Yes we are still alive and headed Westward! Just a quick update since It is after 11 current time and I need to get to bed but wanted to let you all know where we were! We have been without internet and usually without cell coverage most of the last week plus. We left KS last Wed. and spent a delightful but chilly 4 nights in Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park in CO. Visited many of our favorite places in the park. Then we headed towards Denver and a motel for the night with a stop in Boulder to hike the Flat Irons. We left Denver and headed South the Great Sand Dunes National Park. I’ll admit this wasn’t my first choices of places to go, but the kids wanted to. I was Amazed. It is truly an Awesome place, and we only explored a tip of it. It contains the Dunes, but also high mountains (2 in the area are over 14,000 ft high), grasslands, and even wet lands. We hiked to the top of the 2nd tallest dune, 650 ft high, and visited a water fall that we had to hike back to via wading in a snow melt creek and then going into a little cave – but it was well worth it! That was a busy day, as one of my children locked my keys in the car first thing in the AM and our guardian angels in the form of the family camping next door helped us out by lending us their cell phone and AAA card (which I have but was in the car) and feeding us bagels and coffee for breakfast. They had just camped there for the night on a whim pretty much. Kids and I had just prayed we’d be able to get in and the dude came over. That was pretty Amazing in and of itself! We only spent 2 nights at the Dunes (we could have stayed longer!) and today we made our way South and West and are currently in Gallup, NM, just 16 miles from the Arizona border. Tomorrow we’ll make a detour through the Petrified Forest National Park and then on to the Grand Canyon. One week from tonight we’ll be sleeping in our new apartment in CA!
That’s the very briefest version! I’ll attempt to fill in more details from our adventures later!

If anyone’s noticed the change of picture on our blog header, this is a picture Brian took from somewhere near where we’ll be living in Mountain View, CA.  It’s a beautiful area!  Rolling Hills and mountains.  And if you hike in the right area you can climb a mountain, look out over more mountains, and see the gleaming Pacific in the distance!

I suppose some would say it’s not an ending nor a beginning, but a continuation. Maybe the best way to look at it would be like a book   We’ve finished one chapter and the next chapter is beginning.   However you want to look at it, 2 years, 2 months and 2 weeks ago we drove into Florida on April 1, 2009 and stopped at our friends’, the Dauns’, house near Orlando on our trek to Naples.  We had 1 dog, 2.5 kids, 3 cats, 2 cars, and 5 relo-cubes of stuff (in storage).

Yesterday, on June 15, 2 years, 2 months and 2 weeks later, I again arrived, in transit once again, on the Dauns’ front porch.  Now our final destination is Mountain View, CA.  We have 1 dog, 1 car, the equivalent of 1 (plus 1 ft linear space) relocube of stuff (in storage), & 3 kids.  I’m on my own, in the adult category, since Brian’s been working in CA for the last 4 months

This time is a whole lot different.  It has been a life changing 2 years in many ways.  Make that closer to 3 years from the beginning of this particular journey.   When we drove into FL we didn’t intend to stay, but I’m not sure we would have guessed God would take us somewhere new so quickly (although for the last 9 months we’ve certainly prayed He would!)  He continues to believe one of our greatest lessons we need to learn is patience and relying on Him.  As we wait for the delayed closing on our House in FL.  As we waited for someone to buy our house… As we waited to find a 3 bedroom apartment in or near Mountain View. when all of a sudden there were no vacancies… And now as we wait to get into our new apartment.  But at least that one has a definite time period on it…July 20.  1 month and 5 days.

So, for then next 35 or so days, kids and I and dog will be traveling, visiting, and sight-seeing.  This next chapter is bound to be exciting!

I have been reading the Latin Vulgate in an effort to increase my fluency in Latin and of course to increase my understanding of scripture. Instead of spending $30-50 on a nice Latin Vulgate I went the more expensive route and bought a Nook Color, which of course has made available many other old books for my use.

Unfortunately, there was not a good Vulgate available for the Nook when I got it. So I spent a few hours and wrote a script to generate one. I am using the Clementine Vulgate text from The Clementine Text Project. If you are using a Nook, you will have to side-load this ePub. It is not in the Barnes and Noble store.

This ePub works well on the Nook, but may still have a few minor conversion errors. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

Download the Vulgate ePub

UPDATE (6/7/2011): You can now buy this through the Barnes and Noble store for $0.99. I would have made it free, but Barnes and Noble wouldn’t let me:

Buy the Vulgate for Nook

We have been having an evening family read-aloud time for quite some time. On various occasions we have read from the Bible, stories of the lives of saints, Greek mythology, and others. Most recently to supplement an area of school we don’t really emphasize we have begun focusing on American history.

