Skystrideria

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Schedule Turnover

As Dad's coworker is recovering from a brain tumor removal, Dad has to teach an extra class for the fall. This means that Dad will be gone from 10 AM to 6 PM, changing morning routines into evening routines and the other way around. Of course, Dad had just dropped one class so that he could spend more time on the business, when we first got the news of the co-worker's cancer. Oh well, it probably won't kill anyone.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Ads?

That's strange, looks like Blogger got rid of the ads when it added the navigation bar. Interesting.

Party

Yesterday we had a going-away party for James, a friend from Science Olympiad who is heading to college. To keep it a surprise we had everyone park at the neighbor's house, then they had to stay in the backyard. I was directing traffic and waiting for James in the front yard. When his family arrived I quickly radioed everyone else before stepping out and making conversation with James. After about 1 minute we were mobbed by 40+ people. Later we had interesting political discussions and got out the five gallon buckets. Overall, very enjoyable.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Mission

Dad sat our family down earlier this evening to explain our family mission. Namely, To prepare our Great Grandkids to love the Lord and influence the World for Him! As Dad pointed out, we could easily have 500 great-grandkids. If things work out well, it could be 1000. As you can imagine, this is an enormous responsibility. Things could go wrong and there would be 1000 bad voters. But with God's grace and much toil, we will prevail.

Yuck

Just so everyone knows, eating my words is not my favorite hobby. But it looks like that is what I have to do.

Monday, August 02, 2004

Ouch, this trip stuff has taken awhile. Oh well, hopefully I will be posting more frequently in the future.

Trip 10

05/25/04

Today we went to Fort McHenry to see the living flag. Some three thousand-school kids were arranged in a pattern to represent the U.S. flag at the time of the War of 1812. This was interesting but more so was the raising of a replica of the Star Spangled Banner. The Park Ranger responsible had asked us to help raise it, so we were happy to comply. Joshua caught the normal flag as it came down, Jonathan and Kevin held the banner while it was being pulled, and I helped hoist it. As you can see, it worked out rather nicely.

The fort itself is interesting. It was built according to the science of the time, in a star shape. The logic behind this was that if one point of the star was attacked, the guns on different parts of the wall could support it. If these points had been circular, like the towers on older walls, their would be a safe spot where only one gun could fire upon the enemy. The armory building looks like an enormous barn. But only 10% of the space in it held munitions. The rest was armor to make sure that the gunpowder did not explode. One thing I noticed when I was there, the fort is so small it did not give the British much of a target, a nice bonus.

Another busy day. But it was the last day there, so my journals now come to an end.