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

Year: 2014 Page 11 of 13

Even more three wheel cars

Day 901 of 1000

Who would have ever guessed.  Three-wheeled madness is coming out of the woodwork.  Gene is actually working (on an extended schedule) on a building a three wheeler.  See his blog on his effort here.  He even provides a page that holds a bunch of links on the history of three-wheelers here.  Actually, that whole website is very interesting.  I just know I am going to get enticed into buying an Elio.  The thing that gives me pause, though, is this youtube video from Trisha:

Betty Blonde #65 – 10/15/2008
Betty Blonde #65
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Three wheel cars

Day 900 of 1000

With only 100 days left in our 1000 day count, my buddy Eric left a very interesting comment on my post about Elio Motors, the three wheel company. with a link to a strange three wheel car company called Twentieth Century Motor Car Company.  It is stranger even than the last, drug dealing days of DeLorea Motor Company and not in a good way.  The crazy thing is the two three wheel cars have a lot in common including a specification of 84 miles per gallon gas mileage and a very low price.  Maybe this idea’s time has come, but the leadership of the older company see more in line with the spirit of 2014 than the spirit of 1974.  It is an interesting read.

Betty Blonde #64 – 10/14/2008
Betty Blonde #64
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Elio Motors

Day 899 of 1000

Late last year on my way home from Arizona, I went to the wrong gate by accident and set by a nice fellow with whom I struck up a conversation.  I almost missed my plane, but had a fascinating discussion about a new company that had been started to build a new kind of inexpensive 2-seat, 3-wheel car.  He was one of the V.P.’s of the company and explained it all in some detail.  The name of the company is Elio Motors.  They have identified a manufacturing facility in Louisiana and are scheduled to start delivering cars in 2015.  Because it is a three wheel vehicle, they have done a lot of work to assure and to demonstrate its safety.  They expect it to receive a 5-star safety rating.  It gets 84 miles per gallon with an 8 gallon tank–over 600 miles on a tank of gas is pretty amazing.  It is not a speed burner, but it goes 0-60 in 9.6 seconds so it is at least respectable.  The retail price is low enough, $6800, that I am very tempted to get one for going to work.  It looks pretty nice, too.
Elio 3-wheel car

Betty Blonde #63 – 10/13/2008
Betty Blonde #63
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The last Job Fair at NCSU

Day 898 of 1000

Christian is attending the job NCSU job fair looking for internships.  Kelly is there, too, but she is working the booth for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.  It is pretty hard work doing both.  I hope to have a picture of one or both of them later today.

Update: Christian before he cleans up to go to the job fair:

Christian before he cleans up to go to the job fair

Betty Blonde #62 – 10/10/2008
Betty Blonde #62
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PhD application: The first official acceptance letter has arrived from UCSD

Day 897 of 1000

Christian's first PhD acceptance letter from UCSD

Betty Blonde #61 – 10/09/2008
Betty Blonde #61
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Flagstaff

Day 895 of 1000

I made the beautiful drive from Prescott to Flagstaff for gospel meeting this afternoon. Flagstaff is nothing short of stunning spectacular. I could live here.

Update:  I had a an hour and a half to kill, so I made my way over to the Northern Arizona University campus.  It is a beautiful campus, but the setting at the foot of a big mountain is beyond beautiful.  I am sitting in the NAU main library and it is a wonderful facility.  No wonder so many people want to come here.  Very impressive.

Betty Blonde #60 – 10/08/2008
Betty Blonde #60
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Romans 12

Day 894 of 1000

I read through Romans 12 today.  It reminded me again that the Bible is full of statements that shaped the world.

9 Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.
10 Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another;

15 Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.
16 Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.
17 Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.
18 If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

There is an amazing standard of conduct described there.  It is uniquely Christian.  This is the standard to which we are all held.  Some do a much better job than others at upholding it, be we all fail–miserably–in the end.  It is always worth the effort to strive for this kind of conduct.  There are temporal benefits to attaining it, but the eternal ones are profoundly greater.

Betty Blonde #59 – 10/07/2008
Betty Blonde #59
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Dueling invitations

Day 893 of 1000

Well, Christian’s second invitation has now arrived from the Electrical Engineering department at UCSD. How sad would it have to be to go to school at the beach in San Diego. They want him to fly out to visit the school at exactly the same time as the Arizona State invitation.  The professor who invited him is from what looks like a very interesting lab. Maybe there will be more, but he feels pretty grateful for these

Betty Blonde #58 – 10/06/2008
Betty Blonde #58
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Narcissism

I had occassion to read this article titled “Don’t date a girl who travels.”  It talks about the type of woman who is solely devoted to her own pleasure to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.  Her life is all about her.  She wants this. She wants that. You are boring. The money about always going where she wants, when she wants, doing what she wants, in the end, makes for a wasted life.

Chances are, she can’t hold a steady job. Or she’s probably daydreaming about quitting. She doesn’t want to keep working her ass off for someone else’s dream. She has her own and is working towards it. She is a freelancer. She makes money from designing, writing, photography or something that requires creativity and imagination. Don’t waste her time complaining about your boring job.

