Category: General Page 31 of 116

Day 10 of 1000

There are lots of good reasons to keep a journal.  In a quick Google search, I found a PILE of good reasons:

• The Benefits of Keeping a Journal
• Inspiration for You to Keep a Journal
• 10 Reasons to Keep a Journal
• Etc.

There are lots of reasons to make a budget.  I found a PILE of good reasons for that, too:

• Why You Should Use a Budget
• Why You Should Make a Budget
• Why a Budget is a Good Debt Management Tool
• Etc.

President has pontificated gratingly on how the congress needs to take up his proposals and implement them, but he has yet to submit anything to congress in writing.  He is scheduled to give a speech on September 8 that is purported to be about his plan on how to get the economy going and create jobs.  Obama attacked the budget proposal of the Republican controlled House of Representatives and demanded more spending, higher taxes, and bigger government in his budget speech on April 13.  The thing he did NOT do was submit a specific proposal in a written budget.

My daughter, Kelly, started college last year.  She did OK the first semester, better the second semester, and now, in her third semester, she is really on top of it.  She attributes the improvements to the fact that she writes a study plan every day.  She is better at planning and better at studying because she writes it down.  In an earlier post, I described a rut into which I had fallen when we finished homeschooling the kids.  My plan to get out of the rut and accomplish something of value revolves around writing stuff down and committing to get it done.

In this upcoming speech, if Obama does not submit a written budget, he is digging a deeper hole.  The prospects for such a plan do not seem too good.  The title of Jim Geraghty’s blog post says it all:  Obama to Supporters: Demand Congress Pass My Unrevealed Plan Now!.  The worst part about his unwritten plan is that he demands that congress implement it.  If they do not implement this undefined plan, he will hammer them for their intransigence in his eternal election campaign.

I have mentioned that, for our GaugeCam project, I am setting up to program our Nook Color.  I downloaded the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Android SDK, the Nook Color SDK (with a Nook Color emulator), and various and sundry other items to get started.  I have been able to write a program that allows a user to enter a web address, then press a button to load a web page into a web browser and show the HTML code in a text field.  Java is the language of choice for most Android programming.  C/C++ is possible, even with QT creator, but not recommended for anything other than spot speedups for a number of good reasons (complexity, compatibility, development tools, debugging, etc.)  I have not been much of a Java guy because I make my living with C/C++ and a little C#, but I have to admit that I am quite impressed.  The image below shows the small program I wrote to access the web with the Eclipse IDE behind it.  Now comes the fun part of designing a more serious program that we can use at GaugeCam.  Notice the web page shown here is the Chapman Kids Blog!

Eclipse IDE debugging Nook Color program via an emulator running on Windows 7

Day 9 of 1000

I work as a research engineer for a medical device company in Research Triangle Park.  I live a little over thirty miles from where I work.  If I leave home at about 5:45, it takes me about 35 minutes to get to work.  If I leave 6:15 or later, it takes me 45 minutes and a lot more driving hassle.  The commute is about twenty minutes longer than I like, but I have found a routine that I enjoy very much.  I have possibly the worst office I have ever had.  It is what most people might call a half size cube.  It is at the intersection with heavy foot traffic.  The rest of my working group is two rooms away.  My boss gave me an awesome computer, so awesome that it generates enough heat to make my cube the hottest place in the building during the steamy North Carolina summers.

Nevertheless, I love my job.  I have a great routine.  The first thing I do when I get to work is make coffee.  Then I go to my desk and eat a yogurt while I read a chapter of my bible on Xiphos.  When I finish my reading, I go to this awesome streaming radio website to listen to Bill Bennett’s Morning in America.  By the time I finish, the coffee is ready, so I have a cup of coffee and eat a granola bar while I read the news headlines and I am ready to work.  The other people start streaming into work around 7:30.  I work with a great group of very bright people, which mitigates the quality of my cube.  That and the fact that I will get a new (to me) office in a new building after the first of the year.

