I have so much on my plate at my work until mid-November that I will post only irregularly until then. Kelly will pick up the slack by posting a little more often than previously.
Month: October 2009
Please forgive the lax posting as of late! It has been a very full month in the Chapman household. In addition to school, work, gym time and visitors, we have had PSATs, parties, more visitors, eye exams, rescheduling of music lessons, and an upcoming trip to Mexico to plan for! Grandma and Grandpa Chapman left for Oregon early yesterday morning, leaving behind plenty of leftovers. While they were here we made chicken cordon bleu, baked apples, Cornish game hens, fruit and angel food cake trifles, macaroni and peas (a Grandma and Grandpa classic), plenty of baked bread, and a fancy pasta dish made with grandpa’s own dried tomatoes. The pasta leftovers have been a lifesaver since we’ve been running around so much lately. Pictures will come soon!
I got my glasses last week! I don’t know how I could ever have lived without them! I feel, dare I say it, rather like Sarah Palin. In the course of obtaining the glasses, I told five people that I was going for the attractive Alaskan ex-governer look, but no one laughed. Liberals. Anyway, it turns out that I’m a little nearsighted in my right eye, and more than a little nearsighted in my left. The glasses will definitely come in handy once I start going to school, and will be mandatory once I start driving.
School is school. I have heaps of reading to do, but the books are interesting which really helps the reading move along. The Ancient History book is exteremly absorbing. It’s like a novel, but more in depth. It’s really helping me see more of the big picture. The Biblical history is especially interesting next to it’s contemporary secular world. Intellectuals by Paul Johnson is quite salacious. Sometimes when I’m reading it I get a guilty feeling, like I’m reading People magazine, but then I remember that I’m doing homework. 🙂
Our kitchen/family room/breakfast nook is really just one big open room with a fireplace in it. It looks out across our back yard to the forest behind us, so it is a very nice view. We almost never open the windows in either the summer (too hot) or winter (too cold), so Lorena decided she did not want the window screens making the view dingy. So, yesterday afternoon, she took all the screens down and washed all the windows. It is amazing how much it brightens up the room. Then she could Tilapia, rice, and a Greek cucumber, olive, and onion salad for dinner. She is truly a wonder woman!
I picked up Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah at the airport yesterday. They plan to be here for a week. I think the focus of the week will be cooking! Grandpa says he is going to teach Kelly and Christian to cook Chicken Cordon Bleu, Cornish Game Hens, and a special pasta dish. The Chicken Cordon Bleu includes Grandpa Milo’s own special blend of spices that he says he might modify a little to make it a little hotter for us Mexicans. It should be a lot of fun.
When we arrived at the house, the first thing Grandpa Milo did was pick several of the small (about 1 inch) persimmons from the tree at the end of the driveway. They are already ripe and VERY tasty. Maybe we ought to think about making some persimmon jelly, too.
This is a video of Christian’s guitar teacher accompanying his nine year old daughter at her school’s talent show. It is REALLY fun. I REALLY hope that Christian gets some instruction on how to play the blues. My hope that Christian will learn some Etta James, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy tunes is renewed! Maybe Kelly could learn how to sing some of this stuff, too.
A long time ago, my sister Jean got me a pair of brightly colored “weight lifter” pants. They were drawstring pants that, to me at least, looked like pajamas. But, because they were weight lifter pants, she said it was acceptable to wear them in public. Ever since then, I have kept a pair of those pants around because I found them to be quite comfortable no matter the state of my expanding or retracting waistline. I put them when I got up on Saturday because I knew I would be stuck at my computer all day writing code for work. I really do mind that at all–the problem on which I am working is very interesting and I love to write code. Still, on days like this, my family has to suffer through incoherent conversation. I get so engrossed that I pretty much zone out and am unavailable for anything other than a grunt of acknowledgment every now and then.
I got NO exercise all weekend long. It was made the worse (or the better depending on one’s point of view) by our visit to Red Robin for a Whiskey River Burger with the Stepps and the Gilmores after meeting yesterday. Lorena and I split the burger, but they have that “bottomless” french fry thing, so, even though it was a very good weekend for programming, it was a very bad weekend weight-wise. It really is a good thing I have taken to wearing weight lifter pants.
