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!
Lorena thinks she wants a the new house to be yellow. She likes something a little bit on the brighter side of pastel. We have to pick the exterior colors for the house by Monday so our new friend, Larry the house designer, can present them to the Granbury Historic Preservation Commission. God willing, the process has started. My understanding of the way it works is that, as soon as the plans are approved, the construction drawings can start. When the construction drawings are complete, two processes that both take about a month will kick off in parallel. Engineering drawings for the foundation and all adjustments needed for that will start. In addition, a very rigorous costing of the house will be formulated so we will know how much money is needed. There will be a big meeting at the end of that process with spreadsheet in hand to determine what kind of trade-offs are needed to meet budget constraints and/or add some “nice-to-haves” if the money is available. When all this is done and all goes well, the house starts getting built in earnest.
Lorena rented climate-controlled storage space for all our worldly goods today. I worked through the insurance for the things in storage and for Christian’s car which should arrive here, hopefully before the end of the month. He has little use for a car in New York City, so we will keep it here in Texas so we can use it when we come back to check out what is going on with the house as it gets built. I also figured out how to earn some interest on the money we get from the sale of our current house to help us pay for the new house. There are a lot of moving parts in all of this and while we do not feel like we are in control of it all, it seems less harried than in previous moves. Maybe it is because we have been through it so many times before. We will see what happens when it is time to actually start moving things. Lorena has gotten a big jump on packing things, so when the hired packers come, maybe there will be a little less to do.
I bought the black backpack on the right about fifteen years ago at some place like Marshall’s, T.J.Maxx, or one of those outlet malls. I lucked into a very, very good backpack that was rugged, functional (pockets in all the right places), not too big, not too small, and easy to carry. After a lot of hard use, it was time to make a change, but it truly seems like I am saying goodbye to an old and faithful friend. Lorena helped me find a new backpack at Marshall’s based on what I learned from the old one. I think a lot of the features of the new one are the same, quite a few are better or did not exist in the old one, and one or two are not as good. I really like that there is an external jack to connect to a USB power brick and there are some pockets that will really help me get through airports more easily. In addition, I will be able to easily carry two laptops which I will need when we move to Mexico. All in all, I think it was a good purchase.
We made the hard decision to move into one of the units in the apartment building rather than the first floor of the house up on the hill. We would just get in the way up on the hill and the apartments are completed and ready for move in. We need a place to live in Mexico until this time next year and there is some chance the house on the hill will be ready for occupation before we live, but we thing there is an over 50% chance we will not get to move into that house until a year from this fall. Even then, it might not be complete. We can hardly believe it but, God willing, we will be living in Mexico by this time in six weeks.
I ordered a used book I have been wanting to get for quite a while by C.S. Lewis that has four of his works. I really bought it because it had a work in it I wanted to read (Surprised by Joy), but also because it looked cool and I though it would look great on the bookshelves we have always wanted but never had that are now planned for our new house, if it is ever built, God willing. There is an inscription from someone who gave the book to another person named Amada. It was a very nice inscription that has inspired me consider gifting this kind of a gift the next time I get the chance. The house is still up in the air, but I think that is mostly because our real estate agent is on vacation in Costa Rica and out of contact.
I am still reading through the fourth volume of Michael Brown’s five volume set titled “Jewish Objections to Christianity so I am pretty sure I will not get the chance to take this book up for at least another couple of months. I am not sure how many books I need to fill up my bookshelves but it is assuredly quite a few more than what I currently have on hand. I am in a reading frame of mind these days and am looking forward to finding more books on History, Science, and Theology as well as some fiction works to read for fun.
We got a text from our real estate agent that said the people who want to buy our house have made an offer that is acceptable to all parties. We were supposed to get to get a document to sign last night, but it has not arrived close to a day later. I kind of understand because our agent is on vacation in Costa Rica. At the same time, Lorena and I have a finite amount of time to get everything done: 1) travel for work, 2) handle finances for address changes in the US and Mexico, 3) move out of the house into storage, and 4) make the final design changes for the new house before we leave. We are really hoping this thing is complete before the weekend, but our agent is completely out of contact.
When I first started back to school at University of Nebraska, people talked about something called an h-index. It was almost universal that I got told two conflicting things about it. The first was that it was not a good measure of the quality of academic output and no one really puts much stock in it. The second was that, if a recently graduated PhD wanted to have a chance at getting a tenure track position, it was good to have an h-index of 10 or above. My future academic goals and age diminishes the importance of a high h-index even more. Still, it has been pretty cool to watch my h-index inch up. I have enough patents in process and technical articles in the pipeline that I have a decent chance of hitting at least 10, maybe even before I die!
Yesterday we received notice that a couple liked both our house (Lorena is the queen of staging houses for sale) and the price and plan to make us an offer today after figuring out some financing options. It that happens, then the clock starts ticking on a move to the house in the picture in Mexico. Lorena’s brother, Tío Lynn says he will have the first floor of the house turned into an apartment with an operational kitchen, bathroom, and office with broadband internet by the time we get there. We were told we will have 4-6 weeks from the time we accept the offer. In that time, we have to pack up and move everything into storage, fill the car up with the essentials I will need to do my job, set up our new address at the property where the house will be built, God willing, and figure out how to manage finances from our place in Mexico.
Lorena and I are thankful for our fathers. From our view, they had out-sized impacts on the world in which they lived as manifested by how much they are missed now that they are gone. They were flawed like anyone else, but we are especially grateful for their attitudes and understanding of Jesus Christ and our responsibility toward Him and Him alone. We believe those qualities of our fathers equipped us to handle the challenges and disappointments we have encountered of late in our own times and places in a way that does not allow the bad, even evil that plagues our world to rob us of our joy. Thank you Grandpa Lauro and Grandpa Milo.
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