We started out with The Voyage of St. Brendan taken from Brendaniana by Denis O’Donoghue which we read on my son’s Barnes & Noble Nook. We skipped ahead to The Voyages of Columbus by Armstrong Sperry which we acquired used from Abebooks.com (an excellent site for homeschoolers). Tonight we finished Leif the Lucky by Ingri D’aulaire which we acquired from the library. The next book on my list is The Young Folks Book of American Explorers (which we will read on the Nook).

I have added a sidebar widget for our current read-aloud books and linked it to my librarything.com account.

UPDATE (9/22/2010): We tried The Young Folks Book of American Explorers and it did not work out very well as a read-aloud. I have instead started reading America’s story for America’s children, Volume 2, which reads nicely and seems a very good introduction to American History. Volume 1 is merely a collection of simple stories for early readers so we skipped ahead to volume 2.

Today we mourn the passing of a family member. I adopted Mr. Bert 18 years ago about 6 months before we were married. He went through 6 moves and lived in 5 states. He was a faithful and loving companion and we will miss him.

This is a great video on why it is important to study Latin (and Greek).

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Week 4

Week 4

Week 5

Week 5

I thought about making all these separate posts…but there’s not a whole lot you can say about a dehydrating chicken as the weeks go on.  Yes, we are STILL mummifying the chicken.  Week after week it sits in its two ziplock bags, covered in salt with a little baking soda and powder thrown in for good measure.  Oh yeah, and whatever herbs look good to Micah.  Mostly we’ve been using Si Si Cilantro from Tastefully Simple that I never used.  (Don’t think I could ever use it again either…Makes me think of shrunken chicken just smelling it.)

Week 3 was nothing special.  Salt was less wet, but still had some wet areas, and the salt in the cavity had to be dug out – from dampness.  Week 4 brought a definite change.  You could see where the breast was shrinking away from the skin.  The, um, interesting, oder was mostly gone, and there was a definite hardness to the bird that hadn’t been there before.

Week 5, today, was similar to week 4, perhaps a little more shrunken.  All the salt came off very easily, no more wet spots.  Back into the salt and ziplocks for one more week.  I told the kids we just had one more week to go and they got all excited.  “Hurray, next week we can mummify it.”  Ummm…what do you think we’ve been doing for the last five weeks?  “But that will be the FUN part”  Oh goody, we get to wrap the thing in it’s “outfit”.  Wonder where, and for how long, we’ll GET  to display the bird?

The lizard in our house

By Micah

Today, when I was doing Latin with Dad, Hannah suddenly exclaimed, “There’s a lizard in the house!”

So I told Dad  I needed to pause Latin to go and get the lizard out of the house.  I went over to catch it, but it kept going behind stuff.  The worst part was getting it out from behind the cat litter box.  That was disgusting!  Then, when it went under a bag, I slammed my hand down and caught it.

Hannah and Dad took about 20,000 pictures before i could let it go.  Dad said that it was some sort of amphibian, but I’m pretty sure it was a skink or some other type of lizard.  It was black with yellowish-orange stripes and a blue tail.  It felt very smooth.

In my reading on classical education I have comes across some interesting tidbits that I am not going to take the time to expound upon in depth, but are worth making known.

On Sentence Diagramming: I found a book with some of the most remarkably complex sentence diagrams I have ever seen. The one I’ve included here is by no means the most complex.

On Phonics: Most of the books on classical education you come across these days make a point of criticizing the modern look-say method. They instead favor phonics. While phonics is actually quite a bit older than the look-say method, it is not particularly ancient. It was in fact invented by Blaise Pascal circa 1655. Prior to that full syllables were memorized by students. I’m not suggesting we dump phonics and go back to the syllabic method, but perhaps Dick and Jane weren’t as bad as they’re made out to be. “Is Russia about to forget the lesson of Blaise Pascal?” is an interesting read.

On Composition: For at least 1500 years and probably significantly longer, students have learned pre-rhetorical composition using a Greek approach called the Progymnasmata that is attributed to Aphthonius of Antioch. This basically involves a fair amount of imitation of text and method of excerpts of classic authors. While originally written in Greek, the Latin translation has been used for much of that time. You can actually have a look at the Progymnasmata in Latin. An example of an old English based text using this approach is A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike. Both of these are quite impractical for the homeschool, but we did find three hand-holding homeschool programs that are based on these methods in varying degrees:

• The Lost Tools of Writing
• Classical Composition
• Classical Writing

On Spelling: Noah Webster’s famous speller is also an interesting option for spelling. However, as we found with the composition materials, it is somewhat impractical for the busy homeschool teacher since it doesn’t come with a hand-holding teacher guide.