*** Removed, see note in comments ***
To be re-written soon.
Betty Blonde #150 – 02/11/2009
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Category: General Page 9 of 116
Anyone who has read this blog for any time at all knows I am skeptical of government school systems’ ability to provide consistently adequate education. I know it is possible to get a great teacher or two who can beat the system into submission well enough to teach kids what they need to move on to the next grade but that is rare enough that some never get a great teacher. A lot of people get that. So, there is a phenomenon that occurs when those who believe homeschooling is better, but for whatever reason cannot or do not do it meet those who do. We all know there are a LOT of good reasons to have your kid in government or private school. You are better at knowing your own kids needs and your own family situation than anyone else. There is a blog post that describes the phenomenon that was on Luke’s aggregator a couple of days ago titled Quit Judging Me for Judging You. The money quote from the article is this:
…I’m not judging you for making different choices. I’m just trying to keep my own Crazy Train on the tracks.
Betty Blonde #147 – 02/06/2009
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This picture was taken during the first day of the kid’s Senior year at NCSU. The backdrop for the picture is the little 2013 Ford Fiesta sedan they drove to school every day. This year, we hope they send us a “first day of graduate school” picture so we can continue to keep track. Kelly’s classes start in late September. Christian’s starts in late August. Both are already at school and already working.
Betty Blonde #138 – 01/26/2009
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This is the picture we took on the kids first day of class at NCSU when they entered their Junior year there. The big event of that beginning was that they were required to pass tests on why it was bad to binge drink (a good experience) and attend a Freshman orientation (a fairly negative experience for its heavy handed political correctness and poorly socialized government high school participants). All-in-all, though it was a joyous occasion and the kids remain loyal NCSU fans to this day.
Betty Blonde #137 – 01/23/2009
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This is a picture of Kelly and Christian with their new backpacks on their first day of college in August of 2010. I am going to post pictures of them at the start of each year for their for years of college. Now Kelly and Christian both have apartments in their respective new towns as they start their PhD’s. They have both been able to find good apartments. Kelly is about 30 minutes by bus from her office at University of Washington. Christian hit the lottery and found an apartment about a block from the light rail that will take him to within a block of his office at Arizona State University. He should be able to get from his apartment door to his office in about 15 minutes.
They are both in the process of furnishing their apartments and having a great time. I cannot wait to visit both of them in their new digs.
Betty Blonde #135 – 01/21/2009
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A lot of you know I work on a volunteer side project called GaugeCam for the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. The initial program I wrote for the project was made on July 3, 2009 almost exactly five years ago, but the project really started a little before that. We have worked on the project with varying degrees of vigor, but mainly we have kept going fairly consistently for all that time. The most recent couple of events are pretty interesting. I write about all that here, here, and here.
The first came from Norway. A researcher there wanted to put up some cameras in fjords there to measure water height. My colleague, François Birgand sent the gentleman a camera and a calibration target which the researcher dutifully set up in a fjord and the thing did not work. At all. So François got some of the images that had failed and sent them on to me. I could see immediately we had a problem because my software would struggle with two things. The glint at the waterline would confuse our current line find technique and it would be hard to calibrate on a calibration target that filled a very small portion of the field of view relative to previous images. You can see the problem in one of the Norway images shown above. So I started a major update of the program to address those issues. We have now worked our way through most of the current problems and François started a large test run on thousands of images last night to see how much the changes improve our measurements.
Betty Blonde #133 – 01/19/2009
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There were lots of big changes going on in our lives before my wife Lorena’s father died last week. The kids were scheduled to move away from home to college on the other side of the country, we planned to sell the house in North Carolina to move closer to my work in Arizona, Lorena was to start back to school to finish her degree, and we had quite a lot of travel planned to help deal with my father’s Alzheimer’s disease. We believed we had thought all of this stuff out very well, but things can change quickly. First we decided not to sell the house because nothing was opening up for us either with respect to the sell or our efforts to find a new place in Arizona. Next Lorena’s father died. Now we are in the process of rethinking our rethinking. God has his hand in everything and we are thankful for that.
Betty Blonde #130 – 01/14/2009
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On behalf of the entire Pedraza family, we want to let everyone know that Don Lauro (Grandpa Lauro) passed away this morning at 7:00 AM, quietly in his sleep. We are very grateful for all the support we have received during this difficult time. We are thankful for his faithfulness to God and are looking forward to celebrating his life at the visitation later this afternoon and at his funeral tomorrow. Lauro was born on 1942, made a profession of faith in God in 1960, and died at age 71 in Monterrey.
