I always get nervous buying or selling real estate when an agreement on price has been reached and we have done all the signing our side, but are waiting for the other side to do the final signing. That is where we are now. We are chomping at the bit to get started, but will be moving in and out of storage and selling our current house before the first shovel of dirt gets moved. Best case, we are still 3-4 months away.
Currently we are in a one acre lot with a fairly large house out in the country. We really love the house, but it is a long way from civilization (25 minutes to the closest full-size grocery store. We decided that, as I am very close to real retirement now, we probably should get closer to town on a smaller, easier-to-maintain lot. Our offer to buy just such a place was just accepted. It has the added benefit that we can walk to a ton of different restaurants, parks, the river, the lake, coffee houses, live theater, etc., etc. And the grocery stores are five minutes from the house.
The prickly pear cactus Lorena planted early this spring is starting to bloom which means we will soon have the sweet fruits from the cactus called tunas. It is amazing that not only the fruit is edible on this plant, but also the broad, oval shaped nopalitos that are effective against type II diabetes. I think I have tried the tuna fruit before, but really do not remember what they were like so I am looking forward to trying them again. As for the nopal, I really like them when they are part of a bigger salad or salsa. I am looking forward to that, too.
The fact that I am a senior citizen is something I am embracing more every day. I still think of Lorena as a young wife. I do not think I will ever think of the kids anything other than… kids. But in reality, they are adults and have been making their own way and paying their own way for ten years now. The thing that is most distracting to me as a senior citizen is something I have heard others describe and that is that you beginning to disappear to large swaths of society–even when you are in the room, you are not really in the room, if you know what I mean. Plus, the realization arrives that you are not really needed so much by the kids any more other than for moral support. That is a good thing, but hard to digest for us. Then, with retirement on the horizon, it is way more stressful than expected trying to figure out what to do when there is not full time job. It just makes me realize how thankful I am for wife and family.
Lorena, very impressively, fixed the non-filling of our toilet by installing a new float apparatus. And she did it all while I was not looking nor aware by watching online videos. I am totally amazed, but not at all surprised. She can do ANYTHING!!!
Troy flew to Tuscaloosa, Alabama yesterday to attend a water conference. He will give a presentation on the work we do at the GRIME Lab. The main focus of the lab is to drive complexity of the use of ground-based imagery to answer hydrological questions. The above, fairly simple, graphic describes it well. The image on the left is pretty hard to set up and maintain, but reduce the complexity of the image processing task because of the vision targets in the image. The image on the right is way easier to set up because nothing has to be installed or maintained in front of the camera, but the processing is way harder because there are no physical references for real-world unit calibration or camera motion in the scene. We are going to be able to watch Troy’s presentation online this afternoon.
Lorena saw something somewhere on social media the other day and decided she needed to make butter (and buttermilk) with her KitchenAid mixer. She was highly entertained and it came out just excellent. We have been using it for the last couple of days.
I talked to my buddy, Bryan from Oregon, today and it was kind of surreal. They are having a spectacular, warm, sunny day there while we have rain and enough cold for Lorena to fire up the outdoor fireplace. We have gotten enough rain this spring that everything is very green. Even the lawns are all looking Willamette Valley, Oregon level green. We are planning to stay in tonight, eat a grilled ribeye steak, and enjoy that ambiance. Until then, Lorena is practicing on a watercolor that she wants to see if she can perfect. Pretty excellent first pass!
Last week at HEB, we saw a kind of fruit we had never seen before called dragon fruit. A nice guy working in the department took the time to tell us when (you need to let them get a little bit soft) to eat them and how to peel them. We did not really know what to expect, but boy we were happy we tried it. Today, because it is Friday, we decided to take a special trip to Granbury to eat Kung Pao Chicken with Super Greens (only 290 calories and really good), then see if there was any dragon fruit left at HEB–it is on sale. We loaded up and even have one that is ripe enough that we are going to eat it tonight. We bought one red dragon fruit that was a good bit more expensive, but we thought we would try it anyway.
