10th Annual First Responder Conference

Well, it's been a busy weekend away from my boys. I spent the weekend renewing old friendships, starting new friendships and of course, recertifying my First Responder status.


It was the 10th Annual weekend gathering of nearly 200 First Responders, EMTs and Paramedics from southern Saskatchewan. We had a few newbies, with less than a year since becoming certified. We also had some seasoned veterans, with over 25 years experience as "pre-hospital personnel".


The weekend began Friday evening with registration and a couple sessions and then a game of Survivor, EMS style.

Saturday morning began bright and early, with coffee & breakfast at 7:30, with opening remarks at 8:00. The morning had 2 sessions with a break for lunch until 1:00. Pete Lazarra, Paramedic in Charge with Chicago Fire Department, gave his first presentation "Resuscitation of the Rich and Famous". In this presentation, Pete reviewed the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Abraham Lincoln (gunshot to the head), Julius Caesar (multiple stab wounds to the back), Princess Diana (violent car crash) and Jimi Hendrix (suspected drug overdose). If modern-day emergency procedures were available to these celebrities at the time of their deaths, what procedures would have been performed, and could they have survived their injuries.



Of particular interest to many of the participants, one of the afternoon sessions involved a hands-on exploration of the respiratory organs from a donor pig. (Thanks to Drake Meats for the donation of the specimens!) We were able to examine the tongue, trachea, esophagus, heart, aorta and lungs.



An intubation tube was made available and we were able to intubate the specimen and see exactly what takes place when a ventilator bag is used.









We also dissected the heart muscle and inspected the 4 chambers. We inspected the aorta and the aortic chamber, tracing the direction of blood from the heart to the lungs for oxygenation and back through the heart for delivery to the rest of the body.













Upon dissection of the lungs we examined the bronchial tubes and discussed their function. Thankfully, a pork stir fry was NOT on the supper menu.


Supper was still delicious as always, as provided by the Heritage Inn. Roast beef and roast turkey were on the menu, along with seasoned oven roasted potatoes, salads and, of course, decadent desserts. Following supper, guest speaker Roger Aldag of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, spoke of his Career with the Roughriders. Roger is now employed with Trans Gas and has been at most (if not all) conferences as a sponsor and supplier.


Off Beat, a 5 piece band from Regina, provided the evening's entertainment. They performed hits from Loverboy, Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash and Meatloaf, to name a few. The dance floor was busy most of the night as was the cash bar ;) The band shut down just after 1:00am and a few diehard partyers were heard roaming the halls of the Heritage Inn till almost 3:00am. (and we wonder why the Sunday morning sessions were short on attendance!)


Tim Hillier (MD Ambulance, Saskatoon) and Pete Lazarra wrapped up Sunday afternoon with a joint presentation "Looking Back". They touched on a few highlights in the history of emergency medical response, with a few clips from the 1970's show Emergency (starring Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe). They explained how Johnny and Roy heightened the public awareness of Paramedics and brought more people into the profession than any other medical related show.


Many pictures were taken, many friendships were renewed and everyone took home memories they'll keep for a lifetime. Mark your calendars for next year's conference, January 28-30, 2011, Heritage Inn, Moose Jaw. Hope to see you there!

~Carla

It's a good old fashioned blizzard!

The past couple of days have been pretty rough around southern Saskatchewan. We've had quite the blizzard. Usually the area around our town doesn't get a lot of snow, at least not in the past dozen years or so. Usually a blizzard meant an inch or two of snow and howling wind. Not this time. We've probably gotten six inches or more this time.

It started snowing a couple of days ago with just a breeze, but it piled up a couple of inches of snow that drifted a little. I brought out the skidsteer and cleared the trails yesterday morning. It wasn't done, though, because the snow got somewhat heavier throughout the day. Carla was able to get to work at the gas station but we were starting to wonder if she'd be able to make it home when her shift ended at 9pm.

The roads did get treacherous and there was some vehicles getting into trouble on the Trans-Canada Highway that runs by Chaplin. Hopefully that wouldn't happen to Carla! But she did make it home...though she did get stuck at the end of our driveway into the farm yard. I walked out and helped get the van back on the trail and up to the house. We're all home safe and sound! But the storm wasn't over.

That evening we did have the power go out of 20 minutes or so. We were lucky. Some communities would be out for more than a day due to the snow and wind pulling wires off some poles south of the town of Assiniboia.

We woke up the next morning to the snow still falling and the wind really blowing. You wouldn't have known I cleared any snow yesterday. So I fed cows in the morning but held off clearing snow hoping the storm would ease off. Well, it was still going pretty strong after lunch so I went out anyway and pushed a snow for a couple of hours again. The yard was pretty full again, but the wind had actually blown away all the snow that Carla got stuck in last night. Go figure.

So I'm sure I'll be out again tomorrow building my snow piles even higher. The boys love playing on them. Mitchell lost a boot in one this afternoon which I had to dig out. It's a bit of pain in the ass to deal with all this snow, but the land desperately needs it, both to replenish topsoil moisture and to fill dugouts for cattle to drink in the summer. We've had a pretty dry few years. The last time I remember having a really good dump of snow was more than a decade ago.

By the way, the picture above shows my hay bales buried in the snow and in the distance is our neighbor's farm yard half a mile away. Below are a few more of the fun and frivolity of our blizzard!

