Category: General Page 42 of 116

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.

Several things have happened in the past couple of weeks that merit serious thought and gravity.  In a way, the fact that these things happened is good. It is difficult to stress how easy it is for me to fall into self-centeredness, self-pity, vanity.  The things that happened are very sad, but they help to snap me out of myself.

On Friday I learned of a friend of a friend who was terribly injured and burned in a freak car accident. She is just sixteen. I know we would have been good friends if we lived closer.  My thoughts have not left her or her family for the past four days.  We are praying for her swift recovery!  Also, two of my good friends have very recently lost a loved one. I don’t personally know the girl who was injured, or my friend’s loved ones, but their lives have impacted my life a little in a good way.  Life is much, much, much too short to worry about the outside, to be caught up in silly physical things, to be caught up in yourself.

We are trying very hard at work to make some significant improvements
to our product before mid-November.  My part of that includes the
development of a bunch of C++ and C# programs.  Christian and I want to
work on our programs at home while I have been feeling the need to get
Kelly started doing some kind of programming so she will be ready to
take the one or two programming classes required for her degree when
she gets to college.  I feel some programming burnout approaching, just
about the time we are ready to visit Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita
in Mexico.  That is a good thing as I do not want to be distracted from
eating tamales while we are there.

We had a super fun, super busy weekend.  I had a great time visiting my old friend, Ed Kachnic, in Atlanta on Friday.  On Saturday, Lorena and I left the kids at home to work on their video blog, so we could run to Costco to buy stuff.  Then, on Sunday, we had the Steppes and the Summeys over for dinner.  It was a great time.  We got some pork loin at Costco because Grandpa Milo said that was easy to cook and tasted good.  That was true, but the true hit of the meal was some sauce Lorena got at a neighborhood cooking party.  It was one of those parties where all the ladies in the neighborhood get together, someone does a demo of something, then everyone spends way too much money to buy it.  I was pretty irritated when she came home with the stuff–I just hate those kinds of parties–but, in this case, I was just WRONG.  Here special plum based meat sauce was some of the best I ever had.  Lisa does some sauce like that for when the Summeys cook pork, so she is going to give us her recipe.  Then, we are going to experiment a little to try to make it like the sauce Lorena bought.  It should be fun.

The Steppes showed up in a beautiful little rag-top Toyota.  We were all quite envious.

Well Dad’s gone for the day so I’m taking over the blog for a bit.

Christian and I are going to start our videocast up again now that we don’t have anything going on during the weekends.  The floodlights in the living room are already set up, as are the coasters and ice water. The only difficulty we’re going to have is thinking of a subject. We don’t know if we should be serious, funny, musical, dramatic or weird.  Our friends are a always good source of help though, so we decided to ask them what they would like to hear us talk about. The answers were varied. David thought we should say something funny or talk about Obama.  Erik thought we should talk about music, specifically alternative and emo types. Brooke thought we should talk about how brand names affect people’s purchases.  Dana (and Lyle) thought we should talk about technology. Ana thought we should talk about sports, Duke, UNC, NC State, celebrities or vampires. Cousin Julia thought we should argue over the merits of Delilah, discuss Christian’s legendary 10th birthday party, list the pros and cons of Facebook, make a music video or talk about fantasy football.   All of the ideas are workable.  Delilah, Facebook, and music are easy for me to talk about.  Christian would be good at talking about technology, his birthday party or music. We will decide on something eventually. 

Another source of inspiration: these guys. I got an e-mail from Dad yesterday with a link to that video.  After clicking the link and watching the (utterly ridiculous) video, I surfed around their YouTube channel a bit and discovered that Rhett & Link live like 20 minutes away from my house! They also went to NC state (Go Wolfpack!), have a live videocast every Thursday night (I would love to do that sometime!), and make really entertaining, and really ridiculous videos. I don’t know if that’s the style that we’re going for, but there are definitely some things there that would help us.

Anyway, if you blog-readers have anything that you would like to hear, please drop us a line. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting very very close to desperate.

My cousin, Tim Mecum, went into the hospital yesterday for emergency surgery for a clot in his lung.  He has had some additional complication and things are touch and go right now.  Tim is a few years younger than I.  He lives in an assisted living apartment provided to him by the county in Oregon where he lives.  Due to his abilities and lack thereof, we have all been amazed and thankful that Tim has been able to live on his own with a little help from the count and his friends.  It was our great joy to be able to take him to Gospel meetings on Sunday afternoons when we lived in Albany.  The reality is that Tim is the one we miss the most from when we lived there.  Right now Tim needs our prayers.

