How clean is clean?

We did all make it to IHOP at 8:30 AM, although some of us got substantially less sleep than others of us.  Mom seemed to enjoy the breakfast and the time with three of her kids, one of their spouses, and three of her grandkids.  There were a lot of old memories shared and there was much laughter at that table in the back corner of the restaurant.

The North Carolina Three left from IHOP for their drive home, but not until after we snagged another patron to photograph the eight of us all together.

The Missouri Five then went to church at Free Life Church, where Katie’s been attending for several years.  It’s a growing, friendly congregation with good worship and good teaching that meets in the Loudon County high school building.  I liked the people, the worship, and the pastor’s style.  I later explored their website and, clicking on “What to Wear,” found this refreshing statement:  “At Free Life we are interested in you – not what you are wearing.  You don’t need to worry about dressing up – or dressing down.  Wear whatever you feel the most comfortable in; we want to be real.”  I like that!  I have decided that real is really important to me these days.

We ate something – frankly, I don’t remember what – and then we headed in our two remaining cars, the Honda and the White, back to Patrick Henry for the Cleaning Of The Dorm(s).  Katie has been an R.A. for the past two years, and that has been a nice thing, as it has fully paid her room fee for those two years.  However, resident assistants do incur some, shall we say, inconveniences, and Sunday afternoon was decidedly one of them.  There are five dorms and all five have to be spotlessly clean before ANY of the R.A.s can leave campus for the summer.  Each dorm has several (two?) floors, with two wings to a floor.  Each wing has an R.A., who is responsible to move out of and thoroughly clean her own room, check out the detailed cleaning (done by each out-moving student) of every other room in her wing, and work with the other R.A.s in her dorm to clean all the common areas (study room, lounge, lobby, laundry room, etc.).

To say that PHC’s standards for dorm cleanliness are over the top would be the understatement of the decade.  Furthermore, Katie knew that once she completed all the above and her dorm was officially declared “white glove clean,” she was obligated to go to the next dorm and do whatever it took to get that one into the same condition, and so on, until all five dorms were clean.  At that point, she would be free to leave the campus for the summer.  Well, in her case, forever.

It was about 12:45 PM when we arrived back on campus, and our vacation home on the Shenandoah, two hours away, was waiting for us FIVE to all sleep in it that night.  Last year, Katie said it took them till about 11:00 PM to get the dorms clean.  Scott had considered him and the boys going to buy groceries and driving on to the house, while Katie and I stayed to clean and came out later, but the thought of driving we-didn’t-know-where in the dark without a map, while Scott might be asleep and unable to give us directions didn’t seem too smart.  The decision was made that Team Roberts would work together until the infamous dorm cleaning job was done.

I am pretty sure I have never cleaned anything so well in my entire life.  = )

STEP 1:  Remove everything from Katie’s room.  I do mean everything.  She had one old suitcase and two smallish boxes in which to pack everything she owned.  When those were full, we resorted to trash bags.  It took a maybe a couple hours to get everything out of there.  We “packed” while she ran around overseeing and checking progress on her wing-mates’ rooms.  Thankfully, Amy had already moved out and had done a lot of the requisite cleaning.

STEP 2:  Clean Katie’s room and bathroom.  This would be deep cleaning – vacuuming out drawers, cleaning windows and frames and sills, washing baseboards, scouring the shower, cleaning the vents, wiping down the light fixtures – everything. This took another hour or so.

STEP 3:  Mark a detailed checklist to inventory the number and quality of all fixtures in the four rooms and two bathrooms on her wing.  As in, number and condition of drawer knobs, number and condition of drawers, number and condition of pegs that allow one bed to be bunked above another, number and condition of electrical outlets, number and condition of door knobs, etc.  Clearly a beaver with a VERY flat tail made that list.  There were about 25 items on a page for each room; which is more items than you would think could possibly BE in a room that is totally empty and white-glove clean! I spent the better part of an hour doing this for Katie.  She gave me permission to do it because she knew I’m good at detailed tasks.  = )

STEP 4:  While various ones of us worked intermittently on STEPS 1-3, others among us, mainly the males, hauled things down to the lobby, the dumpster, and/or the car(s).  We all went up and down those stairs (Katie’s room was on the second floor) enough times to complete our aerobic workouts for the next two weeks.