My friend and colleague, Dr. Brad, read my last several blog posts and sent me a couple of awesome links. If I was not inspired before to write a book, I am really inspired now. My expectations are getting calibrated in a very good way–the audience for my writing will probably consist of family, friends, and those who have share my kind (not level) of educational values. If my kids get famous after I am dead, I might get a bump then.
So, Brad found a couple of links that could be an absolute blast. The best of which is the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). People have a competition to write the best possible novel in a month. Even better it is November which coincides with Movember. I could get TOTALLY inspired to take a month off, grow a moustache, and write a novel. Seriously! Brad has some friends who have actually participated in this. I am definitely going to have to consult with him on this. Of course, if one competes in an event like this, one of these seems almost essential.
But, it does not stop there. Brad also set me links to SOFTWARE WRITING TOOLS. These are the Tim Allen power tools of the writing set. Actually they look very cool and, for an engineer turning to writing, they might help me consider things and organize my efforts in ways I had never considered. Brad especially liked the Scrivener tool and I do, too.
The only thing left now is to start participating in a writing community and get started.
Betty Blonde #125 – 01/07/2009
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After a year and a half of hard core travel to Arizona and Colorado, our first product is almost to the point where it can move into production. It is exciting and I wish I could say I will have a life after that, but here is an even more exciting, revolutionary really, in the pipeline. I have worked on a lot of products, but none that has a chance to be a true game changer on the level of this next product. So it does not look like I will slow down much through the end of the year, but I expect not to have to travel so much. Wow! This is exciting. I will talk about it when I can.
Betty Blonde #121 – 01/01/2009
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I leave a pair of dress shoes and a Bible in my desk drawer at work so I do not have to haul them back and forth between Raleigh and Prescott. I do almost all of my Bible reading these days either on my computer or on my phone. So, when I am in Prescott, I run into work to grab my Bible and change into my dress shoes before I go to meeting. As is my morning habit, I grab a cup of hot Joe at the hotel on my way through the lobby. It is pretty good coffee, not that that is so important to me. Hot and bitter is about all I ever need. So that is why I find myself sitting at my desk at work in Prescott drinking a nice cup of coffee and writing on my blog as I wait to go to meeting.
Meeting is over for the family out on the East Coast. Lorena and the kids are all together in the Atlanta area to attend the festivities around our friend Hannah’s high school graduation. It surely sounds like they are having a great time. The cool part is that Hannah will head out to Flagstaff to go to school in the fall and her parents have a house in the Phoenix area, so Christian will have some additional friends in the area when he moves out here.
I have quite a bit of alone time over the last few days and have to admit I have been somewhat frantic about figuring out what to do next. We will be very busy for the next couple of months because we have to get the kids moved out West to their colleges, but after that things will slow down pretty dramatically. With now formal responsibilities for the kids homeschool or college anymore, it surely seems like I will have too much time on my hands. I see that slowdown coming fast and it has had me worried, but it dawned on me while I was drinking my coffee that it probably makes sense to take a little time and think about it before I jump into any new big projects.
I realize that I have a couple of really big work projects (GaugeCam and my day job), I am not going to be completely unoccupied. Lorena has stuff she wants to do, too. She is getting very close to her degree and she might want to go to work or start a business. At any rate, we have a big cross-country drive in the plans so we will certainly have a chance to talk. I think we just need to slow down a little, drink some coffee together in the morning and take a little more time to do a little more planning than usual to help us decide what to do next. I am not so good at taking things slow, but it seems like the right thing to do now. It seems like a luxury really–when I take the time to smell the coffee and think about it.
Betty Blonde #119 – 12/30/2008
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I got started on my own list of “what to do next” today. Beside home improvement, travel to see family, hanging out with Lorena and reading of books, there are only a few things that require much planning. Even those things are things that would probably be better planned by someone else. In fact, I can think of only two projects that seem interesting right now and they are really holdovers from homeschool. The are:
- GaugeCam water level finding project
- Comic aggregation program in python for Kelly
I am definitely going to have to do better than that. I will try to keep thinking about it.
Betty Blonde #118 – 12/29/2008
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Day 1000 of 1000
Done. I read a few chapters extra this morning to adjust my attitude, finish the 1000 days well, and finish the second of three reads through the Old Testament that I started tracking on February 9, 2006. Next, I will complete two reads through the New Testament. It has been a great 1000 day run and I am glad I tracked it. I have to think now what I want to do with both the blog and some goals for something good over the next four or five years. By good, I mean something with spiritual value. I have decided I am going to sit down with Lorena and think about it for several months after my current hard push to get the kids settled on their own out West at college and at work bringing our company’s first product to market. Lorena has some stuff she wants to accomplish, so maybe “good” means focusing on her goals now that she has been such a great and selfless champion of her kids to get them where they are.
