Wordless Wednesday: 16 Years of Pictures from This Blog

 

For More Wordless Wednesday @ Comedy Plus Click here.

A is for Awana, Allen, and Ample.

                                                                

Good morning and welcome to another year of the A to Z Challenge.  This year I chose 3 themes for the challenge: Limericks, MLB Sluggers in my life time, and A to Z Wordles.  For more information about these themes click here.  

I did not grow up attending the kind of churches that participate in the children's program Awana.  So, it was not until Amy and I started our own family that we participated as parents and volunteers.. Awana is a program that among other things promotes the memorization  of bible verses from children 2 -18.  They are in many ways similar to a youth scouting program and one of their biggest events is the Awana Grand Prix which is very similar to the Pine Box Derbiesthat  I participated in as a Cub Scout.    Awana is something that worked for out family for many years which I 0ne reason why I penned this limerick 8+ years ago.

                                                         Tell folks, tell friends, tell an iguana.

There's plenty of fun at Awana

                                                         We learn that God is King

                                                         We play games and we sing

                                                         But never Hakuna Matata

                                                         From My Facebook page 3/5/2014

Dick Allen (1942-2020) was my hero when I was a young White Sox fan. His 3 year tenure on the White Sox (1972-1974) is a big reason I became a White Sox fan. When you look at the list of the 10 best homerun hitters from 1964-1975, 7 of them are in the Hall of Fame. Only Dick Allen , Boog Powell and Frank Howard are not. Powell was a MVP winner and Frank Howard won the Rookie of the Year award. Allen had more homers than either of those men and won both awards. Allen hit 331 homers from 1964 -1975. 189 with the Phillies, 85 with the White Sox, 34 with the Cardinals and 23 with the Dodgers. Allen averaged 33 homers per every 162 games played.

Note: Correct letters in the correct places will be shown in bold. Correct letters in incorrect places will be shown in italics.

My starting word on March 1st for Wordle was ample.

A M P L E

With the P and the E in the correct place. I tried to think of words that would fit. The first thing that came to my mind was Rupee.

R U P E E

Much to my delight and surprise it was correct, I found out a week or so later that Rupee caused a little bit of an sensation on wordle with many people breaking their win streaks on this word for Indian currency. For me it was a rare 2 time solve, but a good way to start my a to z wordle openers.

Thus begins another April A to Z to see what other prople are posting click here.

Turtle Cake is Best a HSD Rewind (Sort of)

This post was originally aired in 2010 in November.  It has been one of my most popular posts over the past 2 years.  Somehow, it has been in draft status for a while.  This is probaly from  back when I was trying to clear out all the kid's real names and put in their blog names. 

Since the post was in draft it did not count in my post count.  So this old post is actually # 600.  600 posts and I even brought a cake!



Spider Droid's Cub Scout Pack had a cake walk Friday Tonight. Each Cub Scout was to design and help make a cake according to a theme. I did not tell Spider Droid all the themes. There was an "other" theme which meant decorate the cake any way you want. I neglected to mention that one to Him. Otherwise it would have been A Star Wars Cake all the way. There is a limit to how much Star Wars stuff a guy can take, so I said nothing.


One of the themes was wildlife and SD decided to make a cake based on his favorite animal, the turtle. Here is how it turned out.

While Amy and I helped with some of the baking and decorating, SD was involved in every part of the process.

For each The scoutmaster announced 3 scouts in and asked them to come to the front. At that point, you knew they were in the top 3 but not what place.

When we entered the cake I heard many positive comments about the turtle cake and since some of those same people were judges I was not surprised that his name was called for the top 3.

But this did surprise me . . .

First Prize!!! Congratulations, SD! When it comes to having good ideas and implementing them, I guess you take the cake!

Meanwhile back in 2012 - Spider Droid is no longer doing scouts but he still likes turtles. 

I promised that I would wrap up the HSBA today.  If you check out my pages you will see a HSBA 2011 page. In it I have revealed all my voting for the awards and also highlighted all the winning blogs and shared a sample post from each. 

Misbehavior and Consequences

Rod Blagojevich was sentenced today.  Rod is the 4th former Illinois governor, in my lifetime,  to be convicted of a crime.  His crimes were many.  He, essentially, abused his power in order to make life easier for him and his family.  During the 3 year ordeal between arrest and sentencing, he maintained his innocence and offered no type of apology until today.  The apology appeared to be too little and too late, as he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

When Bunny heard the sentence, she wondered, if what he did was so bad as to earn 14 years.  I explained to her that yes, I thought the punishment did fit the crimes.  Here was a man, who had promised to change the culture of corruption in Illinois when he ran for governor.  (He sure kept that promise.  However, we thought he would change the culture for the better, not the worse.)  Instead, He sullied the  already tarnished reputation of Illinois politics.

