Walnuts on My Windshield

Katie has worked long and hard to get this blog looking the way I want it to.  I really appreciate all her work, and I love the look.  However, homeschoolblogger.com has been VERY tedious to work with.  I have been too frustrated with it for too long, so I have moved my blog. 

Please come visit me at my new address:   http://walnutshademom.wordpress.com/

Thanks.

One of my challenges is to try to stay on top of all the paperwork-ish stuff in my life, and today it seems like I have an extra lot of it.

* Ministry newsletter is due to go out and Scott wants me to plan the layout.

* Ministry staff meeting tommorrow night and prep discussions we need to have prior.

* Family newsletter stuffed, but I found that I am almost out of stamps.  How did I ever let THAT happen?!?!

* Homeschool hours need to be recorded, back into February (sigh).

* Ministry thank yous need to be written.

* I need to figure out how to help Jessica study for her College Algebra CLEP.

* Bank deposit receipts need to be filed.

* New memory verse for boys must be chosen, printed, and entered in MemLok.

* Books the boys have read need to be collected and recorded.

I think I need one whole day ALONE at my desk, and then I will be able to make some progress on each of the above.  Anybody want to give me a day?  = )

In addition, I REALLY want to spend some more time re-sizing my photos and uploading them to Flickr.  However, I am keeping that as my reward.  I work for a while, and then I can recreate with Flickr. 

Now it’s supper time (actually past supper time) and we will have Broccoli Soup which is in the crock-pot.  Scott is on the phone with ministry business, and as soon as he finishes that, I will collect the kids and we will eat.

One more question. . . could someone please invent a machine into which I can dump all our clean clothes and have them come out folded?  I’m thinking along the lines of those bank machines that you dump change into and out come rolls of each kind of coin.  No thought and only a few seconds of time required.  It would revolutionize home design!  Laundry rooms would be bigger and contain three pieces of equipment:  a washer, a dryer, and a folder. 

If you have any design ideas for such an item, please send them my way.  

Breaking news….  Katie was entered in an essay contest sponsored by our local electric cooperative.  The co-op covers a five-county area, and all the schools in those counties were invited to participate.  The seven best essays were invited to compete orally tonight at a banquet.  The three top scorers overall (essay, oral presentation, knowledge of rural electrical co-op trivia) would each win an all-expense paid trip to Washington DC in June.

Katie had been told she should have her essay memorized, although she could use note cards if needed.  She spent QUITE a bit of time in the past couple weeks memorizing her four-page essay; it was 10 minutes long.

Fifteen minutes before we left the house to go to the competition, Katie came into my office looking just a tiny bit flustered.  "Mom, I feel really dumb, but I just re-read the competition rules and found out that I only have three minutes to present my essay.  Could you help me figure out what to cut?"  Fun, fun, fun.

I advised her, and she began scratching off note cards.  While it was easy to take paragraphs out, it was hard to get the thing to "flow" with so many omiussions.  In the car, she practiced while Scott timed her.

Katie was the fifth of the seven to do her thing, and she really shone.  Even though I am her mom, I can honestly say that her delivery was much, much better than the other students’.  She only glanced down at her notes once.  She used emotion, had great eye contact, varied her intonation, spoke clearly, and was a delight to listen to.  Even though she stumbled briefly over a quite which she couldn’t remember, she simply smiled, said apologetically, "Oh well, I forgot it," and kept right on going.  We were all SO proud of her!

After each presentation, the judges asked the student one question.  Katie’s essay had to do with the discovery of penicillin, so the question she received from judge Stan Bess, VP of the Vacation Channel, was (more or less) "What do you think is the most important medical challenge facing humanity today?"  Katie thought a moment and said, "Medicine is not really my field of expertise; history is, but I would say finding a cure for cancer…"  People laughed and Mr. Bess commented on what a great job she had done.

I breathed a sigh of relief that she had not only gotten through it with so many last minute changes, but that she had done so well.  There was one really interesting thing.  Of the seven finalists, five attend public school and two are homeschooled.   Katie’s essay dealt with penicillin, and Aaron’s (the other homeschooler) was about Benedict Arnold.  ALL FIVE of the other essays dealt with blacks and women.  In fact, several of them said the same things in the same ways – even using the same wording.  It let me see what is being emphasized to public school students.

When the winners were anounced – in no particular order, which drove Scott nuts - Katie was one of the three!  She will be traveling to Washington, DC with some 80 other students from Missouri.  There will be a total of some 1300 students on this trip nationwide.  We are quite excited for her.  Thanks especially to all who prayed for her speech memorization.

I really like blogging, but I must confess that homeschoolblogger.com is a PAIN to use!  I hate that.  It’s free, and I guess I get what I am paying for. 

In any case, when I looked at that Georgetown picture at 500 pixels wide, it just looked too "glittery" to me.  I decided I need to re-size them to 700 pixels wide for better resolution. 

Here’s a picture of Josiah, demonstrating how to carry skis and poles.  Scott is walking toward him, and Andrew (red cap) has his skis on and is itching to hit the lift.  This was the first day of skiing at Loveland Basin.  Isn’t the weather gorgeous?

I think this resolution is better, so I’ve made myself a note to stick with 700 pixels wide for Flickr.

I am trying to teach myself how to use Flickr to catalogue my photos.  Doing that requires resizing them and learning how to work with Flickr.  Then, getting them onto here, the world’s SLOWEST-loading site, is another big step.  I am trying one today and hoping I can get a lot faster at this soon. 

This a picture of Georgetown, taken from Guanella Pass Road.  It’s a quaint, historical town of about 1,608 residents, located in the mining district of Clear Creek County. South Clear Creek flows down out of the mountains and forms Georgetown Lake (seen in background). Our condo was near the lake. 

I can see that I re-sized this one too small.  Hmmm…  After 20 minutes of work, I think I will leave it alone and just make a note to re-size them larger in the future.