Betty Blonde #117 – 12/26/2008
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Day 998 of 1000
Life just got a little less complicated for Lorena and I. Due to work and other considerations, we do not have to move from North Carolina, at least for the next few years. The house comes off the market today! We both felt a quite unexpected sense of relief. An added benefit to the big changes are that I will finish my current phase of work in Prescott that has required me to be there 2-3 weeks per month in June or July. After that, I will only need to be on the road one week at a time and I will be home on weekends. In addition, I will need to go to Portland about every other trip to work with members of our image research team there. Throw me to the brier patch!
Betty Blonde #116 – 12/25/2008
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This is the eleventh and last post in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.
[Previous post in series]
[Next post in series]
With the graduation coming up, I thought it might be good to provide some of the kids’ graduation facts as the final post in the why not skip high school series. It is also a follow-up to all the posts we wrote about our homeschool and particularly the series on skipping high school, Sonlight homeschool curricula, CLEP testing, and homeschool socialization.
Christian
- Department graduation ceremony May 9, 2014 (SAS Hall, NCSU Campus, Raleigh, NC)
- Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics (Honors)
- Summa Cum Laude (GPA: 3.93)
- Dean’s list all semesters for which the course load made him eligible
- Will attend the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University for a PhD in Electrical Engineering
- Awarded Dean’s Fellowship (Full scholarship and stipend for four years)
- Supplementary first year fellowship
- Research sponsorship provided by MIT Lincoln Labs (where Christian will perform research during the summers)
- Entering his PhD program at age 18 after skipping high school
- Earned PhD in EE at age 23 with research in Information Theory and three refereed journal articles
Kelly
- Department graduation ceremony May 10, 2014 (Ephesus Baptist Church, Raleigh, NC)
- Bachelor of Science in Statistics
- Magna Cum Laude (GPA: 3.64)
- Dean’s list all semesters for which the course load made her eligible
- Will attend Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington for a PhD in Marketing
- Awarded TA/RA funding for four years
- Supplementary fellowship for duration of PhD
- Awarded funding for training and conference attendance by the PhD Project of the American Marketing Association
- Enter her PhD program at age 20 after skipping most of high school
- Mastered out at age 22 with MS in Marketing Strategy
Day 974 of 1000
Today is Kelly’s last day of class at NCSU. Tomorrow and Friday are reading days followed by finals week next week. Christian will graduate at the same time as Kelly, but take one more class during the first summer session, finishing his time at NCSU at the end of June. Kelly turns in here last big paper of her undergraduate degree (Macroeconomics) and has only two finals left before she is done. Christian gives a speech on his Honors Mathematics research at 4:00 PM, but will have a few more days before he has to turn in the formal research report written with LaTeX. There is so much academic pressure on them right now, there is little time for melancholy, but I am sure that will come. I plan to post these final to undergraduate reports along with their homeschool reports as soon as both of them are available.
Betty Blonde #105 – 12/10/2008
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Day 924 of 1000
This is my third week away from home. Lorena made hand made wheat tortillas today. I am getting really homesick.
Betty Blonde #83 – 11/10/2008
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Day 916 of 1000
I started this blog about ten years ago. It was the summer before Kelly’s fith and Christian’s third grade years of school. The purpose of the blog has been to document the kids path through homeschool. Since Christian never made it to high school, we decided to keep on writing through college. Well, that time is almost here. Kelly and Christian are both scheduled to earn their Bachelors degrees on May 10, 2014. We have talked about this quite a lot. After that point, we believe what they do, whether it be graduate school or a job, is “getting on with life.”
The upshot is that the purpose of this blog will have been fulfilled when we get to the end of our 1000 day count, now only 84 days in the future. I have enjoyed this blog a lot, but have pretty much run out of things to say about the topics for which we get most of our hits, namely how did we did our homeschooling. I enjoy blogging too much to give it up entirely so I am thinking of starting a new blog if and when I give up this. I plan to just leave the blog here for posterity and a pointer to my new blog (if I get one). I hope to download the whole thing and print it out as a hardcover book for each of the kids, the grandparents, and us.
Any thoughts on this topic are very much welcome.
Betty Blonde #78 – 11/03/2008
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Both Kelly and Christian had tests postponed today due to the snow storm. It is coming down hard and it is very beautiful. I love the snow, but we do not think the kids will get back to school until Monday. This is the view out our front door as it continues to come down hard:
My buddy Frank sent me an image of the birdbaths in his yards. They are not only cool because they were made from random springs and farm implement discs, but because they have ten inches of snow on them. I knew Oregon got hit hard, but that amount of snow in that part of Oregon is unprecedented.