My geekfest weekend

So how's your weekend been? Mine's been quite nice. Carla and the boys took a little trip to visit her Mom down at Coronach while I stayed home to look after the cattle and pets. So it's been quiet around here. And thanks to my sister needing work done on her laptop and Space (the Canadian sci-fi channel) showing all the Star Trek movies this weekend it's been a geekfest for me!

Saturday I sat down with the laptop in front of the TV to watch a day's worth of movies starring the original Star Trek series cast. This ailing laptop is a big HP machine. After Staples failed to fix an overheating problem my sister discovered the machine wouldn't boot anymore. Her husband cleaned it out himself but it still refused to boot. Being the 'computer guy' of the family, it often falls to me to try to fix things. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your viewpoint) I'm more of a Mac and Linux guy. I don't do Windows much.
This laptop had XP Pro installed and couldn't find "NTLDR" so I knew it was a boot problem. Now was it just Windows or the drive? I booted off the XP CD and tried to repair the master boot record and boot sector but got nowhere. Next was an attempt at a reinstall.

Now it appeared that a reinstall might work. The CD booted and began the process by copying the install files to the hard drive. Unfortunately when it came time to reboot to continue the setup the computer would reboot before Windows would finish loading. I tried this twice and got the same result. Now what...

I have a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Maybe it would work. So I boot that DVD and begin trying to install Win7. Huh...it can't even see the drive. I'm beginning to suspect the drive is screwed and order a new one online just in case.

My next try is trying to boot my Linux disks. These fail, too, but I sometimes get an error message that I search for online. I try again with a Kubuntu 7.10 disk and add the 'noapic' option to the kernel boot options and the disk boots. Well, let's try an install. It works! I get a working Linux install that boots perfectly off the hard disk! The only problem I have is I can't get wireless networking to work. I know this is an older version of Kubuntu so I setup a download of the 9.10 version and go and visit my dad up in the care home in Central Butte.

When I get back the download is done and I perform an install of Kubuntu 9.10 using the same option as before. I download packages for the wireless networking and get it and running! This is when I call it a day and just relax with my Trek movies and some Christmas goodies.

The next day I work on getting the right software packages installed so my sister can do what she needs to do with the laptop (which is really just getting Firefox installed so she can Facebook right, sis?). Using the package management software on Ubuntu machines makes software installation pretty easy. There's very little of the dependency hell we used to experience in the old days. So while I watched the TNG cast in their movies, I fine-tuned the laptop and wrote out a page of things to help my sister get up to speed with Linux.

So I'm pretty happy that I was able to fix the laptop and just as pleased that it was Linux that came to the rescue. Perhaps if I knew Windows better I might have been able to work out why Windows failed in this case but having been a Linux enthusiast since 1997 I just know it better. If the hard drive keeps running happily I'll put the replacement I ordered into an external case for backup purposes. We should probably clone the laptop drive just in case.

Anyway, that's how I spent my weekend. It made for an enjoyable weekend for a geek like me! :)

Is unschooling in our future?

Lately I've begun to think that we need to consider altering our homeschool method. Mitchell has little enthusiasm for any kind of school work and doesn't seem to want to put any effort into it. It's really quite frustrating to have to struggle for an hour to get through something that should take 20 minutes if he just tried. Lately Carla has taken over some of it and gotten some better results with getting him to do his math worksheets. Perhaps shaking things up a bit might help - a different teacher (mom), some different content.

But it got me thinking that maybe he's not suited to what I was trying to do. When I thought about it Mitchell might have a more comfortable learning environment, that being home instead of at public school, but maybe not a more comfortable learning style. Am I doing a little too much "school at home"? Would he do better following his own learning path? Could that even mean unschooling? Mitchell is quite intelligent and reads above his grade level. He can even tell you which aircraft have variable-geometry wings. He just hates having to do learn what I tell him he has to learn.

Right now it seems the boys prefer to just play computer games or watch TV. They do enjoy going outside to play when it's nice outside. But when I suggest doing some homeschool work all I hear is whining and it's the same battle every day. We had a lot of time off from schoolwork during October and November but I am fearing that that ruined things rather than helped. We got out of our groove.

Anyway, for now Carla will be able to help out more now that she doesn't have as many shifts at the gas station in the next little while, and I plan to start teaching some different things in the hopes that Mitchell will take more interest in his work. But at the upcoming convention I plan to attend the workshop on unschooling and perhaps take some ideas home that may help us out. And if anyone reading this has any ideas, please share!

SHBE convention details

A couple of days ago we got the registration form and information regarding the upcoming Saskatchewan Home Based Educators convention. It takes place February 19 and 20, 2010 and this year it's in Regina at the University of Regina.

Last year's keynote speaker, Dr. Brian Ray, was an excellent choice as last year we took in the conference as homeschool newbies. In fact we hadn't actually made the choice to homeschool until the drive home from Saskatoon last February. Dr. Ray's studies had shown that anyone could successfully homeschool their children. As one-step-beyond-newbies this year, this year's speaker Andrew Pudewa will give us some guidance in writing, something we can apply directly in our lessons at home. I know we could definitely use some help here as Mitchell is a reluctant writer.

