Category: General Page 61 of 116

Today is the first day of school and, while I am excited to start the new year, I am also sad that my summer vacation is over. )c:

One of the biggest highlights of the year was my experience on the YMCA swim-team. I made lots of friends and also improved my swimming skills. The swim meets were really fun, and so were the regular practices. I was surprised to have brought home some first place ribbons also.

Swimming in the pool just for fun was great, also. There is a great, new, high water-slide. Mom gets scared when we go down it because she says we will fall off on the turns, so we are not allowed to ride it very often. The new facilities here are also all nice and clean, so that is good.

I did a lot of things outside of the YMCA. Mom and I painted my room. We decided to paint just one wall and chose a really bright [but dark] blue color that showed through partly to the yellowish color the wall used to be painted. It didn’t turn out that well, so now we are going to repaint it some shade of green and change the bedspreads before we get too deep into the school year.

Dad bought a new riding mower for our lawn that I love to drive. We have a huge back yard, so it is very helpful when cutting the lawn.

Another thing I started this summer was a ‘graphic novel’. While Kelly draws her world-famous Betty Blonde dailies, I work on a strip with a much longer story line about the same characters on one big adventure together. I hope to finish drawing the strip by the end of the semester. It will take a number of weeks after that to scan it all in and publish it.

This is the first of the tri-weekly essays that I am going to write on the family blog throughout the school year.

Last week, Dad informed me that I was a deprived child. Why? I had never before written the imperative essay on what I did during my summer vacation. Every well-educated child must at one point in his or her life compose this all important article. So here goes!

What I did During my Summer Vacation
By Kelly J. Chapman

A few weeks before school let out for the summer, mom signed Christian and I up for swim-team. We, alas, were not looking forward to being thrown into a frigid pool with twenty sarcastic kids and a swim coach bearing a strong inward resemblance to Hitler. Our doubtful mindset was not unjust. We had tried swim-team before in Oregon. Lets just say it was less than thrilling.

Two and a half months later I have proof of a wonderful swim-team experience: 20 new e-mails in my address book, a worn out green and black swimsuit, and a half dozen pink 6th place ribbons hanging in my room. We had a blast!

I could go on and on about what we did at the swim meets and all the friends that we made, but that would probably not be very interesting, so I’ll tell y’all about the small part of my summer that didn’t involve swimming.

If you look at the blue sidebar on the left of your screen, you will see the proof of my summer art project. Since mid-July I have been drawing Betty Blonde comic strips. Sometimes it’s really hard to think of new jokes or story-lines, but I always have Christian to help me. He is currently drawing his own Betty Blonde graphic novel as a matter of fact! We have so much fun thinking of new characters and stories together. A lot of our summer was spent studying comic books and books about comic books and brainstorming Betty Blonde.

The other things I did aren’t very interesting but anyway:
I ate fudgesicles.
I e-mailed my friends.
I watched Micheal Phelps swim.
I sang really loud all the time.
I listened to Delilah on the radio at night.
I learned how to play the Pink Panther theme on the piano. (Score!!!! I’ve been wanting to learn that forever!)
I struggled with my chlorine-soaked hair.
I listened to Dad read aloud the big worldviews book and the green logic book.
I slept in a lot.

And that’s about it! I had a fantastic, lazy summer. Now I’m completely ready for the new school year and conventions!

Last night, Kelly said, “I am really nervous about my first day of high school.”

We all laughed heartily. Today, the kids are starting into their fifth straight year of homeschool. It has been a great run so far and this year is especially good. Oh, we did our normal, beginning of the year lost book thing–I ordered C++ Primer Plus and and a new CLEP preparation book we are going to try and a book that has been lost. I got quite frustrated, lectured about responsibility, and am thinking about a suitable response. After two weeks of robust preparation, one would think these things would be identified sooner than the night before the start of school. It is not like I am immune to this sort of thing. As I backed the Tundra out of the driveway this morning, Lorena came running out of the garage waving her arms. I had left the cans of soup that I had purchased for lunch sitting in the mini-van.

Speaking of cans of soup, I majorly fell off the wagon on my diet again. I am all the way up to 190 pounds after being below 185 for a couple of days in a row. After our regular Saturday visit to the Holly Springs Library, we went to a potluck for our friend Amy who is moving off to Charlotte with her three daughters. We will miss them, but now have an excuse to get up there on a weekend. I hope they make it down to see us, too. On Sunday, we just had to try out the new Mexican Restaurant in the Beaver Creek Mall after meeting. The rest of the time, all we did was work on homeschool kinds of things and read–munching away on stuff the whole time. For some reason, I had a wild craving for summer sausage, sharp cheddar cheese, and Triscuits. That could not have helped. Nevertheless, it was a very nice weekend.