I cannot believe that I enjoy getting out of bed at 5:15 in the morning.  I have turned into my dad.  Life is much better for me when I have a good morning routine.

Day 8 of 1000

I visit National Review Online’s The Corner often.  Some of the regular posters like Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, and Kathryn Jean Lopez are without peer.  Quite a few of them are excellent most of the time, but have a little bit of that country club, neo-con, RINO thing going.  That would include Stanley Kurtz, Jonah Goldberg, and Jim Geraghty.  The thing about the second group is the so often write great stuff that, when they hit a sour note, it grates more than it would if they were not such stellar writers.  Then there are the writers like Ramesh Ponnuru and John Derbyshire who I really wanted to like and kept reading way longer than their material warranted, although Derbyshire has had a few good articles on educational pretension, more than you can say for Ponnuru.  At any rate, Mark Kirkorian was not really on my radar as a distinct personality until today.  He has been one of those authors I knew I had read before, but his writing never made such a strong impression on me that I associated him with any topic in particular.  That is, until now. 
Kirkorian posted an article that is just wrong on many, many levels.  It is profoundly ignorant to say “the attack had nothing to do with drugs (the perpetrators were with a protection racket) and nothing to do with guns (they used gasoline bombs).”  It turns out that the perpetrators of the firebombing were members of the Zeta Drug Cartel and they carried guns into the casino when they went in to firebomb it.

In Felipe Calderon, Mexico has the best president they have had in many years, possibly ever.  He is in an ugly situation.  In the speech Kirkorian cites, Calderon accepts culpability for Mexico’s part in this, but the fact of the matter is that drug consumption in the U.S. drives much of the insidious violence in Monterrey, the beautiful colonial city where the attack took place.  The drug cartels are in Monterrey for its proximity to the U.S. markets and because they launder a LOT of their dirty, drug money in Texas.  What does the American government do?  They send powerful weapons to the drug cartels that are used to murder not only innocent Mexicans, but innocent Americans including a Federal Border Patrol Agent.  Calderon is doing everything within his power to get Mexico’s problem under control; why can’t we prosecute those people in the American government who are selling guns to the bad guys.  In addition to that, there are many reasons to deal with our drug problem here in the U.S. than just to help Mexico.  William F. Buckley, Jr. was flat wrong about drugs.  Drug legalization is just wrong.  If drug addiction is harmful to society, and it is, we should do everything we can to stop it, but that is another topic for another day.

Mexico has its problems, but they are fighting for their lives right now and they are is our neighbor and our friend.  We talk to people on Skype everyday who live in the middle of what was the most peaceful and prosperous large city in Mexico just a few years ago.  We SHOULD help them, not write sanctimonious letters about the evils of Mexico.  We used to be able to go to Mexico to visit our children’s grandparents.  A couple of weeks ago, a man was pushed out of a car onto his knees, shot in the back of the head, and left in the middle of the street, a couple of houses down from those grandparents.  There are too many horrifically violent stories to tell that have directly involved our friends and family in Monterrey including home invasions, a murder, armed robberies, kidnappings, and on and on.  These are the kinds of things that are perpetrated by the drug cartels.  Our insatiable appetite for drugs is a big link in the chain.  Good people on the street on both sides of the border know that this is a problem that belongs to all North Americans, even those in drug addled Canada.

Update:  ATF chief steps down because of the guns to Mexican drug cartels scandal.  The claims of Mark Kirkorian in his shameful article appear even more scurrilous now.

Day 7 of 1000

Uncle Lauro sent this photo of us talking to Grandpa Jose via Skype on his 90th birthday.  We had a great time talking to everyone there.  The reason we did not go there to celebrate in person is because of the war that is taking place in Nuevo Leon (the state where Monterrey is located).  The family was actually a little bit afraid to even have the party because of the terrorism that occurs daily down there.  The party was at Lorena’s Uncle Abel’s beautiful home in Allende which is about thirty miles from Monterrey.  There has been a lot of violence in Allende as well as the other smaller towns around Monterrey.  The last thing we heard about that happened in Allende was a couple of weeks ago, early in the morning, two young men were hung a highway overpass by their ankles and shot in the head as the terrorists drove away.  That all happened within easy hearing distance of where this party occurred.