Mr. Pudewa is the director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing. He's also a father of seven homeschooled children. He will be giving two keynote sessons and leading five workshops over the weekend. I've picked out a couple of the workshops to attend, "Reaching the Reluctant Writer" and "Teaching Boys and Other Children Who Would Rather Make Forts All Day". With three active boys at home I know we really, really need that last one!

The other workshops cover a wide range of topics of course. We have a couple by the HSLDA. There's three lifestyle workshops - health/nutrition, budget, inspirational (I assume that's nonsecular). And for workshops more directly related to homeschooling, there's one on teaching gifted children, one on unschooling and a couple on homeschooling issues that are somewhat related "Why Aren't They Learning" and "Stress Free Homeschooling". There is also a "Teen Convention" with its own set of workshops and activities.

Now that we know what to look for we also plan to take more advantage of the used book sale this year. I plan to make a list of what to look for, unlike last year when I wandered around clueless. I plan to make some changes in math for sure and am tossing around ideas in my head regarding ELA as well. The exhibit hall is obviously a must-see as well. And since a lot of exhibitors give special convention pricing it's a good place to stock up on curriculum, too.

Something really nice to see during convention is the Homeschool Completion Ceremony. Grad for homeschoolers! I'm hoping someday my three boys will be up on stage for this.

Convention registration costs $85CDN for one adult and $135 for an adult couple. Teens are $35. Friday supper and Saturday lunch are included for that price. A number of hotels are giving special rates to those attending the convention as well. Hopefully this year Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be staying at our hotel like he was last year so that we can check in at a decent time. It was cool to see him, though. Unfortunately he had to turn down a request to say a few words at the conference.

So if you're reading this and you're a homeschooler in Saskatchewan I hope you can attend. It's a great time and you can learn so much. Seeya there!

My obligatory H1N1 post

Hey folks. I'm spending a quiet evening watching teevee and surfing around on the netbook. I've been watching some Aussie V8 Supercar racing I downloaded a while back. Speedchannel used to carry these races in the winter but don't any more so I had to find some torrents to download. It's really fantastic racing.

Anyway while sitting here I got to thinking I should write up a blog post about my thoughts on having our family vaccinated for H1N1. Up until a week ago it really wasn't possible anyway because the province of Saskatchewan was only vaccinating health workers and those with higher health risks. But a week ago they opened it up to the general public finally so I started thinking about it more.

I think Carla is the most exposed to infection of all of us due to her work at the gas station and Canada Post. She deals with the public and handles money and mail. In our discussions we've agreed that she could probably use the vaccination more than the rest of us, but for now she's uncertain about whether she would bother getting it.

The kids are not exposed very much being homeschooled now. Public school used to mean Mitchell was brining home a new cold or flu every couple of weeks. Thank goodness that's not happening now. Gymnastics finished last week and won't start again until February so they that's a little less exposure.

What about me? Well, I'm a hermit at heart and tend to stay home most of the time. I get into the city now and then but that's about it. Our family doesn't go out very often for social reasons. It's seven miles to town and there's not much there anyway. So we tend to just stay home.

So I guess what I'm saying is that we really don't feel the need to vaccinate ourselves. Even if we did get H1N1 it appears it's not much different than getting the regular flu. I even heard someone say their doctor told them the same thing. So far in Saskatchewan 12 people have died from H1N1 and all have had an underlying health issue. So I feel rather safe due to our lifestyle and overall health.

By the way, we do have our children vaccinated for the usual diseases through our provinces public health system. We've just never bothered with the annual flu shots. We're exposed to so many germs around the farm that there's probably little that could knock us down anyway!

Perhaps a breakthrough?

If you've read a previous post you know we've been super-ultra-mega busy around the farm the past month...so busy that homeschool has kind of been pushed aside. Sometimes we go a week between lessons and even then it might be just a short lesson. A couple of days ago Mitchell asked if we were doing homeschool that day. I told him that we had to go haul bales with the semi for another farmer. So he said "We should do homeschool tomorrow."

Now, this is a kid that at times gets rather mad if I tell him it's time to do homeschool work. And if I suggest he could go back to public school he says no to that, too. Might this mean that his attitude is changing? I hope so.

But when we did do some lessons today he wasn't so happy to work...so maybe he's just being a typical 7-year old boy.

A step in getting away from BellTV

Back in the spring I bought myself a refurbished Mac Mini from the online Apple Store. It's a great little machine with a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo, a couple of gigs of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. I put together an external hard drive with a 500GB Hitachi drive and a MacAlly case to plug into the Mini's FireWire port. I've used it since then as my main machine...until last week.

I watch a fair amount of video on it, like YouTube or other goodies I've downloaded. So I got to thinking that it couldn't be too hard to hook this computer up to our 42" Samsung plasma TV in the living room. So I did! It was really quite simple. I just needed a DVI-HDMI adapter and HDMI cable to get the video into the TV, and an audio cable with a 1/8" stereo plug on one end and dual RCA on the other to take the audio to the TV. The Mini, which is running MacOS 10.5.8 (Leopard), required no tweaking and treated the Samsung as just another monitor.

