Month: June 2009

Well, I am making a little progress using Troy’s (via Steve) suggested running method.  I think that if I am patient, I can defeat this shin splint thing.  Two minutes of running followed by two minutes of walking for thirty minutes for another week, followed by a week or two of one minute of walking followed by three minutes of walking will be the plan.  After that, I will see where I am and try to go forward that way.  I am going to try to get the entire family to run a 10K this fall.  I think it would be a lot of fun.  My weight has actually started to come down again, but I think that is due to eating discipline as a result of not having time to eat because I have so much work to do.

In the meantime, lots of summer projects are off to a start.  Kelly, of course, is reading like crazy.  She has discovered that Agatha Christie was just one of four “Queens of Crime”, the other three being Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. She is now in the middle of a Sayers book, but has big plans for reading the other two. I do not want to steal her thunder, so enough said. Christian, in the meantime, has decided to design a new mono-space font. Very cool. They should start in on their t-shirt design for the big Betty Blonde t-shirt give-away for her one year anniversary coming up once per month starting as soon as the shirts are designed and we have them in hand–stay tuned.  Lorena works on her reupholster job as she has time, but time has been at a premium this last little while with swim team starting, new guitar teacher finding, a weekend trip coming up, and that sort of thing.

As for me, all I seem to have time for is our read alouds and my programming commitments.  It is a good thing that those are the perfect summer projects for the likes of me.

The school year ended for us on Monday of this week.  We had a great school year, our sixth full year since we started.  Here is a brief list of some of the things each of the kids accomplished:

Kelly’s Freshman year of high school

• Finished Geometry and got a good start into Precalculus
• Received college credit through CLEP tests for Sociology (3 hours), Psychology (3 hours), U.S. History II (3 hours), and Spanish (12 hours).  She will take Biology on June 10 which should bring her grand total to 34 credit hours which would make here a college sophomore
• Completed her tenth year of piano lessons with a great teacher (Brenda Bruce) very encouraged to continue through college
• Established a routine to systematically measure improvements in exercise performance while planning and maintaining a health diet
• Finished memorizing Matthew 6, 7, and 8 to be video taped this summer for posterity
• Read all the Sonlight literature  and history books for the year
• Completed Apologia Biology
• Continued working through the second year of Rosetta Stone Spanish
• Received a very satisfactory score on her first attempt at the ACT college entrance exam

Christian’s seventh grade year

• Finished Algebra II and got a good start into Geometry
• Received college credit for his first CLEP test in Freshman English Compositon (6 hours)
• Completed his third year of guitar–we have found him a new and very accomplished teacher about whom I will write more later
• Established a routine to systematically measure improvements in exercise performance
• Finished memorizing Matthew 6 and 7 to be video taped this summer for posterity
• Read all the Sonlight literature and history books for the year
• Completed Apologia Physical Science
• Completed his two year survey of World History
• Continued working throught the second year of Rosetta Stone Spanish
• Received a high enough score on the ACT college entrance exam as part of the Duke TIP testing to receive a state award
• Assembled a Ham radio (needs to be tested and tuned to get it to work).

Both of the kids continued work on a variety of craft and art projects including knitting, crocheting, drawing comics, etc.  It was a super year that we enjoyed very much.  This summer both of the kids are going to work on their math and Spanish at about half a normal schedule.  They will also both practice their instruments through the summer, swim for the swim team, go to visit relatives, and to two or three church conventions.  Schools out for summer!  I will write a little bit about the plan for next year, but that can wait until next month.

Aaron Burr was the grandson of the famous Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards.  That he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel was not the only trouble he caused in his lifetime.  It seems he stirred up a lot of people and caused a lot of problems.  Still, he appears to have been a genuine war hero earlier in his life.  John Adams seemed to be the most morally upright of the founding fathers, but was argumentative and had an abrasive personality.  Benedict Arnold was a traitor, had been a courageous leader and appeared to have been very much under appreciated by George Washington.  We enjoy our read through A Patriot’s History of the United States every afternoon.

Yesterday during a pause in the reading, Kelly noted how the founding fathers were just regular people. We read that Jefferson went against one of his strongly held principles about what government had the right to do when he made the Louisiana purchase. John Adams, George Washington, and others made similar compromises over the course of their public lives. My thought in reading this was that I have wrongly (and rightly) compromised my own principles, too.  The circumstances surrounding the decisions we make have a huge impact on how we are judged by history.  How would Benedict Arnold now be judged if England had won the Revolutionary War?  How would he be judged if Washington had showed him a little more respect?  How would Aaron Burr’s life had been different if he had chosen to shoot wide of the mark.  So many small decisions we make have what seems to be an inordinate amount of impact on the direction of our lives.

My first thought was that I want to be very careful about even the small things.  My second thought was that I need to show more kindness to those who make spur of the moment decisions that have deleterious consequences on their entire lives.  All this makes the noise and posturing of the rich and powerful to assure a favorable historical legacy ring hollow.  Our read through this book has made me more grateful that our judge is a merciful and omniscient God.

We went into Costco on Saturday and signed up for another couple of years of service with our provider by getting new cellphones for Lorena and I.  It is amazing how good they are.  We have never gotten a cellphone that was nice enough to suggest that we might have actually paid for it, but with my new, Dave Ramsey mentality, I am almost embarrassed to pull this new phone out.  This is also the first time we got phones that were not the clam shell style.  Even though the economy is in the tank–well, maybe, especially because the economy is in the tank, it is cool to have new stuff.  Even more so because it is shiny.

Today is the last day of school for the 2008-2009 school year.  I will detail some of the things we accomplished for the year in the regular, first Thursday of the month update.  This weekend, we talked about some of the fun things we plan to do this summer.  We will start it of with a bang by running over to Charlotte for a get-together on Friday night with a bunch of kids from church who are the same age as Kelly and Christian.  After that, we will be heavy into the summer swim season until mid-July.  We hope Lorena’s brother Jorge will come sometime in late July or early August.  One way or the other, we plan to do some more site seeing around North Carolina and then head off to Oregon to spend a couple of weeks with Grandpa Milo, Grandma Sarah, and all our friends out there.  In the middle of all that the kids plan to continue with a minimal (an hour and a half to two hours per day) amount of homeschool.  They will do a little Spanish/French, Math, reading, and guitar/piano practice.  We also plan to continue our read aloud/comic drawing sessions every evening.  I want to sit with Christian and develop a C++ program for our project with North Carolina State University.  Christian will also work on finishing the cat tower and, hopefully, get the ham radio going.  Kelly plans to knit, read, and draw.  One of the main goals, though is to swim EVERY DAY.  I think that is not a bad summer plan.

Update:  I put in for my first audio book request.  Actually, I asked for two audio books, both by Thomas F. Madden, but the first had two people in front of me so I do not expect to get it for awhile.  The one that should come in first is titled Empire of Gold, A History of the Byzantine Empire.  I hope I get it this weekend in time to listen to it during next weeks workouts.