After the party we spoke with Uncle Jorge, Aunt Mari, and all the cousins. There were military helicopters flying over their home as we spoke. Jorge described the Casino firebombing that happened last week. He lives and works right in one of the municipalities that make up the city of Monterrey and had driven past that exact location of the bombing about 15 minutes before it occurred.  The short video below is of the terrorists as they arrive and enter the casino. You can see the patrons streaming out of the casino followed by billowing black smoke caused by the firebombing, followed by the terrorists getting back into their cars and leaving.  It all took about 3 minutes; At least 53 people died.  That count is expected to rise.  It was the worst terrorist attack so far in Monterrey.

President Felipe Calderon went to Monterrey the next day to mourn with the city.  He sent additional military support to Monterrey.  Here is a quote from a post about Calderon’s Monterrey address on the Los Pinos blog (the Mexican equivalent of the White House in the United States) with which I am in complete agreement:

President Calderón urged society, congress and the US government to reflect on the tragedy currently affecting Mexico and many Latin American countries, due largely to the insatiable drug consumption of millions of Americans.

He indicated that Mexico can no longer be the gateway or pay the consequences of this market, which not only translates into thousands of millions of illicit dollars from the black market but also thousands of deaths as a result of the violence caused by the gangs engaged in this business.

The president asked the US Congress and government to end the criminal sales of high-caliber weapons and assault rifles to the criminals operating in Mexico.

Read the whole thing here.

Day 7 of 1000

Uncle Lauro sent this photo of us talking to Grandpa Jose via Skype on his 90th birthday.  We had a great time talking to everyone there.  The reason we did not go there to celebrate in person is because of the war that is taking place in Nuevo Leon (the state where Monterrey is located).  The family was actually a little bit afraid to even have the party because of the terrorism that occurs daily down there.  The party was at Lorena’s Uncle Abel’s beautiful home in Allende which is about thirty miles from Monterrey.  There has been a lot of violence in Allende as well as the other smaller towns around Monterrey.  The last thing we heard about that happened in Allende was a couple of weeks ago, early in the morning, two young men were hung a highway overpass by their ankles and shot in the head as the terrorists drove away.  That all happened within easy hearing distance of where this party occurred.

After the party we spoke with Uncle Jorge, Aunt Mari, and all the cousins. There were military helicopters flying over their home as we spoke. Jorge described the Casino firebombing that happened last week. He lives and works right in one of the municipalities that make up the city of Monterrey and had driven past that exact location of the bombing about 15 minutes before it occurred.  The short video below is of the terrorists as they arrive and enter the casino. You can see the patrons streaming out of the casino followed by billowing black smoke caused by the firebombing, followed by the terrorists getting back into their cars and leaving.  It all took about 3 minutes; At least 53 people died.  That count is expected to rise.  It was the worst terrorist attack so far in Monterrey.

President Felipe Calderon went to Monterrey the next day to mourn with the city.  He sent additional military support to Monterrey.  Here is a quote from a post about Calderon’s Monterrey address on the Los Pinos blog (the Mexican equivalent of the White House in the United States) with which I am in complete agreement:

President Calderón urged society, congress and the US government to reflect on the tragedy currently affecting Mexico and many Latin American countries, due largely to the insatiable drug consumption of millions of Americans.

He indicated that Mexico can no longer be the gateway or pay the consequences of this market, which not only translates into thousands of millions of illicit dollars from the black market but also thousands of deaths as a result of the violence caused by the gangs engaged in this business.