I recently discovered the joys of Miro, an application that can make use of RSS feeds of shows to automatically download new episodes of almost anything. It's available at getmiro.com. Using a list from ezrss.it I was able to add shows like NCIS, Mythbusters and V. I even have a feed of classic cartoons for the kids. Of course it can also get online-only things like shows from Revision3 such as Techzilla. There's also hundreds of feeds to access at miroguide.com. Much of it is in HD even!

One can watch videos in Miro, but most of the time I just use FrontRow, an app that comes with Leopard. It makes for a nice full-screen menu system that gives you access to all the content on your Mac. I've even used it to watch DVDs I've ripped to the drive and I've been downloading Australian V8 Supercar races to watch since Speed Channel no longer carries those. Carla has also enjoyed being able to use iTunes on the Mini to play her music through the stereo (which is hooked to the TV of course).

My main goal here is to try to get away from satellite TV subscriptions, which keep going up in price but which don't really cater to our families viewing habits. For the most part we don't watch regular network TV. We despise so-called reality shows. For me sometime like Survivorman is what reality TV should be, not Survivor. If I can get what I want online, why should I pay BellTV? So far we're still subscribing but hopefully not for long. Our internet access is only a 1Mb satellite connection which seems to work fairly well so far, but it's kept pretty busy downloading our shows. Hopefully someday something better will come along but for now it's this or dialup!

Now off to watch some quality TV on the Mini! The kids can't wait for Alf to finish downloading!

Help, I haven't fallen but I don't want to get up!

Well, friends, it's the beginning of November. The weather is pretty decent the past couple of days. Not that crappy weather has slowed things down either. October and November are proving to be the most exhausting months for our family this year.

I guess it kind of started a month ago when a fellow employee of Carla's at the gas station had some health problems and has been off work. The other workers are picking up the extra shifts, which means mostly Carla because she's the only part-timer with the time to take extra shifts. We're happy for the extra money but since she already has a second job she's pretty much working full-time now.

That leaves me with the kids a lot more which has presented some issues. We recently added to our livestock. A few weeks ago we got ourselves a miniature goat. It's a cute little African Pygmy nanny, about three or four years old and really just a pet (for now). Last week at an exotic livestock auction we bought 16 layer hens and two Dexter miniature cows (not too small, about 3/4 size I'd say). We're milking one of the Dexters, too. That's twice a day, around 9am and 5pm. They've been a bit nervous so I've tried to avoid having the boys around when I'm working with them. I almost got my nose broken a couple of days ago when one of the cows hit a steel gate and the top bar hit me in the nose where my glasses sit. There was some blood but it turned out alright. Carla was there luckily and checked me out. I held a tissue on the cut while one nostril bled for a while, then I got back to milking. But as you can see it's sometimes better if the kids are off playing by themselves while I work with the cows.

At the same time as dealing with our new animals, I've been trying to get my other work done as well as get in some work for our neighbor. That's mostly been hauling bales with the semi, cleaning out some barns with the skidsteer, or helping with cattle. I had my mom out to watch the kids on Saturday so I could finally do some of my own corral cleaning. Today they rode around with me while I fixed some fences. Carla's home most of the day tomorrow so I hope to be back in the skidsteer cleaning corrals and barns again, both mine and the neighbor's. At least it's dried out a bit. One day last week I had to give up cleaning barns at the neighbors because even the skidsteer couldn't get around after some rain and snow made the ground too sloppy.

Homeschooling has been kinda getting put aside more often so we can get work done. I had kind of expected this, though, which is why I started early (August 17 I think). I briefly entertained the thought of having some to do in the semi since it has a big sleeper cab but two of the three boys spend most of their time up front fighting over who sits in the passenger seat while the other is quietly sitting in the back watching the portable DVD player. There wouldn't be much hope of getting much work done if I brought school work along. I was happy to get peace and quiet, rare as that was. But once winter sets in and all I have to do is feed and milk cows I hope to catch up. I think in the grand scheme of things I'm not too far behind. I even got an hour or so in with Mitchell today after lunch. Having seen a copy of the Chaplin School newsletter we found he's keeping pace in Math which was a relief as that's what gave us the most problems earlier. As November is here I'm going to try and get something together for Remembrance Day so the boys can learn a bit about what it means. It's an important day to me and I hope it will be for them, too. So still plenty of work to do!

As the old saying goes, you can rest when you're dead. :)

Homeschool School Photos

Well, it's that time of year when schools all over do the school photo thing (well, I think it's around now...). Despite the fact we're homeschoolers we're allowed to take part in the public school photo thing, but we thought why don't we just make our own?

A few years ago while I was on my training course to get my Class 1A drivers license Carla took some really good photos of the boys on a nice fall day. After lunch today she pulled out her fancy new camera and headed out with the boys to try to get some nice shots suitable for hanging up on the wall to replace those aging 2006 photos. The boys have grown up a little since then!

As you can see in the "class photo" above, there were a few other customers trying to steal the limelight. They were a bit of a help by distracting the boys from the camera. By the time everyone was starting to get cold they had quite a few nice shots, both as a group and individually. Thank goodness for digital cameras. It's not hard to shoot a lot of photos to get one good one when shooting kids.

To have a look at a few more shots of our boys head on over to Carla's Flickr page. Let her know what you think!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carla_k/sets/72157622622136776/

Letter writing as a homeschool activity

Last week Mitchell got a pleasant surprise. He got mail! His former school's secretary sent him a letter! She had asked our permission of course and realizing the value of letter writing we agreed. Mrs. Gleim was always a good friend to the kids of Chaplin School.

