Susan is now 21!

Susan is in Washington, D.C. this summer and turned 21 today. My brother Paul and his wife Sue were near DC for a conference so they spent all day Friday and part of Saturday with her. I am so glad they were able to spend so much time with her.

I believe they went to the Art museum and the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian. They had lunch at the National Museum of the American Indian which serves native meals.

Today Susan went to dinner with some other interns and had a pomegranate martini. It took her an hour to drink it and since she didn't stir it, it was rather strong by the time she finished it.

The Dali Lama is going to speak in DC tomorrow morning. I guess some of the interns are planning on going. I don't think Susan will be going.

Haskell Alumni of Oklahoma Scholarship

We found out Thursday that Susan had been awarded one of the two $500 scholarships from the Haskell Alumni of Oklahoma Association.

This was great news, especially since she hadn't even applied for it.

One of the alumni members (Carmen Ketcher) knows my mother fairly well. It was my mothers talk about Susan that got her the scholarship.

The alumni association was having their yearly reunion on Saturday so Susan and I went to the Executive meeting that they had in the morning. We got to meet Carmen Ketcher who nominated Susan for the scholarship. The president of Haskell was there.

Carmen will award Susan with the scholarship later this month in an assembly at Haskell. I'm sure there will be lots of other people receiving awards and scholarships at the assembly.

We ran into Clarence Hill in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. He's a fellow programmer here at *&^%$. He was there for a meeting for his church. It's a small world.

UsbConnect with AT&T

There is no wifi provided at Haskell Indian Nations University, so our internet options for Susan were: dsl, cable, cell phone/blue tooth, cityWireless, cell phone, and cell phone/usb.

dsl: Since she will be moving to another dorm next semester, I really didn't want the hassle of dsl or cable. I don't know what the fee's are for starting/stopping service but I assume it's at least $20 each time we start, move, or stop service.

cable: Same stuff as with dsl.

cell phone/blue tooth: I also didn't want to make her use the blue tooth connection from her cell phone to the pc. It just seems like a pain in the butt. I didn't really look into the costs of this either.

cityWireless: this is what I really wanted to get. But her dorm room is too far from the tower to be usable. It's interesting stuff though. The problem with these city wide wireless things is that your pc doesn't send a strong enough signal to the tower. So you can see the connection on the pc but your pc needs to yell at the tower "hey - go to google.com! or - upload this picture to picasa". You end up having to get a signal booster. Best Buy had one of these boosters that was like a hub. So several people could hit the booster for their internet access. I thought that was pretty cool.

Cell Phone: My brother, Paul, suggested she use an i Phone or some other phone that she could surf with. I think I'll wait until cell phones are more like laptops before we go down this route. In a few years, cell phones will probably hook up to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor via bluetooth or whatever. Basically replacing the need for laptops. Ok, maybe the laptop will be just a screen, keyboard, mouse, and battery which you dock your phone into.

cell phone/usb: I ended up getting Susan the UsbConnect service from AT&T. It's $60 a month (ouch!) but it's unlimited access[1], faster than dial-up and slower than dsl. She can get on the internet anywhere she has cell phone service. There was a $30 setup kind of fee (ouch again). The UsbConnect device is around $150 but we got a $100 mail-in rebate.

We hooked it up at the store to Susan's laptop and it started loading the software needed to get this working. It probably took an hour for this process to complete. We ended up leaving the store with it running. It was done about the time we got home. I think it's kind of cool that we were able to drive around while it was connected to the internet and downloading/installing.

So far this seems to work pretty well. New she can take her laptop just about anywhere and get on the internet.

LoJack for Laptops: Now I need to get her lojack for laptops which is $30 a year. This service is supposed to ping their servers whenever the pc is on the internet. If you report the laptop stolen, they can track down the IP and contact the ISP so the police can go arrest the thief. Someone at UCO had this service and they found the laptop within hours. Pretty cool. I wonder if the police would be able to find the laptop if someone was using UsbConnect. It depends on how close AT&T can pinpoint the signal, like they are supposed to do for 911 calls.

*[1]AT&T says it's unlimited access, but while I was researching this, I found out that there is a 5gig a month limit (I believe the limit is on the download side). I asked about it at the store and was told she wouldn't use that much but we probably wouldn't be charged unless she went over the 5gig limit more than 2 months in a row. I'll believe it when I see it.

Looking at our bill, she has used 38mb out of 5120mb over 4 days. Looks like they will charge us $0.00048 per kb over 5gig. This is around $0.5 per mb, I think.

Susan is now at college

We left Susan at Haskell around 12:30 this afternoon. It really wasn't too bad. We're gonna miss her but she's in a better place now.

We arrived in Lawrence around 3:00 pm Friday and went downtown to show Kimberly and Laura the hippy shop. I think it's called 'the third planet'. Kimberly got a new purse and I finally got an FSM emblem to put on my bike.


Funny bumper sticker Kimberly pointed out yesterday -

Lawrence Kansas - 27 square miles of reality surrounded by Kansas

We ate at Carlos O'Kelly's mexican restaurant.

This morning we got up and drove down to Haskell to get Susan checked into her dorm room. Apparently, they decided to not put both male and female freshmen in the same building. So we went to the one that had the sign 'new student housing'. After waiting in line for 20 minutes, we found out that this was the boys dorm. So we hiked to the girls dorm and stood in line again.

Susan's room was pretty small. Her room mate is from Collinsville, OK.

