Looks like she made her local paper.

Pastor taught in Africa
(Sandra Baer, Dayton Daily News, 12 Jun 2008)

The Rev. Ruth M. Brandon of Bellbrook traveled far and wide before moving to Bellbrook, where she lives and serves as an Association Minister for the Southwest Ohio Northern Kentucky Association Ohio Conference of the United Church of Christ.

An Ohio native, Brandon was born in Greenville, but moved to Vermont with her mother and two brothers following the death of her father, who was also a minister.

…

A little over half an hour ago, I dropped Amy off at school for the last day of 7th grade. It is a short day. Brandy will pick her up and she will be home by noon. At will also be the last day at Eastside Prep. This makes me sad, but as I’ve talked about before this year was a rocky year. The school, which had been a wonderful place for us in 6th grade, had just not lived up to expectations in 7th grade. Too much of the time it felt like we (and Amy) were in conflict with the school rather than feeling like the school was really doing their best to act in the best interests of Amy. Conflict over things that should have been no-brainers and obvious or at least easily resolved, which instead became soul-sucking battles. Things got a lot better in the third trimester when we had Amy switched back to the advisor she had in 6th grade who we liked a lot, rather than the advisor Amy had most of the year who Amy just never really got along with. The little things make a huge difference. But it was too late. A lot of the trust and faith we had in the school was already gone. And Amy and Brandy had already fallen in love with a new school.

In the fall Amy will be attending Chrysalis. As is probably obvious just from the name, it is a much less traditional program than EPS. Lots of one on one classes. (All math classes for instance, are always one on one.) In general class size is much smaller than the 30 that is typical in a public school, or even the 15 or so that was normal at EPS. Classes tend to be more like 6 students. And they put an emphasis on matching the right students to the right teachers (and classmates) to ensure a good match in personality, learning style, etc. There is also a lot of emphasis on flexibility. In classes where the student is ahead and going quickly (in Amy’s case Math for instance) they enable that. In cases where the student needs some extra pushing (in Amy’s case study skills) they spend extra time on that. Things like that. There are some bits that I’m worried might be a bit wishy washy and allow the students to slack a bit in some cases, but we shall see.

In the mean time, we just got a call from Amy, extremely upset, because she hadn’t gotten her yearbook when they were handed out today. They say we never submitted the form and paid and all that. Of course we had in fact done those things. Brandy is now rushing to the school to try to resolve the issue and make sure Amy has a yearbook that her friends can sign and such.

As if we needed it, final proof we made the right decision.

The most recent Curmudgeon’s Corner is now fixed. Well, it ain’t a masterpiece, but it is a lot better than it was.

If anybody tried to listen and gave up because it was unlistenable, force your podcast catching software to download it again and you should be good to go. Apologies for the problem.

For anybody who cares, the issue is with Garage Band’s Autonormalize option, which is supposed to BOOST the volume to a normalized level if the highest volume in your audio is lower than full volume. For whatever reason, it instead decided to dampen the volume. And for that matter just completely ignore the differing volumes I’d put on different tracks, the filters I had in place, etc. I turned that off and the results were once what I actually heard while editing in Garage Band.

Now, having said that, there was still an issue with my voice quality in the second half, as when I dropped Cynthia and went solo, unbenounced to me it stopped using my headset mic and started using the built in mic. But I knew that already when I was editing.

I’d always basically trusted in the past though that what I heard in Garage Band was basically what would be in the output once I exported. Guess I shouldn’t trust that. Bleh.

Also, let me just say, trying to troubleshoot and adjust things in Garage Band over a slow VNC connection from the other side of the continent from my desktop is a major pain. This is something I will try to avoid in the future.

I’ve “selected my seat” a bunch of different times for my flight Monday, but it keeps getting reset. I set them all when I first booked the tickets a few weeks ago. I selected again about a week ago. And I go now to double check the exact time of my flight and all, and two out of my four legs are reset again. Grrr…. here I go again. Less good seats to choose from now of course. And I bet when I actually get to the airport, I’ll have to select my seats yet again. Grrr…

I am sick today. And late to work. But I”ll drag myself in because of one meeting I want to make sure I’m at. Otherwise I’d consider staying home. Oh well. Off I go.