Last night Lorena spoke with our next door neighbor, Tina who lives behind us. Tina is a very nice lady and an artist who runs the LaSalles Stewart Center at Oregon State University. Tina said that she is trying to talk some of her friends into buying our house. That would be absolutely great. Now we have two potential buyers that might allow us to sell our house without having to go through a real estate agent. That would save us a pile of money and hassle and maybe even allow me to get the whole family up to Washington before I start work.

Our plan now is to let Michael know that I am taking the job tomorrow and then wait until after the Fourth of July holiday to give notice at ATS. I would really like to have at least a week and a half off between the time I quit ATS and when I start work at Micro Encoder. If worse comes to worse, I am sure I can crash at David and Diane’s place at night for a little while, while we are selling our house down here and finding a new house up there.

It was a cooler night last night, so I mowed the lawn and then put down some fertilizer on it. I think I actually got the mix right this time. After the fertilizer was down, we watered each side of the lawn for two hours. We are going to have quite a water bill, but I hope it will pay off with a green, nice-looking lawn. Tomorrow night, I want to dig out around the service area in one corner of the lawn so that everything will be ready on Saturday to spread barkdust. Maybe I will have time to bury the drainage line on Saturday, too. I really need to get someone out to cut a whole in the curb where the drainage should go. Tony Nelson told us there is a company called Brothers that should do it for us for around $100.

Kelly and Christian are in swimming lessons now. It sounds like it is going OK, just not quite as good as the YMCA in Sherwood. They put both Kelly and Christian in classes beneath their levels so they had to be moved up. They are taking swimming lessons in Corvallis where there seems to be an excessive lack of humility and not much of a spirit of service. Lorena got into a conversation with a lady who told her that homosexuality and divorce really were not that bad. It really will be nice to live in a little bigger and more cosmopolitan town where people tend to be less full of themselves.

Lorena took Kelly and Christian to Borders in Corvallis yesterday after their swimming lesson. A woman shopping there told a man who was looking for books for homeschooling that Oak Grove Elementary School in Albany was excellent and that it would be a shame for the man to homeschool his children when such a great school was available. Lorena told the man that our kids had also been in Oak Grove and that our children had learned absolutely nothing. The woman turned out to be a friend of Kelly’s teacher, Sheryl Gebhart and she told Lorena what a great teacher was Mrs. Gebhart. Lorena told the woman that both Gebhart and Grimmius, the principal were, in our opinion, very bad at their jobs, because they were mean spirited in the way they treated the children, had no idea about where the children were academically, taught the children ideas contrary to the sincerely held beliefs of the parents, and did nothing to inspire the children to learn. As the man left he thanked Lorena and wished her luck with homeschooling next year.