The red box in the image marks an area of the ceiling of the main floor of the house that used to be open to the second floor. Lynn is filling that area with a heavily reinforce concrete and Styrofoam placa that will increase the size of the room above. The second image shows the same staircase and placa from the side.
Lynn continues to make great progress on the house up on the hill. All of the demolition for the area in the front of the property which is planned for a garage on the bottom floor and the master bedroom (with a balcony toward the street) on the top floor. There is a lot of work in progress inside the house that I will try to report on in a subsequent post.
In the meantime, we commissioned a painting of the Portland Head Lighthouse Christian took us to see on a day trip to Portland, Maine when we visited last summer. Tío Lauro is putting the finishes touches on it now. When it is complete we will have him help us find an appropriate frame and hang it in the house on the hill. We hope to commission two or three more pieces for this property and convince Lauro to come and do some paintings of the views from the house.
Fall semester 2022 is complete. I have one class left to complete all the required coursework need for the PhD. The class I am taking is titled “Likelihood and Bayesian Ecology” and I am very much excited about it. It should not only inform my research at University of Nebraska, but also the work I do in my day job. If I am able to complete the course successfully, all I will have left are 21 research credits, a dissertation, and a dissertation defense. The class is a three week, three credit short course. We meet three hours per day, January 3-5. The hard part is that I need to take three hours per day for the fourteen class days and do all the homework while still managing my day job. Hopefully, I can do one more hard push to get this out of the way.
After the course work, I need to finish my research and write my dissertation. I have all of the data I need to do that now. God willing, I will be able to finish everything and defend my dissertation before my next birthday. Of course, I want to walk the graduation which will be in December, but I will have finished my PhD at the moment the dissertation is successfully defended.
I haven’t written for quite awhile so decided I would do a general update on the house and then write a little on my “retirement” PhD. Both houses (#1 and #2) are moving along slowly (that was expected), but nicely. The only thing left to finish the house conversion to apartments is the finishing of the fifth and last apartment and the azotea (roof entertainment area with a grill and a great view). The pictures in this post are of the demolition of the house up on the mountain that we plan to keep. It is really amazing how much the whole space has opened up, both in the garage/entry area and the first floor. We are poised for big progress in the next few weeks.
As for the PhD project, I had a long talk with my professor this week. He tells me that I need to focus only on finishing up now. The things I have left are two classes (one is halfway complete), the writing of my third technical journal article, the writing of my dissertation, and my oral dissertation defense. That is what I have left. I cannot wait to be done.
I just finished the written portion of my PhD comprehensive exam. They were actually quite excellent exams. The questions were way more open-ended than I expected. I spent 6.5 hours writing the first two days, 5.5 hours the third day and 10 hours today. I could have written a LOT more. The cool diagram above is one I created to describe the hardware for the system I designed as part of my research–but I am not a hardware guy so I do not have much of a clue about that. I mostly just wrote the software and designed the vision algorithms.
With the written portion of the comprehensive exam a little over a week away, it is nice to have our Tech Note show up in the Water Resources Research journal. After the comps, if I pass, it is on to the oral portion of the exam, my second to last class and the writing of a third article in the fall.
Here is the link to the article: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022WR033203
Just a few snapshots of the house as we near completion.
A Technical Note I submitted about the free, open-source, commercial friendly software I wrote as part of my dissertation research has been accepted for publication by the Water Resources Research journal. As soon as I get a link to the article I will put it up here. Here is the GUI from the software about which the paper is written.
I have completed the first two-thirds of my dissertation research and am now well into my final project. The goal is to measure water level in images of a stream where a specially designed target is installed. One of the really fun parts of this project is that we have gotten great pictures of lots of birds and animals in our images. Ducks, deer, bison, raccoon, beaver, herons, etc., etc., etc. The target you see installed in the image above is an early failure in our research effort. That target will be replaced with one that can be seen better under IR lighting at night. It should be in place taking pictures by the middle of this month.
Just a bookkeeping note. I just finished speaking with my adviser. We decided life would be a lot easier for the both of us if we pushed out my graduation one semester to Spring 2023. I changed the countdown timer to reflect the new date. It will even out the funding for my adviser and give me a little more time to finish the last third of my research and then write and defend my dissertation. All good!
This is the before and after of the area that is planned to be the garage with the master bedroom above it. The third image is what the back side of the wall looked like. Actually, it had a full bathroom there previously, but the walls were knocked down before the picture was taken.
