Kelly sent this photo of her and Christian yesterday. They had a pretty good time in San Francisco over the New Year. More than anything, I think they are pretty tired. Lorena and I had a quiet day at home because I was still suffering from the residual of a cold. We DID have a big steak with a grilled onion, and a baked potato. Also, I spent most of the day working on the bean sorting project. Gene has made really big progress, so I need to get an application going so that he can have a way to see what the camera captures as the beans drop. That will allow him to develop the lighting. It is a little more complicated than just creating a capture application. We really need to find a way for me to upgrade is program (running on a Raspberry Pi) over the internet. I have done this before, so it will be great to get a little more experience at doing this sort of thing.
Category: Family Page 6 of 18
New Year’s Eve was good. Lorena and I spent a couple of hours at our friends’, Stan and Diane, house with a small group of older folks from our church. We, of course, ate too much then came home a little early, talked and went to bed. I spent a good chunk of this holiday season in bed or an easy chair with a cold so I had a lot of time to reflect on life and what we are doing with it. When I say we, I mean Lorena and I. That reflection led to more questions than answers. Do we live in a house that is too big? How soon should I retire? Do stay here or go somewhere else when that happens? Or sooner? I guess my New Year’s Resolution is to seek some guidance from God on those questions. I am surely thankful to be married to Lorena as my she wants precisely the same things–the right, or at least good answers.
For posterity–nicest Christmas in recent memory.
Kelly co-opted Christian in her big gingerbread house project yesterday and it brought back all kinds of good memories. Christian cannot help himself when it comes to this kind of thing. Christian wants the most artistically creative design possible, but adequate actualization of the design is not really possible without proper attention to even the most minute of details. Kiwi cannot help herself either. She is a people cat. Very social. A warm keyboard with people around is as good as it gets. This is precisely how Christian spent his college years–sitting at the bar with Rubix (Kiwi is the surviving twin cat sister and has filled in nicely now that Rubix is gone) laying on his arms or on the keyboard while Lorena and Kelly are cooking something in the kitchen. That purple and orange thing behind the computer is the bluetooth speaker with traditional Christmas music providing a nice background.
Christian worked on this quite a long time. The stencils for the design, based on Kelly’s absolute requirement to make an English manor, are now ready for the cooking of the gingerbread which should happen sometime starting this afternoon. Some of the pieces are pretty small, so we will have to see how it goes–improvisation and Engineering Change Orders might be necessary depending on suitability of the materials and implementation methods to the design. All good engineers can improvise when needed. Here is a closeup of the design below. Some of Christian’s notebooks (this is typical) are pretty amazing. They are a lot more cryptic these days as he is doing things in the bowels of theoretical Information Theory that is beyond our understanding. It is nice to see this throwback to some of his earlier work in homeschool and his undergraduate degree.
My sister (Aunt) Jean sent me this old photo today. While Lorena and Kelly are away in England and Christian is off at school, I have to admit I have gotten a little melancholy. I was just sitting in my room listening to music and doing a little reading when the photo popped up. I had a wonderful mother who cared greatly about us kids. I remember growing up, consistently hearing how beautiful she was. And it wasn’t just that she was very, very pretty. She had an amazing caring spirit–especially for the underdog. I miss her a lot.
After one of the nicest Thanksgivings in recent memory (by accident really), we are all back to work. Lorena dropped Christian and off at the airport–Christian is headed back to Arizona and I am writing this post on the plane en route to Boston. Lorena then ran Kelly up to work, did her workout and is back home to take her last Astronomy class test of the semester. Actually, I got a lot done on the GaugeCam/PhD project during vacation last week and in transition back to my day job. It really is nice to have a break, but it is also nice to go back to work, too.
Our Thanksgiving this year came together very nicely even though our Thanksgiving was wildly disorganized and we did not even expect to be here before it all started. We are very grateful to our guests (Jack N., Dan T. Warren B., Aaron L., and Charlotte D., not to mention Kelly and Christian) because they all fit in nicely to a fairly chaotic but enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend. Most of us were able to attend a special, Spanish language church service on Friday which very much put the right kind of emphasis on the whole affair.
On top of that, Kiwi the surviving cat sister was the true miracle of the weekend. We emptied the oranges from a cardboard box and before we could move the box Kiwi climbed in. She spent most of the weekend there, minimizing the number of times we had to lock her in her room because she was getting into things to a record low.
We cooked two small turkeys over the weekend and were going to make soup, but Lorena accidentally threw out the broth from the simmer down of the turkey remains after we meticulously removed the fat and other detritus. Oh well. We will try again over Christmas.
