Lorena and I saw this beautiful moon out the window of our car as she drove me to work this morning. It was even bigger and lower in the sky than when I took this picture out the window of my work at DWFritz. Lorena mentioned Oregon would have a blue moon tonight. I looked that up and found that a blue moon is when the moon is full for a second time in a single month.
I do not know why these kinds of things seem to coincide with times when we are thinking deep thoughts. I am actually pretty sure it is the other way around, that I only notice stuff like this when I am in a time of contemplation. This time of reflection seems to be the trifecta of reflection on the meaning of life. Part of it is that all of us, Christian, Kelly, Lorena and I are within a few years, if the Lord gives us those years, of entry to new things and new places while the world seems to be in upheaval.
Of course, Kelly and Christian will graduate from college and go off to do whatever it they are given to do. Always, in the past, they had some next thing they wanted to accomplish that mostly had to do with school. Now, though, there will almost certainly no more school for them, at least as students. So many things are open to them, they have no idea what would be best to do. Since they are still a few years away from that, patience is the key, but that is hard when the next move will be to something they have never previously done.
The same is true for Lorena and I. We have, at most, a few more years to be close to my parents with their memory issues. Then it is on to something new–maybe even retirement for me. Maybe even in Mexico, but maybe not. It is hard not to think about it even though it is not at all knowable. Patience is the word of the day.
Betty Blonde #383 – 01/04/2010
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Our family discusses the subject of objective truth frequently. We have done so as a family for pretty close to a decade. As soon as the kids were old enough to understand the concept, we started to talk about it. The direction our culture is going is not friendly to those who want to live their lives in conformances to mandates placed on them by the objective reality of a Christian God. When the culture embraces the immorality of things like abortion, cohabitation outside of marriage and even the pursuit of fun in the form of sport, music, art and leisure at the expense of the pursuit of God and things God hates, lives get wasted and people suffer.
Kelly bought her own car insurance yesterday and will register the Ford Fiesta in her own name later this week. Christian is doing the same this week with the Honda Accord. Lorena and I are now a one car family. The only remaining thing like this that connects to the kids is our family cell phone plan. Some might think it would be best for me to turn that over to the kids themselves, but they would be wrong. I told them that as a condition for their cell phone plan, they have to provide Lorena with tech support for her phone and tutoring for her community college. In my book that is an absolute steal. It would be a steal at twice the price!
If I have the time right, Christian, at this very moment, is presenting his Information Theory research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the first time he has done this kind of formal presentation (with a tie and all that). It is the culmination of a full year of research in a brand new (to Christian) area of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. Lorena and I are on pins and needles waiting to hear how it went. If all goes well, this should eventually turn into a refereed conference paper and, with expanded research and content, possibly even a refereed journal article.
We are slowly removing all semblances of our time in Raleigh. Christian got his Arizona drivers license several months ago, but Kelly did not get her Washington drivers license until yesterday. She did not even have to take a written test. Lorena and I will take the Oregon drivers license test either this week or next. That will be followed by the registration of our cars in our respective states. One of the only happy money related events in moving to Oregon from North Carolina is that we do not have to pay any sales taxes on our cars when we change the registration.
Christian is scheduled to fly to Boston tomorrow to give a talk on his research. He has all the technical material well in hand and a well organized presentation. Not so amazingly, one of his biggest challenges is to create professional and compelling PowerPoint slides that convey his ideas. It seems like none of the tools commonly used to create graphics for the slides have improved very much or gotten any easier to use in the last twenty years.
Kelly’s whirlwind visit ended yesterday afternoon when Lorena took her up to Vancouver to catch the train back to Seattle. This week has turned into a big week for both Kelly and Christian. I already spoke about Christian’s trip back east to present his research results for the year. Kelly is in the middle of a smaller, but still big chunk of research she needs to show to her boss when he arrives back to Seattle from a month or so away in Europe of some such thing. The upshot is there has been a lot of pressure and angst that should see some relief this week.
Twice now, we have had five people around our table for dinner in our tiny studio apartment. Kelly and Christian have both stayed with us over the weekend a couple of times. All of that worked out really well. This weekend, our apartment manager came around to ask us if we wanted to extend our stay so we signed up for another six months. We do not really know where we will land next. We do not even know when we will be able to make the next changes. Alzheimer’s is like that.
I always get slightly nervous when Lorena and Kelly hang out too much with my sisters. For the first two years of our marriage in Florida I had Lorena pretty well convinced that Walmart was much classier for shopping than the mall. Julia and Jean completely wrecked her with respect to that within 50 milliseconds after we moved back to Oregon. This morning, they all went down to Biscuits Cafe in Wilsonville together while I had breakfast with Harold and Curt Nichols, Jeff Cloyd and Justin (that, incidentally, was very, very nice). Now I am waiting for the latest bombshell that the J aunts dropped on them. Thankfully, Lorena has figured out that most of the stories told by the Chapmans are only very roughly based on the truth.
Lorena and I will have lived in our studio apartment for six months by the end of July. We have a great view from the apartment. We can walk to restaurants, shopping, work and two grocery stores. Our 24/7, very excellent fitness club is in the same building as the apartment. Lorena can scratch her gardening itch at the community garden where she has a small plot for $22 for the season. The only downside so far is it is hard to entertain for dinner or have overnight guests. We want to move into a house eventually by enjoy where we are right now and have no idea where we should be. So we are going to sign up for another stretch in the studio and wait.
