Some Updates

Hey gang. It's been a minute, but I have a good excuse. Like school. I'm back on track now.

First, I'd just like to say that my thoughts and prayers are with the Japanese people in this most difficult time. I try to put myself in their shoes and can't. We have a friend who is stationed there. She's helping out with the rescue and recovery, though there isn't much one can do from the deck of a destroyer. We worry about her too.

Second, does anyone remember when KVIL did the Pet Shop Boys spoof "Quadaffi Sucks"? It's been in my head non-stop since the air strikes started in Libya.

Next, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that SpaceX has inked a deal with Luxembourg-based SES-SA to launch one of their commercial satellites on its Dragon 9 launch vehicle. The launch will occur sometime in 2013. SES is knows to be relatively risk-averse and conservative in its pursuit of new companies. This deal signals a major shift for SpaceX as the company expands into commercial payload launch.

Finally, apparently I missed Ball Aerospace at the recent Career Fair at school. Bummer. I had really wanted to get to talk to Raytheon about internship opportunities. The timing was bad for me - I wasn't able to be in the kind of shape I would have liked. Better luck next time, I suppose.

An extra tidbit: there is scuttlebutt about us selling both of the Accords and using the proceeds to finance a motorcycle for me. Am I crazy? Absolutely :-)

Cheers,

-- Zach

Snow Day

I say snow, but I really mean sleet.

Here in Dallas, we have pretty awful weather conditions. Twenty degrees, an inch of sleet on the ground, everything's closed. Hence, nobody went to school this morning. So I'm on duty, as it were.

This is the extent of the blog for today. I'll go play in the white freezy stuff and write a proper blog post tomorrow.

Cheers,

-- Zach

Baby h Update

Today is a big day for us. This morning, we get to find out if we're having a boy or a girl. The first sonogram suggested that it might be a boy. Understand, though, that this sono happened at 14 weeks - too soon to be conclusive about the gender. Today's sono will tell us for sure.

Assuming the kid cooperates and shows us its bits. Our kids aren't always so helpful.

A lot of people ask if we're trying for a boy, or if we are disappointed by having had so many girls. I am just thankful for a brood of healthy, happy kids. If we have another girl, things will be relatively easy. We're good at girls - the problems they might have, the way they tend to behave, and so on. Boys are uncharted territory, Oh, sure, we call SWWNO our little boy because she's so busy and violent and tough, but she's still a little girl inside.

The other downside to having a boy is that we have no boy stuff at all. If little h turns out to be of the male persuasion, he'll spend the first three years of his life wearing pink diapers with ruffle butts and purple dresses with lacy tutus. Though this may become his preference as he gets older, I'm not interested in dressing him like a little fairy princess ballerina cowgirl until kindergarten.

The upside to having a boy is that I get to teach him all the things that will get him into trouble, all under the auspices of raising him right. For example, he needs to know how to spit, how to fight, how to wrassle, and how to annoy his big sisters. This is what parents of boys call "fun". Also, boy stuff is apparently cheaper than girl stuff.

Whatever the baby is, all I care about is healthy. Ten fingers, ten toes, good neck size, strong heart. We'll worry about the rest of it as it comes.

That's all I have time for today. No clue what I'll write about tomorrow.

(UPDATE: we just got back from the doctor, and Henry is a perfect little in-utero baby boy!)

Cheers,

-- Zach

Feature: Tasty Food

Today I'd like to talk a little about a subject neat to everyone's heart - food. Having three children with another on the way means that we spend a large part of our time devoted to the simple acts of preparing food, shoving it in our faces, and then cleaning up afterward. This is the first in a long-running and semi-irregular series on cooking in our house. One of my goals for this year has two parts. First, I want to do more of the cooking. I like to cook, even though I'm not any good at it. That will improve over the course of the year, but I have to actually cook more first. Second, I want to try one new recipe a week. I'll post those here, along with some feedback as to how the cooking went and if the food was tasty.

Coincidentally, my wife went grocery shopping last night. She returned with twelve paper bags full of primarily breakfast and lunch foods, along with a smattering of fruits and veggies. Oh, and five pounds of ground beef and a ROAST! Woo-hoo! We love roast.

Okay, on to the cooking stuff. We have now two crock pots. I'd like to think that we'll use them maybe twice a week for roasts or chicken stuff or what have you. There are six one-pound bags of different types of beans in the larder. I'm dying to try out a slow cooker bean recipe. One problem - the baby and I are the only two people in the house that eat beans. What I really need is a way to cook beans so that they don't have the texture of beans.

We usually keep a couple of pounds of frozen veggies. There's almost always frozen chicken breasts too. I wonder if you could stir-fry frozen chicken and veggies at the same time and have it come out right. There's an avenue of research.

