Whenever grandpa ran a stop light or forgot to put on his blinker when he changed lanes he said, “I like to follow the spirit of the law. The letter kills.”
We were all pretty skeptical about that, but today we ran into a situation we think might qualify for a Grandpa Milo type approach. I order my prescriptions from the only mail-order place approved by our insurance. They have good prices and represented that after they confirmed my identification and the validity of the prescriptions, most of the time they would just send them. The service has really been pretty good, but they have sent an email every month asking me to call in to confirm new information (or, in most cases, stuff I had already confirmed). The drugs I need are nothing more the benign high blood pressure, high cholesterol medications, nothing heavy at all.
Last month, I was slammed, so Lorena called in for me. They said even though she was my wife, they needed to talk to me. This month, with everything going on, I asked her to tried again.
When she called, a lady told her, “We cannot talk to you, we have to talk to Kenneth.”
She said, “I am Kenneth.”
The lady said, “Mame, are you really Kenneth?”
She said, “I am.”
After a series of fairly intense questions they went ahead and sent her the prescription. I told her afterward she should have acted mad that they did not respect her gender. I think Lorena has that “spirit of the law” thing down pat, but I probably should be ashamed of myself.
Drawings have started to arrive from the kitchen designers. As is always the case in these kinds of things, some of the ideas are exactly what we wanted, but there is a disconnect on others. Part of the disconnect is due to not properly communicating what was wanted. Some though are because of our own disconnect with reality. Sometimes it is not possible to do what you want because of lack of budget, a footprint and configuration that will not fit the available space, etc. etc.
Our annual tax effort started today. This last few years it has been a little more challenging than in the past. I have switched jobs, moved, performed contract work, etc., etc., etc. Even with a good accountant to help out, it is a struggle to get it done in time. In the middle of all this, we are making another move, maybe changing jobs, settling the estate of our parents, buying a new (to us) house, moving across the country and doing a remodel. I know I should be thankful though–I think I have the most unselfish siblings in the history of the world and, of course, Lorena never stops helping. The settling of the estate has been the most amazing thing. My siblings have bent over backwards to do everything they can do to make things come out right. We have all heard horror stories and are thankful to not be part of one. I think if we survive through the month of June we might arrive at some more order in our lives.
Kelly texted me this a couple of days ago. It is hear food and cooking log. She has always been a big cooking buff what with her gourmet Grandpa Milo and the eclectic by unsurpassed everyday cooking of her Mother. Now though, she is taking it to another level. In the meantime, her redheaded Mexican Dayanita is definitely entering the cooking fray. She is currently taking culinary classes in Mexico and, based on recent Instagram posts, is investing some effort upping her confectionery sills. Kelly, for her part, has added some pretty amazing finger foods suitable for potlucks and other assorted get-togethers. This does not bode well for my waist line.
The kitchen in the house we are trying to buy is getting dated. We pretty much need to replace everything. We hope to use the pieces in the current kitchen to make a standalone apartment in the daylight basement. The three things we usually do not have to replace when we move are the refrigerator and the clothes washer and dryer, but they all went as part of the sell in the house in North Carolina. We did buy a new clothes washer and dryer when we moved to Texas, so that means we are going to have to figure out how to get a range top and hood, an oven or two, a microwave, a dish washer and a refrigerator.
Of course everything is negotiable, but Lorena knows what she wants, especially when it comes to the range top. The range top shown in the picture on the left is the one she wants. It is the Thermador Professional 36″ with an electrically heated griddle in the middle (for warming tortillas). The range top is always the center piece in her kitchen so we do the best we can. We think we kind of have it figured out this time. In these pictures, it looks like the Albany range top was better and, in some ways, that was true. It had the cool blue knobs (actually, we still have them because we kept the blue knobs that came as add-ons and returned the original metal knobs back to the range top when we moved from Albany to Raleigh) and it was a 36″ inch top with a grill in the middle. That is not entirely true because we had a much better hood in Raleigh than in Albany. All in all it was about a wash.
