Announcement coming June 1st

We interrupt your Memorial Day to tell you that there are changes coming to this blog starting June 1st.  I know, I know, I should probably just tell you now.  But it's like the old joke goes ...

How do you keep a blog reader in suspense?

I'll tell you June 1st.

Post of the weekFlorida!

This week's post of the week comes from my daughter. I know that seems like a little bit of nepotism. I was on the same trip as she was and took all of the pictures and still found her post interesting.



Wolfina's Secrets: Florida!: Last week I went to Florida and had a great time.  I went to Walt Disney World (Magic Kingdom, Epcot and Downtown Disney), Seaworld, Cl...

Post of the week is ontime. Wow, I did that.

For the first time since I started Post of the week, I have turned one in a timely fashion.  The goal for Post of the week is for me to read the accumulated posts on my blogroll for a given week and choose one as the post of the week.

It is not necessarily the best post, just the one that is most significant to me. 

 This week we sold all our copies of Mystery of History at a curriculum sale.  This was a gutwrenching thing for me.  I taught the kids volumes I and II myself and Amy taught III this year.  It is a fabulous curriculum but due to other considerations we chose to sell them.  

Then Laurie Bluedorn of Trivium Pursuit comes out with a great review of the product and some thoughts on comments regarding the resource.  It easily became the Post of the week.  

Now that I have put two posts of the week together in a timely fashion, I hope to make it an everyday Sunday afternoon thing.  Time will tell.

The nounsense is over

My A to Z Challenge  theme was nouns.

A noun is a person, place or thing.

My people were:

Allen Levi
Dave Ramsey
Frank Thomas
Hank Aaron
King Tut
Minnie Minoso
Nobody
Paul  Konerko
Jimmy Stewart
Bob Wallace

My Places were

Comiskey Park
Debt
Elgin
Illinois
Nowhere
Turkey
Uzbekistan
Virginia
Zoos

My Things were
Bibimbap
Discussions
Giraffe Poop
Jack & Diane
Library
Nothing
Oreos
Quinjet
Ragamuffin
Xanthosis
Yoyo

I enjoyed my time doing a to z blogging.

Here are three things I learned.

1) It is a lot easier to do a to z blogging as a full time home school dad than it is working outside the home.

2) I tried to do two blogs at the same time and had to give up on my  baseball one at U.

3)  Blogging here everyday for a month has gotten me more psyched for blogging than I have been in 2.5 years.  I am actually planning on participating next year in 3 blogs but have already picked my themes and hope to be much more prepared then I was this year.

I am sorry it took me a few weeks to post my thoughts.  But i went to Florida for 1 week right after this ended and it's taken me about a week to get back in the swing of things.

Speaking of road trips I am participating in the a to z road trip .  For more info click here.

Friday Fragments @ Half Past Kissing Time

Here are today's fragments . . .

Trix are for the bathroom?

 I was at Target today and went into the Men's bathroom.  The bathroom smelled exactly like Trix cereal.   I have been noticing this for a few years.  Many bathrooms smell like this but especially Target.  I  have been wanting to post about it  for quite a while.  It is perfect for Friday fragments, because I could not imagine ever writing an entire post about bathrooms that remind me of cereal I ate as a kid.  In fact, I can hardly believe I've written a pargagraph about it.

Saint John the Evangelist



While I was in the  Trix smelling bathroom, I picked up  a religuous tract that had been left in one of the stalls.  It seemed to be left there for the purpose of distribution.  Now, I have handed my share of tracts out in my life.  I know this is not method I would use.  My critics would say, hey it worked, you picked it up.  Christians are supposed to display the aroma of Christ.  Trix or worse bathroom smells are definitely not the aroma I would want to compare my Savior to.

Milking Robotics for all it's worth.

Tomorrow is the big day,  Spider Droid's FLL Robotics Tournament.  His team has been working so hard to get ready for this day.  The theme of this yearsis Food Factor and his team has been working on a solution to prevent the spoiling of milk.  One of the things I love about F.L.L is their Core Values.  The core value I like best is: What we discover is more important than what we win.  So, while the tournament is a culmination of several months of work and research, their season has already been succesful no matter where they finish.



Hof Trip Day 1

I just came home from a trip with one of my kids.  Before I get into it.  Let me tell you about  a trip my son and I took last year.

On Thursday 7/23 SD and I drove to  New York for the primary purpose of going to Baseball Hall of Fame.  We left home at 4 a.m.  and drove out of Illinois  into and out of Indiana and breakfasted in Michigan.

We ate at Cracker Barrel

After breakfast we headed towards the border and at 11:30 a.m. central drove into Canada. We drove a few more hours and stopped for lunch at A&W which are more like the A&W's I remember as a kid and not like the few still in Illinois.

We started a root beer trend that continued on the trip.

I got excited when I saw the above sign and even more excited when we saw the below sight.

Over the past year, I have been writing a limerick each day.  I will share at the end of each post that day's limerick.



Setting 3:40 a.m. alarm
Does my sleeping a great deal of harm
But gives vacay great start
And sure played a big part
Ending day at Niagara with charm.

GoodArticle on the Culture of Dating

Kudos to the matriarch of a local home schooling family who alerted me about an article by Bryana Johnson in The College Conservative via Facebook.

Post of the Week - Mothers day edition

Time again for another monthly edition of post of the week.  I would change it to post of the month, but then  I would probably do it annually.

  The jist of post of the week is to find the most excellent post on my blogroll from the last week and repost it here.

Yesterday, was Mother's day and my sister-in-law who blogs at Peace, Love and Yoga Pants totally nailed it with 5 Lessons My Mom Taught Me.