STEP 5:  Clean the study room.  This is a room containing some dozen or so “cubes” that various girls had used throughout the school year.  The dorm rooms have two desks each, but in some cases there were three girls to a room, so the extra girl’s assigned desk space was in the study room.  Even with all their personal stuff removed, there were a lot of surfaces to wipe, nooks and crannies to scrub, cabinets and chairs to clean, and floor space to be vacuumed.  Worst, however were the windows, which had eight-foot tables pushed against them.  We sat or kneeled on the tables and scrubbed the windows, the frames, and the inside and outside sills. Working together I think we tackled this in about 30 minutes.

STEP 6:  Clean the lounge.  Thankfully, this was much easier than the study room, and a good deal of the work had already been done by someone else.  15 minutes?  We were appropriately thankful.

STEP 7:  Vacuum the entire wing well.  I tried my darndest to do this, but the vacuum cleaner I was using was not cooperating.  It left a jagged pattern of dust everywhere I vacuumed, even though the bag was new.  Hmmm. . . ?  I frustrated myself silly with that stupid vacuum cleaner and finally ended up using the long pointy attachment of a canister vacuum to swipe back and forth over every inch of the hall.  My back was not too thrilled with that.

STEP 8:  (Although we actually did this earlier)  Remove all decor from the hallway walls.  Katie’s wing had a Winnie-the-Pooh theme, which was truly delightful.  She had nifty quotes up all over, each appearing to be behind a little wooden stick window frame.  I LOVED those quotes!!!  They were up with blue tack, and there were also two zillion and eleven leaves, each affixed to the wall with a nail which could not be removed except with needle-nose pliers.  We initially had none of those and so were using fingernails (and teeth?), but Katie borrowed some needle-nose from some gentleman somewhere.  I’d say it took an hour to get all the stuff off the hall wall and figure out how to save most of it intact.

STEP 9:  Clean the stairs and bannisters and all their spokes.

STEP 10:  Haul Katie’s stuff to Katie’s apartment 15 minutes away.

STEP 11:  Go with Aaron K (who has a truck, who graduated PHC last year, who works as an admissions counselor now and who actually did Josiah’s admissions interview, and whose last name – he’s Hawaiian – can be neither spelled nor pronounced) to pick up a chair from Katie’s office that the company was going to discard, but which she said she could use in her apartment.

STEP 12:  Listen to Andrew complain about being A) hungry, B) tired, C), thirsty, D) tired of cleaning, E) weary, F) starving, or G) about to die of exhaustion.  Unknown amount of time invested.

STEP 13:  Try not to cry when Valerie – the overseer of all women R.A.s and final inspector of the cleaning project – commented that a shower that I had personally checked and deemed to be perfectly clean needed “major work.” Only two minutes and I didn’t cry, but I will say that that shower was far cleaner than ANY shower in my house has ever been!!!

STEP 14:  Wait.  A long time.  For Valerie.  Because as we got to around 7:00 PM, and the dorm was getting cleaner, there just wasn’t much to do until Valerie could come back around and see if the (whatever thing she had told us twenty minutes ago wasn’t clean enough) was now clean enough.  For example, Katie asked me to sweep the two stairwells at either end of the building.  I picked the near stairwell and began sweeping down from the top.  It was a royal pain, simply because the stairs have these ridged rubber treads on them, and the treads run parallel to the stair.  Safe for running down in the case of a fire, I suppose, but nearly impossible to sweep.  But the odd thing was that there was NO dirt on the stairs.  None.  Not even really any dust.  In fact, when I got to the bottom of the two or three flights, or whatever it was, I couldn’t even see a pile of stuff to sweep up!  So I went to Katie and asked her if anybody even uses those stairs.  No, no one does. But I went to the other stairwell and did get a tiny bit of dirt; like, and I’m not kidding, a few crumbs in a pile the size of your thumbnail.  Basically, those stairwells were almost as clean as a whistle before I started, and definitely clean as a whistle when I was done.  But get this.  Valerie later checks things and says, “The stairwell’s not clean.  There’s a bug on a windowsill in one of those stairwells.”  Sweet Georgia Peaches!  I couldn’t believe THAT, so I went back to look.  Wouldn’t you know it?  There was a teeny tiny dead ant on a windowsill.  It was so small that if I hadn’t been actually looking for a bug, I never would have seen it.  Well, obviously I didn’t see it while I was sweeping.

STEP 15:  Help other R.A.s in other wings of the dorm get their stuff off their hall walls and packed up; vacuum any place that looks like it needs it; do anything you can think of to help other R.A.s lift, remove, haul, and clean (especially the showers of) their own wings.  Andrew, who cleans bathrooms in our vacation rental home, did LOTS of bathroom cleaning in the dorms, because Valerie said he was really good at bathrooms – and showers!  = )

STEP 16:  Sweep and mop the lobby floor – a true exercise in frustration, as people keep walking on the wet parts to haul things out and tracking dirt back onto the dry parts when they come back in.  Clean the lobby bathroom.  And God forbid that anyone should need to relieve himself or wash his hands!  Those tasks must now be done in the Hodel Center across the street, because once Valerie declared a bathroom clean, no one was fool enough to set foot in it again, for any reason.

