Kid Bones

Ever wonder what your bones look like as a kid? Well, Spencer and I explored that idea today and came up with this...

What do you think? How did we do?

The Whitehouse is taking our FREEDOMS...

Here we are more than 5 years from September 11, 2001 tragedy, and the Whitehouse, President George W. Bush is still using this as a scare tactic to take away our freedoms. The Whitehouse is on a campaign to defend his case to allow the NSA to monitor telephone and email conversations without a court order. Bush calls this his "terrorist surveillance program".

The only think this will allow the government to do is spy on the general public. Sure the NSA will start out only using it on "terrorists", but then the government will start to utilize it for spying on the general public as it sees fit. What does the term terrorist mean to the government? Maybe it means ANYONE who appears to have a threatening disposition against the intended goals of the US government and their propaganda.

People, if this law passes, it will open the gates to an empire of rulers (the government). The government will take total control and won't be afraid to use it for the slightest manipulation of the laws and steal our civil rights.

If you don't mind the US government listening in and recording all of your communications and then later using it to frame and incarcerate you; I'm sorry for having you read this rant...

If you invite someone into your home...

...you open up a huge hole. And into this hole come a lot of things, good and bad. For us, good; it was Van, our foreign exchange student from Vietnam. She introduced us to the Vietnamese culture and also to a wonderful girl – herself. We love her and even through the thick and thin of daily life, she will always be our daughter now.

Now, what did this open into our home? She visited us from college (she returned to the U.S. from last year and is now attending college at Winona State-Minnesota at age 17!) over Christmas break and brought a friend. Her friend happened to be another exchange student from China with an exchange program through Winona State. She stayed with us for almost 3 weeks and also became a part of our extended family. She, Rui, is from China and is 21 years old and studying for the next few years at Winona State. Our son, Spencer took a liking to her, just as he did Van… here’s a picture.

Thanks Van for opening up our home and creating a hole that we hope will never fill in.

My Break is OVER

As most of you know, I'm a teacher. My break (what little there was) is now over. I spent these last two weeks teaching a Cisco CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) 'bootcamp' style course to 12 CentryTel employees, 1 TDS Telecom and 2 of my students.

We spent 8 hours in my lab working with routers, switches and different configurations - lectures and labs! The last day, they were supposed to take the $125 exam. BUT, since it was Friday the 13th, the testing center software at SWTC failed! SO, we gave them their testing voucher to take the exam elsewhere. I'm glad it over for me, as the Instructor, for them, they still have to study and remember everything we went over... it's not a fun thing!

So now that I spent 2 out of 3 of my holiday weeks working, I get to go back and start again. This semster shouldn't be so bad, no that I'm not taking 19 credits...!

See you all in the classroom! :-)