He betrayed the trust of the people he was supposed to govern, and engaged in criminal acts without any sign of remorse, until today's grab to earn a reduced sentence.  I thought the firm sentence was a very good strong message that business as usual, look the other way, what's in it for me politics will no be tolerated. 

I was not only an observer of the justice system today, I was also a participant.  One of my daughters, I wont mention names, but the one with the birthday yesterday, did something she knew was wrong today.  She then lied about it several times before admitting her guilt.  It was very Blago-like.  Except we didn't have to go to trial.

Like Bunny with Blago, I also had to question whether the consequence (which I chose and administered) fit the crime.  The consequence for the misdeed was actually quite light.  The consequence for the cover-up was very strict.  Like the Blagojevich sentence it effected more than her it effected the whole family.  The Awana Grand Prix  was tonight. She had been planning on going and was working hard to prepare for it. 

Puppymobile Grounded

I had been assisting her and not only was it a fun event but it was also a competition that we thought she had a pretty good chance of winning a prize at.  Because she missed the event, Amy also had to miss it as well.  Meaning she could not watch Spider Droid and Bunny compete.  I will write another post tomorrow about how the event went.

I was tempted to make her nonattendance the only consequence.  The cars had been entered last night, so it was logistically possible for her car to race and be judged without her there.  I decided against that because:

A) That would not be fair to a kid who had not misbehaved to lose out to someone who did.
B) It would treat her misbehavior like it was an illness or a scheduling conflict.
C) Regardless of whether she won or not. allowing the car to race would be less of a deterrent for her not lying the next time.

My opinion on Blago's and my daughters sentencing are very similar:  The punishment fits the crime and acts as a deterrent for future misdeeds.  Whether it be politics or parenting justice can be served by following that pattern. 

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In totally unrelated blogging business, I am going to feature 1 HSBA winner in each of my next 20 posts.  Today's featured blog is  the winner of Best Home School Dad Blog, Families Again.  This fantastic blog is very deserving.  Here is a sample of  his fine work
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Next Time: Race Night Roundup

15 minutes to spare

The main reason why I have stopped blogging for the next few months is time, specifically my lack of it. I still get 168 hours a week, like everyone else. I just don't have any extra time for non-essentials. I may have time to do a 1/2 way job on my posts, but not enough time to make the posts as good as I want them. So taking a hiatus seemed the best choice.

Well today due to a schedule glitch, I see that I have an extra 15 minutes at the library and time to produce a post. As you see how little I write in 15 minutes you will see why blogging takes up so much of my time: I do it slowly.

School started 2 weeks ago and has been going pretty well. The past few days I have been in excruciating pain with a recurring neck injury. So, we haven't got as much accomplished as I would hope. Puppy is in kindergarten and I am trying to keep her active while working with Spider Droid and Bunny.

We are in the midst of what we call birthday season. Bunny turned 12 over the weekend. Amy and I have birthdays this month as well. Our co-op begins next week and the kids new classes seem really cool. Awana started today. And Spider Droid's soccer games start Saturday. I am working a full time temp job 2nd shift for the next 13 weeks. Add homeschool and church and you have a busy life with no time for blogging.

And that's 15 minutes!

Thank you Blago, for the home school civics lessons.

It was a Tuesday, that's all I remember for sure. That's the day the kids had their enrichment course. (It's a co-op, but they don't call it a co-op. They call it enrichment courses.) Puppy and I played in a kid's area while Bunny took an art class and then Spider Droid took a chess class. I was driving to enrichment classes, (that's how I knew it was a Tuesday) when I heard on the radio that our state's governor Rod Blagojevich had been arrested on federal corruption charges. The most egregious of which was trying to sell the then President-elect Obama's vacated senate seat to the highest bidder.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a photo by captainleadbottom on Flickr.

It was there in the car on the way to enrichment classes, that our 2 1/2 year civics lessons began. Theses include lessons in filling vacant seats, abuse of power, impeachment, trials, hung juries and retrials. Then today as I went to run errands with the bigs, I turned on the radio and they announced a verdict had been reached in the Blago retrial and would be announced in the early afternoon. As quickly as that, our civics classroom started all over again.

Here are a few educational and pseudo educational moments from the last 30 months of Blagomania:

• When Spider Droid first heard about the Blagojevich arrest he assumed that the governor had been framed since a governor would never do anything wrong. What I wanted to say to him was "live in Illinois much?" But I went the AWANA route and reminded him of his memory verse, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."