Still more good things are happening with our GRIME Lab research team at University of Nebraska. Troy sent me links to two articles that were published yesterday. The first is an UNL general interest news story about the goings on at the GRIME Lab, who works there, and what we are doing. John S. and I are mentioned in the article in addition to Troy and others. The second is an open access article (you can read it and download it for free) on evaluation of whether there is enough information in images of a river to predict stage (water level) and discharge (flow). The article, published in PLOS Water is titled is Stage and discharge prediction from documentary time-lapse imagery. I am the primary author, but Troy, Christian, John, and several others are co-authors. The graph below is one of the prediction vs. actual comparison graphs from the paper.
Troy took this selfie of he and I while we were standing in the hallway waiting to enter the arena at University of Nebraska–Lincoln for the graduation and hooding ceremony (notice I do not yet have my hood on. I still marvel that we have made it this far and are going strong. We are up to about 17 years now working on these ground-based water imagery projects. God willing, I hope to continue contributing for many years to come. It is great to have our friend, John S., join the fray. I have to admit the guy is a monster in the amount of work he gets done. He has accelerated the project massively since he started.
Back when we lived in Oregon, we would sometimes go to a Mexican restaurant in downtown Newberg. The restaurant was run by El Salvadorans. They served fairly good Mexican food, but they also served a side of curtido, an El Salvadoran blanched cabbage and carrot, pickled salad. It was extremely good. Lorena and I were talking about it the other day and she decided she would try to make some. Today is her first attempt, but we will not be able to try it out until tomorrow because we want it to be a little bit more vinegary by the time we eat it. AND, it is on my approved diet items list.
I am finally trying to get back on the weight/exercise/health wagon and get my program on track. To that end, Lorena cooked her first chicken shish kabobs of the season. Last week she did some bee kabobs. Shrimp makes the trifecta and I am hoping for that next week. They are a summer staple for us and are even good reheated for lunch the next day. Now, all I have to do is get back on track with my walking. The problem here in Texas is that, within a few weeks, it will be too hot to walk at lunchtime which is my ideal time to do it because it gets me away from the desk for an hour. I have a plan, though–mostly I just need to be disciplined about it.
Lorena took Christian’s Honor’s Mathematics certificate he earned from North Carolina State University down to Michael’s to get it framed and then added it to the “wall of shame” in my office. We think that is probably the last thing that we have to put up. We are continually irritated with the lack of symmetry of the wall. We are too lazy to change it, though, because we are planning to move, God willing, to a smaller house and property in a year or two.
One of our favorite things about living where we live is that we are only about 20-25 minutes from one of our very favorite restaurants of all time. Baked Bread and Pastry Co. has quite a back story, but they would be a great place to eat, even if they did not have one. The food is nothing short of spectacular. When we first got here, we were told by native Texans that Baked’s biscuits and gravy were the best they had ever eaten. We have lived in the South for over a decade, all told, and as connoisseurs and active searchers for the one true biscuits and gravy, I have to admit we were somewhat skeptical. But we were wrong to be skeptical. The thing is, if you find something that good, it is hard to try anything else, but this is one of those places where they have MANY offerings that are that good. We probably eat there two or three times per month and it is wildly worth it. It turns out that a lot of other people thing the same way about them as us. The Tripadvisor reviews are not wrong. At the time of this post, there were 13 reviews. All were all 5’s.
Lorena did a no-look cell-phone capture of the total eclipse and this is what she got! Notice the star (or planet–might be Venus) down and to the right from the sun in the image. If that is not enough she has gotten Wordle right in three tries for the last two days.
She is definitely putting that hard earned Associate of Arts degree to work. Honestly, for an English speaker of a language she uses frequently, but only for a very limited percentage of all of her communication (we speak Spanish at home), she has an amazing command of the language. She is easily as good at English as I am at Spanish. My Spanish is so good that when I order something at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, the workers might think I am from Mexico, but they always ask me where I am from because they know my accent is not theirs, but they don’t mistake me for a gringo. How impressive is that!?!!