It was a nice little two or three page letter, printed so that a seven year old could read it talking about the usual things that a seven year old boy would talk about. Mitchell was very happy to get it and read it several times. I think he's excited to have a penpal. Remember those? I had a few when I was young, too. If I remember correctly I wrote to people from Singapore, Australia, Germany and England. I remember how happy I was to get real letters in the mail.

So today Carla helped Mitchell get started on his reply while I was out working. I think he's about half done. There are a number of important things he'll be learning and practicing when writing his letter. He'll be learning a bit about formatting a letter of course. He'll be practicing punctuation and sentence structure. He'll be learning how to compose his thoughts and how to put those thoughts down on paper. He'll also be practicing his printing skills. He's had a bit of trouble in that lately and have had him practicing that a bit more, too. I'm not sure he could even read his own writing sometimes.

I think it's important to learn how to write by hand. It's an exercise of the mind in so many ways. And practically, one doesn't need electicity to power a pen and paper. When the electromagnetic pulse comes and wipes out our electronic gadgets (which I will admit I'm addicted to as much as my kids are) that's what we'll be left with!

Front summer to winter in the blink of an eye

September is long gone and October is starting to show it's teeth in Saskatchewan. September was a very warm month for us. Many communities set record highs several days in a row in mid-month. I recall seeing a 32C the odd time and a couple of towns hit 34-35C. David Philips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada, said on the news at the end of the month that September could turn out to be the warmest month of the year for Saskatchewan, the first time that has ever happened. It's no surprise because most the year was much colder than normal. The grass really didn't start growing until about mid-May.

But now it's October and we're getting arctic weather pushing down. Last night we had our first real hard frost. When I got up at 7am it was -6C. When I went out at 8am to start the semi truck I had to give it a shot of ether (starting fluid) to get it started. She was a bit stiff! At least I didn't have to worry about muddy trails because the mud was all frozen!

At lunch time I had to take the boys into Moose Jaw as Mitchell had his first swimming lessons with fellow homeschoolers. The weather was cool, but not too bad. We did some shopping and then went to swimming lessons. After lessons we went to Dairy Queen for a snack. Blizzards are yummy but only if you eat them and not drive them. That's what we hit about halfway home.

Moose Jaw is about 60 miles away from our farm. We saw the odd little snow flurry in the first half of the trip home but I'd say around Mortlach we were well into the snow storm. We got past Parkbeg and headed down Secretan Hill and that's where I started to get nervous. It was starting to stick to the highway. As I went back up the other side I felt the van wiggle slightly. Now there are some ruts in the highway and it was quite windy out so it might not have been slippery but I backed off anyway, from about 100kph (which was down from the 110kph I was doing when I left Moose Jaw) to about 60 by the time I got through the twisties which weave through the hills around Secretan area. Once I was out of that I sped up a bit, maybe 80-90 until I got to Chaplin. It wasn't sticking on the highway quite as bad here, but we're lucky to have a gravel road from Chaplin to the farm which I took. Yeah, it's muddy but it's not going to be nearly as slippery as a slushy highway!

Anyway, we're home safe and sound and I'm curled up by the warm glow of my computer monitor with Rush pounding from the speakers. Life is good. :)

Gettin' there

Well, I thought this would be a good time for an update on how our homeschool is going. It's been a while since I filled you all in.

We've been at this almost six weeks now. At first we went fairly steady. That was for about two weeks. It's been a bit more intermittent since due to farm work but we still manage to fit in a few learning sessions every week. Sometimes I can fit in a whole morning, sometimes I get in an hour.

Lately Mitchell has been working on adding and subtracting larger numbers and we've just introduced working with numbers that require tens to or from the ones column. Mitchell is starting to be able to do simple calculations in his head. Progress in math? Imagine that!

ELA has us working on nouns and adjectives, various vowel sounds (as well as the various 'y' sounds) and combination sounds (such as 'ck' as in 'sock'). We studied the book "A Tree Is Nice" and we read the Dr. Suess book "There's No Place Like Space" just for fun.

In science we've just finished a unit on life cycles where Mitchell learned about the life cycles of mammals, insects and plants, and learned about marsupials, too. He's going to grow some pea plants to see the life cycle of that plant. I guess he kinda saw that in the garden this year anyhow, but why not get up close and personal with a pea plant?

In our social studies class we're learning about Canada. We're exploring it's various geographical and political regions. Mitchell can name almost all the provinces and territories on an unlabeled map. He's only having a little trouble remembering the various smaller maritime provinces (like most of us did when we first learned them). We've also been learning how to use a map generally.

Although we don't have a health class, Mitchell has also taken an interest in a book about the human body for kids. He's spent a fair amount of time looking at it by himself and asking questions. I don't know if there's an invisible switch that's been flipped in me but I notice these child directed learning moments (did I just invent an acronym? CDLMs?) more often and pay more attention to them.

