Christmas in Living Black & White

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Home School "As You Wish"

There is something deeply wrong with my wife. This may surprise some of my readers. Not that you would be surprised to find that I am not married to a perfect person. It's just that I usually write the great things about her. But this thing is so wrong, it emanates from the soul of her being and taints every decision she will ever make.

Yes, my wife, (GASP) does not like the movie the Princess Bride. And the thing is I married her anyway. I just put the videocassette aside and waited until our progeny were born and then old enough to watch it. This coming of age happened last month, when Spider Droid and I watched it together. He absolutely loved it and soon Bunny girl devoured it also. They have only seen it twice and are still able to quote large portions of it to each other in the back of our mini van.

My wife remains apathetic to the film. She walked in while we were watching it New year's Eve and said "Billy Crystal is in The Princess Bride?" and I replied, "Billy Crystal is The Princess Bride", an homage to the line he had just spoken about Fezzik and the Brute Squad. Even though Crystal is in just the one scene his entire performance is one great quote after another, which is indeed a microcosm of the film. The entire movie is in Jeopardy speak, a potent quotable.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post, The Carnival of Homeschooling is celebrating it's 5th anniversary. The Carnival creator/maintainer/many other thing doer Henry Cate of Why Homeschool is hosting the extravaganza. And nothing gives you more vaganza than A Princess Bride themed edition. So check it out. Henry included my recent Library Week posting in the doings, so be sure to check that out as well.

I have to go back into the fire swamp now and start home schooling after a 2 week hiatus. The end of a hiatus is a Byeatus, but that's a post for another day. Until then, have fun storming the castle.

I haven't posted since last year!

Happy New Year!

If you would have told me a year ago that in 2010 that I would be visiting Thomas Edison's and Earl Hamner (AKA John Boy Walton's) home towns I would not have believed you.

If you would have told me that my son's robotics team would qualify for the state tournament, I would have asked "what's a robotics team?"

These and many other things did happen . In many ways, it was a great year. In many ways, it was a horrible year. I guess you could say that about any year.

My new year's wish for all you loyal readers is that 2011 is heavy on the great, light on the horrible!

Library Story with alternat(or) ending

Yesterday we continued one of our favorite family traditions: Library Week.

We generally will visit a number of libraries and spend the day exploring what they have. Our visit to the North Shore suburb of Highland Park was fairly typical.

We found the building . . .
















We entered the building.

We read and relaxed.

We played Games

We made friends.

And more friends

We took in the sights near the library.

From there things became more atypical. 5 minutes after this picture was taken our car battery died. A family visiting the same lake shore view as us stopped and gave us a jump. We could tell within seconds after the car restarted that there was still something wrong. We had no lights and our emergency beeper would not turn off.

We rode about 6 miles (this was in dusk) and pulled over into a gas station that also happened to have a service station. Our alternator had gone out.

An hour and a 1/2 and a good amount of our emergency savings reserve later, we were on our way home. Besides the alternator and the somewhat burned (although still eaten) crock pot meal (due to our lost 1.5 hours) this was a very typical day at the library. (Except for the kids waiting at the gas station, certain people were tired.)