Don’t date a girl who travels. She might have wasted her college degree and switched careers entirely. She is now a dive instructor or a yoga teacher. She’s not sure when the next paycheck is coming. But she doesn’t work like a robot all day, she goes out and takes what life has to offer and challenges you to do the same.

In their travels, many of these people do not have a high enough level of education nor literacy to understand what they were seeing because they are too busy thinking about where they want to be or what they want to be doing rather than productively learning something or working in a way that benefits society. Sadly, their curiosity generally extends to what they learn “in the moment” so they know little or nothing about the places they visit.

I have traveled a lot to places like Taiwan, Korean, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, England, Czech Republic, Israel, etc. The reason I have had time and opportunity to travel was not because I spent all my time and resources on myself.  Rather it was because I was willing to forgo doing the “fun” stuff like being a dive instructor or yoga teacher (as if yoga were fun or interesting).  I got to travel because of hard work at school in a hard degree and a steady job so I could contribute productively to society. My company sent me, sometimes along with friends or family to all these places.

This is one of those things about which we warned our children.  Cheap and easy is not even gratifying in the short term.  Think of a life lived like that and how it culminates in little worth having. People are more important, interesting, and gratifying than places. Those who are dedicated solely to their own fulfillment and “things” like travel are destined to live boring lives.

100 days until commencement

Day 892 of 1000

We are now only 100 days away from commencement for Kelly’s and Christian’s graduation.  Both of the kids have signed up for graduation.  All they have to do is pass their current courses and they are done.  The crazy thing is we do not yet know what will happen next.  The one thing that has been confirmed is Kelly’s return to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for a second summer internship.  Everything else is speculative.  We want to sell the house to move back out West, but who know how that will go.  We are pretty sure Christian will get a PhD offer somewhere out West.  We are not pretty sure Kelly will get a PhD school offer because she is aiming at a degree that usually requires years of work experience.  Still, it is great to be so close to a long term goal.

Betty Blonde #57 –10/03/2008
Betty Blonde #57
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Grandpa José passed away last night

Day 891 of 1000

Don Jose and his children

Don José Rodriguez Cavazos died last night at age 93. He took his final deep breath and died in the arms of his oldest daughter Grandma Conchita.  Don José was the family patriarch in the very best way possible.  He loved, served, and guided his family with every fiber of his being.  He was defined more than any other way by how he loved and served God. His contemporaries called him Chepo. His grandchildren in Mexico called him abuelito.  Kelly and Christian called him Grandpa José.  Virtually everyone else called him Don José.

Don José’s first wife by whom he had all his nine children died at age 57 and he married Irlinda not to long after that.  Don José was the very first person I met from Lorena’s family.  I met him and Irlinda standing in the cafeteria line at a church convention in New Mexico in 1989.  Little did I know at the time that he would play such a huge role, not only in my life, but the life of my extended family.  I remember him as a very colorful, happy, friendly person.  I will write a few things about him in some future blog posts as I want to record some of the colorful stories that he told and that were told about him.

Don José and Grandpa Milo were kindred spirits.  They could not speak each other’s language but got along famously and spent the short amount of time they had together patiently listening to translators help them share stories.  Both of them grew up during the depression in large close knit families.  I remember them giving each other a big old bear hug every time they met.  Grandpa José liked to finish that hug by bouncing us a couple times off his belly.

The picture the accompanies this post is of Don José with his wife Irlinda and seven of his nine children.  The one’s in the back row from left to right are Gudelia, Betty, Nena, Nelda, and Abel.  In the front row are Grandma Conchita, Irlinda, Don José, and Mina.  The two missing are Tomás and Blanca.

Grandpa José was Lorena’s last living grandparent.  He will be greatly missed, but he was a faithful man and is in a better place.

Betty Blonde #56 –10/02/2008
Betty Blonde #56
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First PhD telephone interview

Day 890 of 1000

Christian has his first interview with a prospective professor in a few minutes.  Those kinds of things can be pretty nerve-wracking the first time you do them.  He has this and one more telephone interview scheduled in addition to his trip to Arizona State.  The sense we have about his situation right now is that there is a category of Electrical Engineering research professors who need graduate students with deeper math skills than the normal Electrical Engineering undergraduate student has time to take.  So, for those professors, Christian’s background is particularly attractive.  Our sense is that this category of professors make up  a small, but not insignificant minority in most of the universities to which Christian has applied.

Another thing we have learned is that it is not so common that he would get contacted so early in the process.  Most of the phone interviewing appears to starts in February and goes on through early March.  It also seems that early to mid-March is when the first round of accept/reject letters go out with April 15 as the date when students have to decide to accept/reject any acceptances they receive. So, there is another round starting in April where schools whose students did not accept their offers can be backfilled with previous rejections.

It is all pretty nerve-wracking.