The president asked the US Congress and government to end the criminal sales of high-caliber weapons and assault rifles to the criminals operating in Mexico.

Read the whole thing here.

Grandpa’s Birthday

Today is my grandpa Jose’s 90th birthday from my mom’s side of the family. My brother Lauro (the first grandson) and my cousin’s daughter Susanita (the first great grandchild) were both born on Grandpa Jose’s birthday.  Most of my family is in Allende, Nuevo Leon right now celebrating my grandpa’s birthday party. Grandpa has 7 daughters and 2 sons. 33 Grandchildren, 25 great-grandchildren and 2 great-great-grandchildren My mom is the oldest of the 9 kids that he and my grandma Leonor had together .   My grandpa is a very happy person. He always has a very nice attitude.  I love him very much.  We are very thankful for many, many  things that he taught us.  We wish we could be celebrating with him and all the family.  My uncle Abel has a great house with a huge patio to fill the whole family for party’s.  They told me that they are doing  lots of very good food.   The main course is borrego al ataud. It is kind of like a steam goat. I have never had that before, but it sounds great!

Mi Primer Día de Clase

Después de casi 5 años de haber llegado aquí  a Carolina del Norte. No había podido enrolarme en la escuela por cuestiones de tiempo y otras cosas.  Este verano pensé en que quería regresar de nuevo para avanzar en mi carrera.   Decidí tomar solo una clase por el momento.  Estoy tomando Contabilidad Financiera.  Hasta ahorita me encanta!  Parece ser que tengo un profesor bueno:)  Vamos a ver si así sigue.  Se ve que le encanta enseniar este tipo de clase.  Entre la clase, le gusta contar lo que le paso durante la semana y también le gusta hablar de su mama que tiene 85 años.  Todo esto hace que la clase de 2 horas termine mas pronto.  A mi me gusta mucho escuchar su acento y la manera que describe las cosas. La ultima clase que tuvimos se la paso contando de su ida a la playa y que no tenia acceso al Internet.  Se la paso contándonos como por 20 minutos mas otros 20 minutos de tomar asistencia y repetir los nombres de los compañeros uno por uno. No tuvo suficiente tiempo para darnos la clase entera.  Ahora estamos un poco atrasados en la tarea, pero no fue por culpa nuestra sino de el. Ayer escribió en el correo electrónico disculpándose por no haber dado la clase entera. 

Day 5 of 1000

Hurricane Irene is hammering the North Carolina coast right now, but all we have seen is a little bit of ran and a light bit of wind.  The electricity went out for a couple of seconds at three this morning, but the weather is so mild we are not sure whether it was even hurricane related.  We expect the weather to degrade some between now and when it is supposed to be at its worst (for us here in Raleigh) around 2:00 PM, but we still expect it to be just a hard ran and higher than normal winds.  As I right this the winds have picked up quite a bit.  The trees behind the house are really starting to move.

Kelly’s current plan is to try to get into the best graduate school of journalism that will accept her after she finishes her statistics degree.  As part of her goal to get into a great one, she wants to go to something called the World Journalism Institute.  World magazine has a two year summer program for college students who want to be journalists.  They want prospective students to keep a blog and submit articles written for whatever publications are available to them.  Kelly has started her blog here.  You can also get to her blog from the link at the top of the page.  I think she has quite a good writing voice and is doing very well with it.  In addition to her writing, Kelly plans to continue her caricature work with the idea that she will draw and post some political cartoons when she feels like she is good enough.  For practice, though, she draws caricatures of her friends.  I think she solicits permission from her friends on facebook, then just goes for it.  Here is part of her latest efforts:

Kelly’s Caricatures

Housekeeping notes:  Christian is working on getting me a decent theme for this blog.  He came and looked over my shoulder while I worked on it last night and started asking me questions.  It became obvious, pretty quickly that he is way out of my league when it comes to web design.  He did mock-ups of some options for me.  It is not just the layout, but color selection, page load speed, and a bunch of other stuff that he is improving.  The blog will be in a state of flux while he works on it, but it should not slow down the posting.

