Lorena is finally through Clackamas Community College with an Associate Arts Transfer Degree that she can use for the first two years of her Bachelors degree (if she wants. We are very, very proud of her. It was a 28 year effort in the middle of raising two kids all the way through their PhD and Masters degrees. The beautiful part is that she really did learn a ton in a degree the exemplifies the very spirit of a liberal arts degree. Congratulations for your perseverance and hard work.
Christian shocked us all with an amazing gift for Lorena’s birthday–a robotic vacuum cleaner. He got one for himself to clean his apartment and absolutely loved it. I have to admit I was skeptical about how good the thing might be, but have to admit I am a complete believer after seeing it do its thing.
One of the most amazing things about the device is how easy it was to set up. It took about a half an hour to unpack it and get everything installed. Lorena and I can both start it, stop it, adjust what parts of the house it should clean, watch it move around on a map as it is cleaning, etc., etc.
On top of that, the height of devices is low enough that it can go under things that were hard to reach with our regular vacuum. The path in the map in this post is in our bedroom. The side-ways ‘T’ in the middle of the room is the post holding up the middle of our bed. In addition to that, it was able to clean under the sofa and the Barcalounger in the living room. The amount of cat hairs and dust and the repository was nothing short of amazing.
One thing I can say for sure, though, is that it is not really saving us any time because it is so fun that we usually just sit there with a cup of coffee the whole time it is doing its thing.
All the paperwork for the house we have been buying in San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon is complete and we are now the owners. I have actually never been to the place and I am not sure how long we will own (we have a potential buyer looking at it now and our eyes on the next place), but for now, it feels pretty good!
My class on the Google Earth Engine API is about to end. It has been a very interesting class from a professor who is giving it online for the first time. She has actually done a stellar job. There are two difficulties in this class: How do you give a good online experience (via Zoom–hate it, there are much better tools) and how do you teach a class to a group of student who fall into two very distinct groups–those who are programmers, but know little about earth sciences and those who are very knowledgeable about earth sciences, but know little about programming. I have to admit that I have gotten a LOT more than I expected out of the class and, if I can work it in and have time, I am going try to work it into my dissertation. The professor really did strike a good balance between getting the programming across and getting the earth science across without making either of those parties either crazy or bored. Loved it.
We received a package in our mailbox yesterday with this spectacular gift–a pie server. Our friend Harvey turned the handle on his lathe, put a nice finish on it, and put it in the mail. We LOVE it! Really, really nicely done. Lorena wanted to hang it on the wall as a piece of art. I wanted to use it with as much apple pie as possible. We are probably going to compromise and do both. It was an especially nice gift because it just came out of the blue with zero
I deleted my twitter account today. The next step is to start moving from gmail and outlook email to ProtonMail.com. They are untrustworthy. After that, I will be leaving instagram. I have been using duckduckgo for search but have recently switch to swisscows. Same for WhatsApp and Hangouts–I have mostly made the stitch to Signal. The funny deal is that all the new ones actually work better for me than the ones they replaced.
A box with three bags of XXTRA Flamin’ Hot Crunchy Cheetos arrived from Christian today. We got some regular Flamin’ Hot Crunchy Cheetos when he was here over he holiday and we loved them. He told us the XXTRA ones were too hot to eat. We wanted to try them, but there were none on any of the shelves, so unbeknownst to us, Christian ordered us some. They were a lot hotter, but we really liked them anyway. Sadly, they are not exactly on our diet, so we need to make them last as long as we can. Lorena is rationing them out in a very miserly fashion.
Today, everything that is going on just seems crazy. We do not have a new U.S. President yet and whichever one ends up in office will make half of the country go crazy. The morality of the culture at large is abjectly bad. We are in the middle of a pandemic for over which there are additional levels of crazy on all sides of the issue. The funny deal is that at this one snapshot in time, our lives are going well, at least in a temporal sense. Lorena just earned her Associate of Arts degree in December. Kelly and Christian both have good jobs that would preclude them from being taken into the military if there is war. They both got good little, end-of-year raises at a time when that is quite uncommon. I have a job I love that, if we can solve a few more problems, we will speed up and provided a more controlled environment for virology and other types of research that require the growing of cells under specific conditions. What happens over the next few weeks with respect to the President will not have a huge effect on any of these things, but life could get a lot more insecure with respect to financial, moral, and physical security. In the meantime, we have a great view out our living room window.
Tomorrow morning I start the second class for my PhD program. The first one was a one month course on time series analysis that met for a couple hours twice per week. I received one credit for that course. The course that starts tomorrow is also a short course which meets three times per week for two hours of lecture via Zoom and one our of lab. It is a course on how to use the Google Earth Engine API (javascript) and the publicly available datasets. I got myself an account and went through the first tutorial. It looks pretty slick and fun to program. The cool part is that Lorena played with Google Earth (not the API) in her last Geology class. That gave me a sense for how powerful it is for visualization and research. I am really looking forward to learning this material.
We ran Kelly and Christian to the airport in Portland this morning so they could head back to Baltimore and Boston to return to work on Monday. Their visit this holiday season was a category difference than those in the past. They have been adults making their own way in every sense since they left home to go to graduate school six and a half years ago. They have been adults, making their own decisions for years now, but it just seemed more real this time that they really are grown and gone. We got a little melancholy about that, but also there was a gratifying satisfaction. This is the way it should be. We are grateful for opportunities for them to be here that probably would not have happened if it had not been for the pandemic.
It has been great to have Christian and Kelly here for a couple of weeks. We drive them both to the airport tomorrow morning to fly back to the east coast. We cooked a turkey, donuts, creme puffs, and a ton of other stuff to see in the New Year and have way to many leftovers with two less mouths to eat it all. This is definitely not going to help me keep my New Year’s resolution until we get it whittled down a little. I now longer have any excuses with the rowing machine and treadmill. It is no just a matter of will and taking the time to get some exercise. In broad strokes, the goals are to
I am going to try to remember to review this post at the start of 2022 to see if I was able to stick to my resolutions.
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