Day: February 23, 2009

MOM FOUND MY KNITTING!!!! I’d been looking for it for the longest time! The half-finished scarf was stowed away in a plastic bag in a drawer somewhere, but the important thing is that she found it!!  I was totally blah on knitting for several weeks because I had spent a lot of time on that scarf, and it was very pretty, and I had no idea what else I wanted to knit.  But now I’m back!

Today I did something that I should have done a long time ago.  I got out my CLEP History book to read for twenty minutes, but then I remembered all those study books that Dad got.  Simply reading a book for twenty minutes is not the best way to retain information!  So I pulled out a notebook, pencil and highlighter, and flipped all the way back to Chapter 1.  I skimmed the chapter and wrote down all the treaties and amendments and such, and the dates that went along with them. I also wrote down two sentence summaries of the important events, a list of Resconstruction Era vocabulary words, a list of the presidents in office between 1865 and 1877, and two timelines.  All on one sheet of paper! After reviewing the sheet for a little while, I decided to try to do even better than that! I got out a stack of notecards and wrote down dates, vocabulary words, presidents, and amendments (and such) on the fronts of all of them, and then wrote down information on the backs. Instant flashcards! 

I feel like a genius. 🙂

We had a wonderful weekend.  As is usual on Fridays, we had our family night together at home, complete with pizza and clever repartee.  I wrote a previous post about how the hard drive on our Linux/Homeschool computer went bad, so Christian and I worked through all that.  Actually, it was mostly Christian who did the computer recovery and reassembly work because I worked on some programming projects.  We wanted to finish up the ham radio project this weekend, but that pretty much went by the wayside with our computer problems.  One of the good parts of the weekend was that Lorena found a great deal on a table for the computer that she bought with the furniture money she has been saving.  I will put a picture of her and her new purchase up here a little later today.

Kelly hung out with her friend Jenna quite awhile on Saturday.  I think they were doing crafts, looking at dresses, and other girl stuff that is beyond the scope of my understanding, but I think the had a lot of fun.  We wanted to have Jenna over to draw with on Sunday afternoon, but we never really got around to that.  We HAVE to start making that a priority again.  I think I am going to start looking for a book on watercolor or something like that to move our art forward.  We really have not done anything yeet with color.  It is something I would certainly like to try.

Jenna stuck around for dinner when Troy and Youngin came (bringing the food, too–how good is that?) over on Saturday.  We had a ball with them even though I think we kept them way to late because we did not have an Ubuntu disk ready to install on Troy’s computer when he came.  What is awesome is that, when his screen went blank after he got his newly installed Ubuntu computer back home, he called us, but our phone was turned off so he got onto the internet on Youngin’s computer, found Ubuntu Forums and figured the thing out himself.  No problem!  Actually, the problem was a fairly non-trivial X-Windows thing, but he figured it out anyway.  Christian and I were both impressed.