Elser Family Blog

Rockwell’s teacher made a video for every student. This is amazing! This was some serious work to do for every student in the class. I’m going to have to give her a nice end of the year present.
This video is a WMA file, 18meg.. so it might take a bit to load, but well worth it.
Comments please!

Kathi has taken charge of the garden this year.. so it might be more successful than in the past. heh.

Here are a couple early products! Boy, I never knew how fast radishes grow. It takes weeks, not months.

I posted an interesting entry to the smartkids.sc site.. its worth a mosey on over to check it out.. 🙂
Smartkids.sc Blog Post

And in the same group of pictures I found one that I did not publish.. (cell phone pics) This was the day that Melinda made some “dog Tacos” for Gigi.
Melinda has a very active imagination.

The Belizeian Manny is on his way to watch our children this summer.

Here is the path he will take to get here:

Van down the dirt road to placencia.
Boat about 90 miles to a port in Guatemala.
Cab to the bus station.
Bus to a small town in Guat.
Cab to the small airport.
Airplane to Atlanta.
Try and find Ed in Atlanta.
Drive to North Augusta, SC.

At this time today, he should just be getting off of the Boat.

He estimates the trip will take 27 hours.

He said he is already tired, because he couldn’t get to sleep last night.
Actually, to quote him:
“well it is 3 and I can’t sleep — dreading the adventure —– almost as many weak links today as Apollo 13”

He will be fine. We will be traveling to Atlanta tomorrow morning~!

Happy birthday Mom!
(OK, I’m a couple days late.. oops. 🙂 )
Ive got to call her to see what the driving situation is.. oh boy. Its like asking Mario Andretti not to drive.. “what else is there to leeive for?” (in Italian accent)

OK.. here is the video I promised of me helping Arthur with the removing of rust via electrolysis.. quite fascinating if you ask me. sorry for the poor video.

Here is an interesting summer project that Arthur Shealy has roped me into helping him with!
He has acquired an old Cane press that he is going to rebuild this summer. He plans on having it ready by the fall harvest season.. for what, you ask? He has also planed a quarter acre of sorghum! So, if all goes as planned this fall, we are going to have a sorghum press and boil this fall at the Shealy plantation. It sounds like it will be a regular down home party! It is an old press, one that needs to be powered by a mule.. Arthur has said that he knows someone with a mule, so we should not only have the press, AND the cane, but also a power source for the press! It really sounds like some old fashioned fun.

Here is what it should resemble when it complete.

Below is a picture of the second step of the rebuild.. (the first being the disassembly) We are removing the rust from this antique! And doing it in a interesting fashion if I say so myself. A scientific method! We are going to use electrolysis to convert the rust back to steel! This process does not actually add steel to the rusty item, Rather it makes the (former)rust easy to remove, without doing any more damage to the desired piece of rusty metal. This is a picture of our setup. all those items in the back are pieces we need to rehabilitate.

I also have some video of Arthur explaining the process.. I will add that later, I have to edit it first.

Isn’t this interesting?
OK, now all I have to do is get my wife Kathi to understand why I want to plant a couple hundred square feet of sorghum in our back yard.. 🙂

Here we go again.. going to try and start a garden again. It turns out we found out you can garden all year long in this part of SC.. I guess you just have to choose your veggies wisely. Perhaps we will give it a go!

Pretty Doggie.

Pretty Daughter. Not sure what the concern was. I just thought it was a cute picture.

Melinda dressed the same as her carebear.

Hannah Got to visit her future school this day.. she is going to be in middle school! The band was recruiting.

The kids future middle school.

Today, Hannah was awarded a writing award in the school DARE program. The Girl she is with is Rossie, her friend. Rossie and Hannah compete with reading and academics in general.. but the really like each other. They both won the opportunity to read their paper to the whole 5th grad class at the award ceremony.. Rossie’s dad is the city administrator for North Augusta. (click on the picture to see a video of Hannah reading her award winning essay)

We visited Arthur’s plantation this weekend.. Melinda was begging to go for a swim. We thought the water was going to be cold, but it was actually OK. Of course, the hot day (low 90’s) helped make a a good swimming day.

One of the few pictures I sneak into.. actually, I had to zoom on on this one. It was taken from the other side of the pool by Hannah, I’m guessing.