Friday, October 31, 2008

Our House is Coming Along!




These are the most recent pictures of our new house! This week they put the roof on and the windows in, as well as the plumbing pipes and the duct work. Soon we'll be meeting with the builder to choose our colors and other options! I'm really hoping that we'll be able to get moved in during Christmas break, assuming that the weather cooperates when it comes time to paint the house and pour the driveway!

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Our Next Step



You are looking at what our new kitchen will look like in just a few short months! Skip and I had an accepted offer on a house today, and we are filled with excitement AND anxiety! A few months back we visited an open house for a new development. We really liked the houses, but the lots were terrible. So later we found out that the same builders were starting a new development at another location. Their first house in this new development is the one that Skip and I really liked, and the lot is much better. So we started playing the real estate game and finally settled on an agreement today! They started building the house a few weeks ago, and today the roofing was completed. With all the nice weather we have had, they are ahead of schedule and *should* be finished with the house by the end of the year! We've been taking pictures of the building process 'just in case', so those will be going up on my blog soon! I'm so excited that we'll be watching our first home materialize, and we'll have a say on some of the details. So now I have something exciting to blog about! I just hope that this journey isn't filled with too many bumps, and we can get into our house smoothly!

Monday, October 6, 2008

A Lesson in Math

This evening I was flipping through channels on TV when I came across a debate between our current state superintendent, Terry Bergeson and her opponent, Randy Dorn. The topic was the math WASL and changing the standards that students must meet in order to graduate from high school. Now, I'm against the WASL and think that it is not a good indicator of a student's knowledge. And Randy Dorn agrees with me. But anyway, back to the debate. Randy Dorn spoke about how our math curriculum needs to include calculations, which right now it doesn't. In Terry Bergeson's response, she spoke about how she had spent "1,000,000 hours talking with math folks about standards." So in my own curiosity, I wanted to find out just how long 1,000,000 hours was. With my handy calculator, I punched out the number to find that 1,000,000 hours is equal to about 41,666 days, or 114 years. She's been doing a lot of talking! I think this just goes to show the importance of math and the ability to add.