Summer begins

Summer school ended on Friday for Ellie. She had a lot of fun at school. Most nights she was even willing to go to bed at a reasonable time because she knew she had to be up for the bus in the morning. Walking out to the bus turned out to be one of my favorite times of day. Ellie was generally in a good mood, and she tended to share more than at other times of the day.

Friday also ended my summer teaching. I was teaching a 3-week introduction to computer programming, for junior high school students. For the most part, I think it went well. I don't particularly like the discipline aspects of working with junior high students, but they can't be beat for asking questions and participating in discussions.

Some of them also became pretty reasonable programmers. The last project of the term was writing robots that play in a virtual combat arena. I alway write a robot of my own for theirs to fight against, and this time one of the students wrote a robot that could best mine. I was quite impressed by that, and I had to go back and improve mine some (because in something like this, the teacher really should be able to win).

We're now full into summer things. Ellie is doing swimming lessons. She jumped off the diving board today and swam in the deep end. She was impressively good.

Ellie also decided that she wanted to ride her bike without training wheels, so we took them off on Sunday. She wasn't very good, but we tried again last night and she was amazingly better. Several times she was able to ride like 60 feet. I expect we'll try again tonight and she'll have even more control.

Linda is doing well. She's glad to be ignored a bit less. We went to the farmers' market this weekend and we've been sitting out on the porch later in the day. I'll probably have to drag her to the gym here soon though so she doesn't get soft.