Minisink The First Week

Chris is back from Camp Minisink after spending his first week there. Mom asks many questions and eventually compiles an activities list but it's always hard to gauge his enthusiasm. He swam, went for an overnight hike, played tennis, hit golf balls driving range style, and got out on the lake with a paddle boat.

The counselors were playing Magic The Gathering and that snagged his interest.

K was very concerned that he'd get home and announce that he hated it. That didn't happen. This was the first week that the camp was open and there were fewer kids than will be there this week. We're told that attendance builds as the summer progresses. With fewer kids I think he got more attention and that had to be good for his confidence.

No One to Depend on

My CDs were ripped to MP3 years ago but the vinyl sits in faux egg crates daring me to recreate it all. I did re-buy some of it on CD and MP3 but not the bulk of it.

I have a working turntable so plugging the computer into the tape-out jack on the stereo has always been an alternative but it's been hard to work up the enthusiasm. I remember making mix tapes in the analog days and it sure was time consuming but, for some reason, it was time to add some of those albums to the music we listen to. I set up a patch cord and used CD Spin Doctor which is a part of Toast 8 to record the incoming audio to a file.

The software will guess at where to break up the tracks and it did a yeoman's job on The Best of Carly Simon but failed completely with Santana.

I spent about 4 hours this afternoon to rip 3 albums. Not bad for a first try.

Hot, Hot, Hot

When K was cooking dinner on Sunday the 2 main circuit breakers on the boat tripped and neither would stay on with the A/C running. We looked at the flow of water coming from the A/C water vents and it was reduced from the usual gusher to a very anemic trickle.

The trap was full of eel grass so I was sure that cleaning it would be the cure. Nope! With the A/C off for the week I hope that tidal action will carry the crud away from the intake. If not we'll go on a cruise.

Hagar the Horrible

K and I spoke to Mr. Hagerty from WPS about our concerns that Chris was not closing the achievement gap. We think that he has very little reading confidence because, when he has homework that involves reading more than a paragraph, he'll tell us that he just can't do it.

Mr. H's council was that he thinks the standardized test he took a month ago will show that C is reading closer to grade level and that he's seen real progress in the classroom. We must have patience. His gut feeling is that C won't be ready to mainstream until 10th grade.

We told him that C has very little homework. Many nights he has none and others he'll have only 5-10 mins. We think that homework could make him more self directed and not so dependent on support.

Mr. H was surprised that he had so little homework and lamented that we hadn't raised this sooner. He thinks this would be easy to tweak and, if we see the same thing happening next year, we should raise it early .

Toe Action

Chris went to a new podiatrist in NYC yesterday who assessed his ingrown toenail, right foot, big toe and advised that the nail bed be permanently altered to stop a recurrence of the problem. So he had the surgery and seems to be feeling better.