Lorena made reservations and took me to Mesero’s in Clearfork, Fort Worth this afternoon for an early Father’s Day celebration. It is our favorite Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth (so far) and kind of our go-to place for special events. It is only a very pleasant thirty minute drive. We have decided we need to start doing this more often. I had the chicken enchiladas with Mole and Lorena had tacos de carne asada. The never get it wrong.
Gerardo put some extra lawn in an area of our back yard for erosion management today. He had previously put in the sprinkler system to support the new grass. We were totally humbled by how he did his work. He and and two brothers and their high school aged kids are the people that do the work. We were amazed not only with the quality of the work, but the work ethic and profoundly positive attitude of Gerardo and his team. God willing, if we sell our house, we want to work with him to do the landscaping at our property in Granbury. Lorena wants a water feature and I want low maintenance. We have a lot of confidence Gerardo can give us both.
I would like to know who created this, because I would love to give them credit for saying out loud (well, in an image anyway) what many of us really believe, at least on a day-to-day operational level. It seems like many of the imaging AI/ML people who characterize themselves as experts in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence when in reality, they know little about Computer Vision other than how to throw pixels at existing high level tools. Maybe it is because I am old, but it is a challenge to sit and listen to drivel about Computer Vision that is really only informed by the ability to use a tool without really understanding the underlying concepts.
I think we are getting about three house showings per week on our “for sale” house. It seems like everyone likes the house and thinks the price is just fine, but finds some defect that prevents them from making an offer. That would be great if all the cited defects were the same, because then we could do something about it, but all the cited defects are different, so we do not know what to do. At the same time, it has only been about three weeks now since we put the house on the market. We still feel pretty good about our prospects and we are excited to get started on building the new house so we remain optimistic. It is kind of a hassle to have to vacate the house for a showing and random times, but it is also kind of exciting because we ARE getting viewings. Our worst fear is that we will not be able to sell the house for a year. Our second worse fear is that we will sell it tomorrow and have to get everything move to storage and move to Mexico for six months–not a BAD thing, but one that will require a bunch of work.
This post is just a marker to remember that Kelly and Christian have been gone from home, paying their own way and making their own lives, for ten years now. They both left at the same time at ages 18 and 20 with Bachelors degrees in hand, heading off to graduate school. We are wildly proud of them. They are both scientists at elite national university research laboratories, but more importantly, they still love and serve the God of all creation and Jesus, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.
Lynn rented the first apartment today in our San Pedro renovation building. The tenants are scheduled to move in on June 23. We hope to have the whole thing filled up by mid-July, but who knows. Hopefully, it will not be too long after that before we can sell it and move on to the next project.
I received and signed the offer letter from University of Nebraska-Lincoln to make me an Adjunct Professor. I am very appreciative for the opportunity to continue to participate in Troy’s research. Right now we are working on a project with a public-private business that manages water resources in Brisbane, QLD in Australia. They are really great guys and they are doing a very forward looking project using the GRIME2 water level measurement software that the GRIME Lab has developed over the years.
I have one brother named Doug. He has been an amazingly good brother. He was the first of five while I was the second. Doug turned 70 today. The shortness of life started to hit me when I was starting to finish my PhD and it is kind of a shock that we are now at a place that seemed such a long way off just not too long ago. I am very grateful for my brother. We have not always agreed on everything, but we have always gotten along fine. It is an unbelievable joy, now that we are old, to reconnect as we both move into retirement and realize that we have so much in common and enjoy talking through it all. We plan to work at getting together much more often. My hope is that I can get together with all my amazing siblings again at our house for my 70th birthday whether that be in Texas or Mexico.
We are trying to sell our current house. We have been here over three years now and I was thinking there were fewer memories and events of note that we lived in this house than previous ones. Now that we will need to move in a short amount of time, we are feeling some nostalgia. We have had Thanksgivings with the kids, Lorena has learned to grow flowers in Texas (see the spectacular one in the image on the left), we have enjoyed watching rabbits, huge hares and Golden Eagles, and birds learning to fly (see the image at the top of baby birds sitting and flying on and off a porch beam, long horns, burrows, many, many cows, fantastically beautiful fields of Indian Paintbrush and Bluebonnets, and much more. We will very much miss this place if we ever sell it.
There is nothing quite like the Oregon coast with its rugged terrain and spectacular ocean views. I took this panorama shot while Lorena and I were there, but it was not the best site to do that sort of thing. Still, it makes me nostalgic looking at it. This is what I remember from family trips as a small boy.
Dr. Mary Harner from University of Nebraska-Kearney sent out this image a couple of days ago. It was captured at the KOLA research site. One of the really fun aspects of this work is getting to know individual animals who shop up and get their pictures taken. Mary thinks we have seen this particular deer one time before. This is the first time I have seen an image of a deer at this particular site.
