"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Month: August 2017 Page 1 of 2

Kitchen remodel: The painting is complete

Painting #1Painting #2
Duane and Josiah, our new painter friends, finished up the painting for the remodel yesterday. It completely changed the appearance of the entire main floor of the house. Lorena was ecstatic with the result which the only measure of success. We have really enjoyed eating lunch with the painters every day and we will miss that a lot, but it is very nice to be able to see the hardwood floors again (they were covered with paper and blue tape to protect them from the painting process). Mark came in on Tuesday to put in the base moulding and finish a couple of other items on the punch list. He is scheduled to be here on Friday to do the final pass. The kitchen now looks pretty close to how it will appear when it is complete, but we will wait until it is all done before we take some pictures of the final result.

Painting #3

Painting #4

Kelly moves, takes on worthy endeavors and there are new clothes involved

Kelly's Melania Trump impressionThis is Kelly doing her Melania Trump impression. I guess now that she has moved uptown she needs to express herself with a high level of haute coutre. Actually, along with the move to a much better living situation, she is on the brink of some good, new and ambitious plans. She will start it all off next week with a trip to be with family and long time friends in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon followed by additional travel, preparation (hard preperation) for very difficult new endeavors. We hope we get to help her some with this through moral support and the odd weekend when she comes down her to wash clothes, play the piano and be pampered by Mom.

Kelly moves to better digs

Kelly moves to a new apartmentKelly, with massive help from Mama Lore, moved out of her apartment today. They have a really cool moving service in Seattle where you can have a couple of guys pick up your stuff from your apartment and store it for a month for under $100. That seems to be a really good price, especially for Seattle. Lorena is really glad to be moving out of a house of a bunch of girls to an apartment closer to her work and closer to downtown with one roommate. I am sure she will be sad she was not there to see the hunky guys pick up her stuff–Lorena handled that because Kelly was at work.

Now, Kelly is headed off to Mexico to see family and friends for a week or two with her friend Eliza. Of course we are all envious and would love to be in Monterrey eating tamales and mangoes with her über-hip uncles, but someone has to stay home and work.

Kelly draws for a week

Kelly visits for a drawing session or twoI have written extensively about our homeschool art classes (see here, hereherehere, and many more). One of our most fun, long running activities was to sit at the dining room table and draw together for a half an hour every day. One of the outgrowths of that was Kelly’s two year long, 5-day per week comic strip, Betty Blonde, in addition to the caricature and portrait skills she garnered. This turned us into avid art fans (we are art museum nuts) and avocational artists.

It was so nice that Kelly felt inspired to sit quietly and randomly cartoon for an hour or so while I worked on my Sickle Cell project. She really has not lost her touch. I keep browbeating her into spinning back up a comic strip. We developed quite a process to be able to publish her strips that involved drawing, scanning, inking, accumulation of frames, copyrighting, etc. We both miss it (the process, not the comics themselves, although we miss that, too).

Kitchen remodel: The painting has started

The painting has startedThe painting started early in the week, but has proceeded in small steps. The windows were sanded, primer coat was applied, there was more sanding, etc., etc. Hopefully this phase will be complete by the end of the weekend. We have not, as yet, seen the actually color that was selected except for the ceilings which are, unsurprisingly, “ceiling white.” Actually, this was a much bigger process than we thought it would be. The preparation and attention to detail is pretty amazing. We are very happy that it is Duane and Josiah doing the work. Duane in particular is a perfectionist.

Grandpa Milo’s And Grandma Sarah’s final resting place

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah interred at Willamette Nation Cemetary in PortlandAfter the funeral of Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah in January, Aunt Julia took the initiative for them to be interred in the Willamette National Cemetery near Portland. We had the privilege to put their remains there because of Grandpa Milo’s service during the Korean conflict where, among other things, he worked as a cook on the hydrogen bomb project in the South Pacific (Eniwetok). They gave him military honors, shot the guns, folded the flag and gave it to Julia, thanking her on behalf of the President, the US Army and a grateful nation. It is a beautiful ceremony taken very seriously and we were grateful. We had a short prayer, Aunt Jean read us Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright followed by a second poem read by Charlie. Finally, we drove over to the interment  wall and we all watched while Jean placed the box and the cover was put in place. The photo in this post, from left to right are Uncle Doug, Aunt Julia, Aunt Jean and Dad (me). Amy Louise, the remaining sibling, preceded Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah in death at age six months, the result of SIDS.

Click here to read their obituary.

