Chapman Kids Blog

I talked to a lady (Stacy) at work yesterday about the Flat Belly Diet. She asked for a link to their website, then told me about the about.com calorie count website. It is an amazing site. The purpose of the site is host a location where people can track the quality and quantity of their caloric intake. The thing I like the most about it, is that it is so amazingly easy to use. I will use yesterday as an example. For breakfast, I had a packet of Quaker Oatmeal with a 4 oz. container of blueberry yogurt and 1/4 cup of shelled walnuts. Many of the brand names and their available servings are in the system. When I entered that information into the system, the following information was recorded:

Breakfast	Grade	Grams	Cals
Quaker, Oatmeal, Instant, Maple And Brown Sugar - Prepared With Water	B+	55	157
Yogurt, Fruit, Low Fat, 9 Grams Protein Per 8 Ounce	B+	123	122
Shelled Walnuts	B-	30	200
	Total Calories Consumed 478

Exercise	Mins	Cals
Walking - 3.5 Mph, Level, Brisk, Firm Surface, Walking for Exercise	25	141
	Total Calories Burned 141

When I signed up for an account, I entered a bunch of information about my body type, goals, age, etc. The system provides a mechanism to track just about any kind of exercise you can imagine along with how many calories they consume. Each day, as food, weight, and exercise are entered into the system, a grade is given (A-F) for the quality of nutrition, a graph is created to show both actual weight and the trend of the weight loss, and a complete record of all the food and exercise are kept. Kelly and I are doing the Flat Belly Diet that puts emphasis on mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFA’s). The system allows us to track our MUFA’s by tagging those foods that contain them. The system is very new to us right now, but it is making us think about what we are eating. It seems to be especially good at identifying problem areas that need work and opportunities for improvement. In my case, I need to back off a bunch in my evening eating (my problem area) and take two walks a day instead of one (my opportunity for improvement).

At any rate, this web site is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in losing or managing weight.

Update:  A special note to Troy and Youngin.  Lorena saw this post and decided she was going to try to make them on Saturday.  To say the least, it has NOT been helpful to the successful of my diet.  Also, “Baby in the Oven” was a wildly misleading title.

It’s back to work for Christian and I!  Yesterday night I scheduled my entire day out. It was perfect. I had everything so neat and orderly. Every homework assignment and meal plan in it’s place. And then I woke up this morning and blew it. I underestimated the time it would take me to finish my math assignment, I read the wrong science lesson, and I only got half of my CLEP practice test done with not very good results. But that is all to be expected! After all, it’s only the first day back on the job. And I can’t fool myself into thinking that this was a bad start to the new year. I did lots of good things today. I learned some very interesting things about genetics, I mastered a couple of really hard math problems, I didn’t get frustrated about my CLEP score (that one’s a biggie), and I ate the right amount at the right times and wrote it all down in my food journal. Christmas break was fantastic, but it really is nice to be ‘working hard’ instead of ‘hardly working’.

Speaking of the food journal, I really like this new ‘diet’. All my friends freaked out when I told them that I’d be doing this, but it seems more like a healthy way of eating than a diet. And I’m not trying to lose a bunch of weight. Mom usually cooks meals like the ones in the book that we got, and I usually eat the right portions. My problem is snacking a lot in between meals, snacking while I’m reading, and snacking when I’m bored. So basically I’m just regulating when I eat and making sure that what I do eat has all the right things.

Lately I’ve been knitting a scarf. It’s loooong with chunky bright green and bright blue stripes. I’m very proud of her. As soon as I’m done I will take a picture and post it on the blog!

Here’s a big shout out to my cousin Kylee, who went through my entire Betty Blonde archive in one sitting, poor thing. And she left 7 whole comments for me to relish!

One more shout out to Mrs. G… I loved your idea for my blog, and I will use it as soon as I have the time. Hopefully I’ll write about it tonight.

We had a great Christmas break.  Here is some of what we did:

• Started the Flat Belly Diet
• Soldered a bunch of parts onto our NorCal 40A radio kit printed circuit board (finally)
• Finished reading Explore Evolution
• Got reinvigorated on Betty Blonde
  
• Assembled a great jigsaw puzzle
• Tried new recipes and ate some great dinners with very good friends
• Reworked the look and feel of the blog (not yet complete)
• Started work on adding scanner functionality for BleAx (BettyBlonde Accumulator of Comix)
• Started reading The Electronics of Radio aloud to Kelly and Christian
• Started reading Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success to myself
  
• Hung out and talked about life with each other at home, the library, book stores, the car,  the YMCA, and McDonalds.

The kids start school again today.  Our main efforts for the next couple of months will be to get ready for and take the ACT and several CLEP tests.  In addition, Kelly will try to finish up Geometry so she can go on to pre-calculus by the end of February.  Christian will try to finish up Algebra II so he can move on to Geometry in that same time frame.  As for me, I have my work cut out for me in my efforts to add functionality to our product so we can expand our customer base by the end of March.  It is a very difficult problem, but that is good.  In two weeks, we will go to Tennessee to be with some of our homeschool friends over the MLK weekend.

We were pleasantly surprised yesterday when we saw that there was someone moving into the house next door.  It is a new house that has been vacant since we got here.  Kelly and I walked over to greet the new family and found that it include a seventeen year old boy, a fourteen year old girl, and an eleven year old boy.  When we first got to North Carolina there was a wonderful girl about Kelly’s age with a wonderful family who lived right next door to the house we rented.  When we found a house to buy, we were sad because there was really no one in the neighborhood Kelly and Christian’s age.

We talked to the father of the family and met the seventeen year old boy, too.  They came from South Carolina.  All the kids had gone to a Christian school in Charleston.  When they came here, they found a school they really liked, but could only get the oldest boy into it.  They have decided they will homeschool the other kids for the rest of this year, then make a decision about whether to continue homeschooling or put the kids in school next year.  They sounded very nice.  We are looking forward to meeting the rest of the family.

Business as usual is the best way to describe homeschool for December.  We shut down the homeschool on December 23rd for the holidays.  With the exception of a few minor assignments Kelly worked on yesterday and should finished up today, we have done nothing associated with homeschool for about a week and a half.  In the meantime, Christian and I have started building a ham radio (Morse code only) and I have ordered a book and a compact disk for all three of us on the subject of radio.  The book is the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual.  It covers the material required to earn a Technician Class license.  The CD is titled Your Introduction to Morse Code.  While it is no longer necessary to learn Morse code to get a ham radio license, the radio we are building only works with Morse code and it will be very cool to learn anyway.  I would really like the kids to be able to get their General Class license before the end of the school year.  We will find out whether or not that is realistic after we get the materials.

Our main emphasis for the next little while will be preparation for the ACT on February 7.  In addition, Kelly plans to take the U.S. History II CLEP test and Christian plans to take the Freshman Composition CLEP test sometime in February, too.  Kelly is on course to finish up her Geometry and Christian will finish up Intermediate Algebra by the end of February.  Kelly will then go on to Pre-calculus and Christian to Geometry.  We have just a couple more days in our Explore Evolution book, after which, we will start in on both Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language and The Electronics of Radio.  We normally would read a novel in the mix, too, but we have decided to read our novel on the way to Tennessee later this month to meet a bunch of other homeschool kids.

We had a quiet little New Year’s party at our house last night with Troy and Youngin.  We ate Lorena’s absolutely fabulous tamales and some really amazing dip Youngin put together with cream cheese and seven pepper jelly.  Wow.  I pretty much gave in to eating very badly for an evening, so my starting weight for the weight loss death match will be a little higher than I had initially planned.

The absolute highlight of the evening was the pictures Troy and Youngin showed us of their trip to Argentina.  They were amazing.  We were glued to our seats for over an hour.  The scenery was great and the descriptions of the trip were just perfect. The thing that I really liked about the pictures was the fact that, between stunning pictures of glaciers, mountains, lakes, strange trees, and all the other picturesque items that just about anyone would take on the trip because of their magnificence, Troy and Youngin took pictures of stuff that was just commonplace in Argentina. Some of it, like the little garbage stands in front of the houses to prevent dogs from tearing up the garbage was interesting because it commonplace in Argentina, but not here.

Then there was the machinery, old cars, wagons with HUGE wheels, and odd uses and modifications of cars, trucks, and equipment. I was thinking how much my dad would have enjoyed seeing that. There were also very interesting birds from very small, colorful birds sitting in trees and on the ground to huge, odd-shaped, ostrich-like birds to tufted woodpeckers to a magnificent Andean Condor soaring over open hill country with snow covered mountains in the background. There was a llama/camel like animal called a guanco and too much other stuff to mention it all.

We especially appreciated hearing about Troy’s aunt who has worked in Argentina as a missionary for decades. Much of her time is spent riding buses. The country is huge. She seemed so cheerful and happy to be there, living in very humble circumstances, doing her best to bring the gospel to people who often do not know or acknowledge they need it. I would like to meet her someday.

Finally, after Troy and Youngin went home, we called our good friends at the annual New Years party we went attended when in Oregon. We ended up getting on Skype so we could look at each other. We would have loved to be there in Oregon with them. All the Joyces (including Vernon), the Pedginskis, and a number of others were there. I was quite discouraged looking at Bryan. After he beat me like a drum in last year’s weight loss death match, I enter this year’s death match with fear and trembling after seeing his svelte new physique on Skype.

This has been a great year for blogging.  Kelly started a private girl’s blog. Christian started a tech blog.  I found all the entries from when I started blogging in 2004 and was able to add them to the front end of this blog.  We are even going to spend the evening with our good friends Troy and Youngin who started their blog just this month.  It is one of the best blog starts I have seen with very interesting posts on their recent trip to Argentina.  One of them features a list and beautiful pictures of the many different birds Troy saw while he was there.

We are getting together with Troy and Youngin to finish out the year making tamales.  How much better does it get than that?  Lorena bought all the ingredients yesterday and was hard at the preparations last night with more to follow this morning.  I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, but marrying this particular Mexican woman was not one of them.

Tamale stuff	Mexican wife

Update: Oops. I just got the following note:

Good morning! Not to be picky or anything but… I started my blog in 2007, and I don’t know if you should link to it. But I don’t think anyone could get into it anyway could they???? Because it has a password and all that. Anyway, just a heads up. Happy New Year’s Eve! Love, Kelly

I am WAY sorry I got the date wrong! No one can get into it. It is password protected with a good password, but it will be a good idea to remove the link.

Update II:  One more time.  Kelly writes saying, “And Christian started his in 2007 also I think.”  He did.  Sorry Christian.

Update III:

Dad gets a lesson on how to cook tamales

I had about a two hour conversation last night on the telephone with our good friends David and Rebekah in Texas.  They homeschool twin boys who are just between the ages of Kelly and Christian.  They do an absolutely stellar job in their homeschool.  One idea they tried that we are going to implement for sure is their planning method.  Currently, I make out the schedules one or two weeks in advance.  I list all the things the kids need to accomplish each day of the week, then they figure out how they will get things done for each day.  The new method will be to provide weekly goals, let the kids make their own schedule that meets the goals, review the schedule before the week starts, then follow the progress of the schedule as it is implemented.  It is a great progression.  Another idea they brought up was the possibility of getting certain certifications that require fairly short-term efforts, but that allow the holder of the certificate to work in interesting environments.  The two that were brought up are those required for pharmacy and EKG technicians.  I am going to look into these and several other great ideas we discussed on the telephone.

Christian and I continued work on the ham radio kit last night.  We got all the resistors soldered into place.  We plan to continue on to the next set of components tonight.  We still have a couple of nights of reading in our evolution book before we can move on to the intelligent design and radio theory books we are going to read aloud next.  We also read a novel aloud, but will not read further in that until we go on our homeschool trip to Tennessee in January.

When we returned from the library on Saturday, Christian and I decided to work on our ham radio project.  We hauled one of our rectangular plastic tables up to the bonus room so we could spread out all the materials.  We have two rectangular tables, a big circular one, and two small circular ones that we got at CostCo in Albany.  We use them for projects, get-togethers and that sort of stuff.  We actually got them for a potluck we had at our house.  We thought they were too expensive at the time, but we are surely glad we got them because we have used them a lot.  At any rate, we hauled the table upstairs along with a couple of chairs and organized all the capacitors, resistors, switches, and other radio parts into some little plastic bins we had sitting around.  It was pretty amazing, because I think we have all the parts, even after the radio kit sat in the garage for several months.  There might be one or two that we will have to order, but that is it.

After everthing was organized, we realized we had neither the right kind of solder nor the right kind of soldering iron.  Christian and I hopped into the pickup and ran down to the Radio Shack in Fuquay-Varina where we picked them up.  We followed the instructions and inserted all the resistors into the circuit board.  We then realized that we did not have wire snips, so we decided to wait to start soldering until we pick them up.  I hope Lorena has a chance to do that today.  When we could not go any further, I got out the the study book I had purchased to go along with the project.  It is titled The Electronics of Radio.  It was written as a college freshman level introduction to radio electronics specifically for use with the NorCal 40A radio kit we are assembling.  We have decided we will start the book as soon as we finish Explore Evolution in the next couple of days.  After that, all of us want to try to get our General Class Radio License.  I think it would be fun to learn Morse Code, too, even though that is not required.

Update:  When I got in to work today, one of my buddies, David, told me he cooked up a lamb crown roast for Christmas dinner.  He said it was absolutely excellent.  He said the thing to do is talk to the butcher at the grocery store and get him to order one for the day you want to cook it.  He said he would forward me the recipe he used, too.  I think that would be an excellent thing for the kids to do for New Years Day dinner.  What do you think kids?

Update II:  Make sure you do not embarrass yourself by yelling “Happy New Year” too soon.  Check this out.

We are sitting at the Holly Springs, NC Public Library right now.  I am drinking a cup of coffee (free because we had enough stamps on our card) and Lorena is reading magazines while Kelly and Christian look for books.  What a great way to end the year.  Yesterday, we took Warren downtown to the North Carolina Museum of History.  We had never been there before.  It is really quite good.  We did not see it all, so we have a good excuse to go back.  After that we went to Barnes and Noble by the Crossroads Mall.  I guess we tend to be a bookish family.  No one ever objects when we decide to go to a library or a bookstore.  Sometimes Lorena goes shopping while the kids and I read, but mostly she sits and reads with us.

We decided to try to go to Mexico for Christmas next year.  Our family in Monterrey sent us a bunch of pictures–all the cousins are just the age when Christmas is the most fun.  So this year we have two Mexico trips planned.  One for Kelly’s quinceñera and one for Christmas.  We hope a bunch of them make plans to visit us in North Carolina, too.  We decided, also, to try to get together with more of our homeschool friends.  We are going on a trip to Tennessee with four homeschool families from this part of the world over the MLK three day weekend.  We want to get together with the Larsons and a few others again this year, too.

We truly enjoy taking the time during the holidays to reflect on what we want to do over the next year.  We have talked about diet/health, homeschool/college, hobbies/projects, and a lot of other stuff.  We have uncompleted projects we want to complete, the first being the radio assembly project Christian and I plan to start today.  We have CLEP/ACT tests to take.  We have to decide which language to study next.  We are thinking either Russian or French.  This is a very fun time that we enjoy very much.

Christian and Kelly have specific goals to meet before they start their holiday break.  They should be able to get all their work done to meet those goals by the end of the day today.  When I finish work today, I will not have to come back into work until Monday of next week.  We have everything we need to cook Christmas dinner.  Warren should get here by mid-day tomorrow.  I think we have never, ever, been this ready for the holiday.  Our friends Karen and Ethne from Texas left yesterday afternoon right after I got home from work.  It was great to see them.  We look forward to the break.

I am scheduled to work straight through the holidays.  I really do not mind.  My work is interesting.  There is a lot to break things up and keep it interesting for Lorena and the kids, too.  We have at least three, one or two day visitors between now and the end of the year.  There is a special meeting for all the churches in the area on December 28 so we can get together with some of our friends.  We plan to go see a play.  We bought and got started on our second 750 piece puzzle last night.  It is all good!

Yesterday was a very fun and eventful day.  I found a new diet book that describes a program that is very similar to what I am doing now.  Like most good books about diet, it describes lifestyle and habits more than just weight loss and losing inches.  It incorporates a lot of recent (and not so recent) research on the influence of different kinds of fats on appetite and LDL/HDL cholesterol.  It has lots of interesting recipes, success stories, and useful data.  The name of the book is Flat Belly Diet.  Kelly read the first couple of chapters aloud in the car on the way home from CostCo yesterday.  The book advocates a fairly structured 32 day program to get started.  Kelly and I are going to try to do the things recommended in the book between now and when we go back to school and work after the holidays.  Then we will want to strictly follow the 32 day program to see how we do with it.

In that regard, I am going to check with my weight-loss death match buddies (Bryan, Brad, Lyle, and Warren) with the idea that we will finish the first (2008) chart and leave it posted with a note on how everyone did fir the year, then start a new (2009) chart so we can all start afresh.

Yesterday afternoon we got a note from some of our friends from Georgia, a homeschooling family of five.  They are organizing a three day, homeschooling weekend at a cabin in Tennesee.  We signed up to go and are very excited about it.  There will be four homeschooling families there with the point of the whole weekend being nothing more than to hang out together in a very cool place.  It is a five or six hour drive to get there, but even that looks like pretty nice.  We have figured out that the confinement of the car on a long trip is not such a bad place to get caught up on homeschool and Betty Blonde comic strips.  We also read aloud a lot.  Lorena does not participate so much in the reading aloud–she would much rather listen to Kelly’s iPod.

This morning we got a note from Karen, a very dear friend from Texas who has just started homeschooling her youngest daughter.  She is coming east for some other reasons, but has set aside some time to come and visit us.  It is a long drive out of her way to get to where we live, so we very much appreciate that she is coming.  It will be fun to talk to a new homeschooler.  Lorena is a particularly big fan of Karen because she always made the effort to come by for a visit when we lived in a small apartment in Dallas, Texas.  To this day, every time she talks with Lorena, she asks about the twin cat sisters who were just kittens when Karen met them.

We finished the puzzle last night and we were in a festive mood so we took some pictures.  We particularly liked this one of the twin cat sisters.  The inset is of Kelly and Christian modeling their puzzle putting together outfits.  It was a little bit of a challenge for us to have a right attitude again last night, but  we did much better than the day before.  Ruthie made a timely comment that reminded me of a book we read when we first started homeschooling.  It was Raymond and Dorothy Moore’s homeschool classic, The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook and we highly recommend it for anyone who is thinking about homeschooling.  My big take-away from that book was that if you are overly stressed about something to do with your homeschool, you need to change it–whatever changes you make will still be better than government school.  It probably did more for me with regard to burnout than any other thing I read.  I think that stress advise is equally applicable to work, weight loss, and a plethora of other topics.

Tonight is the company Christmas party.  I expect it to be a quiet affair and a good chance to socialize a little with the people with whom I enjoy working so much.

Yesterday was one of those days that did not quite work out like we had planned.  I expected to come home, correct some math and science, adjust the plan for today based on those corrections, then sit down with the family to work on our Christmas puzzle.  After Christian’s guitar lesson, Lorena and the kids went to the YMCA to do their normal workouts, so they did not get home until about 6:00 PM.  By that time, we were all hungry, so I did our read aloud while Kelly drew a Betty Blonde comic, Christian worked on the puzzle for a bit, and Lorena made dinner.  After we ate dinner, it was already 7:00 PM.  I started correcting the math and science, but both Kelly’s geometry and Christian’s algebra and science were pretty tough, so it took a little longer than usual.  Kelly had to do some unfinished piano practice and Christian had to do some unfinished CLEP studies, so, while I worked with one of them, the other one kept going on uncompleted homeschool work.  We did not finish until around 9:00 PM.  We did not do particularly well on what we did and we did not get everything done that was scheduled.

One of the things that is hardest to describe about homeschool is how difficult it can be to get everything done in a day.  We have specific materials we want the kids to cover to be prepared for college in a few years.  We learned early on that participation in too many activities outside the house did not allow enough time for them to finish the studies they require to know the material.  There are all kinds of great opportunities to participate in science, math, language, art, drama, writing, robotic, and every other kind of workshop and class imaginable.  There are many, many sports opportunities:  football, baseball, basketball, running, swimming, soccer, ping pong, and even lacrosse.  Still we want the kids (and Lorena) to get out of the house at least once a day to get some exercise, break up the day, and interact with other people.

In that regard, we no longer worry at all about “socialization”.  Our own experience with socialization parallels the results of the studies we read when we started our homeschool.  It is really government school kids who bear the greatest social handicap of years wasted in the artificial environment of a traditional school classroom.  Their social interaction is limited to associations with twenty or so children of their exact same age and only one or two adults, all confined to the same room for months on end–something that rarely, if ever, occurs in the world they face when they leave school.  By contrast, homeschool kids tend to interact with people of a broad range of ages in church, at the library, in music, art, science, and language lessons, on sports teams, and homeschool group field trips and get-togethers.  Like everything else in this fallen world, homeschool is not perfect, but it is considerably better than anything else we have available to us.  Nevertheless, because socialization is such a strength in the homeschool setting, we can bias our time toward completion of academic goals.

We were all a little snippy when we started working on the puzzle for a half an hour before going to bed.  We enjoy listening to one particular music channel at this time of year, but when we turned it on, all we got for the entire time we listened was the platitudes of an inane sports interview after an inconsequential game of preseason basketball.  We went to bed late.  Some days are like that.  Maybe tomorrow will be better, but I do not hold out much hope because we all have our biannual checkup with the dentist.  It is hard to get homeschool work complete while waiting in the dentists office and it is hard to deal with a grumpy dad correcting that work after he has been to the dentist, too.  Thankfully, Christmas vacation starts in just one week.

I think I have figured out why it feels more like Christmas season now than it did at this time last week.  We finished our shopping (or the vast bulk thereof), part of which was the purchase of a 750 piece puzzle.  Last night, when I got home from work and everyone else got home from their workout at the YMCA, we ate a dinner of black beans, white rice, tuna, and pico de gallo all mixed together–food does not get much better than that.  After that, Lorena talked to Grandma Conchita on the phone while Kelly, Christian, and I corrected school work.  Then, we gathered around the coffee table in front of the fireplace in the family room, listened to music, and worked on the puzzle for over an hour.  It was absolutely a great time.  It dawned on me that the puzzle pulls together all the things we associate with the Christmas season:  We have done this every year at Christmas time since the kids have been big enough to work on a puzzle so the memories and feelings of Christmases past are brought to mind.  We are together to do something that also allows us to talk to each other and listen to music which adds to the atmosphere.  It was pretty wonderful.

The only problem is that I think we are going to finish the puzzle this weekend and we really want it to last through the New Year.  Last year, the same thing happened when we did a 500 piece puzzle, so we ended up doing a second 500 piece puzzle after we finished the first.  The kids are only a year older, so I do not think their ability to work on the puzzle has improved that much.  Maybe it is their focus this year.  At any rate, I think we are going to get another 750 piece puzzle when we finish this one.  1000 piece puzzles just seem to tedious and small.  Also, the likelihood that the twin cat sister will foul everything up before we get the thing together seems to increase dramatically for a puzzle with 1000 pieces.  I have found that Good Earth Original Sweet & Spicy Tea & Herb Blend tea with a good dolop of molasses is particularly well suited for drinking while putting together Christmas puzzles.

Ruthie is one of our favorite readers and commenters.  In a recent comment, she described and interesting and beautiful phenomena that is taking place in her part of the world in California.

The weather here has been cold, but devoid of wind or rain. We have experienced a little drizzle here and there, but no blowing rain storms. This has led to what I have affectionately called “the phenomenon”. The leaves have had extra time on the trees because of the mild weather (mild, meaning no major rain or wind storms), and have had an extended time to transform and show their magnificent colors. Because there has been no wind to speak of, when the leaves finally drop of their own accord, they waft downward and land beneath the canopy of the tree. Usually, there are rain and wind storms that force the leaves off the trees before they are allowed to show their full splendor, and because the wind has knocked them off, leaves of many different trees linger together on the ground, and sometimes, even, you can find a leaf to which there is NO tree in the neighborhood that would claim it. But, “the phenomenon” has left each tree with its own leaves beneath itself, without mixing with the leaves of any other tree. It almost looks like someone used a leave blower and blew all the leaves back under the canopy of their respective trees. So, aspen trees that have yellow leaves, have only yellow leaves surrounding the trunk, etc. And if you have a row of the same type of tree, there will be leaves under one tree, then a break of grass without leaves, and then another tree with its leaves directly below its own canopy. Very Stepford Wifish, if you know what I mean. I have never seen it before. It is pretty amazing.

I said it would be really nice to see some pictures of that so she took some for us. They were so nice I wanted to post them. They really ARE amazing. Thanks Ruthie!

So we went Christmas shopping on Saturday!  I think this is the 4th or 5th year that Dad and Mom have let Christian and I shop for gifts for each other and for them. It was fun as it always is! I would tell what I got for each person, but that would ruin the surprise so I’ll just wait for another 11 days. I can say this safely though: Each gift is absolutely perfect for it’s corresponding recipient! Also, every year we put together a puzzle for Christmas, and we have discovered that the 750 piece puzzles are just the right size for us. So Dad and I also went to Michael’s and picked up our annual puzzle. They only had three 750 piece puzzles there. Two were of four American pop culture icons (Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and James Dean) and the only one left was one of 5 cute little kittens and pretty flowers. Which is fine! But you know, kittens do look a lot alike. So do flowers. So it’s a challenge.  Hopefully I’ll take a picture of the finished puzzle and post it up after Christmas before our cats get to it.

In school… I wrote my first practice ACT essay last Friday.  I did better than I thought I would, but it was much too short, rather badly thought out and had several more flaws that I noticed when I typed it down.  But here it is, unedited. Please don’t cringe!  (The prompt was second chances)

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s absolutely unavoidable to do or say the wrong thing. If it weren’t for second chances, then we’d all be leading lives of regret and guilt. Thankfully, there are some situations where we can turn around our own faults and make things better again.

Some are opposed to too many second chances. They say that second chances breed bad behavior and allow people to perform their misdeeds over and over again. I agree to a point. Some people obviously don’t want to change or make good. But many people have an honest desire to learn from their mistakes and do the right thing.

Because of this and because of my own personal experiences with second chances, I believe that society should soften it’s heart and learn to be more compassionate towards others. We’re all human after all, and who can honestly say that they’ve ever despised a second chance when it’s been given to them?

Tomorrow, Troy and Youngin will leave for ten days in Argentina. They recently started a blog and tell us they will try to update it with pictures and commentary from internet cafes while on their trip. If their postings from Argentina are anything like what they have put up so far, they should be a very interesting read. You can find their blog here. They are a recently married couple who have been in the Raleigh area about the same time as us. The go to Sunday morning meeting and Wednesday night bible study with us. Lorena and Kelly think Youngin is just about perfect. They will even be more impressed when they see what Youngin knitted for her new (not yet born) niece. I am totally amazed. When does she have time for all the stuff she does? Is there nothing she does poorly? The particularly cool part of all this is that she never says anything about any of the stuff she does, you just find out about it when she does it. For his part, Troy is an engineer (by birth, but soon to be by degree, too) which, of course, is just about perfect as far as Christian and I are concerned. We have a special appreciation for those who can not only do the math, but they are interested in it, too.

Tio Jorge, Tia Mari, and primos Jorgito, Valeria, and Brandon plan to visit us from Mexico in the next two or three weeks. Of course we are very excited about the visit. I called yesterday to talk to Jorge about the timing, but ended up talking to Tio Laurin for about half an hour. He is the one that has lived, worked, and traveled throughout South America for the past ten years or so. He was excited about Troy and Youngin were traveling in Argentina. He marveled at the beauty of the country and the inexpensive, really good food there. He thinks it would be awesome fun for all the family to meet in Buenos Aires for a vacation in the next couple of years. I am going to talk to Uncle Doug and see if I can get something worked out. Be sure to check out one of my favorite pictures of the beautiful Valeria and her favorite uncle.

Warren is my long-time buddy/roommate from college.  We lived in several different places together and have stayed in pretty close touch since I first got to know him over thirty years ago.  I even went to visit him a couple of times when he lived on the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean.  We broke what has been a fairly long running family tradition when he did not spend Thanksgiving with us this year.  We were all happy when he called us yesterday to tell us he would drive over from Nashville to spend Christmas with us this year to make up it.  The kids call him Miss Turbone.  All those of you who have read Louis Sachar’s book Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes will understand exactly what motivated them to start doing that.  The big event for the visit will be our turkey stuffing cookoff.  Warren is famous for his stuffing, but Grandpa Milo taught us a new way to do stuffing when he came for Thanksgiving, so we are going to have a big turkey stuffing death match.  You might have noticed we are big into death matches around here.  We always have lively discussions when Warren is around.  We agree on most things, but I think he is strongly supports Lyle’s view of the whole football/academics thing I wrote about yesterday.  We are going to see if we kind find a play to go see while he is here, but most of the time will be just hanging out, playing the guitar, cooking, walking in the neighborhood, and solving the worlds problems.  If only they would listen to us.

This weekend looks like it is going to be a heavy shopping weekend.  I am thinking of making everyone sit down for the reading of a few chapters of one of Dave Ramsey’s books about the importance of not spending money you don’t have so we can make it a light spending weekend, too.  I ususally lose in these kinds of situations.

Update:  I almost forgot.  Our friend Lester helped us find a new little laser printer.  It is an OKI B2400n network laser printer.  It only prints black and white, but that is all we really use.  We just plugged it into the ethernet hub and it worked.  We can now print from all the computers (Linux, Windows, and Palm) in the house directly to the printer without going through another computer.  Very cool.

This morning on my way into work, I listened to one of the most inane conversations I have heard in a long time.  The “Sports Director” at the WPTF radio station, a guy named Taylor Zarzour, talked about the great help winning football teams provide to the academic programs of universities like Duke, NCSU, and UNC.  He explained that not only do the television networks give the universities two or three free minutes to say anything they want about their schools during the course of a football broadcast, but they build great academic infrastructure like the new study facility inside the sports training complex at one of our local universities.  What is the purpose of that study facility?  To give the student athletes and only student athletes a place where they are required to study with mandatory tutorial help.  His thinking is that kids on the football team are not as well prepared for the rigors of university academic life as the kids who come to the university for purely academic reasons.  Wow!  So the universities are somehow improved academically by helping football players limp through degrees in communications studies, sociology, and psychology on their way to the NFL or, more realistically, into jobs as high school football coaches?  My mind is boggled.

Our whole educational system is broken.  Children leave the government schools with an abysmal education.  Thomas Sowell wrote an article for Townhall.com about the absurd fact that amateurs do a much better job than professionals when it comes to the education of their children.  After high school, we push kids into college who really should not be there.  Charles Murray writes of people with IQs of 100 or higher in a Wall Street Journal article, “Today’s simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.”  Read the article.  He makes a very cogent case for more vocational training and less university training.  So we should use football to attract people to the university who would be better served somewhere else?  In my experience, those attracted to the more rigorous academic disciplines such as engineering, math, physics, and chemistry seem to go to the best school that will accept them without regard to the quality of the football team.  None of them have much time to watch football anyway.  They are busy studying at the dorm or in the library.