I am amazed that I was so impressed by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt’s book The Farm at the Center of the Universe kid’s book published by the Discovery Institute. I am not sure whether my impression of the book counts much because I am old and this book was not aimed at me. At the same time, I have a STEM PhD from an R1 University, understand the material at a fairly deeply level, and I am really sorry this book was not available to us when we homeschooled our kids over a decade ago (our kids are both scientists at elite universities on the East coast–MIT/JHU). We used materials from the Discovery Institute in our homeschool program, but it required some pretty heavy lifting to translate those materials to a level that our middle school age kids could understand. This book fills that void. I highly recommend this book for homeschool and private school use as a mechanism for the discussion of the existence of God and the current state of knowledge, both in popular culture and in the academy. You will thank me for this advice.
I finished the Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volume Three by Michael L. Brown on the trip to Oregon and started reading Volume Four today. These books have been major eye-openers for me in many ways, not only about Christianity from a Jewish perspective, but about Christianity, whole cloth.
I ordered a book titled The Farm at the Center of the Universe by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt that arrived while we were gone. It is a young person’s novel about scientific and other evidences for the existence of God. I got this one just because it looked like it could be very, very good. I hope to have time to read the second one this weekend.
I am doing a pretty good job of upping my reading game, but will have to put more effort into finding more good books. I have several that are pretty heavy reads, so I need to find some new ones that are both interesting and worth reading. Sometimes those ends are at cross purposes with each other.
Lorena and I flew to Oregon to get together with all my siblings to celebrate my older brother, Doug’s, 70th birthday. We met together at a resort at Depoe Bay, Oregon. I am very, very grateful for my siblings. They hosted me at the hotel and at my sister Julia’s house when we returned to Portland. We spent the whole time eating and talking about psychology and God. Of course, we are coming from different places on stuff, but are in agreement on more than that on which we disagree. Most of all, we talked and listened to each other in good will. We have decided to get together like this every year or two. I hope we can do the next one in our house Texas or Mexico.
We flew to Oregon last week to get together with all my siblings for the first time since our parents funeral, seven years ago. Part of the trip was set aside for a meeting with two colleagues of mine with whom I have worked for almost 40 years (Frank Evans) and around 30 years (Dr. Mark Singer). We got a meeting room in Tualatin, Oregon to discuss the technical aspects of work they do for me as contractors in my day job. It is a gift to be able to work with them. In our field, there are none better both technically and in terms of good will. I am writing this as a marker by which to honor and remember them–we are all old and live far apart–them in Oregon and me in Texas, so this might be the last time. I hope not.
Dr. J is exactly half-way through to his PhD at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research software is turning into something amazing indeed. This is an example of his (very preliminary) instance segmentation. Even though it is very early in the process, you can see this is going to be a powerful addition to his already powerful GRIME-AI software suite of tools. The software already downloads and merges images and scalar data according to a user specified, GUI-selectable recipe that includes data cleaning and image triage. Can’t wait to see the finished product.The software is part of the GaugeCam GRIME Lab research initiative at University of Nebraska.
No offers yet, but today we had the third showing in the first three days the house has been on the market. We have been trying to figure out what we should do to be out of the way while waiting for people to view the house and we think we might have found it. There is a place in Godley named Row 171 that serves drinks, but no food. The hook is that people come there for the music and ambiance AND the scheduled food trucks. Tonight, there was some stellar quesadillas and a glass of wine. The music was a little loud for an old guy like me, but it was not bad music. The feeling was that kind of feeling you can only get in a small town in America of a high school ambiance, but with beer, wine, and well drinks. You kind of expect to see Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite to walk by in his high school letter jacket.
Troy is out in the field at the Kearney Outdoor Learning Area working on our research targets. I actually really like this picture. He looks like a real working hydrology scientist. That is right in the same place where the University of Nebraska–Kearney research team got the killer snapping turtle image that I put up in yesterday’s blog post. I really hope he has on some steel encased boots!
This image of a fairly large snapping turtle was captured at the Kearney Outdoor Learning Center on Turkey Creek south of the Kearney, Nebraska High School by the water level measurement targets. The researchers at the site regularly wade around right there where the turtle is to clean and maintain the targets and equipment. It kind of makes me happy that I am not the one doing the wading and is giving pause to everyone else. The breadth of variety in the wildlife there at Turkey Creek is nothing short of amazing with owls, raccoons, herons, turtles and who knows what else.
Our house in Godley is officially on the market. It hit the websites earlier today and we had our first visitor in the early afternoon. We are not sure what that means, but we think we have it priced right and hope it sells pretty quickly. We will be moving to Mexico between when our current house sells and the new house is completed. We have done a lot of work getting ready, but now we are in the hurry up and wait mode. Even though some of our houses have sold very quickly in the past this period gives Lorena and I anxiety!
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén