Year: 2009 Page 9 of 15

As we arrive at the end of the school year–we will be done for the year by the end of the month–we always have a ton of stuff to do.  This year Kelly is especially loaded up.  When we started homeschooling, we thought life would be somewhat more controlled, but then we did not really know what we were doing or what it would be like.  We found that in a government school setting, everything is generally concentrated around the school.  Now, WE are the institution around which all activity is concentrated.  Because we do not have all the resources that the bloated government school budgets provide, we end up distributing a lot of the activity.  There are piano, guitar, art, subject matter, cooking, and every other imaginable kind of lesson.  There are test taking trips, museum trips, book trips, office supply buying trips, park trips, play trips, concert trips, and trips to every other imaginable kind of location.  Now at the end of the year, summer swimming, a CLEP test, a piano recital, a piano adjudication, a regular guitar lesson, and workout time at the YMCA all happen in a three day period.  I will only be able to make it to one of those activities (the piano recital).  I am going to hide the rolling pin from Lorena.  She truly is a champion in her work to make sure the kids study hard, eat right, and get where they need to go.  Lorena says she is the lunchroom lady and bus driver lady of our homeshcool because I manage all the planning and academic elements of the program, but really she is the heart and center of our school.  There is no way we could do this with out her.

Weight loss note:  Lyle is the champion these days.  I have stemmed the weight gain and believe I have started back down.  Bryan!  Where are you???

Note to Eric:  Here is a note from Luke’s Dad’s blog.  (H.T. Luke) that talks about the pride thing.  I LOVED this.  I think it might have been a quote from a talk given by a guy named Kevin Swanson.

He says if you dare practice rhetoric; if you dare stand up and give an answer; if you dare to get involved in the activity of the exchange of information and knowledge–he says, whatever you do, make sure you don’t forget to do it in the fear of God, and in humility before man.  I’ll tell you, guys, the No. 1 sin that seems to be rampant in our society today, among educated people–and I’m talking about pastors, I’m talking about classical educators, I’m talking about kids that are out there blogging, I’m talking about pseudo-smart people who are trying to argue their point on the blogosphere–I’ll tell you, the No. 1 problem I see is the problem of pride. It’s everywhere. It’s insidious, and it’s ripping apart relationships in churches. It rips apart relationships in this movement.

Luke Holzmann over at the Sonlight blog wrote about the Marketplace of Ideas today.

I think he is exactly right when he said, “Shocked, I realized that was my experience as well. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is oddly empty.”

This is something Kelly and I have spoken about at length.  How to participate in the “public discourse” is an interesting question for us.  We are big fans of people like Marvin Olasky and the rest of the crew at World Magazine, David Berlinski, the “public intellectual” who lives in France and seems to be much smarter than almost everone else, Rodney Stark the emminent sociologist and author from Baylor University, and other people of their ilk.  They have obviously worked hard to learn what they know and have honed their knowledge by engaging in discourse with those who have knowledge of their areas of interest.  It seems to us that those types of people are few and far between.  It does not appear that there are very many people who have the time, energy, and especially the will to participate in the Marketplace of Ideas.  We do not think we are particularly well equipped or gifted to do so ourselves, but it certainly interests us and we try to make some level of investment in that.

Luke points to a blog post here that addresses a part of one of the questions with which, we are confronted daily.  How does one go about preparing ones children to participate in the Marketplace of Ideas?  It is a hard question to which I have no satisfying answer.

*Special note:  This article on who should have a voice in the public square appeared at Evolutions News and Views shortly after this article was posted.  It has something quite important to say by Michael Egnor.  He is another of those to whom we pay a lot of attention because of their stellar record of participation in the Marketplace of Ideas.  It comes from the Discovery Institute‘s Evolution News & Views blog.  We read it every day and highly recommend it.

We got invited to a Cinco de Mayo get-together at the neighbors last week.  It was a great excuse to wear the straw hat my brother-in-law, Lauro bought for me while he was in Columbia.  I know a Columbian hat is not the optimal thing to wear when one is celebrating a Mexican holiday, but then Cinco de Mayo is not wildly by any Mexicans I know outside of the United States.  Before I started going down to Mexico a bunch about twenty five years ago, I though Cinco de Mayo was Mexican Independence day.  A friend disabused me of that notion explaining that the Cinco de Mayo celebration is about the Battle of Puebla when the Mexicans routed the French in 1862.  Mexican Independence Day is celebrated with “El Grito de Independencia” on September 16.  Notice the very cool guayaberra shirt my mother-in-law gave to me as a gift specifically for such occasions.  She also gave me a pair of muslin peasant pants to go with it.  I think Kelly looks quite pretty with the bright flower in her hair.  Christian wore a Mexican sombrero to make up for my Columbian hat.

