Utterly Meaningless » About Me

About Me

Updated below on 9/28/11

I was asked to write a post giving some history. Predictably, it turned out longer than I intended.

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I am a home educating father (well, a father supportive of my lovely home educating wife). We have four children ages 12 down to almost 5 as of May 2004. You’ve probably seen pictures of them on the site. We’ve been homeschooling since Sept. 11th, 2001. Yes, I recognize the significance of the date. I was on the phone with the Delaware Department of Education requesting the appropriate forms when the first plane hit.

Early on, Lydia (the aforementioned lovely wife) and I decided to split the homeschooling responsibilities along these lines: she would handle the day-to-day “educating” and I would be responsible for the political/protection role. So, I learned as much as I could about Delaware home schooling laws, got active with the Delaware Home Education Association, and (confession time) joined HSLDA. Hey, I was a newbie; that’s what newbies do.

While working with DHEA, I got to know Joey Ashby. Joey was a long-time DE homeschooling stalwart. For years, she had been keeping other DE homeschoolers informed about what has happening in the state and beyond. She regularly scanned the local papers and the legislature’s website for homeschooling-relevant info. She was also getting ready to move out of state. Shortly before leaving for good, she asked if I’d be willing to pick up her “job” and email some folks when I came across anything interesting. That original email distribution list had about 10 folks on it. We called it the DHEA Yankees (because it mostly consisted of DHEA members in the northern part of the state).

I started scanning the local papers and other websites and was finding interesting (to me) stuff every day. I think I started to aggravate some people on the list with the constant emails. Emailing articles turned out to be a problem, too, as everyone had a different email client, and cutting and pasting in a format accessible by everyone was a technical challenge. That’s when I read a brief article about this guy called Instapundit and this new thing called blogging. The light bulb went off. Here was a way I could post some articles and email a link to the distribution list! I signed up on blogspot that day. The blog was http://dheayankees.blogspot.com It’s still there. That first post was made May 9th, 2002. It was pretty primitive blogging- no permalinks, no comments. Still, a vast improvement over the email route. Finally, about a year ago, I got frustrated with constant outages at blogspot and moved to my own domain.

And that’s the history of the blog. Oh, yeah, one other thing. In my other life, I’m a chemist with DuPont.

Update 9/28/11 — Since this post was originally written, we’ve moved a couple of times: first to NC and recently to WV. And two of the little birdies have flown the coop. Sort of. Our oldest is living in NC finishing up his last semester in college. So he really is on his own, even if we’re still paying the bills. The next oldest finished up her homeschooling last year and is now a freshman in a local community college up here. So, we’re down to two still homeschooling (with three living here).