April 30, 2004 – Collaborating with Nina
April 30, 2004 – Business, Finances, and Robots

On the official last weekend before school starts on August 18, we are planning a fun weekend. I have to do a little bit more work to be ready, but most of the time we are just going to hang out together. Lorena and Christian are desperate for some zpizza, so we are going to do that tonight. Tomorrow we plan to attend a going away picnic for a family who is moving from our area up to Charlotte. We still have to buy a thing or two for homeschool–a C++ programming book for Christian in particular, so we will try to head over to Borders on Sunday after meeting. I always get excited about the start of school and with the changes in schedule, we are really looking forward to something new.

The best part of all this is that we have decided to read as many of Kelly’s novels aloud together as we can squeeze in. We could not wait, so we started that part earlier this week. We spent the entire summer reading a book on worldviews aloud and we are continuing to work through the book on argumentation tools. Even though those books are well written, satisfying reads, and quite enjoyable, they are not as much pure fun as novels. I think the joy we derived from reading about Henry Reed, Homer Price, Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Witch of Blackbird Pond and other very exciting peoples adds to our anticipation. These are stellar books chosen by Sonlight. The first one we chose to read is a Newberry Award winner.

Another thing we have decided we need to do with Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic is revert back to black and white comics now as there is just not enough time for her to both draw and color the comics. I recommended that she cut back to three comics per week, but Kelly wants to continue doing it every day. So, after next week, the comic will be black and white except maybe one day per week when she will do a color one. We have not yet decided whether she will make her Friday comic in color or she will create a sixth cartoon each week which we will post on Saturdays. I voted for Friday because of the heavy school schedule she has this year, but am leaving the decision up to her.

So we have all the pencils, clean, new notebooks, and the schedules in place. Now we just need to really enjoy our last weekend of freedom before we dive back into the joys of learning.

The Wittingshire blog had a great video up today that is a perfect segue into our new homeschool year.

Now that Bryan is within a pound of his final goal of 60 lbs. weight loss, I have decided to put a picture of him up to show what a marvelous change has taken place. As for me, I am hoping to get to my goal by the end of the year!

April 26, 2004 – Joining HSLDA and a birthday party for Tim
April 28, 2004 (No. 1) – Projects for Christian

I just visited a very interesting website that I found while visiting the Uncommon Descent blog. William Dembski had posted a link to something called The Crash Course at a guy name Chris Martenson’s website. The guy seems a seems to be a little bit out of the mainstream, but the material on his site was pretty interesting and I am not unsympathetic to his leanings. The thing that caused Dembski to post the link was the way “The Crash Course” was presented on the site. I, too, was very, very impressed with his Crash Course. He has something to say and he has built an attractive, almost addictive, way of saying it. I am a little agnostic about the material, but the way he presented it was absolutely stellar. At the very beginning of the crash course, he says the course is a work in process. He asks for input about how he can improve the course. I was motivated to want to make a course like that on something about which I am passionate. The course was not flash, but it presented some material that could have been quite complicated in a straightforward, engaging, and non-threatening manner. More courses, presented in this way would be a very helpful tool for those who have something to say.

The posts are little bit out of order! I am just posting them they way they show up in the database.
April 19, 2004 – Stuff for the closet ($)
April 27, 2004 – Piano Lessons

Lorena wanted me to put up some pictures for her family to see. We like to read aloud together in the evening on the screen porch. Christian and Kelly usually work on their drawings. We look out onto the big trees behind the house. It is quite a nice view with both deciduous and evergreen trees. The weather is just perfect for eating and sitting on the back porch right now.

We know we have hit the big time now. Our buddy Troy sent us an image of his email. I am sharing it with you here. Please not that Betty Blonde is just over Dilbert in the hierarchy! Quite exciting, don’t you think, to be rubbing shoulders with such greatness? I would think that is worthy of a “woo-hoo!” I kind of blew it on the mailing this morning by sending an email that was not properly encoded to display the image, so I had to send out a second. I hope you will all forgive me for that. I am just getting the hang of using the email list manager.

On another note, I have final gotten my weight down over thirty pounds in the weight loss death match! Although Bryan is closing in on sixty pounds and that is where the match ends, I think I am only worth another twenty pounds or so. The really good news about this whole deal is that, mostly because of the silly chart that I know Lyle and Bryan are going to update, I have gotten back on the wagon whenever I fell off. That feels really good.