The other picture is of Christian sitting by the computer and camera system we put together for our big project with Troy at North Carolina State University.  Christian did the bulk of the work.  Everything is pretty much ready to install in the Ag Engineering lab now.  We are just waiting for Troy and Youngin to get back from vacation.  The camera is VERY cool.  It is a weather-proof, wireless IP camera with infrared LED’s that come on when it starts getting dark.  We will be talking about this more as the project moves along.

Christian and I found enough pieces to put together to make an internet server this weekend.  We put a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on it, go ourselves a NO-IP address, and put it up on the internet.  This is the computer we will use in the research project Christian, Troy, and I are doing with North Carolina State University.  After we get the camera hooked up and assure that it works, we will tear the whole setup down, take it over to the NCSU Ag Engineering lab, and set it up again.  I say “we” did that, but really, Christian did all the heavy lifting in figuring out how to make it all work.  It is pretty cool that it is possible to do that in only a day with time left over to go to the bookstore for a few hours, go out to breakfast and lunch, play with the neighbor kids.  Also, for Mothers Day, we hung the big mirror over the fireplace, a candle/plant/flower vase thingy by the back porch, and a painting in the kitchen.  It all came out quite nicely.

Lorena wanted to go to Boston Chicken for Mothers Day on Sunday so that is what we did.  We called Grandma Conchita and Grandma Sarah, too.  Of course, my entire family except us, was together at Aunt Julia’s house in Oregon for a Mothers Day dinner and Lorena’s entire family, except us, was at Grandma Conchita’s house in Monterrey eating carne asada, so we were feeling a little sorry for ourselves.

Kelly and Christian had a great time last year on their swim team at the local YMCA.  We just got an email that the practice is going to start back up again in about a week and a half.  The kids are very excited about it.  The swim team was good for them, not only because it was good exercise, but because they got to hang out for an hour or two per day with a great bunch of kids.  They loved the swim meets because it was not only about the competition, but about the camaraderie that developed while everyone sat around and played games while they waited for their next race.

We have really had a pretty good physical education year this year.  Kelly made great progress on getting the amount of calories she consumed up on the elliptical machine.  She learned a lot about diet by studying several books and worked on eating the right kinds of foods in the right amounts at the right times.  Christian would have liked to swim all year long, but there was no program close enough to us with the right time schedule for us to do that.  So, he has worked on running.  I think he just passed the four mile mark for his four day per week 35 minute run.  I think he could hit six miles next year.  Christian, Kelly, and I want to run a 10K together.  We might even be able to talk Lorena into joining us.  I think we might start training for that after we get back from our summer travels in early September.

The other big thing Christian has been working on is his push-ups.  His goal is to do a hundred in a row.  It took quite awhile to get to the point where he could do 100 push-ups in two sets of fifty each.  Now he has been able to improve that to 60 on the first set and 40 on the second.  I am going to encourage him to keep working on that even during swimming season.

I have come to the conclusion that no one, and I mean no one, can ink Betty Blonde except for me.  You see, the rough drafts of Betty Blonde have little lines going everywhere, not perfect, straight lines for a guide. A lot of the inking if also very ad libbed, especially places like Mr. Nobody’s hat or Spike’s spikes. It’s pretty confusing.  That’s why I like to do it myself. Also, I think inking is just as crucial to the cartooning process as drawing or jokes are.  Maybe even more so.  I believe the way you ink really influences people’s first impressions of your comic strip.  For example, I find FoxTrot a lot more visually appealing than Calvin and Hobbes even though Calvin and Hobbes is a lot funnier.  There’s something about the chunky lines and constant cartoony style of FoxTrot that draws me in.  Sure Calvin and Hobbes is more artistic, but at first glance it doesn’t grab my attention.  Calvin and Hobbes is an acquired taste (I’m just speaking for myself.)