The Other McCain has all the best stuff.  Sometimes I can’t let my kids look over my shoulder while I am reading, but he has a GREAT site.  The latest is an article he found about how gold is a super good investment right now, but guns are better.  Who would have thought?  My cousin Merle from Klamath Falls says that since Obama got elected, guns and ammunition have passed up marijuana as the most planted item in certain parts of rural Oregon.

This article reminded me that I want to put my thoughts down on peer review and scholarly article authorship.  There is something very disturbing about how the academic publication and peer review process works.  George Will has proved to be particularly cogent on this topic.  The ideological purity, institutional hierarchy, and profoundly pety personal politics play a big part in peer review.  This post is just a marker to get me started on the subject.

Day 4 of 1000

The talk of the town here in Raleigh right now is Hurricane Irene.  It is supposed to hit the Outer Banks of North Carolina sometime tomorrow.  WRDU and WRAL, my morning commute radio stations, are all hurricane all the time.  The first thing I heard when I turned the radio on this morning was the struggle authorities were having with surfers heading for the beach to surf the hurricane while everyone else is evacuating.  WRAL reported that Raleigh will probably experience one to two inches of rain with 30-40 mph winds.  It gets more intense the closer one gets to the beach.  It is expected that it will hit the Outer Banks as a level 3 hurricane (111-130 mph) with as much as a foot of rain.  Our plan to head over to the Hill Library at NCSU to study as usual.  We will write a post and put up some pictures if anything interesting happens, but we expect the equivalent of a hard thunderstorm with heavier winds than usual.

Oregon is demonstrating that it is as nutsoid as ever.  A man was arrested in Monmouth for the firebombing of a mosque in Corvallis in retaliation for a plan by a Muslim man to kill people at a Christmas celebration in Portland with a car bomb.  The mosque bomber was indicted for “damaging religious property for racial reasons” which is classified as a “hate” crime.  He was also indicted for “using fire to commit a felony”.  The car bomber was indicted for “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction”, but the sympathies of columnist Steve Duin of the hard left-wing Oregonian appear to be with the car bomber.  In this article, speaking of the FBI sting that caught the guy, he said, “How far would Mohamud have traveled down that road without the help of those very operatives?”  No hate crime here.

Kinky is way too liberal for my blood even though he has a little bit of a libertarian streak.  I like him a little better today after reading an article he wrote for the Daily Beast.  I liked this paragraph a lot:

When I ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a mensch.

Rick Perry was willing and thoughtful enough to make the call. Kinky Friedman was willing to take the call and gracious enough to respond to it positively. I liked Rick Perry a lot before I read the article and Kinky Friedman almost not at all. I think I like them both a little bit better now.  Read the whole thing.

H.T.  Kevin Williamson at National Review Online

I did a little calculating and determined that the 1000th day from when I started posting again is on Monday, May 19 2014.  That is perfect.  Commencement for the 2013-2014 school year at NCSU is on Saturday, May 10, 2014.  Graduation in four years from start to finish with hard degrees like Statistics and Applied Math is very difficult.  It will be equally difficult for Lorena to finish her first two years of college for a 4-year college transfer (Associate of Science) degree while she runs (with an iron fist) our household.  I will need to pitch in at home more often to make that happen.  I have thought a lot about what I want to accomplish, too.  I do not want any more degrees, but there are lots of new and old things I want to learn.  I just need to pare my wants down to something tractable in the allotted time.  I figured that beyond the duties of my day job and household duties, there are several things at which I can aim.  I reserve the right to modify some of these goals as circumstances change, but I think it help to write them down and track progress.

