Why Should This Be So Hard?

My son Clay is now three weeks into third grade and already I'm getting frustrated with his math curriculum.

It seems that our school district has drunk from the new-new-math Kool Aid. They have bought the spiel from the Snake Oil salesman from Chicago. To make matters worse, they only use the curriculum until fifth grade, where they change over to the Saxon math program.

Dude, Where's my House

I was online looking up the address of a friend nearby and noticed that Google had published their neighborhood's street view. While I am accustomed to having street view avaialble whenever I'm looking up addresses in urban areas, such as New York City, this is the first time I noticed it in a suburban setting.

Awoke Grumpy

What's got me now you may ask. As my family and friends full well know, there are subjects that just push my buttons into righteous indignation. One of them being dealing with a sub-par curriculum in our local school system. Today was the straw that broke the camel's back, with a note from the Middlesex County chapter of NCADD (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence).

Topic:

Where Do They Find Them

I am sitting here watching the National Geographic Channel with a show about conpiracy theorists that say we never landed on the moon.
 
The bulk of the program focuses on these two mouth breathers that insist that the Apolo missions were a giant hoax put forth by the NASA and the CIA. How come whenever you get these so-called experts, they seem to be living on the outskirts of normal society.
 

Imagination not required.

The PitOur builder, Gary Casazza, is in the process of putting the finishing touches on our foundation today. 

Out with the old, in with the new!

Pro-ExcavatorToday our builder outlined where the men have to dig for the new foundation. Of course, this encompasses the exisiting foundation hole. The workers will dig two feet beyond where the new foundation will be in order for the new basement walls to be installed.  They have to still excavate the old floor and fill below that floor as we are digging deeper in order to have a 9' ceiling in the basement.

Additional photos

Yes, it was facinating to watch the demolition the first day (Thursday); first the roof is taken off, then the guys started to saw the walls down and would push sections off the second story to the ground where the pieces were placed in a dumpster. Anything that could be recycled, was removed and put onto a trailer for transportation.  Shots of the house were done with my Canon digital camera.

New and Improved

At long last, here is the front elevation for the new house...

Finally...

Well, it's been a while since my last post and we are finally moving on. As of yesterday, out builder showed up and started demolition on the house. If you click in the photo, you can view a slide show of shots I took with my camera-phone.

We have a tentative schedule of having the foundation set on the 17th of August and then have the house itself set on the 21st.

Things are a Movin'

We're really movin' and there's no stopping now.

A week and a half ago we did our visit to Haven Homes and we were very happy with what we saw. I shot a batch of photos here. Everything is well constructed and they actually allowed us to go down on the production floor to get a closer look at their workmanship.

Pages

Subscribe to zahler  RSS