Everyone born during or before March, 1994 has their driver’s permit. Everyone except me.
A driver’s license is a necessary tool of survival in the United States. Driver’s permits are the necessary step to obtain the necessary tool. In North Carolina, you are eligible for one if you are at least 14 and a half and have taken the special Driver’s Ed class at your local school. When I was 14 and a half, I was young and naive. The thought of a driver’s permit never crossed my dense little head. When I was 15 and a half I started waking up to reality, and realized that all of my friends had something that I didn’t. I was behind the times. Mom and I began to frantically search for driver’s schools and driver’s manuals and driver’s ed. I am now 15 and eight months old, and at long last am enrolled in a driver’s education class at the local private school. Which means that I won’t be able to get my actual license until I’m most of the way through my 16th year. But that’s OK I guess. It’s a learning experience.
Things are getting cold here in North Carolina. The tips of everyone’s toes and fingers and noses are all chillier than a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Mom and I are pulling out the plaid skirts, the long-long skirts, the footless tights, the thick tights, the fuzzy socks, the cable sweaters, the knee length coats, the knee high boots, the furry boots, the fashionable scarves, the unfashionable scarves, the winter hats, the rain coats, the fuzzy-lined coats, the long sleeve tees and the gloves that never seem to be able to keep your hands warm! We have an extensive collection of winter clothing from all those years living in Oregon. In fact, when we moved to North Carolina I remember only having one pair of shorts! I now have five.
Kelly thinks she did pretty well on her PSAT. She enjoys taking those kinds of tests and she took it with a bunch of other homeschoolers her own age. The other kids were not so talkative, at least to her, and she knows she missed a few of the questions, but all-in-all, she thinks it went fine. The hard thing is that tests like this really throw off our schedule. This is the first time we did not have the Betty Blonde comic scanned into the computer and uploaded to the internet. We have had it fouled up a little and had to make some changes, but this is the first time it was not scanned in at all. Luckily, Christian was able to do that this morning.
Things are not going to slow down to much for awhile either. I am working hard on KamVu, Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah are coming for a visit next week, Kelly starts her driving classes toward the end of October, we go to Mexico for two weeks at the end of November, and both the kids plan to take a CLEP test in early December. I do not expect to be able to get our head above water until Christmas time.
Last night was nice. We all would have liked to get more done, but Kelly wanted to do some brushing up on her Trigonometry and refine her strategy for the writing part of the PSAT she is scheduled to take this morning. Christian received his new Sansa MP3 Player, so he worked on that as much as he could without a power/data transfer cable (that was irritating–we had to order one from Amazon), then played his guitar for us. I struggled through a hard problem with the KamVu software I am developing for both the KamVu and GaugeCam projects. It was nice to just all sit together in the living room and work on stuff. We got a little behind on our other stuff. I will have a ton of math corrections tonight and we will need to have some fairly long reading sessions, but it was worth it.
Kelly is pretty excited about taking her PSAT. Her friend, Sarah Mathias will be taking it with her. Wake Christian Academy was kind enough to let us take the test with them. The have been super helpful in all of this and we are grateful. We have decided to aim for early December for the kids to take their next CLEP tests. Christian thinks he will be ready to take the Spanish test. We will be recently back from Mexico if all goes well, so he will be all practiced up. I think Kelly will take the American Government test, but we are still negotiating that.
In the morning, I got a call from Dad to tell us to pick him up at the airport tomorrow. I remembered, when I helped him get the tickets that they were not coming until next week. That is a great thing, but it is good they called to tell us or they would have made a needless trip to the airport. Then, I got a call yesterday afternoon from Lorena to tell me the car’s battery was dead. Christian was able to recharge it for her so they could go to the YMCA for their workout yesterday afternoon. Consequently they were late getting home. I used the free time to do some work on KamVu. I got the website on the new server going and some more code written, but not much else last night. Well, at least we are getting some things done.
