip.
• I am in the process of writing a Python based program to accumulate and post Kelly’s comic strip. Right now, it takes me about ten minutes per strip using GIMP. That is down from about twenty minutes before Christian showed me David’s Batch Processor.
• We want to set up a computer on the network to serve our homeschool schedules, reports, etc, via a wiki. I am going to give that task to Christian. The way I would really like to do it is set up both a web server for the wiki and a Virtual Private Network so that we can run some programs on the server if necessary.
• Christian is deciding which technology he is going to use to prepare his Spike the Cactus graphic novel (comic book). We do not know whether he will colorize the comic on the computer or not, but he needs to both find programs to process the images and accumulate them into pages and then to display them on the web.

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.

April 13, 2004 (no. 3)
April 14, 2004 (no. 1)

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.

April 8, 2004
April 9, 2004