We went to the Parent Orientation and brunch and then on back to the dorms. We helped Susan get settled a little more and said our goodbyes.

We were 5 miles away when Susan called and said to come back, she was moving rooms and needed help. It took about 20 minutes to get back and her first room was empty. We asked about her and someone told us she was upstairs. So we head upstairs and I start knocking on doors. The first door that someone answered was Susan's room.

Wow - what a move. This room was made for 3 people and it just has Susan and her room mate.
The A/C didn't seem to work very well but it's big. It does have a rather large breaker box near Susan's bed. So I guess they could turn off power to most of the building or at least their floor if they wanted to break the lock and flip some breakers. We helped her get settled again and said our goodbyes, again.

I didn't get many pictures and some aren't very good but... go HERE to see them

Red Earth and the Girls

I am so proud of my 'little' girls! They did very well in the basket and beading competitions!

Susan got First Prize (and $100) for her basket!


Kimberly got Second Prize (and $75) for her beaded choker!



Kimberly got Third Prize (and $50) for her basket!


All the money is going into their savings accounts.

Thanks to the Indian Education Program at Edmond Public Schools for their help in making the baskets and bead work!

Here is a link to the article about this that was in the Edmond Sun.

Susan's Graduation

Susan is now a high school graduate! There were about 19 of us there for the ceremony.

I was pretty stressed about getting downtown and parked and then from the parking garage to 235 afterwards. Turns out, that part was the easiest.

I guess I was responsible for finding out where to go once we got into the Cox Center. I had only been there to go to a home and garden show. We finally made it to some decent seats after 2 or 3 wrong turns.

Afterward we all made it to El Parian in Edmond and had a great dinner. Except for Yana - I guess she shouldn't have had the guacamole. After a little coaxing from Laura, Susan stood up and thanked everyone for showing up. She did a pretty good job, I guess all those presentations at school paid off.

Susan managed to get $240 and some other great stuff.

NDN Hand Game Event

The four of us went to a dinner and hand game event last night. The event was put on by the Edmond Public Schools Native American Education program. It was a great time. Many thanks to everyone who helped run this event - Mrs. Yellowfish, Mrs. Smith, and Susan. I don't remember the other peoples names.

We were fed Corn Soup, Fry Bread, Grape Dumplings, fruits, and brownies. Very good stuff. I got some tips on making Grape Dumplings. My first try wasn't all that good. Susan wants me to make them for her internship presentation.

The hand game was played by the Plains Indians back in the day and is a lot of fun. We played the version that the Ponca and some other tribes played.

You have two teams and one team guesses and one teams hides. The hiding team has 2 small objects and one of each is given to two players. They put their hands behind their backs and when they are ready, show their clenched fists. The guesser has to guess which hands the objects are in. If he/she are right, then the guessing team hides and the hiding team guesses. If he/she guesses wrong, the hiding team gets one or two points (depending on whether they guessed wrong for both or just one of the hidden objects).

Each team starts out with 5 sticks/points and you win when you have all 10 sticks/points.

While the games is going on, the singers are drumming and singing. The hiding team claps and tries to distract the guesser by waving their hands in between the guesser and the hiders. This is one the really fun parts.

Our team got creamed. We lost the last game in less than 2 minutes. It only took about 4 bad guesses.

Almost everyone won a door prize - mostly t-shirts and canvas bags. A really nice Pendleton briefcase was the 'big prize'.

Here are some pictures of the event:

American Indian Chamber of Commerce Scholarship

Susan was one of the 5 finalists for the AICCO scholarship (http://aicco.org/). This is a $1000 scholarship for Native American high school seniors who live in the OKC Metro area.

The AICC held a luncheon today for the finalists at Twin Hills Country Club.

She didn't win. But all 5 finalists were given a savings account with Bank2 (owned by the Chickasaw Nation) with $100 in it. The interest rate is around 3.9%. So we may move her savings account. Just gotta figure out how to get the money to her after she starts college.

Susan's mentor, Mrs. Yellowfish, attended the luncheon with Susan, Laura, and I. Here is a picture of Susan and Mrs. Yellowfish.


Mrs. Yellowfish has been such a great teacher and mentor to Susan. I know Susan will look back at her school days and think that Mrs. Yellowfish was one of her best and most influential teachers.

Here is a picture of Susan receiving her $100 saving account:

Trip to Lawrence

What a fun 5 hour drive it was to Lawrence Kansas! Nothing exciting, just a 5 hour drive. The Kansas turnpike got at least one thing right, the gas/food stops are in between the north and south bound lanes. Their turnpike radio station was helpful, it said the low temps would be around 45. At that point, Susan and I looked at each other and realized we didn't bring any kind of jacket or warm shirts. I spent a couple of hours Wednesday night finding Wal-mart and buying a couple of sweat shirts. They worked well on our tour of the campus.

Lawrence does have hills. One I drove on was very steep (made my ears pop). I had assumed the city was pretty flat.

There are tons of stores and restaurants.

My favorite bar I saw was the Phoggy Dogg. My favorite restaurant was Carlos O'Kelly's Mexican Restaurant. I've gotta get shirt from Carlos's when I go back in May for Susan's pre-enrollment.

Haskell seems like a great little university. It seemed like a small town, you get to know everyone. They also have several clubs/groups the kids can join. The first year, the counselors keep a pretty close eye on them and try to keep them on campus. We ate lunch at the cafeteria and it was pretty good. It was amazing to see all the license plates in the parking lot - California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and a few from Kansas.