• Blogging and reading – I attribute part of my blogging hiatus to the fact that I quit taking time to read for both edification and pleasure.  I had less things about which to write.  I have two-fold goal here:  1) Daily progress through a book unrelated to my other goals.  Reasonable Faith qualifies as does Farnsworth’s Classic English Rhetoric whose author I heard on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America this morning.  I will try to throw in a novel now and again.  Most importantly, I will continue to track my daily Bible reading here.
• GaugeCam – I make my living as a technology researcher.  There is so much stuff I would love to learn to allow me to do my job better, that I do not have time to learn everything.  We have identified a new project at GaugeCam to “webify” the work we are doing there.  My part of that task will be to write some vision libraries and to make the cameras and I/O devices available from an Android tablet.  My goal then, will be to learn how to program Android well enough on my Nook Color to write and publish a program to access GaugeCam connected cameras and I/O devices over the internet.
• Get my weight down to 170 pounds.

I think those are good goals.  Enough to keep me focused and interest, but not so much I cannot help out with everyone else’s school and around the house.  The kids have additional goals on which they work, but I will leave that to them to talk about in their own blogs.  We might not make it all, but these appear to be worthy goals.

Day 3 of 1000

I talked about a book titled Reasonable Faith that I downloaded to my Nook Color while I walked on a treadmill at the YMCA.  It is a great book, but not one that is easy to digest as a light read.  I have often listened to William Lane Craig debates and podcasts as I do my nightly walks (well, four times per week anyway).  I think different apologetic arguments appeal to differently to different people.  What I mean by that is, even though I am totally entranced by discussions of the historicity of Christ, the historical reality of the resurrection of Christ, cosmic fine tuning, and intelligent design, others are more interested in more philosophical questions such as the problem of evil (theodicy)  and other philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  Reasonable Faith covers all of these.

I started reading about these kinds of topics over twenty five years ago when I had a close relative start beating me up about what I believe.  He had been a serious Christian, but had doubts, and, for a period of time, tried to convince others of the rightness of his apostate worldview.  I was shaken to my core and wanted to figure out what I really believed.  This relative was very taken with the writings of Marcus Borg, a knee-jerk liberal (in the scholarly sense) professor of religion at Oregon State University who is a member of the fringe group called the Jesus Seminar and does not believe Jesus was bodily resurrected, but still claims he is a Christian.  After a few fits and false starts I found many, much more reputable scholars such as Gary Habermas, Ben Witherington III, N.T. Wright, and J.P. Moreland, and William Lane Craig.  It was quite gratifying to see both N.T. Wright and William Lane Craig destroy Borg in scholarly debates several years after I had started reading this kind of scholarship.  You can watch the Craig’s debate with Borg on YouTube.  The first in the series of videos can be found here.  Borg did not do any better in his debate against N.T. Wright.  It is very sad to me as a second generation alumni of Oregon State that this charlatan has been given an endowed chair and continues to promulgate his fringe views at a public university.

At any rate, I have started reading Reasonable Faith.  The first section is a very accessible treatise on some philosophical considerations.  It talks about Augustine, Aquinas, John Locke, Bultmann, Barth, etc.  I think I will get the most out of those sections of the book where I, because of my disposition, have less interest.  I am glad for that.  I need to be more well-rounded in my understanding of these importand topics.

Day 2 of 1000

One of the last things I did before I left Oregon this summer was to buy a Nook Color from the Washington Square Barnes and Noble Bookstore.  We bought it for two reasons:  1) It is a very inexpensive Android tablet computer that Christian and I plan to learn how to program and 2) We thought it would be good for the kids textbooks.  We are still excited about programming the Nook.  It might be good for textbooks, too, but we still have one or two books the kids need to read on their laptops with Kindle PC Software while the rest are real paper books.  We like the Nook a lot.  Christian plays Angry Birds on it every now and then, but I probably use it more than anyone.  I bought a James Mills author (I wish he would write a lot more books–great author) to read on the plane flight home and have been hooked ever since.