We ran up to Charlotte to stay with some friends over the weekend. The crowd was mostly people from Charlotte, but there were a few from the Raleigh area, too. It is people we only get to see a handful of times during the year so it was really great to have some time with them. Ostensibly, we are there so the kids can be with their friends, play games, and just hang out together, but us grownups really enjoyed it a lot, too. We ate and ate and ate and talked and talked and talked. It was a super weekend. The picture to the left is of two characters some of you might recognize.
This weekend, Lorena and the kids will be talking with friends and eating lots of good food. Last night they made a big batch of Grandpa Milo style popcorn balls to take to a party. I will be doing some of that, too, but will have a mostly programming weekend. The KamVu project has spun back up with a vengeance so I will be spending most of my time working on that. I really do not have much else to say or time to say it today.
I have found a truly amazing and economical recipe, but it is not for the faint of heart. I am not sure when (if ever) we are going to get a chance to try it, but I am sure it would be a hit with Rubix and Kiwi. You can find it here. Last night Kelly and I were talking on the couch while Christian was playing his guitar for us. We were talking about all kinds of things and for some reason I remembered the first time I ate Chicken Cordon Bleu. It was when I lived at a place called Heckart Lodge on the campus of Oregon State University. I have memories of great enjoyment in making it, serving it to our Mom’s for the Mothers Weekend event, and eating it ourselves. I think that is something the kids ought to do the next time we have a free weekend. I am writing about it here to assure the kids will keep it mind so they can have some fond memories of their own. That and, on a more selfish note, I really want some.
We continue to read our VERY big book on U.S. History. We are about two-thirds of the way through. Kelly and I have been talking about what should be her next history book and also what should be our next read aloud. I have decided that two 900 page books in a row are just too much, so I am going to have Kelly read the Susan Wise Bauer book about ancient history on her own. We have a lighter book with tips on how to act socially next, but that should not take too long. I thought of a book I had read awhile back that I liked a lot and thought would be good to read after the “social tips” book. It is titled Seven Men Who Rule the World From the Grave by David Breese and is about Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and four others whose ideas wreak havoc even though they are long dead. While I was rummaging around the bonus room looking for Seven Men, I found Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, a book about the personal lives of Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Lillian Hellman, Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, and many others. It is quite enlightening and will surely spark some interesting conversations when we read it aloud together.
Woo-hoo! Kelly went to the optometrist to get her eyes checked yesterday. I will say no more until we have some pictures.
Kelly made an interesting observation last night. She said something to the effect that she was just like me, pretty normal most of the time, but very manic when she got in a crowd of her peers. I reflected on that and concluded she was right. At least she was right about me. I am not sure about her. I am probably being too manic whenever a crowd is around to notice whether or not she is manic, too. Maybe that is a little (or a lot) narcissistic. I think I need to watch that (Or is that being narcissistic, too?).
Our weekend was quite fruitful in terms of the work we accomplished. Kelly had a makeup piano lesson on Saturday, so Christian and I hung out there while Lorena did some shopping and Kelly went to Mrs. Bruce’s house. There is free wireless broadband now at both Borders and Barnes and Noble, so we were able to work on our computers to our hearts content. Kelly caught up on her reading and drew some Betty Blonde comics. Lorena shopped and cooked. All we did was sit around all weekend. The only time anyone went outside was when Christian mowed the lawn and he did that sitting down. By the end of the weekend we were all a little bit snippy. It serves us right, we really need to, no matter what, get off our duffs, get outside and get some exercise, even if it is only a walk around the neighborhood.
Christian wrote a Bash script that allows him to automatically download and install the Firefox hourly builds so he can run the absolute bleeding edge version of Firefox whenever he wants. This has absolutely no meaning to normal people (me included, although some my argue that I be included in that category), but it is definitely has cachet amongst the nerd crowd.