I lied actually. ‘No one and I mean no one’ is not true. Christian is my back up inker in case of emergencies. He knows my style better than I do.  Also, if I happen to have a favorite aunt or uncle or cousin or devoted Betty Blonde fan (of which there are many 😉 ) or friend or worker or grandparent or interested onlooker in the house, and they feel like inking, then I will relinquish the pen. (generally a Bic z4, with a 0.5 point. Works wonders.) I’m even more willing to give up the pen if the volunteer is stressed. Inking is wonderfully therapeutic, sort of like coloring, especially if you have a Dad that’s willing to share his homemade popcorn and read aloud a history book to you.  I recommend taking it up sometime

Drop on by around 5:30 PM sometime… I’d be happy to hand over the z4. 🙂

On a different but related note: I’ve heard tell that professional cartoonists use brushes or fancy fountain pens with India ink.  India ink. Isn’t that fantastic? I don’t know if it’s actually from India, but it sounds awesome, and that’s good enough for me. You know how some people dream of Ferraris, yachts, and high social status ? I dream of India Ink, an NCS membership, and (just maybe) a Reuben Award. 😛

Kelly’s big accomplishments for April included a couple of piano competitions and her CLEP US History II test.  After a month or so of work on the Thinkwell Precalculus program we have adjusted her schedule for completion a little to mid-year next year.  She likes the program a lot because it is giving her a good review of Algebra II from a different perspective and with some new and different techniques from the Teaching Textbooks Algebra II program we liked so much.  After Aunt Julia came to visit, she called us to encourage us to start into some volunteering.  Cousins Amy and Charlie have both been great at that and have both received and given great benefit by their participation.  One of our neighbor lady’s children attend the local, government elementary school.  She says there are some hispanic children who go to school there.  The lady has been kind enough to offer to see whether they would allow Kelly to volunteer there to help Spanish speaking children learn how to speak English.  We do not know whether it will work out, but we are excited about the prospect.

Christian is well into his Teaching Textbooks Geometry now.  It is hard to get the concept of proofs, but he is moving up the learning curve.  He is studying for his CLEP Western Civilization I test, but we have not decided yet whether he will take the test in May or June.  We will decide after he takes the practice tests from the REA study book a couple of times.  His plan is to work hard to get through Chapter 12 of C++ Primer Plus before the end of the school year.  That is because his volunteer work will be to work with Troy and I on our research project with the Agricultural Engineering Department at NCSU.  We need a server to act as an FTP site and a web server.  Christian will set up and manage that first.  After that, he will use his C++ programming skills to program a computer to control some servo motors, lighting, and pumps for the experiment we are tasked to perform.

Special note for Christian:  Imagine the incredible investigative skills required to crack this case.

I have not written on any of the projects we have on our plate for quite awhile because they have been in flux.  An opportunity has come up for me to help out with a project for a professor at Troy’s school (NCSU).  I had been trying to figure out how to combine the Volcano computer project (that is on hold right now because Mt. St. Helens is so quiet), Christian’s C++ programming, and our desire to do some robotics work.  The plan is for Troy to manage a small research program that involves a camera that looks at water.  His water blog is really a better place for a description of the progress we make on the project, but I will try to describe some of the work Christian and I do on this blog.  Our plan is to start putting some of the equipment together this weekend.

It is a very cool project.  The plan calls for three computers.  The first one is inside a camera that looks at an outdoor scene (or a scene in a lab made to look like an outdoor scene) of a body of water.  The second one is a webserver that wirelessly receives the images from the camera and hosts a website that can be viewed from the internet.  The third one controls some robotic devices that control pumps, water motion actuators, light controllers, and hardware to move the lights to create shadows and bright spots in the scene to see if the system can still work in varying conditions.

This weekend, Christian and I hope to put to gether the second computer.  We have everything we need for that computer.  We will put an Ubuntu based LAMP stack on it.  We will also try to get it up on the internet.  We have registered an internet address, so Troy will point that out as soon as we have it up and running and we decide we have something to show.  The camera should get here sometime next week, so the next step will be to figure out how to get it to transmit pictures to the website.  After all that is running, we will start putting the control computer together.

All our other projects are on hold (with the exception of the cat tower) while we work on this.  I will post some stuff here on how it is going and I am sure Christian will post some stuff about his parts of the project on NerdHow, but place where we will describe that is on Troy’s water blog.