Matthew and Michael have been doing some work, too. I've been working on getting them to learn their alphabet and numbers, which includes learning how to write them. So we've also been working on how to write their names. I've also done a very small amount of basic math with them. They've recieved some homework from their speech therapist and we've been doing that, too. That's mostly been about learning bigger/smaller, full/empty, etc. They also take part in extra activities like when we went for a walk to look at different kinds of seeds in the trees and grass. They all do art projects together, too. The last project was leaf rubbing. Yes, of course, those pictures are hanging in the kitchen!

How about extra curricular activities? The boys are two weeks into their fall gymnastics session. And starting October 8, Mitchell's in swimming lessons with other homeschool kids in Moose Jaw. He gets a one-hour lesson once a week for five weeks for $25. Good deal! And best of all we can finally meet some other homeschool families!

I've been considering moving our 'classroom' upstairs, too. Lately we've been doing more of our work on the main floor (and sometimes Mitchell takes it to his room upstairs, too). Some of you have seen our little classroom in the basement. It's a nice cozy corner sometimes, but also a bit of a dungeon. But to do that I have to find a spot for stories our materials. Piling it in various corners isn't the greatest idea. And where do I put the whiteboard and maps? Oh well, we'll get it figured out.

So how do I feel about our progress? Well, I think we're coming along fine. There's time's I've felt a bit disappointed that I can't fit in classes more regularly but I know I can make it up on weekends and holidays. And I know that we're getting more learning done in the shorter periods we're working than the boys would get at school anyway. Besides the boys are spending more 'quality' time with me, too, if having them fighting over the front passenger seat of the semi is considered quality time! But seriously there was a day last week that I took them out with me to finish baling a field of straw and we saw a moose wandering up the field so we followed it a little way and had a good look at it. Moose are kind of rare around our farm, although not so rare in other areas of this region of Saskatchewan. There's a family of them about 15 miles south of our farm apparently. But this is only the second one I've ever seen. We all thought it was pretty cool!

So ya...homeschool's going alright...no matter where it's taking place!

Ready to work! (I hope!)

Last winter after becoming dissatisfied with farming as a career I sold of a couple of quarters of land. Carla and I had a business plan in mind but that dream had to be let go, too, after some things beyond our control made that proposition a little too risky. Instead I bought myself the toy pictured which is a 2003 Caterpillar 246 skid steer loader. My idea is to pick up some work with it to make up for the money I wasn't making farming my land. I made sure I didn't borrow any money to get into this business, spending only what I got for the sale of my land. Debt scares me these days. This machine cost me around $24,000 with a little more than 900 hours on the hourmeter. Fairly low for its age.

Anyway, this machine came with a straight bucket only so at a Richie Brothers auction I picked up a hay spear (for picking up large round bales) and the manure grapple pictured, which I'm hoping will be the core of my business. A couple of years ago I rented a Bobcat S185 and quite enjoyed operating it cleaning my own corrals and barns so I have a bit of experience running these kind of machines. This one is even better than the Bobcat as the Cat doesn't require the use of pedals to operated the loader and bucket. It's all on joysticks. The left stick controls movement forward, back, left and right. The right stick controls the loader and bucket. Each stick also has a switch to control extra hydraulic attachments. In this case the right stick's switch controls the claw on the grapple. Another bonus is that I have heat and air conditioning. Yes, I'm a big suck! I need my air and heat!

Of course I had to get a trailer to haul this thing around. Carla and I went to a farm auction that had a used Dumenceau 8-1/2x20 gooseneck triaxle flatdeck on offer. It was in average condition, nothing special but quite usable. It sold for $9500! And no, not to me! It definitely wasn't worth that kind of money to me. So we made our way back into Swift Current and visited JayDee AgTech, a dealer for Trailtech trailers (and obviously John Deere farm equipment!). Anyway, we left there towing a shiney brand new Trailtech 8-1/2x20 gooseneck tandem axle flatdeck and it only cost us $8800 taxes included! Yeah, it's got one less axle but even with two I've got plenty of capacity to carry the Cat. My neighbor has actually borrowed the trailer a lot to haul stuff so it's obviously a hit with him!

I also have a set of brand new tires on the Cat. The ones that came with it had very little traction in wet manure. It's possible to get tracks that fit over the tires but they're very expensive - $3500 for one set I saw advertised in the Western Producer newspaper. I checked into chains but Brake and Drive in SC quoted me well over $1000 which seemed odd because I've seen them online for a lot less, but I didn't feel like ordering from the US. Anyway, I got a set of Trelleburgs from Fountain Tire in SC with an extra wide sidewall to protect the rims and spent just over $900. No fussing with chains and they seem to perform quite well in my own barnyard after some testing today.

Anyway, what it all comes down to is that this coming Monday I have my first "official" job cleaning corrals for Hughes Farms south of Chaplin. Hopefully I've worked out all the kinks at home and have a good, trouble-free day!

Road safety matters

A number of recent incidents on the highway around this part of the world have me thinking about why some motorists aren't taking more care out there.

The first one I'll deal with is seat belt usage. There have been two single-vehicle rollovers this week, one of which killed a two-year-old girl who was allowed to sleep in the back of a vehicle without a car seat. Nobody else in the vehicle was wearing a seatbelt either.

Less than 24 hours later another vehicle rolled when the driver fell asleep at the wheel in the middle of the night. Nobody was killed but at least one passenger was ejected from the vehicle because, again, they weren't wearing seatbelts.

