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Jan
12
2020

October/November/December Homeschooling Miscellany

Everything kind of completely fell apart in October.  12yo had caught everything under the sun in Term 3 and so had missed a fair chunk of it.  At the beginning of Term 4 she continued insisting that she loved school and still wanted to go, but two weeks in I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually gone.  She kept insisting she was "sick" or "too tired" but would always be better just in time for gymnastics.  Things eventually came to a head when we had a massive blowout as I told her if she was really that sick then she was not going to gymnastics so she could recover properly and she told me to pull her out of school so she could go to gym (a threat I'd made a few times previously but hadn't done because I give too many chances).  I tried to get her to be reasonable and told her she could go to gym, and then she had to go to school for the rest of the week.  If she wanted to quit after that she was to tell me on the weekend and I

Nov
11
2012

Skate ramp tests and the first honey harvest

The skate ramp is skatable!

Skater almost silhouette

Okay so this is a slightly older picture but it was a good opener :P

All but one of the backs are up (the thing that will prevent skaters and skateboards from ending up in the raised bed or in the neighbour's yard) and the whole thing is now covered in both layers of skin and has been reinforced and all those good things.  Now it just needs a paint job (and I know someone who is good at painting that I would like to rope in to help).

Testing the skate ramp properly

Little Big Boy getting used to the ramp

Apr
20
2012

New camera, more aquaponics photos

We finally bought a NAS, it's living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router).  I'm currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). 

Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it's 53Gb and going to blow out as I'm shooting RAW.

Moving the iTunes library was a bit more of a hassle.  Dragged to new location, changed library reference is preferences, dumped original in bin, restarted to make sure all was good, it seemed to be, so I emptied the trash can.  I think I missed the consolidation step (another reason to not do this when tired) so it had a huge cry about not having a libary to use.  I "opened" the folder I'd moved and now all is well with the world.

The D5000 died on us, Josh was quite determined he was going to stick with film and never getting another digital camera as the thing had only been 2 years old when it stopped working, apparently afflicted by a known and common problem with the D5000s.  The film camera bodies he has (F3 and F4) are still going strong and they're relics from the 1980s.

I i nformed him that I needed a digital camera as I wanted to be able to blog photos shortly after taking them, not a month or so after we'd finished the roll of film and gotten around to getting it developed, and that I was going to buy one of those little point and shoot numbers that would fit in my cargo pockets.

He apparently couldn't cope with the thought, so he bought me a Nikon D70.

 

Nikond70front

Nikond70front (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's a new-to-us thing and came with a Sigma lens (though I'm going to swap it out for my favourite which is an 18-55 that came with the D5000 and Josh doesn't think much of it) and a rather beat up old bag.  I'm now on a quest for a bag that will haul the camera, my laptop, wallet, phone and some miscellany, and I've also finally been able to take more photos of the aquaponics setup.

Feb
19
2012

Life and !schooling in 2012

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the moderator department, which meant I completely forgot about the moderation until the new moderator rocked up on my door towards the end of my work period.  Oops.  Fortunately I work from home and can make up hours easy, and I hadn't gone out to pick up my shiny new computer yet, though I had gotten dressed to do so.  So all she saw was that my place is a mess, which is about normal and I don't clean up for anyone!

We chatted and she seems like a nice person.  I gave her enough information to write a happy report and get us approved for another year.  She also sent me the literacy outcomes to help with the learning program which I have only just worked out that I do actually have (I'm a bit slow, I seem to do a lot of things because they make sense or because I need to do them to do other things etc and never realise they are processes that have names or that I'm implementing a program).

So what's been happening around here, we've managed to cram a bit into the couple of weeks we've been back.

Nov
18
2011

Insects and a gappy boy

It's all happening.  The garden is going nuts, we're going to go through a stage of not having to buy so many veges, and we're turning into those old people that like pottering around their gardens (though I don't do much of any garden work as I seem to have a knack for killing plants).

This morning, as we were going around to see how the garden was going (the zuchinni is huge, all zuchinni plants have gotten bigger since the last post), when we encountered this fellow practising kung fu on a mulberry leaf:

Praying mantis doing kung fu

Mantis kung fu!

Nov
16
2011

Photos. Lots of them.

Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead.

kids storyboarding on a storyboard template

Homeschooling art and English: storyboarding with Mummy (who was working on AR storyboards)

Sep
15
2011

Photos from the garden

A friend introduced the kids to the My Little Pony remake some time ago and with the starting of this blog post this song stuck in my brain (had no help whatsoever from the kids watching it a few times ;).

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic "Winter Wrap Up"

So I'm a bit late for "tomorrow spring is here", we're about halfway through the first month of spring as humans like to count it.  I think spring came a bit earlier than September.  As far as I'm concerned it's spring when the weather and the flowers say it's spring.

Speaking of flowers, our plum tree is looking rather pretty.

Plum flower

Flowers on the plum tree

Apr
22
2011

Work, Wannabe and other projects and a dash of unschooling

Firstly, what in the hell is with the life category?!

I've been (very slowly!) importing livejournal entries so I can replace missing photos.  Very minor regret that I didn't bother skimming through my shadowshifter livejournal before I deleted it as I probably had a few progress reports for my various projects kicking around on it, but oh well.