I have been going to Mexico on a regular basis now for about twenty-five years.  I have a Mexican wife.  We have two kids.  We all speak Spanish fluently.  Mexican Spanish with a Norteño accent.  We have access to El Norte, the daily newspaper of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon which we read often.  I lived in Guadalajara for awhile, lectured in a good number of Mexican Universities from the ITESM system to the Instituto Tecnologico regional engineering university system.  I spent three years moving advanced manufacturing technology from the U.S. to maquiladora companies in Juarez and Chihuahua.  I have visited Guanajuato, Queretero, Bustamante, Allende, Morelia, Patzcuaro, Zamorra, Puerto Vallarta, San Luis Potosi, Cancun, and many other parts of Mexico.  I have visited Chapultapec Castle, Teotihuacan, and the Museum of Archeology in Mexico City.  One of my brothers-in-law runs his own business in Monterrey.  One of them runs the Latin American operations for a Fortune 500 company.  One works as an engineering manager for a large Mexican owned textile company.  One of them works as a project manager for an IT services company.  My father-in-law and mother-in-law are minor political functionaries in their town.  I have spent many, many hours talking with them about Mexican culture, politics, religion, and business.

After all that, I know that I am gringo.  Even though I love Mexico and really want to understand everything about it, I am still gringo.  There are some things I will never understand.  I was in a conversation with a fellow who has been going down to one location in Mexico each year for a month or so at a time for the last ten years or so.  He is an older man who has done an admirable job of learning the language.  He has lots of very strong opinions about Mexico and what would make Mexico better.  One of those ideas is that Mexico would be better off with a strong left-wing dictator.  I thought he was kidding when he told me.  He was not.  He reminded me a lot of the main stream media and the academic community.  He truly believed he knew things about which he had no clue.  People would suffer greatly if any of his ideas were implemented.  It is a condescending view toward the people of Mexico.  There are many sixties era types (young and old) who, having struggled with living productive lives in their own country, still believe they know what is best for people in a fundamentally different culture, with a very different history, and language.  It amazes me.

Long time no post is a good excuse to use bullet points!

• We’ve already planted a dozen things in our garden! A couple of weeks ago Mom and Christian and I bought two cherry tomato plants (yellow for Christian, grape for me) two normal tomato plants, lavendar and basil. Saturday afternoon, Dad and I went to the Wal-Mart and got cucumber, pepper, cantaloupe, carrot, beet, radish, zucchini, watermelon and chive seeds. Mom and I planted those on Saturday evening.  I even made cute little popsicle stick signs for them!!  I’m super excited for the plants to come up.  We still need lemon cucumbers, chard and lettuce, but I have no clue how we’re going to fit them in the boxes.
• I don’t know if it was just me, but I think that the special meeting we went to yesterday was one of the most amazing ever. Words really can’t describe how helpful it was to me. It’s embarrassing to say, but I usually listen on and off at meeting! 🙁 This time I took in the entire thing, and I am so so so thankful for that.
• Swimteam starts May 18!! We’ve already started talking to all our old friends.  Everyone is super excited!!
• I’m going to start a series of interviews with random friends and relatives for the blog. I think Grandma Conchita will be first, as she has a close-up look at swine flu in Mexico… 😉

I think that’s it. Thank goodness for bullet points!

On my drive into work this morning, I listened to a morning talk show guy interview a public school official who seemed to be quite smug.  The school district had just won an appeal to the state supreme court and won the right to force kids into year-round schools of the districts choice, even if it did not work out for the family.  A little later, I found an LA Times article on Slashdot about how difficult it is to fire bad teachers.  There was some horrific information in the article.  We lived through some of that same kind of horror when our children were in the Albany, Oregon public school system.  Some of it is even documented on this blog.  It was good to have some more confirmation that we made the right choice to homeschool.  The crazy part is that, in spite of the really weak academics and the horrendous socialization at both the schools in Oregon and the schools in our area of North Carolina, many parents praise them as great schools because they never took the time to figure out what is really going on.

That got me to thinking that it is kind of sad that most people decide to start homeschooling, not so much because they think homeschool is good.  They start homeschooling because the alternatives are so bad.  That was certainly true in our case.  We did not realize, until after we had done it for awhile, that homeschool was the very best option for our family on just about every measure.  Our kids were especially better off socially, but they were also better off academically and with respect to health and happiness.  Now that we have some experience, we do not think so much about having had to leave a bad school with bad teachers because we see the positive benefits of homeschooling daily.  Still it is good to have a reminder every now and then of why we stared in the first place.

This is one of those “I can hardly wait to the weekend” weeks.  Hopefully, we will be able to get caught up a little this weekend and enjoy our Special Meeting on Sunday with some great visiting speakers who have worked in some very foreign places, like Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nebraska, and Minnesota!

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.