Lorena had her annual medical check-up yesterday and it came out great. She continues to work out HARD four days per week and that was manifested in her results. The doctor told her that she only needs to come in every other year for the time being and that the best thing she can do to say healthy is to maintain her rigorous exercise schedule. Now, with her new Garmin watch, she can track everything she does quite nicely. Again, this is a lesson to me, I have completely fallen off the health wagon again and need to get back on and start exercising. Maintaining the same kind of schedule Lorena maintains would be optimal–two days per week on the rowing machine and two days per week running on the treadmill. I like to do as much as I can outside, but that really is not very practical in the summer in our part of Texas.
That is little spot at the edge on the sun at the edge of the moon is not a smudge on the lens, but literally a sunspot. My buddy John S. took that picture and sent it to me. Lorena and I spent a couple of hours just enjoying the whole event. We had seen a 95% eclipse when we lived in Washington state, but this was a whole different category of thing. The temperature dropped ten degrees and it got way, way darker than the 95% eclipse. I might be game to travel to see the one in Spain next year or the year after. The image below is what it looked like when the eclipse was at totality.
Lynn sent this picture of the upper azotea of the first house we bought in Mexico. The mountains are the same ones we can see from the front of the house we bought further up the hill, but the view of these mountains (Cerro de Las Mitras) is really better from the lower house because you can see more of them and at a little bit of a distance. Both views looking at the valley and the mountains on the other side of the house are pretty spectacular. Honestly, I am somewhat surprised at how nice this all turned out. The only work left on Casa #1 is clean up and a few minor details. Hopefully, it will sell soon and we can start again.
I started blogging in Albany Oregon on April 6, 2004. It is hard to imagine that 20 years have passed since that unauspicious start. Kelly was in finishing fourth grade, Christian was finishing second grade, and we had just made the decision to remove them from what were abysmal circumstances in the local government schools, both academically and socially. I started the blog to help me focus my thinking and keep a record of our homeschool planning and execution. It became immediately apparent that it was well worth the effort. The rate at which I blogged ebbed and flowed over the years. There was a period from 2019 through Spring semester of 2023 when I was working a full-time job and studying as a full-time PhD student when I slowed down pretty dramatically, but on finishing the degree, I started posting back at my normal pace of about 240 blog posts per year. Over that whole time, I have averaged, even with the slow years, a pace of a little over 200 posts per year.
We finished all the educational efforts of Kelly and Christian that we set out to record, added Lorena’s Associate Degree and my PhD, finished those, and have now moved on to new projects. Christian earned a Bachelor’s and PhD degree, Kelly earned an Associate, Bachelor’s and Master of Science degree, Lorena earned an Associate Degree, and I earned a PhD. We worked on all that so hard for so long that, when we finished, we were a little bit lost about what to do. Fortunately, during that time, we had undertaken two very large remodel projects and learned that we loved that. That had given us the impetus to by a couple of fixer-upper houses in Mexico, one of them now converted into a six unit apartment building and the other, the one we hope to use as a residence, is in the middle of a fairly large remodel. The problem is that we are not doing the work on those houses and we do not currently live in them, so we are watching it all happen as opposed to participating in it ourselves. It is fun to watch and write about here, but still leaves quite a bit of time on our hands.
We are navigating what to do as we move toward retirement age–I said “retirement age” advisedly because I hope I never have to retire. I am currently committed to continue working at my current job until I am at least 70. In addition, the paperwork is in progress to make me an Adjunct Professor so I can continue volunteer research contributions at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and North Carolina State University. Lorena and the kids want to travel a little more, so we hope to do that some, too. I expect there will be plenty of things about which to write, but there is nothing better than a longer term, hard goal to inspire effort and creativity to complete. I am getting to the age now where I think there might be only one more of those left. Maybe not even one. Nevertheless, I think I will have plenty of things to write to keep this blog going, hopefully for another twenty years, God willing.
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