Betty Blonde #55 –10/01/2008
Betty Blonde #55
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The joy of air travel

Day 889 of 1000

My flight to Phoenix arrived seven hours late yesterday, so I did not get to bed until 4:30 (6:30 Raleigh time) this morning.  It was not nearly as bad as it seems.  I slept about three and a half hours on the plane and got another three before I went into work.  This was a good reminder of why it will be nice to start living in the same town where I work.

Betty Blonde #54 – 09/30/2008
Betty Blonde #54
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Feminism, career women, and the stay at home mom

I wrote this post on career women a little over a week ago and got some interesting responses.  Matt Walsh very thoughtfully responds to a blog post titled I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry that characterizes the attitude about which I wrote.  Feminism is going to have to confront and defeat that kind of thinking if it is ever wants to be taken seriously, let alone capture the pro-life, high moral ground held by the early suffragists in America.

Time to start some house dealing

Day 887 of 1000

I am at the last of what has turned into over a year of travel, two weeks at a time out to Arizona.  I help doing some kinds of programming I do not normally do in the spirit of getting our first product out the door.  My real job entails development of algorithms to analyze images produced by our first product.  The reality is that I have very much enjoyed the robotic control programming I have done for the last year.  If it were not for the insane hours and all the travel, it is one of those programming things one might do as a hobby.

All this time on airplanes and in hotel rooms has given me time to reflect.  Lorena and I have not yet decided where we want to land if and when we can sell our house in Raleigh.  All the information about our options is not yet in–we know neither where the kids will be nor what makes sense in terms of my work. The only thing we know for sure is that we want to head West.  The most viable options are the Willamette Valley in Oregon or Prescott, Arizona, or Phoenix, Arizona.

We have good friends in all those places, but Oregon would not really be within driving distance to the kids unless one or both of them go to University of Washington which is fairly unlikely at this point even though both the kids have applied there.  At this point, we are leaning toward Prescott, but that changes on a minute to minute basis.  We do know that we need to get the house on the market pretty soon if we plan to sell it this spring or summer.  Lorena has started to prepare the house and I plan to start looking for an agent during my next trip home.

Betty Blonde #53 – 09/29/2008
Betty Blonde #53
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Wake Technical Community College reunion

Day 886 of 1000

Kelly and Christian made good friends when they went to Wake Technical Community College.  Of their three closest friends from that time, two entered five year co-op programs, so will graduate next year with a boat-load of engineering experience.  The third is an Iraq war vet name Mike who is nothing short of amazing.  We expect to hear very big things about him some day.  I hope it is in my lifetime.  He will graduate this May the same time as Kelly and Christian with a degree in Computer Science.  They have all maintained very high grades since the arrived at NCSU at least partially due the stellar preparation they received at community college.  I guess I never expected these kids would stay in touch.  Actually, the kids from the community college seem to be significantly more mature both in their studies and in the way they live their lives than the kids that started out at NCSU as freshman.  We are glad and thankful the kids started at Wake Tech.

Betty Blonde #52 – 09/26/2008
Betty Blonde #52
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It is easy to forget that I am not that smart

Day 885 of 1000

I have been reminded the last couple that it is hard to learn new stuff.  The sad part is I am trying to learn a bunch of old stuff and it is still hard.  At work, we use a Linux server with a Wiki, a file server, and a bunch of other handy tools to communicate with each other, share files, record stuff in a common place we might easily forget, etc., etc.  I decided I should do this at home now that the kids are about to head out so we can have a common place for stuff we want to share.  The process of installing this stuff is currently owning me.  I am going to do this, but it might kill me in the process.

Betty Blonde #51 – 09/25/2008
Betty Blonde #51
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A sighting of our favorite Lemonade–Lorina–in Hong Kong!!!

Day 884 of 1000

Our buddy Jon found himself in Hong Kong eating pizza sandwiches and drinking Lorina lemonade!  He was kind enough to forward us the picture because he knew that lemonade was our favorite doble sentido.  What he probably did not know is that if he sent me a picture like this there would be no way we could avoid trying to duplicate this meal.  Guaranteed, it probably would not taste as good in Raleigh as in an exotic place like Hong Kong and we probably will not be as good as that looks, but it seems to me even if is only a shadow of what Jon ate, it will still be some mighty fine eating.  Now all we have to do is remember where we bought that Lorina here in Raleigh…

Jon drinks Lorina in Hong Kong with his pizza sandwich

Betty Blonde #50 – 09/24/2008
Betty Blonde #50
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Lorena is an upholstering frame of mind

Lorena fixes the barstools

We have had two barstools in the kitchen that featured seats with torn fabric that moved around because they had worked their way free from the frame.  She fixed all that yesterday and today.  She is a born fixer-upper.  We plan to get her a house on which to ply her skills when we move out West, hopefully this spring or summer.

The reality is I am guilty of this

Here is a great article in the Wall Street Journal about verbal “tee-ups” as prefixes to statements.  They say it is a sign of insecurity.

“To be honest…”
“I want you to know…”
“I’m just saying…”
“I hate to be the one to tell you this…”
“I’m not saying…”

I think they are right on all counts and, furthermore, I confess my guilt.

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