A truncated train ride

The mystery ride to CentraliaSeveral months ago an Amtrak train derailed that Kelly was scheduled to catch for a ride to visit us in Centralia. She was stuck at the train station, but a mysterious and very handsome Englishman who smoked Gauloises cigarettes gallantly talked to a couple who had an SUV to take them along with an old married couple to Centralia, Portland and beyond. There was an old married couple and a hatchet in the door pocket of the back seat. If that is not a murder mystery, I do not know what is. Kelly had a great time and got this picture in an email today. She will probably never see them again, but she has a great story.

Refinishing projects: Staining for the first time in a long time

Second time refinish of the dining room tableLorena found some stain, tried it, did not like it, bought some more stain, decided to do the dining room table top, too, and here we are. She saw the desk at Goodwill a couple of weeks back, texted me a picture of it and said she did not want to buy that piece of junk because it had some pretty deep scratches in it. I told her to buy it and we can use it in the garage because it only cos $8.99. NOW, however, it was a brilliant idea she had to buy the thing because she could sand out those scratches with her brand new Walmart sander.

And yes this is the sander Aunt Jean bought for me when she came to visit in Corvallis in about 1983. We refinished it one time before when we lived in South Florida in the early 90’sStaring on the Goodwill desk. It was due for another pass. I must say, it is looking great. I view this as a very positive turn of events. I am going to have and excuse now to just say, “Why don’t you pick up something at Goodwill and refinish it? We really do not need something from Ethan Allen.” We have everything we need for the guest bedroom upstairs. When she finishes this, she wants to paint and put in an LVT “hardwood-look” floor.

We are deciding (that is the royal “we” because, actually, Lorena does all this kind of deciding) which room to do next. I am hoping it is the upstairs office, but I think she might be leaning toward the upstairs landing/library.

Refinishing projects: The Goodwill desk and the dining room table.

The refinishing desk (and dining room table)The painter is coming to start work this afternoon. Maybe that is what got Lorena inspired to start sanding stuff with her new Walmart sander (she LOVES it). She has the desk fairly close to being ready and from what I see in the bottom left of the image she texted me, it looks like she is getting close to refinishing the dining room table. She just needs to do one more pass with a finer grit and she will be ready to paint.

Kitchen remodel: The stove hood

After Mark attached all the drawer pulls yesterday afternoon, he stayed all evening to install the stove hood. It is not quite all done as he has to add some flashing on the outside of the house where the blower fan resides. Still, we can use the stove and hood now and we are quite pleased with it all.

Thermador stove hood from angle

Thermador stove hood straight on

Kitchen remodel: Cabinet glass and drawer pulls

Glass in the cabinetsThings are spinning back up again. Today, Mark put glass in the cabinets that needed them and add drawer pulls to the already installed cabinet door pulls. He also plans to have the stove hood up and working (with a little more work required for some flashing and other things when he comes back. Wednesday, the paint guy will start his work on the kitchen and living room. We can hardly wait to have this all finished.

Drawer pulls

How to not be assimilated by the Borg–resistence is not futile

Brave browser (click here to go to their website)Google, in the minds of many, is pretty much the devil. I have started to come around to that opinion myself. There are lots of people who believe this. The problem is there has never really been any other option. After the most recent spate of ignorance and draconian overreach when Google fired a guy for expressing an idea that is objectively true, I decided to see if I could bail out of use of the Google search engine because, in my opinion, they censors what is good and true to promulgate evil. I found out that is kind of a hard thing to do. There are some searches for my work at which Google is better than anything else available. That led me to the idea that I need to minimize my Google searches to those for which there is no other alternative.

The good news is that I found a solution. I wrote earlier (here) about what I believe to be malfeasance on the part of Mozilla in their treatment of a very good man. That man, Brendan Eich, got fired from Mozilla for unconscionable pretexts. Because he believes in and supports “traditional marriage” (just marriage for non-double-speak people), he got fired from Mozilla. He immediately started a competing browser company named Brave. I tried that browser when it first came out, but it really was not ready for prime time. I tried it again today because I was so feed up with Google and Mozilla and I have to say that if it is not yet ready for prime time, it is very, very close. In addition, they have a way to set my browser (I use DuckDuckGo to avoid Google for the vast bulk of my searches) and Google only for those where it works best–stuff where they cannot impose their extreme hard left-wing bias. Brave facilitates all of this and I am grateful. Check it out. Don’t get swallowed by the Borg.

The mountain appears as Kiwi does battle with the printer

Kiwi does battle with the printerThe weekend was an interesting one. Lorena, Kelly and I attended a church convention this weekend. I had not been to this particular one for over forty years. Even so, I made connection with old friends from Oregon, Washington, California, Virginia, and Arizona. Lorena so the sister of some dear friends of hers from Mexico City. It was a great weekend. While we were there, it rained enough to knock down sufficient smoke from the British Columbia forest fires that we could make out the outline of Mount Rainier out our back window.