I'm a racing fan. I see drivers walk away from horrendous crashes because of the safety equipment which obviously includes seat belts. An airbag won't do you much good when you are ejected from the vehicle and it rolls over you.

The second issue I want to deal with is respecting heavy trucks on the road. It seems like every few weeks I hear on the radio about an accident involving semi trucks. And guess what. It's almost always some dumbass has attempted to cross the highway without looking and is killed when his vehicle is struck by a truck. It happened again today at Moose Jaw. It's almost as suicidal as trying to beat a train at a railroad crossing. I drive a truck sometimes myself and sometimes weigh as much as 50,000 pounds with a load of hay. I've come over a hill to see cows on the road and luckily had the distance to get slowed down and stopped but it sure scared the crap out of me. Now imagine my brother-in-law who pulls Super-B grain trailers for a living with a gross weight of 120,000 pounds comes across someone attempting to cross the highway immediately in front of him. What's he going to do? He's going to spend the rest of his life reliving that nightmare that 'someone' gave him. Thankfully that hasn't happened to him and I sure hope it never does.

Please take a moment when you head out to do up your seat belt and those of your children. And when you come to that intersection, take an extra look before you cross.

The Fun And Frivolity of Canning

Well, I think we're starting to see the end of our canning for this year. There's still a four liter pail of juice extracted from apples to turn into jelly but that won't be too hard. It's sitting in the fridge waiting for another day to deal with. Today I did up a pail of chokecherry juice and made six jars of jelly and three of syrup (all pint jars).

I've always struggled with making chokecherry jelly, but I learned this year I probably wasn't boiling it long enough. There are some recipes that say boil hard one minute. Uh-uh. No way. Won't work for me. Carla asked a few people this year that are boiling 15 to 30 minutes. So I tried 30. Yay! It worked! Went back to 20 and ended up with thick syrup again. Now this is with liquid pectin. We got a slightly different recipe that uses pectin crystals and after 30 minutes of boiling, I ended up with some sugar crystals in the jelly so my next batch went back to 20 minutes. I'll hope it's better.

Carla's also made some dill pickles with 20 pounds of cucumbers she got from the Hutterites at the farmers' market last week (from my brother-in-law's sister as a matter of fact). Some were jarred in quart sealers but she also made a batch just in pails. She got this recipe from my sister who made up a batch in a plastic cat litter pail (so of course I had to bug my sister about getting the litter box recipe). We haven't tried them yet, but the kids love pickles and have been bugging us to try them.

But the biggest canning issue this year has been the demise of Carla's beloved smooth-top stove. I was sterilizing jars one morning and heard a funny noise. Wasn't sure what it was...maybe just a jar with a snap lid sealing? Anyway when Carla got home from work I went baling. Later she sent me a text message saying "OMG the stove top is cracked!" Luckily this was already a 15-year-old stove but it still worked fine (well, except for the oven light but that's nothing). Guess how much to fix it. No, higher...Keep going...Right, $500! So we decided to get a new stove. For $699 plus tax (regular $849) we got a new Kenmore with coil burners since we're not giving up the canning. It was probably the heat and/or the weight of the large canner that cracked the smooth-top, something that will not affect the traditional coil burners. Plus the oven is bigger, which might be a bonus sometimes.

Hopefully we can get 15 years and more out of this stove. We replaced the dishwasher this year, too, so hopefully that's all for now! Having cloth-diapered all the kids, I ended up having to replace some plastic couplers on the washing machine between the motor and transmission several times over the years and it's kept going. Crossing my fingers!

Carla's Photographic Fun

Carla's turning into quite the photography enthusiast lately. She's always had an interest in it and for the past few years has used a Kodak Z740. It's a five megapixel device that resides somewhere between the simple point-and-shoot and the DSLR. She's taken lots of good shots with it. But we recently invested in a real DSLR, a Canon Rebel XS, a ten megapixel camera with an 18-55mm lens.

Carla studied long and hard before choosing the XS. She did a lot of research online getting reviews and specifications. At first she fell in love with the Nikon D60 after looking at one at Wells Camera and Sound in Moose Jaw. One of the things shes looking for is faster focus and shooting and the D60 was far faster than the old Kodak. But then she held the Canon XSi at Walmart and she forgot all about the Nikon. It slipped into her hands perfectly and just "felt" right.

So she spent the next few days studying the differences between the XSi and the XS. While the XSi had 12 megapixels and the XS 10, some reviews claimed the XS experienced less noise at higher ISOs, less red eye and fewer blurred shots. Plus it's cheaper! It sounded like a good camera for a novice photographer. It shoots blazingly fast, which was the main reason for a new one.

She ordered online from Henry's, a shop in Toronto and had the camera a few days later. She also ordered a Lowepro backback that can swivel around to lay horizontally in front of you for easy access to equipment. Carla almost looks like a pro with all this gear! It might be a while before she gets it but she's now lusting after a long zoom lens. Let's learn to use the camera first, 'kay? She's joined a Rebel Yahoo group for hints and tips and loves hanging out there now.

