I am very grateful to my brother because he reminded me and reminded me until I got the Living Trust, Last Wills and Testaments, Financial Powers of Attorney, and Medical Powers of Attorney completed, signed, and notarized before we head down to Mexico for a (relatively) short stint. It was just not that hard. We have the hard copy version of all these documents in a safe place along with soft copies for everyone involved. Our good friends, James and Janet Coker were kind to take the time to witness a bazillion signatures and their son, Brad’s, administrator notarized them for us. To top it off, it gave us an excuse to take James and Jan to Baked for lunch. It has been a busy, but amazing couple of days.
Month: July 2024 Page 1 of 2
Troy (my professor at University of Nebraska), John (my old buddy from the Bronx, colleague, and fellow student), and I have big plans going forward. My main contribution will be to perform research on water level measurement with ground-based cameras and the use of the GRIME-AI software package from GaugeCam to detect and measure as yet undefined “things” of interests to ecologists and hydrologists. But first, I need to work with Troy to finish an in-progress article based on the fourth chapter of my dissertation, then gather data and write a second paper on our efforts to reduce the footprint of the calibration target we use in our water level measurements to the same size as a typical staff gauge used by the USGS. If that second paper is successful, we plan to extend the GRIME2 software package to accommodate those smaller calibration targets. Troy has a grad student who is currently writing code and running data for the second paper. It has been an enjoyable process working with him.
Lots of good and interesting minor events happening right now. My name got added to the Adjunct Professor list on the University of Nebraska–Linclon website, I got some cool new Thrive Bioscience bling for Christian and I (a winter vest from Land’s End with the Thrive logo, and I got a title change with new cards that feature the title change and the PhD suffix. Small favors can be nice.
Big changes are about to occur in the lives of Lorena and I. God willing, we will be living in Mexico this time next week. Things will be be hectic until we finish the move and have some time to setup our household. The time spent at the Thrive Bioscience corporate meeting was excellent though very manic. The picture above is of the whole team sailing around Salem Harbor. It was a nice event with time to talk about things other than just work. A good number of my colleagues are close to my age and we talked a lot about what we will do as we move toward retirement. It was interesting that our consensus was that we wanted to keep working, at some level, as long as possible. I reflected on that and on all the projects I am doing as I move toward my 70’s on the flight home. I had no huge epiphany in all this, but operationally, it dawned on me that I need to do things that will not require a lot of ongoing maintenance when my projects are complete for very obvious reasons. It also came clear that all the things I read in my Bible in terms of my personal relationship with God, what is required of me at a personally level, and the scope of world events are immutable and good. I can either go along with His will and plan or suffer. Those are the only two options. That the former leads to joy and peace is a hard won truth in my life. What that means at this new stage will become apparent according to His timing and I am good with that.
I am flying home froym Boston to DFW after three days of corporate meeting with new Thrive Bioscience Branded Vests for Christian and I, a new title (Vice President of Algorithms), and new cards with my new title and PhD appended to my name on the cards. I ate way too much but came away with new energy and optimism about our company. I am working with a group of very nice people. Hopefully, I can continue to make myself useful for a few more years.
Kelly and Christian took Lorena to eat at Pastis in New York City. I am so grateful for them. They have been confronted with some difficult obstacles with which I have been almost no help to them. We are all confused about the time and place or our existence, but here we are and the kids truly make their own decisions. I have every confidence they are on the path where God has taken them and they are still listening to Him. They are kind to their mother and they are kind to me, even though Lorena and I are at a different place and struggling with some of the same battles–we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. The very best we can do is pray and depend on God to lead them where He want them to be.
I am sorry that I am not with Lorena and the kids in New York City right now. This is Lorena’s first time there and she is ecstatic, mostly because of the kids, but also because New York City, for all its foibles and failures, is a magnificent place. The did a lot of things today, but the highlight was almost certainly the visit to MOMA and the spectacular Starry Night painting by Vincent Van Gogh which she has no seen, in person, and I have not. I cannot wait to go there myself. Tomorrow, Keith McNally’s equally spectacular Pastis Restaurant is on the schedule and it is killing me that I cannot be there.
