Month: February 2011

We dropped Christian off at the NCSU library of Friday night after dinner at a restaurant in Cameron Village, then made our way over to the Raleigh Little Theater to see The Man Who Came to Dinner.  It was a great play.  Kelly said she loved it, but has a special place in her heart for Charlie’s Aunt which we have seen twice, once here in Raleigh and once at the community theater in Albany, Oregon.  It was a great play and a super good time with the Stepps.  We all decided we have to do it again soon.  Christian, for his part, found that almost no one goes to a university library on a Friday night.  He said it was little bit creepy up on the ninth floor of a totally empty building at 10:30 PM.  He said it was even creepier going down the stairwells on his way out.

Kelly and I went to our bi-weekly GaugeCam meeting on Saturday.  It was great to have Andrew back.  It is not the same without him.  We made some great progress and Kelly got some private tutoring from Dr. Birgand on the R statistical programming language.  In the meantime, Christian headed back to the NCSU library for another long session which he continued when we got home in the afternoon.  He continued after church on Sunday and should be able to finish the thing up tonight.  I am sure his paper on the cipher machine used by the Japanese in World War II called Purple will benefit from his herculean effort.  I did not even know something like Purple existed, but I get to proofread the paper tonight, so I expect to know a lot more shortly.  It sounds very interesting.

We are going to see a play this evening with our great friends, the Stepps.  We hardly ever see them anymore because we have switched to a new Sunday morning meeting.  The venue is the Raleigh Little Theatre.  I will report the results tomorrow.  The last time we went to a play with the Stepps, they took us to the Dos Taquitos restaurant in downtown Raleigh.  We could not recommend it more highly–great Mexican food and we think the owners are from South America.  South Americans are notoriously bad at Mexican food, but this was absolutely fabulous.  Tonight, we are going to go out to eat before the play.  Lester and Esther have been here a long time and know a LOT more about the great places to eat than us Oregonians, so they are going to pick the place.  That should be just as fun as the play.

Poor Christian.  He has a big paper due on Tuesday, so we are going to drop him off at the NCSU library after dinner so he can study.  We will be feeling pretty sorry for him, but at least he will get a great meal if Lester and Esther maintain the string of great restaurant picks.  I will report back next post.

The kids have a Calculus mid-term today.  It is amazing how much more efficient they are now at math test preparation compared to when they started last September.  They stayed up late last night to prepare.  Christian has a big paper due for his history class next Tuesday and a speech and a paper due for his psychology class on Thursday.  Kelly has a statistics mid-term next week.  They also have the normal daily homework, but it surely appears as though they know how to go about it more efficiently and less emotionally.  After the test today, Christian will go back to the NCSU library to finish the research for his paper.  He will go again tomorrow night to start the writing.  Spring break is coming mid-week next week.  They only get four days off for spring break with a weekend in the middle for a total of six days.  That is oddly short, but the up side is that they get off in early May.  Grandma and Grandpa will arrive the day before the break, so they will definitely have some down time.  Christian’s plan is to hang out and play his guitar.  Kelly plan is to hang out, draw Betty Blonde and work on her new web site.  She be fun but relaxing.

Kelly and I talk regularly about her “new media” plan.  After her “hard” degree in math and statistics, she wants to go on to a graduate degree in something that engages in the public discourse.  She has investigated things like summer internships at National Review and the World Journalism Institute, but she needs some more formal writing experience to be able to get into a program like that.  She investigates opportunities to get that experience as she has time and will discuss that on her blog as she begins to participate in them.  In the meantime, she wants to practice.  There are two ways she plans to get that practice.

First, she wants to continue with Betty Blonde.  It was difficult to just quit cold turkey after two years of daily strips, but she needed to do that to concentrate on a full load of college classes.  She did a good job last semester as a full time student, but with a light load.  This semester she is doing even better with a sixteen hours that include four credit classes in Statistics and her second semester of Calculus.  She has a good system for both test and daily class preparation so that we have many fewer “hair on fire” days this semester than last even though her work load is significantly heavier.  Kelly feels like she has time now to write one or two daily Betty Blonde strips per week.  She also feels, and I agree, that her comic strip is a core element of her preparation for life after her bachelor degree.

There are several things we have to prepare before she can restart the strip.  My part of this will include a rewrite of the BleAx program so that it is easier to use and does not require my participation.  I also need to work with Kelly (with input from Christian) to design a new Betty Blonde site.  We are not sure whether we want to do this from scratch or use WordPress again.  We will be able to get by with the old BleAx program for awhile, but we cannot even start until the new web site is up and running.  Do not fear, all the old strips will be included in the new site.

Second, Kelly plans to start a new blog just for writing and a few photos.  She has not chosen a name yet and she is still thinking about topics.  The purpose of the blog is to practice and try out new stuff that has to do with where she plans to go with her studies and career.  I do not want to steal any of her thunder on that, but will report on this a little more as we move forward.  When we get the two new web sites up and going, I will prevail on Kelly to write introductory posts here to introduce her new stuff.  We are probably a month or two away from these new beginnings.

I have a great job that I love, but it is a long way from where I live.  When I took the job, it was agreed that I could work from home 2/3 days per week.  Today I am at home and will start work as soon as I finish this post.  There is a real up side to not having to drive for forty minutes to get to work.  On the other hand, I am not really a “work at home” kind of guy.  There is WAY too much food around here.  Still, under the right circumstances, I can get a LOT more done here than at work.  Part of that has to do that I have two extra hours to get it done, but the isolation helps, too.  I am a social guy, so I do not like it as much, but it helps.  I have VNC to get onto the company computers and communicate with the office with email and Skype.  It all works amazingly well.  Best of all, Lorena brings me breakfast at my desk!!!  What a wife.  It is even more amazing today because she is having her annual checkup and the doctor said she had to fast after midnight until they took samples, so she made breakfast for me without having any for herself!

I received a couple of comments about my long hiatus from blogging.  When I complained about it to my kids, they gave me no sympathy and said get back to blogging.  And here I am.  The reality was that, after the kids started at college, I struggled trying to figure out what to write.  There was the added pressure of a new job and it was just more convenient not to think about it.  That is over now.  It is time to get back in the saddle.  Kelly and I are in on-going talks about what she needs to do, in addition to her school, to prepare for a career.  She has narrowed her goals down to something manageable enough that we have the beginnings of a plan–thank goodness it involves Betty Blonde.  I will save the whole plan for another day, but it has us excited.  It has also increased the length of our to-do lists.  As for Christian, we got him a new guitar (with mother-of-pearl in-lays–way cool!) that he plays whenever he can squeeze in a minute or two between studies.  We bought a BeagleBoard so we can build a vision system for a side project.  Christian will help me with some of the development on that.

I will try to spend the rest of the week on our scheduled revamp of Betty Blonde and a couple of projects.  Our original Betty Blonde rework plan did not work out so well, so we went back to the drawing board.  As for the projects, everyone has been so busy, we have not had much time to pursue and “fun” stuff, but we have decided we need to try to get back to that.