Stream of consciousness

For today’s 500 words, I’m giving you stream of consciousness. I don’t particularly like doing that, but writing 500 words of any kind counts.

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Yesterday was a fun day for our family. Last semester my daughter auditioned for the Oklahoma Choral Directors Association All-State chorus and made it in. In fact, she was the only person from Cimarron Middle School! Yesterday was the concert; Gramma and Papa came over from Tulsa to enjoy it with us. She was in the women’s treble chorus with 159 other young women. They performed:

* A Festive Call to Praise (Joseph Martin)
* Lachen und Weinen (Franz Schubert, arr. Linda Spevacek)
* Set Me as a Seal (Rene’ Clausen)
* Hamisha Asar (Flory Jagoda, arr. Page Ladino)
* Dance on my Heart (Allen Koepke)
* Ouvre ton Coeur (Georges Bizet, arr. Biddlecombe)

The choir was *awesome*! I was quite impressed by the fact that they performed three foreign language songs and that they performed them beautifully! I am very proud of my daughter!

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Some of you may not be aware that my daughter and I (mostly me :p) maintain a blog over at theFAQs.net. It’s a blog full of end-user-focused tech tips and tricks. Currently, we’re filling out a series of Google search quick tips. We just posted the sixth tip in the series. We’ll go at least to 10, but maybe even as many as fifteen or twenty. We’ll see. We invite you to check it out and tell your friends about it! In fact, if you want to know how to do something, we have a way for you to send in your questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

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While I’m discussing my kids, I should mention that my son is really into Tai Kwon Do. He’s been taking classes for only a couple of months and he breezed through the white belt and got his orange belt just before the holidays. I suspect that he will advance to the next level pretty quickly. Last Friday at his practice, another kid’s mom leaned over to me and asked how long he’d been taking classes. I told her just a couple of months and she responded, "Wow! He’s *good*!" I’m pretty sure I was beaming. :p Now, I’m a football guy, and what football guy who’s a dad doesn’t want his son(s) to be interested in football? Well, my boy hasn’t really been all that interested in football until recently. Want to know what’s doing the trick? Madden 2013 on the x-box! LOL!

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This coming Tuesday I begin classes to get my online teaching certification from Sloan Consortium I've been teaching online and teaching others how to teach online for a good while now. When I started, certifications like this didn't exist. Now Sloan-C has created a *strong* certificate program, and I and my team jumped at the opportunity. We believe this certification, especially because it is from a credible consortium, will gain our team a greater level of respect from the faculty we work with at Oklahoma Christian University. Not only that, each of us on the team teach courses that are either entirely online or blended/hybrid. What we learn or have confirmed as we participate in this certificate program will benefit students in our own classes.