Category: Blogging Page 1 of 3

I started blogging in Albany Oregon on April 6, 2004. It is hard to imagine that 20 years have passed since that unauspicious start. Kelly was in finishing fourth grade, Christian was finishing second grade, and we had just made the decision to remove them from what were abysmal circumstances in the local government schools, both academically and socially. I started the blog to help me focus my thinking and keep a record of our homeschool planning and execution. It became immediately apparent that it was well worth the effort. The rate at which I blogged ebbed and flowed over the years. There was a period from 2019 through Spring semester of 2023 when I was working a full-time job and studying as a full-time PhD student when I slowed down pretty dramatically, but on finishing the degree, I started posting back at my normal pace of about 240 blog posts per year. Over that whole time, I have averaged, even with the slow years, a pace of a little over 200 posts per year.

We finished all the educational efforts of Kelly and Christian that we set out to record, added Lorena’s Associate Degree and my PhD, finished those, and have now moved on to new projects. Christian earned a Bachelor’s and PhD degree, Kelly earned an Associate, Bachelor’s and Master of Science degree, Lorena earned an Associate Degree, and I earned a PhD. We worked on all that so hard for so long that, when we finished, we were a little bit lost about what to do. Fortunately, during that time, we had undertaken two very large remodel projects and learned that we loved that. That had given us the impetus to by a couple of fixer-upper houses in Mexico, one of them now converted into a six unit apartment building and the other, the one we hope to use as a residence, is in the middle of a fairly large remodel. The problem is that we are not doing the work on those houses and we do not currently live in them, so we are watching it all happen as opposed to participating in it ourselves. It is fun to watch and write about here, but still leaves quite a bit of time on our hands.

We are navigating what to do as we move toward retirement age–I said “retirement age” advisedly because I hope I never have to retire. I am currently committed to continue working at my current job until I am at least 70. In addition, the paperwork is in progress to make me an Adjunct Professor so I can continue volunteer research contributions at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and North Carolina State University. Lorena and the kids want to travel a little more, so we hope to do that some, too. I expect there will be plenty of things about which to write, but there is nothing better than a longer term, hard goal to inspire effort and creativity to complete. I am getting to the age now where I think there might be only one more of those left. Maybe not even one. Nevertheless, I think I will have plenty of things to write to keep this blog going, hopefully for another twenty years, God willing.

Since I started posting back in 2004, I have written almost 4000 posts. There are a handful of guest posts, but the vast bulk of them are mine. By the time I hit the 20 year mark, God willing, I should be well over that 4000 mark. I have averaged just a little over 200 posts per year and plan to keep doing that as long as I can. The two big personal habits I have adopted that have had a monster positive effect on my life are 1) reading my Bible every day as the first thing I do (starting in 2006) and 2) writing in this blog, initially to have a record of our homeschool, but secondarily, to hold myself accountable with respect to many aspects of my life.

I changed the header to the blog this morning. The image is of the City of San Pedro Garza Garcia where we have our house. The location of the house we plan to remodel and keep is about a quarter of the way up the left side of the mountain in the middle of the image. San Pedro is to the left of the mountain and Monterrey is to the right. The mountain is 6788 feet high. We should be able to post some new images in the next couple of days of the work Lynn has completed on first house we purchased that we plan to put on the market within the next month or so.

I had a long talk with Andrew, my buddy and colleague from our Raleigh days, yesterday. It was really good to get caught up. We talked about many things, but Andrew made mention of my journaling habit. I thought about it a lot after the phone call. Journaling–blogging in this case–really helps me stay on track with things that I want to accomplish. The writing helps me refine my thoughts and consider things I would not have considered if I were not writing about it.

I need to stay organized on several things that might actually be of interest to a few people, but that would certainly be improved with some writing to give myself some direction. I have talked about this before, but now that I am into a couple of projects, I can talk about them in more detail. I do not want to try to do too much so I am going to try to focus on just three things. I have talked about #1 and #2 before, but have really just started getting into #3. The things I want to talk about, but in more detail are these:

1. Doing a retirement PhD — just the part of being old and going back to school.
2. The technical aspects of the PhD program — hydrology, machine learning and machine vision.
3. Flipping houses in Mexico — something on which we embarked almost by accident

I am doing this all for selfish reasons–it helps me stay organized and motivated. It also helps me decide if/when I am done or when it is no longer worth it. All good things.

It is a beautiful snowy day in Centralia. The view is from my office. Western Washington State is kind of a crazy place to be right now. The current count for the coronavirus for the state is 37 dead and 568 infected. Kelly and Christian in Baltimore and Boston, respectively, have both been instructed to work from home until things calm down a little. As for me, I have been asked not to visit our home office in the Boston area for the same reason. That does not change much for me. It is nice to be home with Lorena, but we get cabin fever with no one going to the store unless they really need something.

The situation does lend it self to allow me work on my PhD project and I am making good progress. Since things are moving forward nicely on the doctoral front and I have the time, I thought it might be nice to start writing again. I will try to write several times per week going forward. There are lots of changes taking place in the world right now and it will be nice to have a place to comment on those things, too.

I am averaging 241 posts per year. I am going to try to maintain that as I go forward even though I have moved to more of a diarist posture where only I (and select friends) can see what I post. In a few months I will hit fifteen years. It has absolutely been worth it.

