It has been truly an odd year. It was partly odd because we held the funeral for goth Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah in February, we moved from an apartment in Texas to Washington State after having moved from an apartment in Oregon to Texas the year before and from our house in North Carolina to Oregon the year before that–all to deal with aging parents. We were so much in upheaval, it really felt odd to be settled in a house again.
During this time, we had no time nor inclination to pay attention to or participate in one of the strangest elections in American history. The funny deal was that we were thankful for that in many ways–looking back it made me realize that there is no reason to lose one’s peace given the sure knowledge that God is in control. We will probably participate in future elections, but with a fundamentally different mindset than in the past.
The other odd occurrence, was the movement of our children from a status of students to a status of being truly on their own, making their own decisions, paying their own bills, and living on their own. Actually, they have lived that way for three and a half years now, but this year there seemed to be some finality to it. We had a wonderful time at Christmas, not always calm, but always wonderful. Lorena and I are always sad to see them go, but this time, more than any time before, it felt like they were going home after a visit rather than leaving home to go back to school.
This all puts us at a new place in life. It seems like Lorena and I are more in upheaval than the kids. We are still trying to figure out what to do next. As a New Year’s resolution, I have decided (beside my perennial favorite to be less fat), to sin less, love more and find a peace in my God-given vocation whatever that might be.
I bought a global shutter camera from 
It is 
Lorena and Kelly did a mother/daughter Christmas concert. The dressed up, went to an elegant dinner, and then on to the concert. They had a great time. I hope this turns into an annual affair. I also gives me a chance to live a day and a half of a slovenly life without Lorena sweeping up the crumbs and browbeating me into cleaning up after myself. All I have to do is clean up before she gets home.
The camera for the project Gene and I are working on arrived. It is pretty amazing. It cost literally 20% of the cost of what a camera with similar features would have cost only five years ago. I am dying to try it out, but in my normal bonehead manner of operation, I did not get the USB 3.0 cable I need to make it work. I was highly confident I had the right cable. It turns out I have a gazillion cables that are rapidly in the process of becoming obsolete and a gazillion more that ARE obsolete.
After a week of crisp, clear, late fall days with beautiful territorial views from my office of the town belows, the foothills behind it and the mountain behind that, today I can barely see to the edge of the property. Still, it is not raining and any day in this part of the world at this time of year without rain is a day to be enjoyed. I walked to the mailbox twice yesterday in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I hope to do it again today even if the fog does not burn off. If we get a drought this summer, I suppose I will lament all this, but right now I am enjoying it immensely. I can see that I am now one of those guy who talks about the weather and the birds in the backyard. I have turned into my grandparents.
We did not get a picture that really did these fireworks. We certainly were not expecting a professional fireworks display off our back balcony. This part of the world is very enthusiastic about their fireworks in a way that exceeds any place I have ever been including Mexico. They were very nicely done and very colorful. We hope they do it every year at Christmas time.
After a few days of experimentation (and actual usage), I finally have the treadmill set up in a way that works for me. Bob helped me move the treadmill downstairs, then I futzed with a way to read my Kindle for three days before I got something that actually works. I used a suction pad from the base of a cell phone holder to hold the Kindle in exactly the right place to read when I walk. Now all I need is some decent new books to read. I am about a quarter of the way through a good one and I have another good one coming in January, but I am going to need a lot more if I stick to this. It is helping my weight-loss plan quite a lot, too. This combined with the Fitbit allows me to keep my calorie output well above my calorie intake by quite a bit.
They say it is unusual for the sun to shine during the rainy season in Western Washington. It may be unusual, but it is not that unusual. For instance: today. The air is crisp, clean, and clear. You can see forever. It is a great day to be alive. It would even be better if I were not chained to a desk although I have to admit that I do not mind that.
It is about as good as you gets if you are living in Seattle, but just happen to plan a weekend trip to San Francisco, the sun is shining , AND you decide to make pie, all the while it is raining and dismal in Seattle. The sad, sad part about this sorry saga is that we will not even get to try any of the pie.
Yesterday I bought a machine vision camera for the project my buddy Gene and I are doing to build a (semi-)cheap little machine to inspect coffee beans. We need something called a global shutter camera because the beans will be in motion when we capture their images. In the past a camera like this would have cost in the $1000 range. Over the years they dropped to $300-$400. Yesterday, I paid $135 for this camera–quantity 1–and that included shipping. If this is coupled with a 
Lorena will never let me retire if my company keeps doing stuff like this. They sent a huge Christmas package with multiple boxes from 
A very cool new toy arrived at our door a couple of days ago. It is a camera copy stand that will hold a cellphone or other arbitrary item that fits a certain form factor. It will be invaluable in the bean sorting project, but I will be able to use it for a lot of other machine vision image capture testing tasks. We have made a lot of progress on the project and expect to start buying the actual cameras and lighting we hope to use within the next few weeks. The next difficult task is to drop the beans past a camera while we synchronize the capture and lighting of the scene so the bean is not blurry and we can see the surface of both sides very well. There are more tricky little things we need to do after that, but we cannot move forward until we know that is possible. As soon as that is figured out, I will see if Gene can help me set up a more permanent test fixture to systematically drop beans past the cameras so we can gather a test set from which to build a classifier.
All the guests are gone, Kelly has driven back up to Washington and Christian is set to fly out tomorrow. Thanksgiving was a great success. We had different groups over for meals and dessert on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was really nice. I got to cook the turkey and make the turkey soup. Both of those are a 50/50 proposition for me, but we hit the lottery this year so we had a moist turkey that was cooked enough and soup that was neither too greasy nor too bland. I guess the stars were aligned. Even Kiwi got hit with that tryptophan snooze button this year. Here are a few more photos of the weekend (sorry we had none from Friday night).
People will start arriving in an hour or so, Lorena has started in on the Thanksgiving Quiche–the holiday has officially started for the Chapman household. We are having a little bit of a topsy-turvy weekend and will be out as much as we are in, but this is the first time in three years the whole family has been together and we actually have a house instead of an apartment to celebrate Thanksgiving. We even have two turkeys!