SETP 17:  Wait for Valerie.  I, bored with STEP 17, went over to the Hodel Center for a drink of cold water fountain water and found a piano with a hymnal there, so I played around with that for a while, while Katie spectated.

Finally, at 9:45 PM, we got word from Valerie that Katie’s dorm was “clean!”  YAY!!! It was clean enough for us to move on to help in another dorm, but Valerie said that because Katie’s entire family had been working hard to help for nine hours straight, even though none of the other dorms were done, and all the R.A.s had to stay till they were ALL done, Katie and our family could leave!!!  WOW!!!  What favor!!!  We were really blessed and thankful.  We thanked Valerie and hopped in our cars (males in the Honda, females in the White) and left quickly, before she could change her mind.

It was dark.  It was spitting rain.  It was a two-hour drive into the boonies.  In a fluke of poor planning, we had no music, so with Katie driving and getting sleepy – well, shoot, we were all getting sleepy, given nine hours of hard physical work following the short previous night with that strange man – Yours Truly provided constant commentation, in a noble effort to keep her driver awake, as we plunged into the darkness of north central Virginia, toward the Shenandoah River.

To be continued. . .

Final HSF classes today

Andrew has really enjoyed his Home School Fridays classes this school year.  I find that it irks me to even write the phrase “school year,” because in a way I still kind of resent having to even think about such a thing.  I do miss those days some years ago, when we did what we wanted how we wanted when we wanted, without having to fit into ANYONE else’s idea of how our time should be allocated.   Had we adopted another son shortly after Andrew, I think we could have continued that lifestyle, but the fact is that we didn’t, and I can’t change that now.  Maybe part of grief is coming to accept that what can’t be can’t be.

Andrew has hated his speech class, and enjoyed the P.E., flags, and vocal music offerings.   I have enjoyed having Friday mornings to manage as I see fit.  While this will come to an end after today, I’m planning to still leave Andrew’s academic load light on Fridays and still try to take that day as an off day for me. It will be a little harder without HSF, but while Josiah is at home on Fridays this summer, I think things will work out okay.

I am thinking today of all the changes this season of my life is bringing and trying to process some of the emotions that swirl around it all.  So far, this has not been an easy day, but I’m getting ready to go prep stuff for tomorrow’s cook out, re-pot a plant, and maybe plants some flower seeds, all of which should be helpful and encouraging.  I think today is also tough because last night was rugged.  I am expecting a much better night tonight, beginning with a hot bath that I have already reserved!

 

I remember those days

Today Jessica asked me for some help in solving a certain third-degree algebraic equation.  I looked at the problem for a few minutes, then did the only possible things I could do to the equation – to no avail.  I then tried tackling it from another angle, with the same result.  I found this to be quite discouraging and fairly reminiscent of my ninth grade year of horror and tears in Algebra 1.

I spent that year dreading algebra class during the day and crying over algebra homework at night.  Just about every night.  I hated to fail, and because I didn’t understand how to work the problems, I knew I would fail.  This was completely unacceptable, so for the first and only time in my life, I cheated on a test.

The teacher – I can picture him and his one glass eye clearly, but I can’t remember his name – handed out the tests and left the room.  I struggled through the first couple of problems (problems which I had NO idea how to work) and then turned around and copied the answers from the mathematically brilliant guy who sat behind me.

Imagine my total shock when the tests were handed back.  He got an A and I got an F!!!  It had never occurred to me that there could be different test forms. . . duh.

So today, when I had no earthly idea how to solve this rather simple looking equation, I pulled out the Saxon Algebra 2 book and looked through lots of lessons and lots of examples, but I couldn’t find anywhere in that book or its index where it taught how to solve third-degree polynomial equations.  I’m not saying it doesn’t teach that; just that I couldn’t find it.  So – VERY frustrated with myself – I gave up.