Lorena and I have been doing some talking and some introspecting about what we are going to do over the next few years. It has been very good for us. I really love my work here in North Carolina. I have always loved my work, but I do not know if I have ever either contributed as much or enjoyed my role more than in my current position. The really neat part about it is that they product we are making not only is groundbreaking, but it will have a positive impact on society by preventing problems from occur far more often than they should today. Still, we miss family and friends in other places and the kids will be needing to go to college before too long, maybe in someplace other than North Carolina. God has his hand in all of this. We think there is a way we can meet all of those needs that is both fun and exciting.

April 22, 2004 – Back home from South Carolina
April 23, 2004 – RealScience-4-Kids arrived

First things first! This weekend is the first weekend where I finished the weekend at under 190 lbs. Woo-hoo! I am losing at a rate of a little under five pounds per month. Some tell me that losing weight at that rate is optimal because when you lose rate a lot faster than that, it is harder to keep off. All right. I can buy into that. Still, it tells me a couple of other things. The bad news first. After looking at my weight chart, I can see that I make good progress during the week, then blow it on the weekend. That tells me that I am not nearly so disciplined as I would like to think. The good news is that, because of Bryan, Lyle, and the chart, I have stuck to this thing better than in the past. The upshot is that tenacity, returning to good eating habits after having blown it, and low intensity exercise (I am currently walking four miles per day) works better for me over the long haul than any kind of fad dieting or intense exercise plan. I do plan to return to weight lifting as soon as time permits, but that is because I like it and it is good for long-term health, not because it will help me lose weight.

When I posted my old blog post from April 16, 2004, it got me to thinking about doing a homeschool family business again. The purpose of the homeschool business is to teach the kids responsibility, to earn some money for college, and to teach the kids about how to keep books and run a small business. Raymond Moore and Dorothy Moore highly recommend starting such a business in their stellar book The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook, subtitled “A Creative and Stress-free Approach to Homeschooling”. We have talked about this a lot over the years, but have never really done much about it because we have been so focused on academics. Lorena is fundamentally more entrepreneurial than I and would be great at doing this if I helped with the bookkeeping and some of the logistics. Lorena just loves to make and sell things and she is a very hard and dedicated worker. The old blog post is a timely reminder that I need to refocus on this part of our homeschool education. I think Audrey and her family are particularly good at this, so we might consult them if we come up with a good idea. I will post our thoughts and efforts on this as we move through this school year.

April 16, 2004 – Homeschool business?
April 22, 2004 – Trip to South Carolina

We went to the Holly Springs public library this morning, to drink coffee, browse, and work on the computer. We met a really nice kid there. He must have been sixteen or seventeen years old and had been homeschooled his whole life. I did not know that I was in such a precarious situation. I evaluated the situation, took a picture with my cellphone, and got out of there.

I am glad they are labeling them now.

The kids have been enjoying their summer very much. The swim team was very good for them; they made lots of friends and got lots of exercise. They still go down to the YMCA every morning so Lorena can use the exercise equipment while the kids swim some laps, go down the water slide, and hang out with their friends. Kelly and Christian both started their comic strip authoring careers. Kelly slowed down a little on the piano (although she did not stop) while Christian kept plugging away. Right now they are working on a piece for piano and guitar they can play together the music for which their friend Sara pointed them on the internet. Kelly did some reading and Christian did some IT servicing of his computer. They both continue to blog–Kelly mostly doing social networking while Christian worked on his (high technical) how-to’s at his NerdHow blog. All that is starting to come to an end now. There is only one more week of summer before we jump back into homeschool.

Homeschool will start a week or two early this year. I say that, but it seems like we start a week or two early just about every year so that we can have time during the normal government school year to visit Mexico, go skiing, and other stuff like that. The kids are tasked to empty the homeschool bookshelf in the bonus room and load it up with all their books for the new school year. This weekend, on the way home from the Holly Springs library, we will go to Target to buy notebooks, pencils, and other supplies. We really love to do that. I have the schedules pretty well under control for both of the kids, but I am planning a couple of hours to refine them, get them printed out, go over them with the kids, and get the first couple of weeks into their notebooks.

