Lorena bought a little device she uses to make long, spaghetti-like strings from zucchini. It is amazing. Last night she made Kung Pao chicken with the noodles so I had a low calorie Chinese dish that tasted just as good as the real thing. I think I could get into a very good rut, eating this kind of Chinese every night for the next long, long time.
This is what I see from my BarcaLounger easy chair from the living room of our new house. It is one of those gifts that come along serendipitously every now and then that the chair Lorena picked out for me as an easy chair to use for reading books and just relaxing in the living room. It is truly serendipitous that it is a BarcaLounger. That was precisely the one luxury my father, Grandpa Milo afforded himself with the full complicity of Grandma Sarah even during the most difficult of times. It saddens me that he never got to see where Lorena and I ended up. None of his kids really aspired to have a place like the one he developed from literally a bare patch of dirt with a late 1800’s farmhouse on it (forged square nails and full-size 2×4 rough lumber framing) into a destination location called The Water Oasis–truly a showcase. We never expected to be at a place like this, but here we are–a smallish (2¼ acres) lot with a house built in the 1980’s we are slowly (as we have resources) upgrading into a place of which Grandpa Milo might have been quite proud. We are sorry he is not here to give us advice along the way, but having his signature BarcaLounger is a small help and an inspiration. Even though we know we will never arrive at the sublime level of Milo-ness that turned into The Water Oasis, this is definitely a nod in that direction.
Gene outdid himself with his first pass at the bean feeder. I got this video as a text this morning and was very impressed. It will take some more work, but it is doing all the really critical things we need it to do–singulating the beans, dropping them off the end in single file with separation. He will refine the design and set up to start taking pictures of the beans as the drop. The main takeaway for me is that now I am the short stick again and will need to start blasting away.
I thought this was very cool. I took a set of pictures with my new Pixel 2 XL cellphone to make a panorama of our roof as it was getting installed. The picture in the previous post is from the sequence. Before I got to stitch it together, the camera did it for me without me even asking. It also made an animation. I was pretty impressed with the quality of the image stitching, too.
I just talked to our roofer. He says he should have this completed either late today or early tomorrow morning. There is one more surface and a bunch of vents, then they are done.
Our new nephew, Mateo Pedraza Martinez, was born this morning in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. This could very be the last one on either side. Mateo was born to Lorena’s baby brother Rigo and his wife Minita. It was a difficult pregnancy, but the baby was very healthy and the mother is doing very well. We are very excited to meet him soon.
The first day of roof installation is complete. This is the area over the dining room that looks out onto the deck. We love the new color. Now all we have to do is pick the right color to paint the house.
The new roof work got started today. Here is the view out my third floor office windows.
We really liked our old coffee maker, but did not like the fact that there was no jar that could be carried over to the table or people in the living room to serve coffee. Rather, the coffee stayed in a reservoir in the coffeemaker and was served with a lever directly into cups there. That would have been fine if we could have easily transferred the coffee in the reservoir into a large coffee pitcher, but the device made room only for a cup. So Lorena went down to her favorite department store (Goodwill) and found a coffeemaker we really love. It can make coffee from grounds into a jar AND from single serving K-Cups. It also has a small receptacle that fits in the place of a K-Cup where you can do single servings from grounds. We really like it a lot. It is not one of those fancy espresso/coffee/mocha/latte automatic machines like our friends, the Douglas’s have in North Carolina, but it will have to do until (and if) we can ever afford one of those.
Installation of our new roof is scheduled to start on Monday morning. Today, a truck showed up with a conveyor to arrange the shingles at different locations on the roof. It is still a very labor intensive process that included two very lean, fit young guys to muscle the shingles onto the conveyor then move them to where they need to go after they get there. We are changing the color from a white to “Pewter Gray.” If all goes well, we hope to get the exterior painted this summer, too. After that, we only have one semi-major improvement and we have told ourselves we are done.
Lorena and I were looking through some old pictures yesterday and found a Norman Rockwellesque classic. We had several nostalgic moments going through those pictures. Mostly, we are grateful for the amazing, Godly support we received from both sets of grandparents during the kids growing up years. Kelly posted this photo on Instagram and added the caption, “When you don’t get the attention you know you deserve.” Exactly right.
I have not made a whole lot of progress on my diet over the last two months. On the other hand, I went on a week of vacation and had a couple of big events that were not so diet friendly and I still managed to not gain any weight. Right now, I am within 1/10th of a pound of my record low (for the diet–not for my life) back on March 30. I am down almost 45 pounds from where I started and figure I am well positioned now to make a push to get down another 15-20 pounds. After that, I will figure out whether I want to stay where I am or go a little lower. One thing is certain: I have done this in completely sedentary mode and I need to break that habit. There are work changes coming so I will try to use those to my advantage to add some exercise.
The numbers in the image at the top left of the post are the lifetime counts for the stuff I track on my fitbits. I have had and used a fitbit since Christmas of 2014, but it has been off and on. I figure my actual usage has been for about a year and a half of those three and a half years. The numbers look pretty big, but they should be a lot bigger and more consistent. The number of steps the fitbit counted is probably pretty accurate and I am just astounded that God designed such a machine that runs on its own for eighty years and what calculates out to well over 100,000,000 steps over a lifetime.
