After staying up so late last night we had to sleep in some this morning. Today is a big project day with a lot of work to be done. Both Dominica and I got right to work this morning on our weekend projects and worked busily into the afternoon. For lunch we just had our leftovers from the Omega Diner last night which were almost as good today as they were last night.
Early this afternoon we decided to take Oreo for a drive in the convertible and go up to Hunterdon County and look at the house and the area around it. Dominica has not been there since we went for the tour several weeks ago and has never had a chance to drive around the area at all. So we drove out to Lebanon and took some quick pictures in the village so that people could see what the place looks like and then we took a few pictures up at the house so that we could show you the house and the view. Then we zipped back around back of the house to the lake since no one is going to believe what that lake looks like. I am looking forward to being able to go for walks back there. The big downside to the lake is that it is a resevoir and it is fenced off near our house so we can see it but we can walk down to the shore. Instead we have to go around to the park entrance which isn’t very far but it is a bit long for a casual walk. But there is a boat launch very close to the house so we could easily use it quite often so, of course, we are kicking around the idea of getting kayaks. The lake is very still and perfect for small watercraft like that. Nothing like the Finger Lakes where a large boat is a much better idea.
We drove over to Clinton so that we could see what the nearest “big” town was like. We were hoping that there would be some shopping there as Lebanon has nothing at all. Fortunately Clinton has a Walmart and a ShopRite and a few other things so we will be able to get most of our supplies there. Clinton is only a few minutes away on the highway so it won’t be bad getting things there even though we have to leave town to do all of our shopping.
We came home and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening hard at work on our respective projects. For dinner we just ordered some pizza from Domino’s. I wasn’t really hungry but Dominica wanted pizza.
Dominica is starting to get eye strain from working on the computer all day long and so had to take a break to do a little reading and then to watch a movie. She watched The Perfect Score which I saw last week on the train from Rochester to New York City. It really isn’t that good of a movie. Watching it again pointed out even more how it was written by illiterate losers who probably did really poorly on the test, for obvious reasons, and set out to make a movie attacking it. It was quite clear from the movie’s dialogue that the writers were quite unaware of the mechanics of the test and did not even do the most basic research into the test that I would expect from any high schooler or parent of a high school who may be taking the test. Things like the fact that the minimum score is a 400 with a minimum of 200 points given for either half and that you final SAT score is the highest cumulative of your best English portion and your best Math portion. That and the absurd notion that you have to have some insanely high SAT score to get into any good college. The numbers in the real world simply do not bear that out. People often claim that you have to have a 1400+ SAT score to get into many “good” schools and that this is a hard fact and that no one has ever gotten in with less than that but when you actually look at that particular school you discover that its AVERAGE SAT score for its students is generally hundreds of points below the “number you have to have to get in.” For all of you who failed elementary math – that means that only a handful of students ever had those really high scores and that just as many students were probably admitted with really low scores to average out the high ones! When I was looking at colleges many years ago the highest average SAT score of any school in the nation was only 1280 and the next was 1240 and the rest were in the 1100’s or below. Now that was some years ago and the numbers have changed over time but the basics are still there. People claim that some schools like Harvard only accept people with perfect scores. Think about that. If Harvard accepts 6,000 freshman each year (which is approximately correct) and there are only twenty perfect scores each year (which is approximatley correct – I researched both numbers) then it takes 300 years of SAT takers to turn out a single freshman class at Harvard assuming that every perfect scorer lived at least 318 years and waited until Harvard was ready to accept them all at once and that they new that Harvard was going to exist and that the SAT’s existed in 1706 since if those people waited to take the SAT’s by even a single year it would throw off the averages again messing up the whole thing. And that also assumes that Harvard has never had a freshman class until 2006.