Tonight was the third night of Honors Week. I didn’t write about it last night because it seemed almost unholy to write about building kites in the same post that told of Sally’s death. So I’ll recap it in today’s post.
Warran Smith taught us the kites honor. We had 15 or 16 people there, and I think nearly everyone there built a kite. The honor requires us to build two different types of kites, so we’ll have to finish that up when regular meetings get underway. It was really a blast, and once we helped everyone tune their kites, every one of them flew. There were two basic adjustments that we needed to make: add more tail, and/or align the spine. Aligning the spine would balance the kite. If it tilted to the left when suspended by the bridle, we shifted the spine to the right, and vice versa. One kite refused to be balanced that way though, so we taped a chunk of a styrofoam cup to one side. That did the trick, and it flew within minutes.
Tonight was my night to teach, and I would say that I taught the Communications honor, except that… no one earned it other than me. 
I had been worrying about this one for a little while, and had started to regret proposing it. I spent six to eight hours sewing up semaphore flags over the past couple of days, making four pairs. Then I hacked another pair together in ten minutes when I got home tonight. The first four pairs are red and white triangles joined across the diagonal of a square. They are each hemmed neatly around the edges. The hack job was just solid red folded over and stitched to hold the flag pole. I was up until 2:00 last night making the red and white ones.
Me signaling B
We had ten people show up for this one, so attendance was down. I suspected it would be, and frankly, that’s what I was sorta hoping for. Jonathan came along, but he was suffering from a sinus infection and gave up 30 minutes into the class. He went to sleep on a couch in the Youth Room. The younger kids stayed focused anywhere between 10 seconds to an hour (depending on the kid). The adults and older kids/near-adults stuck with it the whole time, but no one other than me attempted to send a message while being timed. I sent 20 words in 2:47. That meets the 7 words per minute requirement. I had this fantasy that I would get 12 words per minute so I could claim the advanced honor too, but I just don’t think that’s going to happen! My strategy was to have everyone send the first 20 words of Philippians 4:8:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable
My thought was that if you could send “whatever is” really fast, you’d have time to think when sending “noble,” etc. By the time I was ready to send though, I could send pretty much every letter at the same speed, “whatever is” or something else.
I let the three people who were still interested in it at the end of the class take home a pair of flags each. Unless someone besides me learns this, I don’t think I can add the teacher diamond to the patch!
Once I got home, I made some adjustments to the answers I added to the Wikibook about a year ago. I know more about what works now than I did then, and the adjustments reflect that!