I just got a really nice note in the form of a comment from another homeschooling father who keeps a very extensive blog called Every Good Path on homeschooling and some other stuff. Thanks, Ruthie! Percentage-wise, there are not so many of us as homeschooling seems to be mostly a mother managed thing. I will put him on our blogroll. He gave me a link to something I have been wanting to do for a long time! It is a bible reading list that is in chronological order. As soon as I finish my current pass through the bible, I think we will try to do a family read through the bible using Mark’s list.

April 14, 2004 (no. 2) – Tentative Schedule
April 15, 2004 – Closet preparation

There are a few interesting tech things going on right now and I just thought I would list them.

• First, Christian has pointed out a great little program named Launchy that does something called “Keystroke Launching”. It is very handy and runs on both Windows and Linux. It is funny how we are using fewer and fewer programs that run in only one of the two environments. Our expectation is moving toward compatibility with both operating systems.
• The volcano computer is moving right along. Evan brought me the GPS which he now has wired so that it can receive power from a USB port while sending positional information from the GPS to a serial port. Very cool. I am working on a code snippet for him that receives the information from the serial port and parses it.
• At the request of our buddy, Troy, we have started using phplist on our website to manage the daily mailings of Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic strip.
• I am in the process of writing a Python based program to accumulate and post Kelly’s comic strip. Right now, it takes me about ten minutes per strip using GIMP. That is down from about twenty minutes before Christian showed me David’s Batch Processor.
• We want to set up a computer on the network to serve our homeschool schedules, reports, etc, via a wiki. I am going to give that task to Christian. The way I would really like to do it is set up both a web server for the wiki and a Virtual Private Network so that we can run some programs on the server if necessary.
• Christian is deciding which technology he is going to use to prepare his Spike the Cactus graphic novel (comic book). We do not know whether he will colorize the comic on the computer or not, but he needs to both find programs to process the images and accumulate them into pages and then to display them on the web.

When I got to my computer this morning, I reminder email to do a homeschool update was waiting for me. I try to do one once per month after the year has started, but since we still have a couple of weeks of summer vacation, I will hold off writing the August homeschool update until my next reminder at the beginning of September.

April 13, 2004 (no. 3)
April 14, 2004 (no. 1)

I grew up in a track and field family in a track and field state. Grandpa Milo’s cousin was a middle distance runner in the Rome and Tokyo Olympic games and held several American records. We lived very close to Eugene, Oregon, arguably the center of the world for track and field. I have seen world record’s broken on the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. Two of my favorites were when John Smith broke the world record in the 440 yard dash at an AAU National Track and Field Championships in the early 1970’s. As he walked back in front of the bleachers, John Smith lifted his arm to wave to the crowd. My cousin Neil and I appeared in the Oregonian newspaper the next day right under his armpit. We felt famous. Another favorite was when Dave Wottle ran in a mile race against Steve Prefontaine in a Twilight meet. It was a a highly emotional race that Wottle won with his signature kick at the end while the crowd went wild in a way that I have never seen at a track meet in any other place than Hayward field. I love watching a track meet more than any other type of sporting event. I think a lot of it has to do with where I grew up.

Still, when we moved to Klamath Falls, a small town in southern Oregon, my brother and I started going to baseball games. During the time we lived in Klamath, both the American Legion World Series and the Babe Ruth World Series were hosted there. For me, baseball is less about the game than it is about the chance (read excuse) to hang out with friends on a sunny afternoon, eat peanuts and talk about life. Some of my very best memories of times I spent with my big brother, Doug, were at those baseball games. We went to basketball and football games, too, but it was just not the same. It did not get much more satisfying than when we could talk Dad and Mom into running by the Artic Circle drive-in to pick up a bucket of chicken to eat at a night game under the lights at Kiger Stadium.

I think I got to reminiscing about this since we moved here to North Carolina. For the two years before we got here, my alma mater, Oregon State beat University of North Carolina for the NCAA Division I national championship in baseball. The coach at Oregon State is from my home town of Newberg and went to high school with one of my little sisters, so I feel like I have a little bit of a connection. This year, Christian and I went to watch UNC play against Florida State. It was just like I remembered. With the Olympics coming up juxtaposed and the baseball season in full swing, some great memories of my youth returned to mind.

April 13, 2004 (no. 1) – In the comments yesterday we discussed math facts. I was EXACTLY in the situation we discussed when I wrote this post!
April 13, 2004 (no. 2)

I worked on Christian’s homeschool schedule for about an hour or so while Lorena and the kids were at Christian’s guitar lesson followed by shopping for new shoes for Christian. I cannot believe it–Christian wears size 7½ now. That is only a half size smaller than me. Lorena got him some running shoes so he could start preparing for a triathlon. After having spent several days getting Kelly’s schedule ready, I decided to change the way we are going to do seventh grade for Christian relative to how we did it for Kelly. There are several reasons. Kelly and Christian are different from each other, Christian is half a year older than Kelly when she started seventh grade, we have learned some new ways of studying that seem to work better for us, etc., etc.