Puppy was talking about cheerios tonight and how they are good for you. She said if you opened your heart you would see Cheerios and Jesus.

Mothers day gifts of a lifetime!

Z is for Zoo (Place)

3 years ago when I last participated in a to z blogging.  I ended with this video my wife took when the kids were younger.  It feels like cheating to do it again.  But. it's eithe that or not finish.







For more A to Z blogging click here.

Y is for YoYo (thing)

i

When I think of the yoyo I think of the Duncan Couagempany and the yo-yo fad that started in the 1920's and the subsequent fads since then.  

Did you know that the yoyo is a Tagalog word?  Tagalog is a language of the Philippines.  The yoyo was used for 400 years in the Philippines as a weapon for hunting and fighting,  In Tagalog yoyo means come back.  The yoyo goes back much farther than 400 years and dates back to 500 years before  the time of Christ it was used as a toy in ancient Greece.  It was also used in China, before moving to Europe in the 1800's.  the toy came to the us in the 1860's with the British name bandalore.  In 1920 A Filipino immigrant by the name of Pedro Flores brought the name yoyo to the US and started producing the toy his shop on California.  His taught caught the attentiogin of Donald Duncan who brought the rights. to it.

A to Z blogging like the yoyo has had it's ups and downs for me.  But with one day left we are definitely ending on an up.

X is for Xanthosis (thing)

According to Merriam Webster, Xanthosis is ...

1

:  yellow discoloration of the skin from abnormal causes

2

:  a virus disease of the strawberry plant characterized by crinkling and curling, yellowing and dwarfing of the leaves, and stunting of the entire plant

Why did I choose such a noun? Because of the movie Akeelah and the Bee.  Before the scene we are about to watch, Akeelah and Dylan are talking about the word xanthosis and it is clear in the movie by the time of the spelling bee finals when they are the last 2 contestants, that they both know how to spell that word.  Akeelah has been observing throughout the movie that Dylan's dad is a tyrannical spelling bee Dad and only the championship trophy will be enough for Dylan to achieve.

Let's see what happens next .

If you have not seen this fine 2006 movie I strongly recommend that you do.  For more A to Z challenge click here.

W is for Wallace (Person)

Today's noun was going to be a place.  It was going to be Walt Disney World aka The Magic Kingdom.  On Saturday, 4/25 Robert Wallace passed away. "Mr. Bob" as he was known at Lake Zurich Community Church and the Lake Zurich Harvest, to generation after generation of AWANA kids was one of the kindest and Godliest men I ever had the pleasure of meeting,  He and his wife Lucille made every day living a ministry.  His life was spent investing in God's eternal kingdom, not a magical one.  He is there now, enjoying God's presence forever.

As this Father's day video shows,   Life does goes fast!  Bob is the last father featured.

V is for Virginia (Place)

V is for Virginia and it also stands for vacation it also is the roman numeral for 5.

5 years ago our family went on vacation in Virginia and 5 years ago we went into Washington DC and flew kites.

 

 

Flying a kite on the mall in D.C.
Posted by David Roller on Sunday, April 25, 2010

For more A to Z blogging click here.   

 

U is forUribe

White Sox Homerun hitters from A.J. to Zeke

U is for Uribe 

Juan Uribe

When I think of Juan Uribe, I think of the 2nd out of  the ninth inning of game4 of the 200 World Series

I will show it to you.

Juan Uribe is still playing major league baseball almosts  10 year dcerneafter that epic play.  To date he as 178 homers.  87 of them came was a member of the Sox.  Hie best 2 seasons were 2004 and 2006 as far as the long ball was concerned.  He hit 23 in 2004 and 21 in 2006.  He averaged 18 homeruns over an 162 game season or 1 dinger every 8 ganes.

For more A to Z blogging click here.   

U is for Uzbekistan

For  Friday Fragments I thought I would go back in time  and look at 3  increments of 5 years starting in 1993 and telling you what  late April of those years may have looked like.


Fragment 1 :  22 years ago  in Tash Kent
Family Status: Single as they come
Employment Status: Southern Baptist Missionary


In  April 1993 I spent a week In Tashkent, Uzbekistan.  This was right after it had become it's own country after the breakdown of the U.S.S.R.  I was living in Russia at time as a Baptist missionary/English teacher and was spending a week in Tashkent to observe how ministry with Korean Russian youth was going since the team leadership aspect of the ministry in  Tashkent would matc hopefully to what we planned to do in my city of Khabarovsk.

I don't remember a lot about my time there.  I helped with English classes, church services, and also spent time enjoying the city.  I had a caricature of myself drawn at a sidewalk cafe which I gave to my folks upon my return.  My time in Tashkent was as close to a business trip as I've ever been on.

Fragment 2: 17 years ago in Hickory Hills
Family Status: Newlywed
Employed at Dovenmuehle Mortgage

In  April 1998, we had just moved into our apartment after getting home from honeymoon in TN.  We were very busy with our church, work, and being madly in love.  I was working in the phone center at the mortgage company and had only been there since December of 1997.

We ate out a lot, but also spent a lot of time with friends and family.  We started a tradition of visiting our living grandparents about once a month.  Those newlywed times will always be precious to me.  Every day was an adventure and I am glad to say that it still is.

Fragment 3: 12 years ago in Carpentersville, IL

Family Status: Married 5 years and had 3.5 year old girl and 1.5-year-old boy
Employed at Dovenmuehle Mortgage

By April 2003 life was getting back to normal after an eventful 2001 and 2002.  I was working in the research department at my job mostly handling presidential correspondence.  We were attending church in Crystal Lake

For more Friday fragments