This post is inspired by the exemplary calendar keeping of Brett Kavanaugh and, more impressively, his father. I have never really kept a calendar, but I have been assiduously attentive to writing on this blog for a long time. I hardly believe it, but I have been keeping a blog now for over 14 years at a rate of over twenty posts per month. I started in 2004. At the writing of this blog, the post count stands at 3551 posts. Only a handful of them are not mine. One of the more significant addenda to this blog is the tracking of my Bible reading. I started that in 2006 (over 12 years) and my Bible reading and enjoyment of reading has gradually increased to the point where I am on track to make it through the entire Bible in a single year–something I have never done before and thanks, to a large extent, to keeping track of my reading on this blog, 

The honest truth is that I do not have much of any real significance about which to write since our homeschool end a little over four years ago. I had heard that people who keep diaries from an early age through their active years tend to accomplish more. There must be some research somewhere that backs that up? I know it has been true for me. When I am inspired to write stuff down, planning before I do it, documenting my steps as I go along, and analyzing the results when I am done, I certainly seem to accomplish more.

My thought, thanks to Judge Kavanaugh, is that if I find something that inspires me to write, maybe that will up my game a little as I move toward retirement–from my profession, hopefully not my active participation in significant projects.

My blog posting has fallen off quite a bit over the last month or so. Part of this is due to a lack of time with work on the sickle cell disease project and my day job and the travel required for that, getting Grandpa Milo’s and Grandma Sarah’s estate settled, remodeling the house (even though the new kitchen is in, we still have about a year to go at our current pace), etc., etc. Really, though, I have not been so inspired to write too much. It was nice to be able to put up pictures so friends and family in other places could see pictures of what was going on with the remodel, but there has not really been any greater goal in my posting. The early posting about homeschool, CLEP testing, and posting about skipping high school to go to college had a greater appeal and still draws a lot of traffic to the site and was well worth the effort. After some thought, I have to find something better about which to write or just turn this into a personal blog with pictures and posts suitable for friends and family. I am working through that now. I do not think it will be a short process and I plan to continue to write as I go, but my desire is to find better things about which to write.

Kelly Jean started her new blog (KellyJean.net) just in time to show off her Pi Day pink rhubarb pie in her inaugural post. Who knows what she will post there, but seems like a not inauspicious start to what will, hopefully, be a long and prosperous blogging career. I hope she has as much enjoyment with her blog as I have had with mine. She drew and published a comic strip for two years so I hope she does some of that.

The blog design is very simple which is good and there is a heavy use of the color pink. Surprise, surprise. You will be able to get to Kelly’s blog both from a link in the banner at the top of the page and from the blog roll in the column to the right of the posts here at ChapmanKids.net.

If anyone wants to follow me on twittery you can go here to do that. Trying to figure out how to tweet my posts. This post is my test post to use to figure that out. The photo was of Kelly at Thanksgiving time this year in Wilsonville.

Update: I found out the way to make it look good is to use Twitter Summary Cards. I am also adding the ability to tweet my posts from a button click.

Update 2: Figuring out that I have a lot left to learn. None of this stuff really lines up right and the lining up syntax seems really arbitrary.[bctt tweet=”Testing to see if my ‘Click to Tweet’ capability works.” via=”no”]

It has been quite awhile since I did an update on this blog itself. First, I would like to say I am glad I have been able to keep writing on a regular (sometime only semi-regular) basis and I plan to keep going indefinitely. Here are a few statistics, milestones and comments:

• I started the blog on April 6, 2004, so the blog is a little over 12 years old.
• This is the 2978th blog post, so we should hit 3000 pretty soon. I, myself, have only written 2810, so I probably will not hit the 3000 post mark until 2017 if I can keep going.
• We average around two comments per post, but that has slowed down since I write less now about Homeschool since the kids are gone to college.
• I started tracking my Bible reading on the blog on February 9, 2006, so I have continued with that for over 10 years and have to say it has helped my reading consistency a lot. My plan when I started was to systematically read through the Old Testament three times and the New Testament nine times. I am on track to complete that within the next year or two. After that, I will probably set another goal and maybe switch versions to the ESV or maybe even the Reina Valera. What is most amazing and cool about this little program is that the amount I read every day has been on a steady increase over the last year or so.
• I do not keep many blog statistics, but have a tool that shows the last month. On average I get a little over 100 unique visitors per day and between 300-400 page hits per day (not including spiders and bots). I know how to make those numbers go up, but I do not really enjoy doing the type of writing required to increase traffic all the time (I sometimes go on a binge) and that has never been the point of this blog.

Something that has interested me lately is that the use of the most popular social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (and probably even SnapChat) appears to have fallen off a cliff in terms of daily usage by the great unwashed masses at the same time these sites are increasingly dominated by commercial clutter. Meanwhile, the humble blog has maintained its attraction for people who have a message, like to keep a journal, want a place to put baby pictures for posterity or distant relatives or a million other personal, non-commercial reasons.

So my blog goals are modest. I plan to keep writing about twenty posts per month. I hope to find some things that are compelling to read for anyone else but me. I have found that to be a little bit difficult since the kids are no longer in homeschool, but I have hope with a couple of pretty big things that are happening with life and work. The include a business, a new house and, who knows, maybe someday we will have grandkids and I will get to participate in homeschool again.