Top 3 questions I get asked about Betty Blonde

3. How did you come up with the characters?
Answer: A condensed version of this)

2. What’s the website address?
Answer: H-t-t-p colon, slash, slash, w-w-w, dot, bettyblonde, dot, com

1. How do you come up with new ideas every day?
Short Answer: I don’t.

Nearly every evening Dad and Christian and I will gather around on the couch, sometimes with a bowl of popcorn, always with paper and pencils and whatever book we may be reading aloud at the moment. Dad will read and Christian and I will ink and draw quietly. Or at least semi-quietly. Dad is interrupted several times in the midst of his declamation and asked any one of the following:

“What should I draw?”
“I don’t know how to end this!”
“Should Spike be rolling his eyes or frowning?”
“Is this too cliched/politically correct/stereotypical?”
“Should I put Big Wilma in this one?”
“Do you think this will offend anyone?”

Dad says 5 PM is the time for reading aloud. But I know it’s actually focus group time. Nearly all the comic strip storylines, punchlines, and ideas have come from this little gathering.  No matter what, we’ll always come up with something to draw.  A good example of this is yesterday’s comic strip (yes I drew it on Monday, yes I am behind, yes I need to get ahead) about all the people showing up to Betty Blonde’s pink party dressed in blue.  I was desperate to finish that storyline because I couldn’t think of anything more for it, and it seemed a little overused to me anyway. Thankfully Dad thought up a suitable finish just in time! Christian and I rounded out the idea and we decided to add some color. Now it’s one of my favorites.

So it’s not just me. I don’t think I could come up with an idea every day if it weren’t for Christian and Dad.  I have no idea how syndicated cartoonists do it.  They are supermen.

After her workout last night, Lorena got it into her head that she wanted to make some quiche.  She is fairly notorious for going by the spirit of a recipe rather than the letter.  At any rate, whatever she did, it was awesome.  We are all lobbying for her to do it again very soon with the help that it will come out as good next time as it did this time.  In the meantime, Grandpa Milo told me he and Grandma Sarah plan to come out to North Carolina to visit us in October.  Of course, that means there will be some great cooking and cooking lessons for the kids.  Of course, in November we are going to Mexico for a couple of weeks and will follow that up with the holidays, so it appears as if we are in for some VERY good eating through the end of the year.

There will be light blogging on my part for a few days.  I am going down to Atlanta on Friday to see an old friend, I need to concentrate on a ton of stuff at both work and homeschool, and so the heavy blogging will be left up to Kelly as she owes us several blog posts.

We had a very good weekend with some old friends and some new ones at one of our church conventions in Shelby, NC this weekend.  We left right after work on Friday, then got back late in the afternoon on Sunday.  Lorena has her work cut out for her getting reorganized after the weekend and I will have a very busy week at work.  While we were there we found that there will be a big get-together in the Charlotte area early in October for Kelly and Christian.  With Christian’s (late) birthday party at the end of the month, Kelly’s PSAT, and our trip to Mexico coming fast, we STILL have a very busy calendar right when we thought we might be slowing down a little.

Last night, Christian and I sat down at the dining room table with the idea that we would start programming our little Arduino micro-controller.  After we got started, we thought it would be a good idea to write a console program to talk to the Arduino through the serial port.  After we got into that a little ways, we thought of the idea of writing a practice program to talk to our little Garmin serial port GPS.  That was a cool idea so now we have started a pre-project that will consist of writing a program using QT to do all the things it is possible to do with the GPS on a PC running Windows or Linux.  After that I think we will add a GUI to the whole thing and maybe even some map images.  At any rate, we are having some fun with it and have a great project with which to do our C/C++ learning.  We will get back to the Arduino after we have let this play out for awhile.

Since I administer the academic elements of our homeschool, I usually call the kids a couple of times per day to talk about their progress on the days assignments.  I usually make the calls during mid-morning and mid-afternoon walk breaks.  That works OK, but it is actually easier and quicker (especially when it is raining) to connect up for a chat over Pidgin.  When I was chatting with Christian yesterday using Pidgin, it dawned on me that it would be nice to be able to share a whiteboard and some applications, too.  So, I did a search on “open source application sharing”, found something called dimdim and got myself an account there.  After we try that out for awhile, we will write about our experience here.

