Keep Thou My Feet

This post sounds kind of like a Christmas letter, but it's been over a month since I've written about our family, so I guess that's what happens.

We are alive and safe and haven't gone completely insane yet. The semester's only half over, though, so there's still plenty of time.

Kevin is going to preschool at the New Adventures Kids Club and having a great time. It is three mornings a week. I hear from his teachers that he is participating a lot more now than he did in the beginning. He does the activities and the worksheets and he is getting better at tracing the letters (which he completely refused to do before preschool started). He loves taking something to share for "Show up time" (i.e. Show and Tell--they bring something that starts with the letter of the week) every Wednesday and he often acts out preschool scenarios like circle time with Heidi. Kevin's teachers often tell me how much he loves to be their helper, which makes me pleased. I am really glad we made the decision to send him to preschool this year because it has helped him in so many ways. Heidi and I came along for their first field trip to the fire department on Monday and we had a nice time. One of the firemen put on all of his gear, including the face mask, so that they could see what a fireman looks like in his suit. I thought it was a really good idea because if a kid was trapped in a house during a fire it might be kind of scary to see a fireman in a full suit.

Kevin is also doing soccer at the YMCA every Saturday morning. He usually stays on the field now. We're still working on getting him to actually participate. He seems to move around more if there are cute little girls to follow around. (Her name was Rosie.) (She had blue eyes.) (Don't tell Kevin's other girlfriend who lives upstairs.)

Heidi goes to a play group for a couple of hours on Wednesdays. The moms take turns watching the kids. We try to do a little lesson about the letter of the week, but mostly the idea is for the kids to play with each other and the moms to get a break. I am also trading babysitting on Mondays and Fridays with the mother of another boy in Kevin's preschool, so on Mondays during preschool Heidi has a friend over and on Fridays during preschool I am kid-free.

Heidi likes eating plain tortillas. Preferably in stacks of five or more at once. (Yuck!) I have to hide them so she doesn't waste an entire bag at one go. Kevin likes wrapping the leftovers on his plate in saran wrap and putting them in the fridge for later. And yes, he often does come back and eat them later. They both like cooking scrambled eggs. Interestingly, they are not as interested in eating said scrambled eggs. They claim that somebody else should eat them.

My GIS class is proving to be very time-consuming. I am convinced that ArcMap occasionally decides not to work just because it doesn't like me. On Saturday I was trying to work on a portion of the homework assignment, and even though I followed the directions exactly I kept getting error messages. Three hours later I came back and tried again, and did the same exact things I had done before, and this time it worked. Then yesterday I ended up spending the entire day on the last part of the assignment. We were supposed to make a model that tells ArcMap to go through a series of steps and repeat (iterate) those steps for all ten files in a folder. It would either stop after the first file (it was not iterating) or get caught in a loop where it repeated the steps over and over for the first file. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. Ryan looked at it when he got home and said it was a problem with ArcMap, not me. We finally sacrificed enough chickens and Ryan did the right dance as the model ran, and it worked half an hour before class started. It was not me, it was ArcMap. Since it was about a quarter of the points on the assignment, I opted to hurry and finish it and get to class ten minutes late. (I told my teacher that ArcMap doesn't like me and he completely agreed. It's a really useful program, but it definitely has a lot of bugs.) It can be really stressful because often I can't move on in a lab until I figure out the part that's not working, and there have been several times when I've basically spent the entire day on Monday trying to finish before class because I had problems all week. Most of my dreams these days are about making maps (which is really annoying because that's a really boring thing to dream about). I am glad I'm taking the class, though, because I am gaining a lot of skills that will be useful if I need to apply for a job.

For my research project, I acquired some precipitation samples that had been collected at UNC-W and did the Strontium chemistry for them. I am working on scheduling a time to sample some well water. It looks like I am also going to collect vegetation from various places in my study area, burn them to ash, and then do the Strontium chemistry of the ash. (I don't really know how that process works since I haven't done it yet.) As part of my GIS class, we are supposed to do a project related to our research, so I am going to use remote sensing, precipitation, and elevation data to find out whether the Sr concentrations or 87/86 ratios in some rivers could be changed by a single storm. I noticed that some of my precipitation samples had Sr concentrations that were higher than the Sr concentrations in some of the surface water I sampled last year, so I was curious to know if a storm could affect the Sr chemistry of the water in those spots.

I am very ready to be done with school. This is my eighth year of college and it's getting harder and harder to balance my school responsibilities with my family and church responsibilities. Next semester I will probably just be taking what Ryan calls a "fluff class." I'm thinking choir. Ryan has been taking care of a lot of the housework and staying with the kids a lot so I can do homework. I would never have made it this far if he hadn't refused to let me drop out. I have grand plans for making Halloween costumes this year, but at this point I don't even have the fabric, so we'll see.

Ryan passed his preliminary oral exam last summer and he is working on getting data and papers done as he works toward getting his dissertation written (expected graduation date: May 2015). He also has a "minion" (i.e. a high school student who comes once a week to do research). He is serving again on the GPSF Senate and as the Student Parent Advocate. Check out the awesome post that he wrote on his blog about evil villain lairs. Also check out the interesting posts from his on-going "Stories from My Mission" series.