Month: April 2009 Page 1 of 2

Since my ability to dedicate sufficient time to the blog has been restricted for a bit, Kelly and I have taken some time (mostly in the car going from place to place) to discuss some of the things we want to do in the near future.  She wants to write some topical interview posts.  She will try to do some of the interviews in person and some of them by email.  We very much enjoyed this interview on Betty Blonde with Kevin.

Christian will continue to blog at Nerdhow.  We are over the hump for awhile at work, so I should be able to get back to my regular blogging routine early next week.

I got home at a normal hour last night after all the company left.  It had been great to have them and we are looking forward to more visits.  Still, it was very nice to spend a “normal” evening at home to read, talk, draw, and eat with the family.  We had only been bumped off our routine for about a week, but it felt like something was missing.  I cannot imagine how I will handle it when the kids are out of the house.  There are few things we enjoy as much as sitting in the living room, eating popcorn, and reading a good book together.

Christian found this video.  We loved it.  (H.T. Gizmodo)

We had a group of our ministers over for lunch (I had to work yesterday).  A couple of them spent the night with us on Sunday night and a couple more on Monday.  They are here for a round of special meetings that we will attend tomorrow and Sunday.  I have a project that needs to be finished at work, too, so posting will be light until next week.

Kelly makes all the final editorial decisions about the Betty Blonde comic strip, but she is amazingly collegial about it.  She gets lots of input from Christian on artwork, gag and storyline ideas, narrative, character development, and just about everything else to do with the strip.  She tries to be as gracious as possible in letting me down when we have an idea for a strip that is not up to snuff.

“That is a great idea Dad.  Maybe I can work that in some time, but I think that will break the narrative if I do it right now.”

I know exactly what that means, but I keep trying because it is cool when she uses one of my ideas.  Still, I get to participate pretty heavily in the strip by maintaining the website and mailing list, erasing and scanning the drawings into the computer, acting as the enforcer to remind Kelly there is a deadline, etc.

As we finish the school year and get ready for the summer, we have some pretty big plans for the one year anniversary of Betty Blonde.  We want to add one or two strips per week.  We do not know yet whether the workload will be too heavy to draw Saturday and Sunday strips during the school year next year, but we are going to try it out during the summer.  The plan is for Christian to draw one of the weekly strips as a serial.  Kelly will add a Sunday style color strip each week.  We want to accumulate our first year of strips into a book.  We want to do a t-shirt or mug giveaway.  This all should start ramping up in June of the one year anniversary in mid-July.

Last night, in our bible study, we studied Exodus 33 and 34.  It talks about how Moses spoke to God face to face.  There are a good number of people who contribute to this blog we have never met, but feel like we have come to know.  One of best most faithful readers and contributors, Ruthie, left a comment about some very serious health issues with which she is dealing.  Our prayers and thoughts go out to Ruthie and her family.  Please consider her in your prayers, too.

Lorena cooked mole for lunch yesterday because that was what Aunt Julia wanted.  Lorena does not really need much of an excuse to cook mole, so when she has an enthusiastic audience, it is a double joy for her.  While Lorena cooked the Mole, Aunt Julia made something call no-knead bread that takes 20 or so hours to raise.  She will cook it in one of those big cast-iron skillets.  If it is not totally gone by the time I get home, I will take a picture and put it up here.  Lorena, Christian, Kelly, and Jenna might have to do it again on Saturday so they can get some practice and I can get some pictures.  We took a walk, ate Salmon before dinner, talked, and talked, and talked.

Christian helped Aunt Julia get FireFTP added to the Firefox web browser he put on her computer last time she was here.  Then he upgraded the WordPress installation on her website, put up a new theme and showed her how to do some of the stuff.  I gave him permission to take some time from his homeschool to work with her a little more before she leaves.  She gave us some amazing new lids for virtually ALL of the containers in the house as a gift.

Aunt Julia is working in Greensboro this week.  That is not too far away from here.  She said she would try to make it back here for one more evening.  We all hope that is true.

Update:

Aunt Julia’s Bread

We all love it when Aunt Julia comes.  I get kind of manic because she is my sister and we do not get to see her often enough.  She talked about the books, Outliers and Three Cups of Tea (she actually organized a talk that Greg Mortenson gave in Portland before his book was published), the value of life-long learning, the joy of statistics, cooking, Betty Blonde, her (very cool) job, and a ton of other stuff.  A classic, only Aunt Julia would do it, kind of thing that she did was let us know that the text in the Betty Blonde comic she receives in the mail every day is very hard to read.  That was great.  We did not know that.  So, after she showed it to us, we looked at the text on the Betty Blonde web site and that was hard to read, too.  So, Kelly is going to try to make the text bigger and more well formed.  We would not have known that unless Aunt Julia told us (or, DUH, we would have looked for ourselves).

Today, there are big plans.  Everyone is going to run down to the YMCA to work out.  There will have to be a cooking session.  Julia has been cooking since she was a Child, so it is absolutely necessary for Kelly and Christian to get in on some of that.  Christian is going to install some stuff on her computer for her so she can work on her website–she sells personalized crafty kinds of things, imagine that.  The only problem is that she will be gone tomorrow!