The thing that got me to thinking about this was that, when Christian fixed Grandpa Milo’s and Grandma Sarah’s computer, he set it up so he could log into the computer and fix things on their computer in Oregon from his computer in North Carolina.  That has already helped him when he needed to get Skype set up for them.  The struggled a little because of some hardware problems, but the fact that he could log in and work on their computer himself rather than direct Grandpa Milo was helpful to the extreme.  The software he used to do that is called Logmein.

The other day I received a handwritten letter in the mail from one of my best friends in Oregon.  It wasn’t very long and it’s contents weren’t particularly exciting, but I loved it. I read it three times. I felt like Queen Victoria or Anne Shirley or one of the March sisters. There is just something special about receiving a handwritten letter just for you from a good friend. It’s better than a thousand notifications or friend requests or e-mails.  It’s definitely on my Favorite Things list, right up there with the Lord of the Rings and homemade Mac and Cheese. The only problem is that handwritten, just-for-you letters are so uncommon now.  Maybe that’s what makes them so special, but I think that if snail mail was the only form of communication I would still be just as excited to receive one as I am now. 

I love reading old books, where the characters write extremely long, detailed letters to each other. It inspires me. I know it’s so much fun to receive a nice long letter that will last for a while, so I try to write really long (non-boring) letters for other people. That’s almost more fun than getting a detailed letter.  In the online world however, I fail miserably. My typical (boring) online correspondence will go like this:

Hey!!!! What’s up?
Nm u?
Sammmee… lotsa homework
Bleh. Me too 😛
So are you going to _____?
Ya, maybe if I can get out of school. Hope so!
Kewl 🙂

Bad spelling, lots of smileys (that’s not such a bad thing actually), and nothing to talk about. I know better! I TRY not to be a stereotype, but hey. I’m a teenager in a texting world. It’s tough.

So I’m going to start writing a LOT more letters to other people. Interesting, informative, timely letters. Emphasis on timely… I often write the letters, but fail to send them. But if I do make my letters interesting, informative and timely just think! I could start a fad! Plus, if I wrote to two or three people a week, and they each responded and sent a letter as soon as they received mine, I could receive at least one letter a week!  That would be awesome!

The Mexican “Grito de Dolores” that started the Mexican revolution occurred just before midnight on September 15, 1810.  That is 199 years ago yesterday.  Today, September 16, is the official Mexican Independence Day and also our very good friend Vanesa Batista’s birthday.  Vanesa was Lorena’s best friend in Florida when we lived there right after we got married, so calling her is part of our Independence Day ritual.  This seems like a very good occasion to eat some tacos!

I did not get home until after five yesterday.  That really throws a wrench into our homeschool routine.  We did not finish our reading aloud until 6:30 or so.  After dinner, we started in on math corrections and the two or three small items the kids had not finished during the day.  We did not finish up until after 10:00 PM.  I wanted to work on the robot project with Christian, but that did not happen.  Still, I got a reminder of how hard the kids work.  Currently we are letting a few things fall through the cracks, writing being the principle one, but we have a plan in place to work on that and a book that should arrive in a day or two titled I Hate Writing: The Unofficial Guide to Freshman Composition and Undergraduate Writing. We hope to start making some systematic changes in the way we work on our writing as soon as that book arrives.  Hopefully, Christian and I will be able to start working on our robotic programming project tonight.

World’s oldest person dies in Los Angeles at 115.  File under “The title is cursed”.

Yesterday afternoon we went to Troy’s and Youngin’s house for dinner after Sunday morning meeting.  Beside the fact that we ate fabulous Korean food complete with Kimchee, we got the chance to marvel at their new kitchen.  The pictures do not do it justice.  The thing that amazed us most was how much bigger the kitchen feels.  We did not realize that the whole process, from start to end, including the week or two wait for the granite to be installed, only took six weeks or so.  Congratulations!

We lived in Sherwood, Oregon on September 11, 2001.  Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita had been visiting us for a couple of weeks and were scheduled to fly back to Monterrey from Portland very early that day.  We left the house about 5:00 am and I dropped them off at the airport.  As I was driving in to work at ESI in Portland, I turned on the radio in time to hear that something crazy was going on in New York City.  It took me about a half an hour to get to work.  When I arrived, some guys already had the television on and were watching the first tower burn.  More and more people kept showing up to watch as the second tower got hit, then both towers collapsed.  Not much work got done that day.  We all just kind of walked around in a daze.