After church a couple of Sundays back, I was talking to the elder, Al R. (we meet in his home), about the doll house business my father ran for many years. He told me he made birdhouses that were similar. I thought that was nice and interesting, but did not think much of it. Then he texted me a picture of his work and I was completely amazed. It is not just that they are beautifully done with a lot of ornate rock work, but the houses are weatherized so they can handle the outside, too.
The appraisal for our house purchase came in fine yesterday. We signed off on all the improvements required for the sale. The only thing left is to close. The close will occur, God willing, at the end of the month. So now we are are excited about making the move. We know a lot about that part of the world, but not so much about the particular place we chose. We love everything we have seen in our visits and within a two hour drive of our house we have a gazillion old friends. Right in town it surely seems like we have a great and growing group of new friends we look forward to getting to know better.
I am starting to talk to truck rental places. Some of you might know that, even though we are currently living in Dallas, all we have is an apartment and enough “stuff” to live there short term. Most of our “stuff” is still in a warehouse in Raleigh. So, this trip will entail me flying from Dallas to Raleigh, loading up the truck, driving to Dallas, picking up Lorena and the “stuff” in our apartment there, driving to Tempe to spend some time with Christian and go to one of our church conventions, then driving (through California, not Utah) on up to Washington state. I put “stuff” in scare quotes advisedly. Why do we need all that?
We bought a new house in Albany, Oregon back in about 2004 (picture to the left). When we bought the house it did not have anything but a small slab for a patio in the back. Grandpa Milo helped us put in a beautiful, stamped concrete patio with large planters in the back. There was no landscaping other than a small patch at the front of the house; all of the rest of it was dirt and weeds. I have to say we had a great time putting in the lawn and doing a little landscaping around the house. We planted rows of trees along both streets (it is a corner lot) and the back property line. There were some electrical services at the front of the lot that drew attention that we did not look. Since there was a very slight slope toward that corner of the lot, we put a small retaining wall around the services, built up the dirt behind the wall a little and planted some trees and plants. We also added the porch roof and decorative posts that cover the porch that leads to the lawn on two sides of the house and the French doors that lead out to the porch. lead out to the lawn from(well that was our builder Mark, but we paid for it). What you see here is the result.
Lorena and I need to decide how much of the lawn we want to maintain as landscape and how much we want to maintain as “forest.” We definitely have an opportunity to put in some terracing that will change the area behind the house into something eminently more usable. One of the first things we plan to do as soon as we get out there is take a bunch a pictures of the yard and start figuring out what we want to do. Part of our goal is to get me some manual labor with a shovel in doing any kind of transformation we plan. I think the landscape will be at least a three phase effort, especially since I am going to be providing the manual labor (unless I wimp out).
Kelly and I had an interesting discussion last night about her work. Her work is very similar to mine in many ways. The work Christian does has similarities to mine, but they are superficial (see his office in the picture to the left). Some have assumed I pushed Christian toward the kind of work I do to live vicariously through his superior training and skills. Over all the years of homeschool, I fought against that, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. In the end, though Christian went off into an area for which I am admittedly a fan-boy, but that is so deep in the bowels of the theoretical math associated with network information theory, I have no clue about how even to talk about it with him.
One of her first steps was to find where and how different sets of features (answers to survey questions) cluster with respect to the characteristics of the customers who took the survey. Crazily, she is using precisely the same algorithms I use every day to find clusters of motion pixels in video images that indicate someone is about to fall out of a bed in a hospital. She predominately uses the R statistical programming language, but also Python which she is in the process of learning. The clustering algorithms she is trying are k-means clustering, mean-shift filtering, density based spatial clustering, support vector machines, etc.
Lorena is at the airport right now, waiting to return home from a very good stay with Christian. Of course Christian was slammed with work–he had to respond to reviewers on a paper he wants to publish, prepare for a technical presentation for his Network Information Theory class, etc., etc. But at least now he is slammed with a shiny clean apartment, food in the pantry, rotated tires and all those other little details of which Lorena is queen.