On my way into work this morning, Kim Komando had a radio spot that talked about this study.  It basically says that the more one uses Facebook, the lower their grades.  Her conclusion seemed to be that, if you are a parent, this report should cause you to want to check what your kids are doing on Facebook, but not necessarily restrict their time there.  Hmmm…  That does not make sense to me.  The more I am around Facebook and Twitter, the more I like my blogs–the ones that I read, and even the one that I write.  In some ways, I think Facebook is even more mind-numbing than television.  With television, the communication only travels one direction.  On Facebook, the ability to be heard provides sufficient feedback to keep people hooked in.  And don’t get me started on the narcissism of the whole thing.

We have been on a reading aloud hiatus for the last couple of weeks because of a bunch test preparation we needed to do.  We wanted to wait until Aunt Julia got here because she is bringing us Outliers which is the exact kind of book we like to read together.  Catherine recommended Three Cups of Tea.  Ruthie and Karen Joy seconded the recommendation (you can find Karen’s review of the book here), so we ordered it and are waiting for it to arrive from Amazon.  Kelly’s work on Betty Blonde suffers when we do not read aloud because that gives her just the right environment she likes.  Christian is right there to give advise on the fine points of humor and drawing that go way over my head.  Then I read this post.  That was the last straw!  I decided we needed to read aloud again today.  When I finish this post and our homeschool lesson plans for the next couple of weeks, we are going to start in on a fairly large tome that should take us well into the summer.  It is called A Patriot’s History of the United States.  Hopefully it will be interesting and help Christian with his US History CLEP tests.  Also, hopefully, we will be able to resist reading the other two books to ourselves when they get here!

Last weekend I forgot my purse at the Chick-Fil-A. Second or third time this year that that has happened. I don’t know why I even bother carrying one around with me anymore. I always lose it somewhere!!! But carrying a purse around makes me feel awfully grown up and sophisticated, so I do. Unfortunately, this time around I had my cell phone in my purse. It’s not like I use my cell phone all the time (In fact, I had no idea it was missing until mom reminded me.) but it is a necessary little gadget. Christian and I use it a lot when we are at the bookstore on Saturdays, at our music lessons, or at a friend’s house. At first I thought I had left the purse at the Starbucks inside the Barnes and Noble, but we called and it wasn’t there.  So we racked our brains trying to remember where we had gone for lunch on Saturday.  I thought for sure that it was Wendy’s. Wendy’s is the Chapman household’s second kitchen on Saturday afternoons. BUT Mom remembered Chick-Fil-A. We called, and sure enough, they had it!!! Unfortunately, all of my CLEP US History II notecards were stashed inside one of the purse pockets and Mom called Chick-Fil-A just when we were parking in front of the CLEP testing place. 😛 No harm done though! I had my CLEP book and my notebook with me, and I did squeak by on the test, even with the little distraction of the fire alarm (see Dad’s post below)  Now I have to do it all over again twice! Sociology and Biology are coming up next…

Last night Christian and I got set up to program together.  He is going to continue on his daily C++ lesson, but we are also going to program some other stuff together.  We kind of had a cool project fall into our lap that is very similar to the volcano project.  The good part of the whole deal is that it requires something that we have been wanting to get for a garden adornment anyway.  So this weekend we are going to go out and try to find one of those wooden barrels that have been cut in half so they can be used as a fountain.  Hopefully, we will be able to find some goldfish and a water pump to go with it.  The idea is to point a camera and a light at the barrel to measure and report the water level in the barrel, real-time, via a web page.  It will look nice in the garden AND provide for a fun mechanical/electrical/computer programming/web development project.  I will take some pictures and post them here if we find something good to buy.

Trouble:  Yesterday, Lorena and the kids ran down to Johnston Community College in Smithfield so Kelly could take her US History II CLEP test.  They got there just fine, but about halfway through the test, the fire alarm went off.  It seems that someone had left their popcorn in the microwave too long.  So, our friend Ciara, the test administrator had to pause all the test computers and clear the building.  After the fire department checked everything out, all the test takers filed back into the room, Ciara unpaused the computers and everyone finished their test.  It was not an optimal performance for Kelly.  The test conditions did not help, but Kelly got an adequate score and we have some ideas on how to improve the study procedures for when Christian takes his history tests next year, so we are not at all unhappy.  I will discuss in a few days when I update our Homeschool:  How to Prepare For CLEP tests – US History post with how we did and what we learned from this last test.

Opportunity:  While the rest of the family was off taking tests, I met Troy at NCSU.  We went to visit one of his professors.  I had a GREAT time.  We had quite a long discussion about a lot of interesting things having to do with the measurement of water and water quality.  I am not going to talk about it in a whole lot of detail on this blog, but as a result of the meeting, Troy and I are firing up a project that will use similar technology to the volcano computer.  I think Troy might be the one that wants to do some of the documentation of this on his water blog, although we might host some real-time logging on the chapmankids.net site.  Stay tuned.