Until Katie chatted me.  Now, I haven’t actually studied algebra since 1977 – some 34 years ago.  (By the way, after limping through Algebra 1 in 1975 and somehow ending up the year with an A, even though I didn’t understand ANY of the material we covered, I took Algebra 2 with Alice Jo Gadberry.  Unlike the Algebra 1 guy – and BTW, I think his name might have been something like Mr. Nicholson – Mrs. Gadberry actually explained things until I understood them, and I did quite well in her class.  I actually enjoyed it and even considered taking Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry from her my senior year.)  But Katie probably studied algebra something like five or six years ago.  That 28-year difference, plus the fact Katie must’ve inherited her dad’s innate mathematical ability, was key.  She was able to tell me what I was doing wrong on that silly problem, and given one key fact, I was able to solve the problem.

Jessica’s trigonometry prof on Monday gave the class something insane like 200 algebra problems to work before the next class on Wednesday.  I think Jessica feels under the gun, and I wish her high school algebra teacher had been named Mrs. Gadberry.  Jessica did Algebra 1 and 2 on her own, because I’m not much of a teacher.  I’m a much better mom.

I just hate it when algebra makes me feel helpless and ignorant, and I resent the fact that it can still do that to me.

She felt the earth. move. under her feet.

There was an earthquake in Virginia today.  It was centered about 95 miles south of Purcellville, occurred at 1:51 PM local time, and registered 5.8 on the Richter Scale.

Katie was in her boss’ office (ground floor) at the time, and she said seh definitely felt it.  It sounds like everyone did.  Evidently, it felt really weird, a rumbling as if some enormous truck or something was going by, but instead of stopping after a couple seconds, it just kept going.  It was strong enough that some pictures were no longer straight on the walls.

I’ve certainly never experienced an earthquake, and I guess as long as no one was injured and nothing was damaged, it’s kind of exciting.

College comparisons

Both our girls start college classes today.

One’s a freshman and one’s a senior.  One’s living on campus and one’s living at home.  One has a roommate, and one doesn’t.  One is taking First Year Foundations, Physical Geography, Psychology, Fundamentals of Public Speaking, and Trigonometry, and one is taking Roman Civilization, Music History and Appreciation, Cold War Novel, and will be writing a Senior Thesis.

Both had orientation-ish meetings over the past couple weeks, but last night only one returned to her room with a rubber duckie from the Health and Wellness Center AND a Reese’s peanut butter cup from the Gay and Lesbian Task Force.  (sigh)

We just hope that our tax dollars at work help fund Christian campus organizations, as well.

Symphonic Fun

Thanks to the Branson Arts Council, Andrew and I were able to attend a special concert given by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra at the Andy Williams “Moon River” theater this morning.  It’s a very nice venue.

Each year, and I think this is the fifth year, the Arts Council brings the symphony to town for the benefit of the elementary school kids in the area.  Buses and buses of kids arrive, and I’m guessing they’re mostly about 4th and 5th grade.  The concert is free, and homeschoolers are allowed to attend, too.

Bonnie Herman, the executive director of the Arts Council, with whom I am on a first-name basis after many years of art classes, hands on clay, and children’s theater workshops, told me we should be there at 9:00 AM, which we were.  Howevever, when we arrived, only about 1/4  of the orchestra members were there, and NO kids, except for one other homeschooling family.

It was fun for us, because we got to watch people bring in their instruments and tune them up. Very educational.  Then the kids arrived, and the fun began.  This year’s concert was a series of well-known dance tunes of all styles and from many nations.  Andrew recognized many of them.  He was in his heyday, because, as he said, “I just love classical music!”

Conductor Ron Spigelman, is quite the showman, making the presentation really fun for the audience.  He did a repeat performance of last year’s musical cartoon, which we both really enjoyed.  It was really neat for us to both get to experience a bit of live classical music, and the price was certainly right.  Thank you Arts Council and Springfield Symphony!

2nd day of school

I think I forgot to mention that last week, Jessica had her first day of school – and I didn’t even take a picture.

She’s auditing a Chinese 2 class at MSU on Wednesdays, and as she headed out the door that day, I realized with a start, “Oh my, this will be her first day of school!”  With all the incredible places she’s gone and things she’s done, until last Wednesday, she had never sat in a traditional classroom in her life.

It’s a small class of about a dozen, and I think she held her own.  She’s behind the other students in not knowing characters, but she’s ahead of them in verbal understanding, vocabulary, and pronunciation.   She’s studying and practicing characters on her own, and that seems to be a successful approach for Our Fair Peacock; after last Wednesday’s Chinese class she took and passed her American Government CLEP with flying colors!  She devised her own study plan, collected her own materials, and disciplined herself to do it four hours a day.  All that work paid off, as she now has two college classes out of the way, with more on the horizon.

