Of Chemical Explosions, Hallucinations, and Joy in Homeschooling

How's that for a great title? LOL Just wait, I'll explain how it all works together. :-)



The sci-fi book, Assignment to White Planet 8069, group of Christian writers and I are working on is going great!! The story is really getting exciting. We meet once a week in a chat room, with lots of emailing and such going on during the week. Last week one of the other writers and I had a secret meeting with our characters, Damian and Meinta. Well, they got caught in a chemical explosion and we kind of painted ourselves into a corner! So we let the other characters figure out how to get us out alive. LOL Jason came up with a marvelous plan.

One of the writers realized that she would be unable to continue the project because of time issues. Well, as sorry as I was to see her go, the timing was perfect! :-D It only added to the drama to have her character die a heroic death while rescuing Damian and Meinta. So we ended the chapter with three characters in the hospital and one on her death bed.

This Monday I decided at the last minute since my character was in the hospital anyway, that it wouldn’t throw things off too much if I didn’t come to the session. Diana Waring, from History Alive, was coming to my town to speak to homeschoolers. I graduated in 2000, so we haven’t been homeschooling for a long time, but the Warings were friends of our before they moved out of state, so we wanted to see them. We figured out that it had been probably at least ten years since we had seen them, so it was great to catch up a little.

Diana spoke about bringing joy into home schooling and how it wasn’t about a formulaic process, but about bringing delight of knowledge. She used several Bible verses that speak of the joy of learning. She also explained some of the different learning styles and brought us threw some of her struggles and learning as she began home schooling so many years ago.

Anyway, when I got home I had an email waiting for me from one of my Chat-A-Book friends. “Can't wait till you see what we did! he he he” The Chatzy chat room we use keeps all the chat until it is manually cleared, so the whole session was there for me to read and let me tell you, I just about died laughing. When the cat’s away, the mice play! First there was all this “Amy’s not here. What trouble shall we make?” “Let’s kill off her character!” “Let’s kill off everyone!” “hhmm, Amy might not like that.” So they finally decided to do a dream. After all, several of the characters were in the hospital doped up with meds, right? Hallucinating dreams isn’t so far out there. Yup, so they killed almost all the characters and nearly killed me too, since I was hyperventilating from laughing so hard.