We love fruit and vegetables. Often, a bowl of fruit becomes a meal. Another recipe that I'm dying to try out involves a steamed veggie plate. I could be bad and add cheese to it, to make sure that the kids eat it. Or, I could just wait until they're really hungry ;-) Fruit salad should be a weekly thing in our house, but I don't know if it's substantial enough. What would one pair with a fruit salad? Would you put salad in your fruit salad? Inquiring minds want to know.

I think that we maybe eat too much red meat. Rather than have it four or five times a week, I want to cut that down to once or twice a week. That should help with our health and with our budget. If I could figure out how to get everyone else to eat beans, I'd be home free. Beans are a prime red meat replacement. Maybe I'll just have to wait and make the bean-things for my lunches.

There's another topic for discussion - lunch. The Pickle gets her lunch for free from school, but she usually doesn't like it. I want to send her lunch with her, but it needs to be inexpensive. Sandwiches are only palatable for so many consecutive days. Maybe she'll start taking leftovers once or trice a week. Pizza, chicken, and roast are all good cold, and she loves them all.

Okay, I'll admit that this isn't my best post ever, but it will get better. Tonight, the missus wants to make a roast. Tomorrow, I'll try making something. I'll let y'all know how it goes.

Until then, bon appetite.

Cheers,

-- Zach

I really need a room...

with nothing in it except for a wall to wall bed. Then, we could get rid of all the other beds in the house, since they aren't ever used anyway. We'll call it the "Bedroom".

Our children co-sleep. Well, except for the ten year old (thankfully). This means that at some point over the course of the evening, the little people will leave whatever beds they happen to be in and migrate, asleep, like some zombie wildebeest, into our bed. I'm sure you can imagine how inconvenient this is.

We stayed the night at my parents house this past Saturday. My grandparents and aunt & uncle drove in too. This meant that we finally had the chance to complete Christmas, over a fortnight later that we had planned. Since my whole family was sick with SARS or Ebola or something, we figured it best to stay away from my grandparents. I'm glad we did, because they looked fabulous.

Yes, before you ask, the little children ended up in bed with us at my folks house too. In a double bed. An antique, incredibly noisy, double bed.

Digression: as I type this, it snows here in big D. I think I just heard someone go by in a dog sled. True story.

My Spring semester at the wonderful UTD begins today. Just Calculus II on Mondays. I figure that this will be my study heavy day. Today's tasks include making it to campus without the train going off the track and finding where all my classes will be. Tomorrow I have my technical writing c;ass and Physics II. I'm really looking forward to it.

That's about it. I'm a bit short on time, so I'll wrap it up here. Tomorrow, I think I'll have something on the projects that I'm working on or wish to do. Until then, enjoy the snow.

Cheers,

-- Zach

Science and Technology Schooling

Education is a topic that is close to my heart. My wife and I have three kids already, and the fourth is due in June. Our oldest is in public school. We feel that it's sufficient for now, but she'll probably end up going to a magnet or private school sometime in the future. The (currently) middle child is already beginning to display a knack for language and logic. If we had the money to put her in a Montessori, we would. The (current) baby is the quiet reserved one, best known for taking her time in figuring things out. School is going to need to move at her pace, I'm afraid.

When I was in school, I remember how often the games we played were math or science inspired. Whether tasked with counting and manipulating, or given a question and asked to observe to find an answer, science and math was woven into everything we did. Yearly science fairs accelerated the gifted and were a source of wonder and awe for the younger kids.

Then, we moved to south Dallas.

I remember wondering why it was that some of the sixth grade kids could drive their own cars to school. The concept of being held back was utterly foreign to me. I didn't realize that other kids might not want to succeed, and this new understanding troubled me deeply. Why weren't the teachers interested in the kids, and why did the kids seem to hate the teachers? The whole scene made no sense to me.

Over time, I began to understand the dynamics of poor neighborhoods, why kids with so much potential acted so fatalistic toward their education and their lives. Not everyone was the stereotypical ghetto kid, of course. My first-ever crush went to Space Camp and dreamed of being an astronaut. On the whole, however, education was far less of a focus than was survival. Math, science, humanities, art, all cast by the wayside on the journey to big chains and bigger rims.

My schools were typical of those found all over the country. The decline in test scores from US kids is a direct result of something or other. There are too many problems with the schools to point a finger at any one thing (save perhaps parent involvement - the one key indicator to a child's success in school). The decline of the American student is not going unnoticed or unchallenged. A middle school in Minneapolis is offering a complete curricula in STEM learning.

The Richard Allen Math & Science Academy (RAMSA) has only been open for a  year and a half, but it's already showing dramatic results. The curriculum includes math and science foci, as you might expect. Students go on field trips twice a month to reinforce their learning. Daily engineering classes help answer the age-old question, "When will I ever use this in the real world?" And finally. they've built a trebuchet. Who could ask for anything more?

I'm not sure what kind of schools my children will attend. I hope that they are as cool as RAMSA.

Cheers,

-- Zach