I think she’ll do extremely well in school.  = )

Unpleasable

So Josiah finished Algebra 2 with Mr. Saxon while complaining daily about how idiotically stupid Mr. Saxon was.  This after he did Jacobs Algebra 1.  To MY way of thinking, Mr. Jacobs is an infinite improvement over Mr. Saxon, because Mr. Jacobs makes the problems interesting and/or funny.  Mr. Saxon is as boring as a dirty sock.

Today I was checking the Llama’s JACOBS Geometry, and as usual, the Llama had a bone to pick with the textbook author.  It was a logic question and it had to do with whether or not a certain postulate clearly stated that the line determined by two points is straight.  GIVE ME AN EVER-LOVING BREAK!  Technically, no, the postulate doesn’t say that.  It says that two points determine a line, but as I tried unsuccessfully to explain to Josiah, there are a few very basic premises that simply must be ASSUMED to be true.  Kind of like you can’t argue biblical doctrine until both parties choose to accept the Bible as their final authority.

The Llama and the Pelican went round and round on the above geometric matter, until finally I was too dizzy to think straight.  (Hmmm. . . would such supposedly “straight” thinking involve deductive or inductive reasoning?)  Anyway, I turned my firstborn son over to the Major Skink, who managed to read the problem and calmly explain to the Llama that the only way two points can determine a line is if the lines are indeed straight.  I didn’t follow his reasoning, but I decided I didn’t need to follow it, because I had no moral or logical qualms whatsoever about the matter; I was perfectly fine with assuming the line was straight.

Josiah went away satisfied that his answer to the problem (which I had circled in red as wrong – none of that emotionally sensitive purple ink in this household) was indeed wrong.  I was relieved, but oh my stars, are we going to have yet ANOTHER math course that results in daily arguments?  As I remember it, and my recall is admittedly quite a bit less than perfect, math was so much easier with the girls.  I assigned the work.  They did the work.  I checked the work.  If they disagreed with me (or actually, with the answer key) on an answer, they calmly explained why, and based onwhich way the wind was blowing that day, I either did or didn’t give them credit for the problem.

I have now been through the Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry series a total of 3.7 times.  I still have to do the whole thing one more time, and specifically, I have to survive the next several months of Josiah and Mr. Jacobs.  The frustrating thing is that it wouldn’t matter if it were Saxon, or Teaching Textbooks, or Math-U-See, or Singapore, or Abeka, or Horizon,s or Bob Jones, or any other math curriculum.  Josiah would argue with every single one of them.

I guess I should be thankful that I don’t have a whole classroom full of bleating Llamas!  May God help the school teachers who do!

American education

I heard on the news a few days ago that some new report is out about how students from various nations performed on some test that is given internationally.  The U.S. students rank WAY down the list, especially in math and science, where they were in something like 15th place among developed nations.  If I am remembering correctly, Singapore, Taiwan, and China all ranked above the U.S.

Our friend, Ruth, is visiting, and Scott asked her how her first semester of college (Fairleigh-Dickinson University, just outside New York City) compared with her high school experience in China.  She replied, “Oh, the classes are easier. . . but you have to do it all in English.”  That made me smile on the one hand, but grimace inwardly.  If our university courses are easier than Chinese high school, I wonder what our high school courses would correspond to in China?   It sounds like there may be a correlation between that and Maybe that has something to do with why our students perform so abysmally low. . .

Consummatum!

Katie will be home for Thanksgiving in less than a week, and I have her on my mind and in my heart.  With a nod to her successful completion of four semesters of college Latin and her present role as teacher of Latin to two young homeschoolers,we provide the above exclamation of joy relative to Josiah’s Sonlight Core 100 (American History in Depth):  It is finished!

That’s right, sports fans and geeks far and wide.  Josiah has FINISHED Core 100, including all the writing assignments (weekly assignments, current events reports, and two research papers) and all the history and literature reading assignments.  In addition to reading a 10-volume lower-level treatise on U.S. history and a 200+ page poetry book, he read some 50 additional books, including biographies, historical fictions, non-fictions, and other miscellaneous fictions.

Of course, it is to be remembered that his older sisters both did likewise – and, I might add, with significantly less (that is to say, no) input from their mother, but they did not face the same constellation of challenges in so doing that Josiah did.  While it is true that he pulled a great deal of his hair over the past year, only a small fraction of it actually came out.  And, while I certainly possess more gray hairs than I did when we started this wonderful core on December 2, 2009, Josiah and I still generally like each other.

So, mission accomplished, and by the way, he received for his efforts an A in US history, an A in American Literature, and an A in Composition.  Next task on the agenda:  complete Saxon Algebra 2 before Thanksgiving break.