• Many of Blagojevich's public appearances gave us quite a lot to discuss. I tried to find a video of him quoting Rudyard Kipling shortly after his initial arrest. The only one I could find was merged with Simpson's clips. So instead here is the beginning of an interview he did with Dave Letterman shortly after the impeachment.

• The kids' impression of him was aided by the media. At one point between the arrest and the impeachment, the kids got to calling him "Governor Deadmeat" because he had been referred to that way in a local paper.






• We even did a Lego workshop about him. . .

Just kidding! Here's the real credit.

rod blagojevich, a photo by robayre on Flickr.

Blagojevich's downfall seemed to be that he felt that his years of service to the public entitle him to some sort of payback. During the past 2.5 years, even in his trial, he talked about all the great things he did for the state of Illinois. His defense seems to be (a) This is what politics is(everybody's doing it)and (b) I deserve something out of this. I am sure that in his mind, which must be an amazing place to visit, he did nothing wrong.








Interestingly enough, these are my kids' two biggest excuses for not admitting when they were wrong. "They started it"and "But I wanted it." Blagoevich serves as a warning to my kids and hopefully everyone who tries to cover up their misdeeds with excuses.








So thanks Blago, for all the civics lessons. I guess we'll just have to wait until your sentencing date to learn more.






Thanks to As for my House for hosting this weeks carnival of homeschooling and puting in this post. To go visit the carnival click here.

Dole - Now in 100% Juice Aloha Sweepstakes and other fragments

It is Friday Fragment time again. I have had a strange and wonderful week. Drove to Springfield with the Family on Tuesday to protest a bill that would take away some of the freedoms we have here in Illinois to Home School, The bill was tabled and I blogged about it here. ************************************************************************************ My next Fragment reminds me of the book and movie The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio. This is a contest to win a Hawaiian vacation. There are several ways to win. Any time Amy and I see a contest we know for sure that we are "slated" to win. It doesn't matter that, we often forget to enter and that we never win. We just know we are going to win. So enter if you want, but Amy and I have got the vacation in the bag. Dole - Now in 100% Juice Aloha Sweepstakes ************************************************************************************ We saw this add on Hulu this week. I know I've been sharing lots of commercials lately but this one is hilarious. Bunny Girl especially liked it. Even though one of her favorite creatures was threatened. ************************************************************************************ This commercial by the same airlines does a very good job of explaining why companies don't say Super Bowl in their radio and t.v. spots. It's also very funny. ************************************************************************************

Final Fragment. The pictures that started this post were taken last Saturday at our Church for Awana Bible Quizzing. Both Spider Droid and Bunny Girl were just a small # of the kids participating to get 8 of 8 correct in their multiple choice round. It is rewarding to put God's word in your heart!

Off to the races!

It seems like the beginning of January seems to be a rude awakening of activity that we somehow forgot about in all the holiday flurry.

First, we forgot to sign Spider Droid up for spring soccer, which we took care of in the nick of time!

While at the park district signing him up, we remembered to sign up Puppy for ballet...which started yesterday. Got that in just under the wire. Whew!

On top of that, the Lego Robotics state finals is next Friday and Saturday.

And then the homeschool co-op starts up again. Not to mention Awana on Monday nights, in which the two older are working on Bible Quizzing as well. Then after that is over, I am sure that Spider Droid will want to be in the Awana games again. There's always something, you know. Homeschooling doesn't always involve being at home! Homeschool, it's not a place, it's a state of mind. In fact don't think of it as homeschooling, it's more like life.

Not Much. what's a woodchuck with you?

On the way home from Awana today, my son asked me why a woodchuck is called a woodchuck. I told him, I did not know but would find out.

And the thing is I did . . .




groundhog day! Originally uploaded by NapaneeGal


I originally thought that woodchuck was just an informal version of Wood Charles. It turns out, a woodchuck is just another name for a groundhog. It comes from the Indian name for groundhogs and other similar animals, wujak. The name evolved into woodchuck. I don't believe the animal evolved, but I can believe the name did.

I also found out that woodchuck isn't the only alternate name for groundhog. There is also Land Beaver and Whistle Pig. It reminds me of that old tongue twister (I just made up):

How many names would a ground hog have if a ground hog could ground names?

Keith Time: Memories From the Funeral Part I

My son the action hero: the slide show

Talking about my children is one of my favorite things to do on this blog. In terms of labels the # 9 through the first 300 blog posts has been posts about my son and his action hero ways. Here is an interview conducted by his sister this past winter . . .

He has many facets ...

Teammate

Fashion Plate

Athlete















School Project assistant


















School Project Model
















































Day Laborer



















Goofball




















Big Brother





















Goofball





















Military Archivist

















Did I mention

goofball?

Next Time: A Lucyism by any other name.