We put the deck furniture out after Sunday lunch yesterday because of the crazy good weather. We had spent the weekend with the kids in Arizona last week so that was our early Mother’s Day celebration, but Lorena and I talked with both of them and with Grandma Conchita (and Tio Lauro) last night. Mexico celebrates Mother’s Day on May 10th no matter what is the day of the week, so they had actually had there big carne asada with the whole family down at Tio Jorge’s house last weekend, too. It was a very nice, relaxed day–which we really needed after several weeks
of upheaval. We did eat out of the house a couple of times yesterday for our own two-person Mother’s Day celebration. Lorena made me were a tie to meeting on Sunday morning and I have finally lost enough weight so it does not just kill me to do that.
The next few weeks could lead to some pretty big changes for our little household with the re-engagement with our friend Troy at U
niversity of Nebraska Lincoln and some work opportunities. It has nothing (or at least very little) to do with where we live, but could mean we have a little more mobility on a less onerous schedule. So there are on-going talks about which I cannot say much through May. I hope to know something before Memorial Day.
Our friend Bonnie took care of Kiwi the surviving twin cat sister when Lorena and I went on vacation and trips last week. When we returned, Kiwi was not happy. This picture shows the concept. After dinner last night, I was sitting at the table reading a book on my new Pixel 2 XL phone. Kiwi likes to get close and crawls into whichever spot she can find to be close. She lightly extends her claws to make sure I am not going away. When I am at my office chair working, she repeatedly attempts to get my attention by standing on her hind legs and touching my arm with her paws until I pick her up or run her away. Even when I run her away, she tries again within a few minutes. I have had to lock her out to get any work done. Slowly, she is starting to calm down and sleep in the sun by the window, but I think it will take a couple more weeks to get her back to normal.
Over the last couple of days, I had a couple of long and interesting talks with my old friend, Troy, with whom I worked on the GaugeCam project when we lived in North Carolina. Troy is an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska right now with lots of interesting research going on. We discussed the idea of me reengaging on some of his research again when I started to approach retirement. Well, retirement is rapidly approaching and it looks like the stars might be starting to align. This is still just wishful thinking, but we have talked about a few specific ideas and I even called and talked to my old Masters degree professor, Carroll Johnson long retired from University of Texas at El Paso. We have hope we can make something happen. If this idea comes to fruition, I hope to be writing about it here on a semi-regular basis.
We are home from our trip to Casa Grande, AZ and Burnaby, B.C. We are grateful for our friend, Bonnie’s, help with Kiwi the surviving, twin cat sister. It was a trip for which to be thankful. We had the family all together for a few days, we spent some quality time with our friends, the Rizos, we got some new spiritual insights, we got new Pixel 2 XL cell phones, and when we got home, our new phone cases were waiting for us in the mailbox. Fortunately, neither of us dropped our phones hard enough to make them break (an unusual source of satisfaction) before we got them into the protective cases. Even more cool, the cases have the piece of metal in them that allows them to mount on the windshield fixture we have in our car. We are a little worn out, but plan to hit the hay early tonight and reengage at the salt mines in the morning.
We got this selfie snapshot as Kelly and Christian dropped us off at the airport and then ran out to Casa Grande to get there in time for the baptism of one of our very good friends. We had a great time and decided we really need to get the family together in Arizona more frequently. We made new friends, hung out with old friends, ate lots of good food, saw lots of beautiful scenery (and dust). Starting in May, Kelly works a four day week, every other week, so we are trying to spend more time with Christian. Maybe it makes more sense to have Christian come up to Washington during the winter, but this fall, we hope to head south way more frequently.
Christian has taken great care of us. Tonight he drove us all over Tempe and Chandler so we could replace Lorena’s Note 3 and my Note for with two Pixel 2 XL phones. We have had these phones for four years–a record for us. They are very nice. The weather has been insanely good since we have been here and Christian found the one true taco shop in all of Phoenix (Los Taquitos on Elliot Rd) and even though I can hardly believe I am saying it, they are on par or maybe even better than the one true taco shop (Tacos Regio Monterrey) in Lewisville, TX. That is really saying something.
We are enjoying Tempe a lot. Lorena went with Christian to buy new tires for his car and to do some other shopping. The thing we notice is how “alive” this place is–maybe it is the time of year and the amazing weather (not too hot), but we are glad to be here right now. Christian is taking us to a new taco place he just found that is authentic in the way we measure Mexican authenticity. He said he had the “street tacos.” What else would you order in a truly authentic Mexican restaurant–especially for the first visit–so you can have a common metric against which to compare other “authentic” Mexican restaurants. Can hardly wait.
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Lorena took this picture in a mall parking lot, waiting for the stores to open. We are down in Arizona visiting Christian, waiting for our friends to get here from Chula Vista, and wondering why everyone does not want to live in Arizona with its fabulous weather, unique culture–heavily influenced by Mexico and Mexican food, and lots of things to do and see. I know we might think differently in the heat of summer in a few months, but right now it is very, very nice.
Thanks to Bonnie and Kiwi for holding down the fort for us back home.
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