For those that would like to see some of her work, she's set up a Flikr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carla_k/

I can't wait to get my paws on it next time I go to the races or air show. :)

If it ain't broke you're not trying hard enough

I remember hearing or reading that saying somewhere. Maybe it was a bumper sticker. If it's true, I must be trying real hard because I've got broken equipment all over this farm. Last Thursday night around 10:45pm I broke the other axle on the baler. I had a shop in Swift Current make me a new one but it wasn't ready until Monday. So over the weekend I started swathing an oat field that I'll be baling, too. Well, I broke a canvas drive roller on there! It's getting to the point I just want it to be winter so I'm not working in the field breaking stuff!

Anyway, the baler's fixed and I've done a couple of night baling sessions because it's been hot again. Hopefully this evening after supper (and after it cools off a bit) I'll get the swather fixed and finish cutting that oat field. Then I'll hop up on the baler tractor and bale the first bit of that field that I cut a few days ago. At least being a cultivated field it will be a whole hell of a lot smoother than that old hay field I just finished. No wonder I'm breaking stuff! I'm going to have to break up a few old hay fields and start fresh. Gophers, moles and badgers do not make for smooth hay fields.

Oh, and to make matters worse we're having a problem with the hard drive in our BEV (or BellTV now I guess) PVR. I suspect corruption because we've lost a lot of recorded programming lately. Maybe this weekend when Carla's working I'll pull the drive and reformat. I had to replace the drive a year or two ago and still have the instructions on how to remarry a virgin drive to the 5900 reciever. This is almost more important than fixing the farm equipment. Must have PVR!

I must say I have a lot more fun digging in the guts of computers and satellite recievers than I do turning into a greaseball fixing my farm equipment. Sometimes Carla wants me to put lotion on her feet. I think "Ick." Didn't my hands feel like this a few hours ago...

Math Mayhem

Well, it's been a fun and exciting and frustrating week of homeschooling. Yep, all that rolled into one. I love seeing my kids happily learning something new. I love to see the joy of accomplishment. It's not always that much fun trying to keep three young boys on task. I'm sure those of you with several young children know exactly what I'm talking about.

But the past couple of days the biggest problem I'm having is getting Mitchell to work through his math problems. I helped him often enough with math homework from public school last year to know that he knows what to and how to do it. This year it's like he's afraid to try even the simplest problems. At first it seemed like he was just being distracted by what Matthew and Michael were doing (which is their preschool level worksheets usually). Today we worked alone and I could see it was more than that. He really didn't want to do it. We took a break from it and moved onto some science stuff (marsupials!) and some online animations of thunderstorms. Then we came back to math and I "talked him down" by offering to reward him with some big red check marks in his work book if he just tried. I told him that I didn't care if he got the problems wrong or not. That got him started so we finished one page then we moved onto an earlier page where we'd really run into a roadblock. This page had four small sets of problems (10 total) and I promised one check mark for each section he finished. He breezed through them with minimal fuss with only one error I think. Good job Mitchell!

We've been using Miquon for math, by the way. We had looked at Saxon and Singapore and thought Miquon might be a happy medium between the repetitiveness (so we've heard) of Saxon and the more advanced level of Singapore. We have the counting rods but Mitchell seems to have trouble wrapping his head around how to use them usually and prefers to count on a ruler or his fingers. That's fine, as long as he finds a way to solve his problems I'm happy. I think the biggest problem is confidence and initiative. Perhaps I'll continue with rewarding effort and hope for the best as we move along.

And two days later...

Anyone else out there like Whitesnake? Listening to 'Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City' from "Live: In The Still Of The Night".

As most of you, or some of you, or you over there know we began homeschooling the three Ms yesterday and now we've been through two sessions. We've had our ups and downs but overall I'd say we're doing well and enjoying ourselves. I've covered all our subjects so far.

ELA we're doing pretty well with and moving along nicely. Math is still an exercise in patience for Mitchell but with some calm coaching and encouragement he easily works out his problems with Cuisinaire rods or fingers. It's just a matter of getting him to try.

Science has been fun. We're learning about lifecycles of animals and plants and we're in the process of cutting open peas after a period of time soaking in water to see them germinate. Social has us studying Canada and maps. We had a good start on that but Mitchell had a little meltdown and I knew it was time to pack it up and go look at our peas instead. Then it was lunchtime!

Matthew and Michael have been working on coloring and gluing alphabet and number worksheets. I'm also having them work on spelling their names. Michael is doing pretty well with these projects. Matthew needs some practice with printing his letters so I had Carla print off a bunch of worsheets for tracing letters.

I would say I've learned a couple of things myself the past couple of days. First is that it's a challenge to work with all the boys together. The first day I didn't have enough for M&M to do while I helped Mitchell, the second I had enough but they required more attention than I expected so I found myself working with all three boys and once. Mitchell is easily distracted, too.

The second thing I learned is that I'm trying to fit too much into a morning. I'm going to have to cut back my expectations and perhaps just do two subjects instead of three. If I have time for extra, great. If not, there's time tomorrow. Or maybe do some kind of project in the afternoon. We'll see what we have time for. I know the first hour we do well, so maybe I'll save that for what we really need to get done and leave hour three for fun stuff that doesn't matter so much.

Anyway, I'd just like to say I'm having fun learning along with the three Ms. And special thanks to my "staff" Carla for finding online worksheets and the copying services! I can compile a Linux kernel but I'd be lost on the multi-function printer. :)

I'll send you out with "In The Still Of The Night"...love that interlude...