Christian and I looked over the preliminary schedule when I had it pretty well put together. We made some adjustments based on his desire to keep his NerdHow “how-to” blog posting as a non-school activity. Really that is great. He enjoys that and if we turn it into something he has to do, it could be a lot less fun. I have some good writing activities in there already, but I need to add a little more. In addition, I have decided that he will work on the Freshman English Composition CLEP preparation book from the very beginning of the year. A different kind of studying is required to prepare for that CLEP test, so it will be a good English review and a time to practice some new study techniques that will be useful when he gets to college.

Kelly has set up a mailing list for her Betty Blonde comic. If you would like to subscribe to her mailing list, you can click here to do that. Christian is making great progress on his Spike the Cactus comic that uses the same Betty Blonde characters, but from a little different perspective.

April 8, 2004
April 9, 2004

This weekend was a nice summer weekend. We went to a friend’s house for a picnic and to swim on Saturday and we went to a potluck after church on Sunday. It was both busy and lazy at the same time. I worked on the homeschool plan during a few free moments. The plan is coming together very nicely. It feels so good to start getting things in place. Mostly, I have worked on Kelly’s plan because it is a lot different than in the past. We talked it over together and believe we have a schedule she will be able to complete every day in four or five hours if she works hard, but that will push her a little bit. We think it is similar in difficulty to what she has done in the past, but the content is different. Kelly’s plan changes have given me some ideas on how to improve Christian’s plan, too. I will start on that plan with some input from Christian starting sometime this week.

This Saturday, I think we will go out and buy school supplies. That is one of our great joys of the year. It is so much find to chose just the right notebooks, pencils, pens, and other materials to be as ready as possible to start school with vigor. We really need to prepare the bonus room, too, by getting all the books organized in the homeschool bookcase, setting up the computer with the latest software, and getting all the furniture back in place that we took downstairs for the summer. It is a little different here in North Carolina than in Oregon. We used the bonus room above the garage in Oregon all year long. Here in North Carolina, it is a lot cooler downstairs in our house during the summer, so we did not use the bonus room very much when the weather turned hot.

April 6, 2004 (no. 2)
April 7, 2004

We homeschooled Kelly when she was in first grade. We started the kids in the government school when Kelly was in the second grade and Christian was in kindergarten. We started to have some real challenges both with the kids and the system when Kelly entered the fourth grade and Christian entered the second grade. I was blogging about all this at the time it was happening in 2004, but I was using a different set of blog software. When I switched from the old software to the WordPress we use now, I stored the old blog posts in a text file to eventually put back up as part of the new blog. I ran across them yesterday and have started to put them up on the blog as I have time. I will start putting links to a couple of them per day as I get them cleaned up and uploaded to the blog. You can find the first two here:

April 5, 2004
April 6, 2004 (no. 1)

Last weekend, we were asked where we get our new since we do not have a television and we do not receive a daily newspaper. That is a question that comes up every now and then so I thought I would write a post about what has taken the place of reading the morning newspaper in my life. I get up at 5:30 AM every morning to beat the traffic into work. I leave the house a little before 6:00 and am at my desk at work by 6:20 or so. Before I start work I make a pot of coffee. I have a great job–they provide us as much Starbucks coffee as we can drink every day! Then I sit down to my computer, read a chapter or two in the bible using the e-Sword bible program, record what I read on the blog, post Kelly’s latest Betty Blonde comic, and then settle in to read the news for fifteen or twenty minutes before I start work.

The blogs I read can be broken up into four categories. The categories are Friends and Family, News, Homeschool/Science/Christianity, and Technology. I will not list the Friends and Family blogs because they are probably not of general interest. You might be asking why I include homeschool, science, and Christianity in one category. I do not have an answer for that. That is just the way I do it. If you see something I am obviously missing and that I should be reading, please let me know!

News

• Free Republic – Excerpts from, commentary on, and links to a lot of different news sources. Updated in realtime.
• Hugh Hewitt – Radio talk show hosts website about national politics.
• Powerline Blog – Three lawyers who went to college together at Dartmouth about national, Minnesota, and Dartmouth politics.
• World Magazine Blog – Christian worldview magazine blog.

