Category: General Page 48 of 116

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.

Lorena cooked mole for lunch yesterday because that was what Aunt Julia wanted.  Lorena does not really need much of an excuse to cook mole, so when she has an enthusiastic audience, it is a double joy for her.  While Lorena cooked the Mole, Aunt Julia made something call no-knead bread that takes 20 or so hours to raise.  She will cook it in one of those big cast-iron skillets.  If it is not totally gone by the time I get home, I will take a picture and put it up here.  Lorena, Christian, Kelly, and Jenna might have to do it again on Saturday so they can get some practice and I can get some pictures.  We took a walk, ate Salmon before dinner, talked, and talked, and talked.

Christian helped Aunt Julia get FireFTP added to the Firefox web browser he put on her computer last time she was here.  Then he upgraded the WordPress installation on her website, put up a new theme and showed her how to do some of the stuff.  I gave him permission to take some time from his homeschool to work with her a little more before she leaves.  She gave us some amazing new lids for virtually ALL of the containers in the house as a gift.

Aunt Julia is working in Greensboro this week.  That is not too far away from here.  She said she would try to make it back here for one more evening.  We all hope that is true.

Update:

Aunt Julia’s Bread

We all love it when Aunt Julia comes.  I get kind of manic because she is my sister and we do not get to see her often enough.  She talked about the books, Outliers and Three Cups of Tea (she actually organized a talk that Greg Mortenson gave in Portland before his book was published), the value of life-long learning, the joy of statistics, cooking, Betty Blonde, her (very cool) job, and a ton of other stuff.  A classic, only Aunt Julia would do it, kind of thing that she did was let us know that the text in the Betty Blonde comic she receives in the mail every day is very hard to read.  That was great.  We did not know that.  So, after she showed it to us, we looked at the text on the Betty Blonde web site and that was hard to read, too.  So, Kelly is going to try to make the text bigger and more well formed.  We would not have known that unless Aunt Julia told us (or, DUH, we would have looked for ourselves).

Today, there are big plans.  Everyone is going to run down to the YMCA to work out.  There will have to be a cooking session.  Julia has been cooking since she was a Child, so it is absolutely necessary for Kelly and Christian to get in on some of that.  Christian is going to install some stuff on her computer for her so she can work on her website–she sells personalized crafty kinds of things, imagine that.  The only problem is that she will be gone tomorrow!

On my way into work this morning, Kim Komando had a radio spot that talked about this study.  It basically says that the more one uses Facebook, the lower their grades.  Her conclusion seemed to be that, if you are a parent, this report should cause you to want to check what your kids are doing on Facebook, but not necessarily restrict their time there.  Hmmm…  That does not make sense to me.  The more I am around Facebook and Twitter, the more I like my blogs–the ones that I read, and even the one that I write.  In some ways, I think Facebook is even more mind-numbing than television.  With television, the communication only travels one direction.  On Facebook, the ability to be heard provides sufficient feedback to keep people hooked in.  And don’t get me started on the narcissism of the whole thing.

We have been on a reading aloud hiatus for the last couple of weeks because of a bunch test preparation we needed to do.  We wanted to wait until Aunt Julia got here because she is bringing us Outliers which is the exact kind of book we like to read together.  Catherine recommended Three Cups of Tea.  Ruthie and Karen Joy seconded the recommendation (you can find Karen’s review of the book here), so we ordered it and are waiting for it to arrive from Amazon.  Kelly’s work on Betty Blonde suffers when we do not read aloud because that gives her just the right environment she likes.  Christian is right there to give advise on the fine points of humor and drawing that go way over my head.  Then I read this post.  That was the last straw!  I decided we needed to read aloud again today.  When I finish this post and our homeschool lesson plans for the next couple of weeks, we are going to start in on a fairly large tome that should take us well into the summer.  It is called A Patriot’s History of the United States.  Hopefully it will be interesting and help Christian with his US History CLEP tests.  Also, hopefully, we will be able to resist reading the other two books to ourselves when they get here!