The Good News and the Bad News

So wow!  I can’t thank you folks enough for all the well wishes on my behalf after I shared my basically nauseating tale of having a mole on my upper back removed.  The good news, though?  The little creep was innocent of all charges, and had been taken to the slammer unjustly.  However, as a [...]

Who Is This Linux Guy…And What Does He Want With My Son??

Image by rigeneriamoci via Flickr I’m not sure how your family actively studies vocabulary, but we have our own unique strategy around here: give birth to a geekling.  Our 15-year-old has a new passion, and I can always tell, because a whole new crop of words begin cropping up in his daily conversations. Now I [...]

It’s a Major Award!

The movie A Christmas Story is a major part of our holiday traditions.  Ralphie, Flick, Schwartz, Farkus, and yes…even the Bumpuses’ dogs are more familiar to our boys than Dasher, Prancer, or Comet could ever hope to be. We have watched the movie as we’ve decorated our tree every year since the boys were knee [...]

We’ve Still Got It

Image by bpende via Flickr So from time to time, I look back at my bloggy beginnings, and I’m a bit in awe of the way things have taken shape over the last couple of years.  I wish I had a saved screenshot of Topsy-Techie in it’s humble first months…it would be a hoot to [...]

You Know You Are Raising Geeklings When…

You head to the microwave to warm a cup of tea, and discover that the clay version of the angel of death (complete with sword) beat you to it…   (warning: this could become an occasional regular feature.  You have no idea the crazy things that randomly show up around my house!!!)

Some Weeks Are A Little More Topsy Than Techie

So I came home from that glorious Camp Greenville field trip on Sunday to a message in my inbox from one of the members at my SecularHomeschool.com website.  It seemed that while I was hiking and dosey-do’ing, a major tool of a person was busy hacking into the site.  I didn’t want to believe it [...]

Something Weird This Way Comes

So something eerie has happened to my two sons this week.  This whole interest-led, unstructured approach to learning has had an incredibly strange backlash-effect. My sons started SETTING THEIR ALARM CLOCKS.  And even weirder, Uber got up three mornings this week BEFORE his alarm clock went off.  Do you know why?? He said he wanted [...]

I’m Not Talking To Myself…I’m Having A Parent/Teacher Conference!

Having been a homeschooling family for pretty much all of my sons’ educational careers has left me with a few nagging questions. There are certain “quirks” my kids have that I never know whether to chalk up to their individual personalities or to the fact that they haven’t had the opportunity to have those idiosyncrasies [...]

Looking for a Tour Guide?

The Topsies have company!  In what is an absolutely appropriate turn of events for a tech-geek, Uber developed a relationship with one of his classmates at the virtual reality school he has attended the last couple of years.  He and she became really close over this school year and began “dating” online sometime after the [...]

Mutually Exclusive

So last week I penned about the paradox of having two techie teens who don’t necessarily always fit nicely into a stereotypical box.  But wait – – there’s more! Not only are the boys paradoxical within themselves, they also are so radically different from each other that I often wonder not only if they come [...]