Kelly spent the weekend here in Centralia. Lorena is driving with her back to Seattle and then taking the train back to Centralia. Kiwi is helping retrieve her Amtrak ticket from the printer.

Incredible evolution

When I say evolution is incredible, especially the abiogenesis part, I really mean it. It is not credible. James Tour is incredible, but in the popular sense of the word. Watch this video to see why.

Kitchen remodel: Semigloss hardwood floor

Retouch of floor -- matte to semi-gloss and defect repairWork inches forward on the remodel. We found some pretty serious defects in the floor, so the floor guy came back, fixed the defects, did something called “refill” and then put a coat of semi-gloss finish. Lorena was ecstatic with the finish. She liked the previous matte, but likes this much better. Next week we hope to have the stove hood in place, glass in the kitchen cabinets, and the painting mostly complete. The hood was planned for this week, so things have stretched out a little.

Using Mattermost

Using Mattermost from home serverI have installed a program named Mattermost on my home server. I have been using it for a couple of weeks and it is very powerful. In my previous job, we used a similar program named Slack that we used extensively. Both of these are super-capable chat clients. I figured out how to do task lists in Mattermost. This is a life saver for a lot of the stuff I am doing.

I like Mattermost best because it is free at the low level I need, easy to use, I can run it on my home server, and it does everything I want it to do.

Christian cleans up on visit home

Christian's haircut after Boston internshipIt seems like Christian makes a big effort to look a little scruffy whenever he comes to visit us. I used to think it was because he did not have time or just did not think about it, but now I like to think it because he likes his mom to make a fuss about it. She takes him down to one of the local haircut places, then he comes home, takes a shower and trims his beard.

We are up in Canada again for my work. Christian spent the night in Seattle so he could go out to dinner with Kelly and a few friends. One of those friends was John Michael, who recently moved out from North Carolina. He was a math major at North Carolina and spent many an hour with both Kelly in Christian in the undergraduate Math lounge in SAS Hall. I am sure they are having a great time. Christian flies back to Tempe, Arizona tomorrow night.

In the meantime, work is progressing at the house. It has slowed down fairly dramatically, but we have hope it will be complete before the end of August.

Family time: Turning off the telephone

August 6, 2017 Family PictureI did something yesterday I have not done in a long, long time: I turned off my telephone and just spent the day with the family. We tried to figure out when was the last time we had all been together as a family in our own home–not in apartment, not at a funeral or other event, but at home. The reality is that we have been very distributed for a long time. With Lorena and I in North Carolina or in an apartment in Texas, or Oregon, Kelly in Seattle and Christian in Tempe, it has taken some effort to get together. We have only been able to manage it a handful of times since we left our home in North Carolina, so it was very, very nice to be together again even for such a short time.

We did not do much. We went to church and ate out a couple of times, but mostly we hung out at home. Lorena and Kelly cooked and we talked and talked and talked. Kelly went home to Seattle last night. Christian is leaving to spend a couple of days with her in Seattle before he returns to school in Tempe. Lorena are trying to work out how and when we can do it again.

Kelly comes home to see Christian

Kelly comes home to see ChristianKelly came down for the weekend to bake blueberry muffins and spend some time with her baby brother. It is truly nice to be in a house (as opposed to the apartments we inhabited for the two previous years in Texas and Oregon) and the family is all together. This is the first time for that in over three years. We know it is fleeting, but it is a very good feeling that we hope to make happen more frequently now that we have a home base.

Christian’s natural habitat (Starbucks)

Christian studying at starbucksThis is Christian’s new habitat now that he does not have Mom’s kitchen island anymore. It has been fun to have him here and it is so nice to see him sitting down in the kitchen, thinking, playing his guitar, working on his computer, and studying while Lorena works in the kitchen. We miss that. We have been to Jimmy John’s twice, and out to breakfast three times since he has been here. Lorena has him all cleaned up with a new haircut. Lorena and Christian have been down to Anytime Fitness a couple of times with the obligatory stop at Starbucks for some coffee. Christian spends a lot of study time there. It is a way to keep going on his studies while avoiding being stuck in his apartment or the lab for ours on end. It is kind of amazing to us that he actually sits and just thinks a lot. It is part of the territory with his area of Information Theory. Most of all, though, we are trying to get him to forget all that for a few days and just relax. Maybe he will come back again before too long.

P.S. Note the nice new haircut. Mom dragged him down to the barber earlier today.

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