We confront competing interests all the time in terms of the way our homeschool time is spent.  It is particularly difficult this time of year.  That is particularly true for Kelly right now.  She has a very difficult CLEP test tomorrow (US History II) along with another one in May (Sociology), and a third one in June (Biology).  She has a challenging number of Precalculus lessons to finish per day through the middle of June so that she can be well situated to finish Calculus next year and still have a decent summer break.  There is a piano recital in May for which to prepare.  Betty Blonde is heating up as we prepare for the big one year anniversary T-shirt and coffee cup give-away.  What is good about all this is that it gives her a great opportunity to learn how to plan.  One thing I have not really thought about is that, as kids get older and leisure time becomes more scarce, “down time” is an item for which it is important to regularly plan, too.  It IS important to make time to play with the neighbor kids, go swimming, read a book for fun rather than for study, ride a bike, do a craft project, etc., etc.  We are going through a very, very busy patch right now, but that makes down time planning even that much more important.

Last Friday I received this in the mail.

If you can’t tell, it is a princess sticker. Given to me for my valor and bravery in the harrowing halls of the doctor’s office. I felt SO embarrassed when I opened the envelope and saw what it was. As you all know, I complained bitterly (for an entire paragraph!) about not receiving such a sticker after my recent visit to the doctor’s office for a tetanus shot.  Never did it occur to me that the kind-hearted souls at Cary Healthcare Associates (?) would actually take the time to post the above sticker to me.  Alas, I did nothing but sit and feel sorry for my poor, wounded, sticker-less self.  Now, however, the world is a little less lonesome, the grass is a bit greener, and the pink wall of my room is that much pinker.

Thank you Doctor Gilmore!!!!

We had what could have been one of our top five weekends since we got to North Carolina.  I had Friday off so I we all ran down to Lowes to pick up materials so I could build another raised bed.  I only goofed up on it a little.  You would have to look at it pretty close to figure out what I did wrong, but it is certainly good enough for the likes of us.  It did not start raining until after I had finished making it.

I mentioned previously that I found some really nice arrechera at a Mexican Carnicería in Durham on Thursday.  Troy and Youngin in came over on Friday night to help us cook it up.  We forgot to put the spices on it before we cooked it, but it came out great anyone.  That means it will come out even better next time.  We have big plans for having a carne asada at our house soon after Special Meetings, probably in mid May.  Our friends from Guatemala were able to get off from work to come to Sunday morning fellowship meeting this week because it was Easter weekend.  They all went with Troy, Youngin, and us to Red Robin’s for lunch.  This is the second year in a row that we have gotten together with them on Easter after meeting.  It is also the second year in a row that we went to two restaurants before we found one that was not closed for Easter.  At any rate, we told the Guatemalans about the arrechera and they thought it would be a super idea to get together soon at our house for a carne asada.  They promised to do all the cooking.  We thought it was a super idea.

Then, on Saturday, Lorena convinced us that we needed to go to the Crabtree Mall because my sister, Jean, had given her a gift certificate for Pottery Barn.  She found the EXACT rug that she needed to have for the living room and it was on SALE!!!  So we got it.  Kelly, Christian, and I decided that we really like the Barnes and Noble at Crossroads much better than the one at Crabtree because the one at Crabtree is small, cramped, has a small, lousy set of chairs, and no electrical connections for our computers.  Beside that, it takes an extra seven or eight minutes to get there.  We had to admit, though, they did have a much more interesting set of fast food joints in the food court.

On top of all that, we all did all the exercise sessions we were supposed to do.  We are currently in a “twenty days in a row–report every day” kind of an exercise pact with all the Chapman side aunts, nieces, and assorted friends.  We are supposed to do thirty minutes of exercise every day for twenty days.  We walked several times, but one day we even went down to the YMCA and worked on the exercise machines.  We all enjoyed the weekend a great deal.  Lorena was looking so pleased that Kelly took her out on the porch and took her picture on Sunday after meeting.

I have a three day weekend coming up, lots of work to do, and not enough time to right a thoughtful post so I thought I would just write about a few disconnected things I want to get recorded so I do not forget:

• Our read aloud program has pretty much fallen apart over the last couple of weeks.  We are rethinking the video blogging as we have not been very inspired by the books we were reading about that.  I think we still want to do some video blogging, but we are thinking that we might want it to be more about blogging than about video production.  This is one thing that might need to wait until the start of summer vacation.
• It is supposed to rain every day this weekend except Sunday.  Our outdoor projects–building another raised bed, spreading more bark dust, installing rain barrels, etc.–might have to be postponed for a week or two.
• Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita are talking about coming to North Carolina from Monterrey in May.  We are going to try to talk one or two of the uncles into coming with them.  Of course everyone is excited about that.
• We are in preliminary planning with Lorena’s brothers to build a palapa and a fence around the family property in Allende, N.L. to use as a weekend picnic spot.
• Only three more days until Kelly’s next CLEP test (US History II).
• Lorena finally has all her transcripts to the local community college and should be able to go in for advising on finishing her degree sometime next week.
• Christian and I are planning to set up a web server (Ubuntu LAMP stack) this weekend with one of the old computers.
• Aunt Julia is coming to visit a week from Monday for two days.

That is not much, but that is all I got today.