If the truth would be known, i have been apprehensive over the last several weeks about quitting teaching. I am now comfortable with the decision and I have let my class know that I am bowing out of teaching and letting my two compatriots take over. I have been teaching this Sunday School class for the last 9 and a half years. You would think that I would want to give it a rest. I really didn't know that there was a problem, pride, that would cause the Lord to want me off of the team. Perhaps I have learned as much as I can learn or maybe he has another spot for me or, maybe he wants me to give it a rest. I think the latter is true. Now with only two classes left, I can concentrate on learning some lessons from the Lord. It will also give me a chance to be in better contact with my wife, whom I have been neglecting over these last few years. I have a chance now of seeing what we need to do to get her back to Church on a regular basis. At the moment, that is one of the more important things that I can do.

This has been a great experience in my life. I have been with a great group of high school students which includes my grandson. Today is the start of the double eliminations. We start in the 41 bracket and our school is in the 23rd bracket. We have a good chance at placing high enough that we will make the final competition on Sunday which will include the last eight brackets. The guys are excited and I am excited about the prospects. To put this in perspective, there are about 65 teams at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics being held at the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Our team came out 3rd overall out of about 55 teams at the regionals in DC. We are now with the best of the best in the country, and since this is an international competition we have one team from Kuwait and two teams from Poland. The competition is friendly and ideas for designs have been passing back and forth freely between teams.

I am finally back from my vacation with my daughter and son-in-law at Massanutten. Over all, I really liked the facility. It's too bad that it could not have been for another week. I was just getting used to the place. I went kayaking down the Shannandoah river and flipped the kayak twice. I will post pictures here and on my Facebook page when I get the pictures developed (I was using a water tight disposable camera on the river). That was an adventure. I also had the opportunity to hike up the ridge line from Massanutten almost to the area where the ski slopes are at. I didn't want to have to climb down the ski slope because it is a double black diamond slope, a little too steep. So I went half way on the ridge and then came back the same way. In all, I spent about three hours on the peak. My wife and I got a chance to sit in the jacusi on the last night of our stay, that felt real good.

I am finally on vacation with my wife. My daughter invited us to their time share for the week and I am finally getting to the rested stage after 4 days. I have to say that the Shannandoa Valley is a great place to be. Too bad everything costs money here. The view is terrific and I have enjoyed the time with my wife and my granddaughter.

there was a time when the last thing that I wanted to do was to be caught shopping with my wife. but now after all these years together it is actually nice to see her satisfied with a purchase no matter how long the process takes. I just love to see her reactions now.

There was a time that I thought I might go ahead and purchase an iPad. I am starting to have second thoughts about it. When you get right down to it it is a want and not a need. I already have an older laptop that I have just replaced the battery in. The only thing missing that would make it more useful is to add a Windows operating system. Right now it is running Ubuntu and I pretty much can do everything that I want on it. I would of course make it a dual boot machine because I don't see using the Windows part more than about 20% at best. About the only thing that I would use it for is running some Cakewalk software that I recently purchased. Unfortunately I don't have a Windows XP or 7 package that I can load onto it so I will have to deal with the Microsoft tax that I have tried so hard to avoid. So much for being frugal. A Netbook is not the right answer because of my large hands and the small screen, not to mention the lack of horsepower. S o I will be updating my old laptop in the next few days to get around the problem.

Not that it really matters to anyone out there but the screen on my work laptop just went crazy. I had just booted into the computer and was starting to do things on the computer when all of a sudden everything froze and the screen started showing all kinds of funky colors. I had to power down and when it came back up, I had a double screen and it kept rebooting on me. go figure.