About half of the demolition is now complete and cleaned up on the half of the second floor that faces the valley. The plan is to replace the balustrade with glass and a very sturdy aluminum rail. The beam at the top of the opening leading to the balcony is a support beam so we are working with a structural designer to find a way to remove it or, worst case, leave a 5-6 inch beam above the opening and add a long horizontal window above it. The entire opening is planned to be four sheets of thick, tinted glass. The outside two are to be fixed and the inner two are sliding doors. The bottom image is some of the stuff that was removed to open the place up.
This is one of the front doors we had made for the apartments. Excited to see what they look like when they are installed.
Christian finished his PhD at about the same time as I started mine–at the end of 2019. That is not precisely true because I understand you have the thing as soon as you successfully defend your dissertation and he defended his in August of 2019. I started the University of Nebraska Lincoln PhD program in January of 2020. So, now I am at the make-or-break point of my program–the comprehensive exam. Up until I pass the comprehensive exam, I am merely a PhD student. When I pass the exam, that makes me a PhD “candidate.” Everyone hears horror stories about comprehensive exams. I have two months to prepare. Luckily, I have my partner in crime, John S. and a (mostly) great committee helping out. John is a non-traditional (read old) grad student like me and it is really nice to have him along for the ride. I will keep you posted on how it goes.
Work started today on the second house. It is a lot higher up the hill so it has a better view. We want to take advantage of the view by completely removing the current balcony (shown to the left). I will be replaced with a thick glass, 3 ft. high muro con barandal. The second image shows the wall across from the balcony openings. That wall will be completely removed and replaced with ceiling to floor glass walls and a doors. This glass area will have to have some thin, unobtrusive vertical stripes or hanging strings to prevent bird hits, but the idea is to open this up as much as possible both for lighting and to expose the view. This is going to go pretty slowly as resources allow. Of course, if we are able to sell the other house that we converted to apartments lower on this same hill, we can use some of the resources to speed up the changes. Lynn is planning to use the house (above) as his office, so we are hoping that will allow him to keep the focus on the changes there.
The semester is over, the kids are on a two week vacation in Europe (probably the first of two this summer), and we have nothing much to do other than batten down the hatches for the stifling North Texas summer. It often feels like we are just waiting for the next thing to happen, but it is not really true. Lorena and I have several active projects that require serious attention and effort including the apartments (still preparing to sell) and the house (getting the remodel ready for ourselves and our visitors) in Mexico, landscape construction projects, dissertation research, two more classes, and my comprehensive exam for school, and other stuff we want to complete, if God is willing, before I retire. We have it all laid out, but one thing we have done differently than in previous major efforts as we arrived to a defined end, we have decided we need to take some time to smell the roses.
If we take another year, again, God willing, it does not matter that much. We want to visit the kids as much as possible, go on a trip or two to Mexico and to Europe, and just take things with a whole lot more calm than before. The way we see it, retirement is not when you quit, but when you start with something new. The problem is that we do not have that next thing quite figure out. We are going to try to spend more time with the kids and with Lorena’s mom and I plan to continue with some consulting if I can and continue to perform volunteer research, but it seems very, very unstructured. That is also okay, but it is so gratifying to have positive means and ends in mind that it would be a shame to throw that all aside at the end.
Lorena and I ran down to Mexico for a few days to see family and visit the house projects we are doing there. This is the first time I have been back since the pandemic. It is amazing to me how easy it is to forget how good the cuisine is in this part of the world. The picture was taken yesterday afternoon in Tío Lauro’s atelier. It is a truly beautiful setting and the improvements he has made since we were here last are incredible. Lauro has a lot of work left to do, but you can see where he is going with the place now in a way that was not so evident before. The other thing about the place we like is all the fruit trues he planted in the garden behind the house that are bearing fruit. It is a little piece of paradise.
All my homework is complete for Spring Semester 2022. There are is only one more class to attend where I will present my final ArcGIS project. Then, I will only have two three hour classes and an additional 30 credits of research before my credit requirements will be complete. I am scheduled to take my Comprehensive Exam and present my thesis proposal in January 2023 with the goal of completing my dissertation defense before the end of Spring Semester 2023. This summer will be spent on doing the research for my third and final paper. The three papers, when completed will be the three chapters of my dissertation. The plan for this summer is to finish the software and start processing images that have not yet been captured yet. The camera is on Turkey Creek in something called the Kearney Outdoor Learning Area (KOLA) south of Kearney West High School near Kearney, Nebraska. It is a beautiful setting and I am glad it is there. The latest functionality added to the research software (GRIME2) is shown in the video below.
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