This is the view from the top of Christian’s apartment building in Brooklyn, New York. Lorena flew in this afternoon to spend the week with him. Kelly is taking the train up from Washington, D.C. for the weekend. I am so sad that I cannot be there, too, but I have a business trip to Boston–that actually should be a phenomenal time with the Thrive Bioscience team. Honestly, it is very exciting to me that the kids have taken their own paths and are living in places that, while I might not have chosen to live, are spectacular, storied places. It is a chaotic time, not only in terms of the lives of our children, but in the world writ large. The kids are doing the best they know to do and, I believe, loving Christ and trying to do what God gives them to do.
This view is from the same location as the first image. My Finnish great grandparents arrived in America and were receive on Ellis Island (the island in the image) in the late 1800’s. This is a powerful image and one that evokes a sense of gratitude in me. God put me at the time and place that was in accord with His plan. And now Christian lives within view of where they arrive. I am humbled before God.
I have used Linux exclusively at work for seven out of the last eight years and at home for around 15 years now. Xubuntu is my distribution of choice because it is lightweight and uncomplicated. Also, it is a pain in the neck to change distribution although I might be forced into it as there are rumors that Xubuntu will no longer be supported for the long term. I hope they are just rumors. I bring this up because of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) pandemic that hit Windows computers worldwide. Linux and Mac users are crowing loudly about not getting hit–although if I were a Mac user, I would be too ashamed to admit that to crow about it. I am absolutely a huge Open Source software fan, with a free (as in beer), open source software project for measuring water level with cameras called GaugeCam GRIME2 that I maintain on GitHub. I hope the reason Linux was not hurt by this problem is that is just better because it is Open Source.
Dark, dark clouds are on the horizon. I hope they are actual and not metaphorical, too. Things just seem to be getting crazier and crazier. Politics, culture, and just life. It is a very interesting time to be alive. I need to keep reminding myself we were all put in this time and place by a higher power and to just go where I am taken and do what I can to be a help. God is in control and it all comes out OK in the end.
I officially started work six years ago today at Thrive Bioscience. I had actually contracted there for a very brief time before I started. It has been a good enough experience, I want to continue working there as long as they will let me. In the end, it is all about the people. Thrive has great people. In addition, they have allowed me to bring in my own talented contractors to work with me. It really does feel like we are on the verge of something big. I had planned to retire at 70, but for a company this good, I am willing to rethink that a little if I am needed.
Lynn sent me some images of the area around our house in San Pedro this weekend. There has been some much ran there, that the park that is about a block away from our house and they mountain in front of our house where there are no other houses look like they could be in Oregon. It is all very green and overcast. We cannot wait to get down there and experience it in real life.
There was an assassination attempt yesterday on Donald Trump. I am writing this post, not so much to comment about it, but to provide a marker in the blog for when it happened. The first time something like this happened in my lifetime was in 1963 when I was eight years old at recess in the third grade at Harrison Elementary School in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Cottage Grove High School was up the hill from Harrison and we saw some high school kids running down the hill to talk to the teacher on recess duty. They told her that John F. Kennedy had been killed. The second was, of course, when the Twin Trade Towers in New York City were hit in 2001. We lived in Sherwood, Oregon at the time and I had just dropped my in-laws off at the airport to return to Monterrey, Mexico and was on my way to work. When I got to work, everyone was glued to a television watching the it all. I got there just in time to see the second tower get hit, live. This attempt might fit into a second category in terms of my awareness–not the gravity of the event, the assassin killed an innocent bystander in the audience. I remember where I was and what I was doing when Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981 (riding on a train from Boise to Denver with Curt Nichols) and when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986 (sitting in a dentist chair). Yesterday, Christian sent a note to Lorena that the President Trump had been shot. I was sitting at my desk working (on a Saturday) so I immediately pulled up X (Twitter) and spent the rest of the day following the events.
Lorena and I love the Panda Express in Granbury, Texas. It has been our experience that, while most Panda Expresses are at least “pretty good,” they are not all created equal and our experience at some of them was just not very good. We are grateful that we have one we like in our new town. We think the ones we do not enjoy might have to do with the cultures of the people who work there. The reason we like this Panda Express is that it is a fast food place that serves fairly low calorie, healthy offerings that are reasonably priced. There are two other fast food places that meet that criteria–Wendy’s (chili, salads, and baked potatoes) and Jimmy John’s (unwiches). Right now, I am at my desk all day long with little reason to leave the house. So, at least until we move, we tend to go out to eat more to get out of the house than to eat. Hopefully, that will change when we go to Mexico. This is kind of bad for my health.