We have gotten a little behind in our homeschool (a day or so) and have been so busy we have not been able to find the time to get caught up. This is the weekend. If we do not do it this weekend it will not happen for another couple of weeks because of parties and other stuff. Really though, I am pretty pleased. The main thing Kelly works on is her significantly more aggressive reading schedule. The material is more difficult and there is more of it. She is doing great, but it takes practice to be able to handle the level of reading required to perform well in school. She has been reading How to Read a Book and believes that should help here through the process for the rest of the year.
Christian’s main thing is his writing. His schedule called for a good chunk of writing about three times per week, but I think we will go to a daily writing schedule. I will try to negotiate that this afternoon. In addition, we continue to work on his programming. Last night we stayed at it until a little past bedtime. I wanted to get something specific done. We got it done, but went too fast through some new material, so we will address what we did on the next pass. It was pretty cool because we are now able to capture images with Christian’s laptop camera. I need to draw some block diagrams to explain what we did because it is not something that is really obvious when you just look at the code.
On Saturday, we definitely want to run down to the bookstore or the library to just hang out in a nice environment and study.
Autumn is such a beautiful season. Here in North Carolina the leaves haven’t fallen yet, but they are beginning to develop just a tinge of color and brittleness. The sky is blue and the wind is blowing. It’s not cold enough for scarves, but it’s just cold enough to make soups and stews. Gala apples are more delicious now than any other time of the year (in my humble opinion). It’s definitely not summer anymore, but fall isn’t yet in full bloom. We are in between seasons and I am loving it!
I feel slightly disloyal to my birth season, spring. But please take into account that I’m from Oregon. Most of the springs that I’ve seen have been wet and gray and cold. Also, when it’s not a cold spring day, it’s a sunny spring day, and when it’s a sunny spring day that means hay fever! In Oregon Mom and I always suffered horribly from hay fever. It’s a shame, because a sunny spring in Oregon is just about the most beautiful thing since a sunny fall in North Carolina. Summer, of course, is wonderful. I don’t know why it’s not my first favorite season, but fall is just so hard to beat. Anyway, everyone likes summer. Explaining why summer is so wonderful is not at all necessary. Winter is nice, excepting January and February. There are probably 3 things I like about winter:
1. Christmas
2. Snow
3. Fireplaces ablaze and all the associated cozy feelings
But fall, fall, fall is always full of cozy feelings! October is especially nice because you are past the beginning of the school year and you have your routine down pat. Thankfully that’s the case this year because this October is going to be very busy for our family. Having a routine down pat is pretty much going to be required if we want to keep up. Like Dad said in the post below, we have a lot of scheduled interruptions, but it’s all good. Busy is good!!
We have gotten off to a fairly disorganized start this year with lots of interruptions to go places and see things. In addition to that, both of the Kelly and Christian are doing more of their own time management this year. They have been doing “within the day” time management for a couple of years, but now they are starting to do their time management for a week or even longer. It is a little bit of a tough transition, but very necessary. Our plan is for Kelly to start 3/4 time at the community college next year, so she needs to be able to manage all of her own work by then. A typical thing we have done to facilitate that is to give her materials to prepare for a CLEP test and a date when we want her to take the test. She plans out her study schedule to be ready for the test on the preassigned date. We will see how it goes.
We have so much to do and so many (planned) interruptions between now and the end of the year, that we have decided to put all non-homeschool related projects on hold until late winter or spring. So, the things on which we will continue are Betty Blonde–Kelly has been working on some very creative new directions and ideas including a little color here and there, and Christian has started scanning in his comic book and Christian’s C++ programming project to hook up a GPS and a webcam to his laptop–we will take more about that as we make progress.
As for our scheduled homeschool work, there are just a couple of interesting things happening right now. We are two-thirds of the way through our reading of A Patriot’s History of the United States. We will move on to a book on personal communications, probably sometime in November. It is a little lighter and a little shorter than the 900 page Patriot’s History next. After the first of the year, we plan to start in on Susan Wise Bauer’s adult history book The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. We have pre-ordered her next book in that series, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. Other than that, the only thing on our plate is Kelly’s PSAT on October 14, piano and guitar lessons, time at the YMCA, and our upcoming two week immersion Spanish lessons (with Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita) in Mexico at the end of November.