Homeschool/Science/Christianity

• Betty Blonde – The best comic strip on the internet
• HSLDA – Home School Legal Defense Association
• Uncommon Descent – William Dembski/Denyse O’Leary intelligent design blog
• Evolution News and Views – Discovery Institute intelligent design blog
• Wittingshire – Homeschool mom and wife of leading intelligent design adovcate blog
• Tektonics – Christian apologetics website by J.P. Holding
• A Christian Thinktank – Christian apologetics website by Glenn Miller

Technology

• Nerdhow – The best technology “how-to” blog on the internet
• Linux Online – Linux news
• Slashdot – Technology news aggregator

Unplanned events are the source of much pleasure when it comes to both homeschool and summer vacation in our family. I had all kinds of artwork and learning planned for this summer as is well attested in this blog. We were going to work on drawing people. We were going to take some art classes. We were going to do some big woodworking projects. We did a little of all that and we plan to keep going on it, but with my work, the swim team, and just the busyness of life, most of that fell by the wayside. That is really OK. We like to give the kids a break in the summer and a chance to be just kids. So, we decided to just keep up with the read aloud books we had chosen for the summer because that is really not work, but something we genuinely love doing together. For summer reading, the kids draw while I read.

Kelly started in on what she called “gag” comics. Those are stand-alone strips that do not tell a big story. After the first couple of those, Kelly moved on to do week long, very uncomplicated story lines that she hopes will help the readers to get to know her characters. The longest that any story line might go is two or three weeks and each of the strips can stand on its own. Christian, on the other hand, has decided to tell a much longer story. He has about forty panels written with quite an interesting story featuring the same characters, but with a much more involved plot. We plan to put his strip up in three or four weeks when he gets it finished and scanned in.

I had kind of decided to write a program to help me scan in the strips, adjust them for size, and accumulate them into a single strip with four panels because I have had to do that one step at a time by hand up until now. When Christian saw how I was doing it with the open source image editing program, GIMP, he suggested I use a GIMP plug-in called David’s Batch Processor to adjust the individual images after I have them scanned. That took a twenty step process that has been taking me about 15 minutes down to a two step process that takes about 30 seconds. Very, very cool.

The only thing I have left now to really make the preparation of strip more tractable is something to perform the accumulation of the four panels into a finished comic strip with a title, byline, and copyright date. GIMP works really well, but the way I am doing it now is a little tedious and not as consistent as possible in terms of individual panel positioning. Currently, that process takes about ten minutes. After Christian showed me David’s Batch Processor, I looked into the GIMP a little deeper. It looks like I can write a script using either Python-fu or script-fu to perform the panel accumulation steps automatically. Very cool. That beats writing the program from scratch all hollow. If I get the script written and the steps worked out, I will post a “how-to” here.

There are about three weeks left until we start the 2008-2009 homeschool year. This year will bring a relatively big change in the way we do our work. Christian will be working in a similar way to what we have done in the past, but more emphasis will be placed on CLEP preparation. Since he is now in Algebra II that is so important for the science and engineering fields where his interest lies, we will work hard to establish a strong base there. Our plan is for him to take three CLEP tests this year in History of Western Civilization I and II and Spanish. Christian has a strong enough interest and background in programming now, that I think it is time to jump into C++. I am not sure whether we will do it on Linux or Windows, but either way it will be exciting to get started on a good project with him. Of course, he will continue with his guitar lessons.

Kelly will no longer follow the Sonlight suggested history and literature schedules. She will still read all of the Sonlight literature books for the year, writing about one book report per week. Mainly she will concentrate on college prepartion materials. She will use this year’s Apologia Biology to help her prepare for the CLEP Biology test, Rosetta Stone Spanish to help her prepare for the CLEP Spanish test, and the some CLEP preparation books to prepare for U.S. History II, Psychology, and Sociology. Her comic strip and two-per-week blog postings on a variety of subjects will be good for exercising her use of “new media”. She will continue with piano lessons.

As for exercise, both Kelly and Christian will swim until the outdoor pool at the YMCA closes for the winter. Then we have to make some hard decisions. I would really like to run a triathlon with the kids, but it would be kind of neat to systematically prepare for and run in a 10K race sometime before then. Running is a lifelong sport that could fit well into our schedule. I even think Lorena would like it. It is still a little early for Christian to do any serious weight training, but Kelly might do some of that with Lorena during the winter while Christian runs. We will see about all that and negotiate through what interests them and provides them a goal.