In the meantime, Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita got sent home in a cab.  They ended up staying with us for an extra week before they could get a flight home.  Since we did not have a television, Aunt Julia loaned us a little portable one so we could watch the events unfold.  What we did not know until later is that Aunt Jean and Uncle Rick were in New York City with Cousins Julia and Kylee.  They were taking Julia to catch an airplane to Madrid as she was scheduled to go there as an exchange student.  The whole family was spending a few days in New York to do some site seeing together.  They were all on a tour bus on the way for a tour and lunch at the top of the towers when they saw all the smoke.  They got stuck in New York City for several days before they could make their way home.

Kelly is currently at work preparing for the CLEP Western Civilization I Exam which covers the “Ancient Near East to 1648”. She has to read a lot of politically incorrect nonsense in preparation to take the test.  As an antidote to that, she will read a several books by Rodney Stark, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome and (as soon as it comes out) The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade.  We will try to find some similar treatments of the material she covers to prepare for the CLEP Western Civilization II Exam which covers “1648 to Present”.

Kelly wrote her first book report for this series of books which she posted here on this blog.  She will post reviews of all the books she reads in this series.  I think she did an absolutely stellar job and am looking forward to reading her other reviews.

I am sorry to say that I’m not a big fan of non-fiction.  I like it when Dad reads aloud non-fiction books and I will occasionally pick up a practical non-fiction book. But non-fiction just for fun? Never. Why read dry books about ancient Rome or engineering or the life of Paul when you can read Agatha Christie?  The only reason I would ever pick up a non-fiction book would be to feel self-satisfied and intelligent. Very sad. My views are changing now though.  After finishing The Victory of Reason, I can honestly say that I am very excited for my next scholarly tome. It’s not that the book wasn’t a drag to read, because I did have to slog through a lot of tedious material, but it was extremely interesting. Extremely interesting.

Rodney Stark explains why Christianity is the force that thrust the ancient world into modernity. Because of it’s fundamental doctrines and values, Christianity gave birth to modern capitalism, progress, freedom and enlightenment. Belief in progress is intrinsically rooted in Christianity, making practical innovations, logic and learning quite natural, even compulsory to Christians.  When tyrannical rulers were in power, the serfs and peasants under their rule had no reason to increase their productivity.  Why produce more if it was all going to be taken away? There were no banks for their money, no investments to make with what little they had, ergo no motivation. The logical (and Christian) alternative to this problem was freedom. When there is individual freedom and free trade there will be progress, learning, and prosperity.

What I found particularly fascinating was the fact that even in the times of kings and despots, early forms of democracy and political freedom could be found in parts of Europe, especially Italy. Medieval Venice was far ahead of it’s time with it’s five level pyramidal government.  An elected duke with limited powers at the top, then a six-member elected Ducal Council, followed by the Forty and the Senate.  The Forty were basically a court of appeals, the Senate was composed of sixty men who concerned themselves with issues of commerce and foreign policy. These hundred were elected from the Great Council, who were in turn elected by the General Assembly. The General Assembly consisted of all the voting Venetians. Participation in Venetian politics was limited to a few elites at first, but became much more inclusive over time, especially when guilds became more powerful.  Venice was also in a comfortable position physically, surrounded by marshes and water, so being attacked was very difficult.  They grew in sea power and trade and began to produce textiles, dyes, shoes, eyeglasses, crystal and much more. Rodney Stark explained:

The “rebirth” of freedom in some parts of Europe was the result of three necessary elements: Christian ideals, small political units, and within them, the appearance of well-matched interest groups. There were no societies like these anywhere else in the world.

Another interesting point made was that contrary to popular belief, the Dark Ages were not a time of superstition and ignorance. In fact, Stark postulates that during the Dark Ages revolutionary innovations such as fulling mills, renovated horse collars, eyeglasses and clocks were invented and put into widespread practice in Christian Europe. Real science, not alchemy or astrology, but real, organized, practical science, also came about in Christian nations.  In the beginning science and religion were inseparable because Christians were the only ones to not only observe, but theorize. Only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry, and astrology into astronomy.  Stark says this is because Christians “believed it could be done, and should be done” (emphasis his).  Christians believed that their God was a rational God, and so he made a rational world that they could work to understand. Other religions and cultures, including Islam, Greece, Rome, and China did not have this same belief in rationality. Their gods were mysterious and aloof.  The Greek gods were subject to natural cycles, and were not conscious creators. The Chinese Tao was a formless impersonal essence, unable to do anything.  The Muslim Allah on the other hand, was a very active participator in the world, thus creating a major theological obstacle. Natural laws were Muslim blasphemy, as they did not allow Allah freedom to act in this world. There was no room for science!

It seems that most modern scholars would like to forget about their Christian roots.  The Victory of Reason provides enough reason to forget about forgetting.