I bought my first Andrew Klavan mystery, Empire of Lies, to read on the treadmill at the YMCA.  The book was a pretty rough but an excellent read; I will get more.  The thing that was awesome about the Nook was that when I finished the book, I just connected to the YMCA wireless network and downloaded a new book without missing a beat on my workout.  The book I downloaded is William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith.  I love the book and will talk more about it in another post as I get further into the book.

The main reason we chose the Nook Color over any of the Kindles was the low price coupled with the ability to easily hack the Nook Color into a full blown Android Tablet, not just the limited version of Android provided by Barnes and Noble.  There is even a Kindle app for the Nook so you can read Amazon books as well as Barnes and Noble books.  How much better does it get than that.  There are two things we would really like to have on the Nook Color that are not there:  a camera and a microphone.  A little bit of searching showed that some people appear to have been able to hook cameras, keyboards, and mice, but no one has done the work required to hook up a bluetooth microphone for VOIP calls.  We expect it will happen.

In the meantime, I have downloaded the Nook Color SDK, have a project in mind that involves work I am doing at GaugeCam.  We want to control a remote, cell-phone enable Arduino, micro-controller to turn stuff on and off from both an iPhone and an Android tablet.  My buddy, Andrew will do the iPhone programming.  I will do the Android tablet.

The Dawning — Day 1 of 1000

It dawned on me last night during my walk that I am in a rut.  There is no excuse for my current mood and mode of operation centered around whining and complaining.  I am generally a “glass half full” kind of a guy so I can only image how disconcerting it is to those who have to put up with me when I am in this state of mind.  Still, I know why and when it happened–not to excuse myself, mind you, just to put down a marker and get back on that positive track.  If you have read this blog in the past, you will know that I spent about all of my spare time (along with my wife, Lorena) homeschooling my kids.  That ended in June of 2010.  It took about six months to get them established at the community college, but the real effort to make that happen ended over a year ago.  I spent some time and effort on volunteer and learning projects, but really, I have not aggressively focused on anything for more than a week or two at a time since homeschool ended.  The dawning that occurred last night was excellent because it made me realize two things:  1) The kids are only three years away from going off to graduate school and 2) I am going to go nuts if I do not set myself some goals and make a plan to accomplish them.

The Next Thousand Days

During my walk, I thought about some stuff that has gone on here in North Carolina that is just wrong.  It is not North Carolina itself.  We love North Carolina in general and Raleigh in particular–best small city in America in our humble opinion!  This lead to the thought that we need to get our family out of here as soon as we can.  The problem is that we would have a hard struggle to sell our house in this really bad economy with this really, really bad president who is making it daily worse and doing everything he can to kill unborn babies, take vacation, and play golf while he is at it.  The economy probably will not get better until and if he is out of office for a couple of years starting in 2013.  That pretty much means we are stuck here until 2013 or 2014.  Well, not stuck–we have really great schools for the kids, the best guitar teacher in the world, a great neighborhood, interesting work, summer opportunities for the kids, some good friends, great weather (except in the misery of summer) and a lot of other super cool stuff here.  Now that I put it that way, I wonder why I have been in such a funk these last several months.

The time we need to be in North Carolina corresponds almost directly to the amount of time it will take for Kelly and Christian to graduate from college.  They have a great university here for the applied math and statistics they want to study.  The time is almost exactly one thousand days from today!  That is a good chunk of time.  Not so much that you cannot see the end of it, but enough to accomplish some significant stuff.  I have even identified some stuff that would be good to accomplish.  Of course, we have to get the kids out of community college with a great education, summer internships, jobs, summer school (maybe necessary so they can graduate in four years) and good grades, then into NCSU for two years with the same challenges and opportunities.  That is not a full time job…

So that leaves me with some time for some very cool stuff.  Most of it has to do with the start of a business–one that does not interfere with my day job, but that still requires a lot of learning and work.  I have at least a thousand days of work and learning if the market accepts our concept, but only about 500 if it does not.  I do not have to worry about that for another 500 days or so.