With only a few weeks to go, the preparation to move has accelerated. We are tearing down beds, making hard choices about what to put in storage, what to take to Mexico and what to throw away. I am truly married to an anti-hoarder.
This is close to the final design for the house we want to build in Granbury. The color is not quite right–it will be blue rather than gray, but the floor plan and the rest of the exterior are complete. The next step is to go before the Historic Preservation Committee. Larry, our designer is submitting the final renderings for that process sometime today for a meeting later this month.
The first floor window on the valley side of the house up on the hill is taking shape. The whole first floor was dark before the window was punched in–it completely changed the atmosphere of that floor. We were supposed to live there when we move to Mexico in August, but it won’t be complete for a couple more months so we are going to live in one of the apartments in our building halfway down the hill until this house is more complete. Probably it does not make sense to move in up there until one or two more large projects are completed that will create a lot of noise and dust. We hope that happens by November this year so we can celebrate Thanksgiving there, but we think there is about a 50/50 chance of that happening.
The plan is to live one floor up from where this window is located when the house is fully complete. It has an even more amazing view with a balcony. Above the floor with the balcony Lynn plans to build a roofed entertainment area with a kitchen, bathrooms, and other facilities.
Since Larry, our house designer, has to submit our stuff by Wednesday to get on the Historic Preservation Committee meeting agenda later in the month, we have been frantically scrolling through house pictures to find the exact combination that meets Lorena’s approval. We think we have found it. Lorena wants it to look like the house in this image, but with maybe a slightly lighter blue and a slightly whiter white. Picking something that is already in the neighborhood makes it easier for the committee to give their approval. We really do like the colors and Larry says we should be able to test it out on a little portion of the house when we get to that point and adjust the brightness a little. We also think it will go nicely with the red window frames our builder and designer want to use.
I had occasion to call an old acquaintance in Oregon yesterday. The purpose of the call was to make a connection between people whose parents had been friends in the distant past. After asking the acquaintance about himself and his family, he directed his discussion toward his work, made misguided statements about the nature of God with which I am deeply familiar, and told me I had lashed out at him because I was offended about what he said. I was totally baffled by the aggressiveness as I had only expressed a quite calm thought about one of his statements and realized I needed to back out of the conversation. I said it seems like we have very different worldviews and maybe it would be safer not to discuss it, trying to get back to the purpose of the call.
He then started to talk about my beliefs. I am sure he has no clue about what I believe as I have had no contact with him for decades and we really never talked about that kind of thing anyway. I have spent all of that time studying these subjects deeply to the point where I have deep knowledge of what I believe and the reasons for those beliefs. I should have stopped the conversation then (due to the aggressiveness) but, in my weakness, told him my beliefs were not “leaps of faith,” rather they were reasoned understanding based on years of studying and reflecting on the scholarship. I did not mention that these reasoned understandings were bolstered by my own personal experiences of God, because that would have just gotten in the way and the reasoned understandings stand on their own. When he pushed back harder, I told him maybe we ought to just leave it at that. He stated that he would be willing to take the conversation back up again when I was willing to hear (as opposed to have a conversation). The premise on which he had started his diatribe was a false premise, so it is hard to imagine that being a meaningful conversation.
It made me sad. Not so much what he said–that tended toward the quality of argument you might see in an internet atheist forum and I have heard it all before–but because of the level of vitriol, lack of self-awareness, and unwarranted confidence in his ideas that reminds me of the baseness of the western cultural milieu.
This Fourth of July weekend has been relaxing for Lorena and I. Our main goal this weekend has been to decide what colors we want for the exterior of the new house so we can take it to the Granbury Historic Preservation Commission for approval. We think we have decided but are going to sleep on it for a couple more nights. One of the things we found out is that a free trolley runs a loop to all the hotels and tourist spots around town on holidays and weekends. It stops wherever you want it to stop and it runs right in front of our house, so that is going to be handy!