Good Morning!

School has started back and life takes on a new sort of pace. I'm trying to adapt. This year things are going to be a bit different. First and foremost, my lovely wife has gone back to work. When we moved here from New Jersey, she was pregnant and decided to take a year or so off with our new baby. Well a year stretched into 14.

With my son off to college and my daughter getting a bit more independant, my wife was getting antsy to do something. The fact that I was out of work and not making much money with my little business venture may have also have influenced her thinking. Anyhow, she decided that she didn't want to be a scientist anymore, which was what she used to be, and that she preferred to return to her roots in math. So she decided to get a teaching degree and teach math to hormone addled middle school students. She entered a program called NC-Teach, a state program designed to allow people, primarily in the math and science fields, to quickly get teacher certification. Good math teachers are hard to come by apparently. It's a total immersion teacher training thing where you go to school at all kinds of irregular hours and do lots of homework.

Anyhow, she did the whole banana and got a job. I may talk about that at another time. I sure the travails of teaching will make for some interesting stories. The reason I started writing this blog entry was to explain why I have time to write this today. The job she took requires her to get up at about 5:30 in the morning. She tries to be quiet when she gets up but I started slamming the Snooze every 10 minutes to try to get a bit more sleep and eventually, I decided it wasn't working. So now I get up. But I have to take my daughter to school at 8:00 so that gives me two and a half hours to kill. So first, I go for a fast walk in the dark. My walk takes about 2o minutes. Then I have some coffee and a poptart. Then I wake up my daughter and then I log onto the computer and check email and the web for news and other things and then I shower and shave and then I take my daughter to school and I go to work. Today I tried to insert a blog session and if I write a bit less than today it might just work. But Today, I'm out of time and need to jump in the shower.

So bye for now!

We just got back from taking my oldest son off to college. For reasons that I don't fully understand but will learn to accept, he decided to attend a small Quaker school about 10 hours from home. Let me just say that saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'll get used to it eventually, I guess. But it won't be easy.

I think he'll do well and I believe that the school will be good for him and also, that he'll be good for the school. It's small enough that he'll make an impact and I think it will be a positive one.

And he'll also get good grades or he's coming home.

Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the beach. I used Picassa to export them into a bunch of web pages and I uploaded the whole thing into my web site. The pictures don't have anything to do with my web site but it's a good place to post them so that anyone can get to them quickly.

So here's the link:

Pictures from the Beach 2005

Hey, that was pretty easy. Enjoy!!

Hi there. It's Monday. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a really good time. Sunset Beach is a really nice beach in NC. Some say it's the best. One of the reasons is that for some cause or another, sand is piling up on Sunset while it's washing away from all the other beaches. This leads to a very wide flat beach with very fine sand (at least by east coast standards). So it's good for building sandcastles, spreading out without being on top of other people and letting your kids run loose. That allows you to relax and drink beer all day while you talk with old friends about other people who aren't there.

This year we had a bigger crowd than usual. We had some friends down from Pennsylvania for a few days who stayed with us. My cousin from Chicago stayed next door. Her brother-in-law and family had another house. My sisters and another cousin had another house and an old friend from my home town got another house. I was particularly glad that my buddy from Tabor stayed for the week. When he visited in past years, I was always worried about him driving home at night after too many beers. Also, his wife, an avid NC State fan in a sea of Carolina fans, always adds spice to any discussions of ACC athletics.

I may say more later but for now, I'll post a couple of sandcastle pictures. The timing of the tides made this a good year to build sandcastles. Low tide occurred about 11:00 AM on Monday and moved up about 52 minutes each day. The result is that after you build a sandcastle, you get to watch the tide destroy it rather than going in for supper, knowing that some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid was going to kick it in. I build my castles for God to destroy, not some some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid. Plus, I like to watch the destruction myself.

Bye for now.

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