Thanksgiving was great this year. We were not sure we were even going to be in town together, but it all got pulled together at the last minute. Kelly came mid-morning, a few guests arrived a little later. A few more arrived after that. One arrived even after dinner to spend the night. It was small impromptu and wonderful. Of course we ate too much. Kelly started it off with a cheese board and lox, crackers and cream cheese. Aaron L. made and brought a butter nut squash pie with coconut milk whipped topping (stunningly good). I cooked the (smallish) turkey and overruled Mom when she told me I needed to leave it in the oven for another 30-60 minutes–it was the best turkey we ever had. We set the table for eight and ate and ate and ate. Cannot wait until next year.
Christian arrived from Tempe last night to spend Thanksgiving week with us. We plan to celebrate his passing the Comprehensive Exam for his PhD within the next week with a big steak. It is nice to hear the sound of a classical guitar while he is here. Our whole plan for his visit is to just sit around and relax. Kelly should be joining us soon.
This last few months has been nothing short of just hard work for virtually the whole family. Lorena took her Astronomy class at Centralia College, Christian studied for his comprehensive exam, Kelly did her normal job, applied for other jobs, applied to schools, planned a trip to London and continued her effort to up her Python and machine learning skills, and I started a new job and started the application process for a PhD. Even Kiwi was hard at it, staring at the neighbor cat through the back window. So, Thanksgiving week, we will be here doing as little as possible other than to eat and relax with maybe a little shopping or something even less strenuous in the mix. I pick up Christian at the airport in a few hours. Kelly will be here mid-week.
I got this for Lorena for our anniversary and am putting it up here to see if she actually reads my blog or just SAYS she does. The reality is, she has wanted one of these things for many, many years. My hope is that she is going to make me some homemade bread and even some egg bagels. Also, I have a feeling that this will be a big draw for Kelly to come home. It comes on Tuesday and I will report back whether Lorena sees this before the thing arrives. She USED to read my blog every day, but after 26 years, my shtick has admittedly gotten a little stale.
Lorena and I got married on a beautiful fall afternoon at El Tio in Monterrey 26 years ago today. Grateful.
Yesterday was my 63rd birthday. It is a strange and interesting time in life and the world. The New Year whether counted from one’s birthday, January 1, or some other important annual even like the start of school or a church convention is a time for reflection. For some reason, this year more than many in the past, I feel a need to reassess what we (Lorena and I) do. We have a few short term goals we want to accomplish like Lorena’s degree and some remodel projects, but in the whole scheme of things, they are not so consequential.
I have professional and financial responsibilities to meet over the next couple of years, but they are not so onerous. I also have some side projects I want to complete. The main one is the coffee bean project, but I also really would like to do some work with my new friend Stan on his Raspberry Pi. All those things considered, I am seeing how it might be good to figure out what to do when I retire in 3-4 years. Do we stay where we are? We like it here, but we are the kind of people who believe there is a place we are “supposed” to be. We need to give it some time to figure out. It is nice to have events like birthdays so this kind of thing comes onto one’s radar.
Beside all that, I had a great, but very quiet birthday. Both the kids called, I talked to Grandma Conchita on Skype, Lorena cooked me a really nice, too big, New York steak and a carrot cake, and Kiwi sat on my lap more than she should have given that it diminishes my work output fairly dramatically.
This one speaks for itself.
We pulled the kids out of school so they and Lorena could fly to San Diego with me for a business trip. The hung out at the hotel, swam in the pool, and visited the Rizo family in Chula Vista. A great time was had by all.
I have been reading a lot of memories of 9/11/2001 on the internet today. I dug up some old video (kind of bad, but if you download it, you can hear the sound) of the Kelly when she was 7 years old and Christian when he was 5 years old, just three months before the attack on the twin trade towers. Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita were visiting us when we lived in Sherwood, Oregon. It all happened right after I dropped them off at the airport in Portland and headed off to work in West Portland. Their flight got canceled and they had to take a taxi home. I listened on the radio after the first tower was hit, then made it to work at ESI in time to watch the second airplane fly into the second tower and the two towers both fall to the ground on live television. My sister Jean was in New York heading toward the towers when this all happened. They got stuck there for quite a few days before they could make their way home, but that is another story for another time.
Kelly is coming home this afternoon for a few hours to wash some clothes and get some work done. Lorena made up some quiche out of leftovers from the party. We are planning to do nothing but get stuff done today–we will see if that plan actually works. Hopefully the plan will include a practice run on a new way to cook tri-tip. Well, it is new to us. I think everybody and their grandmother has done what we are going to try, but Lorena thinks she is really bad at stuff that she has not tried before. With respect to cooking, that is almost certainly 100% wrong these days. If it was ever true before, it is certainly not true now.
Christian had been in Washington for a little over a week and flew home yesterday on his birthday. It is getting harder and harder to find cool stuff for gifts, but cool new sunglasses are always appropriate no matter how many you already have and especially if you live in Tempe, Arizona.
He got some very cool things from some very cool friends (some books I actually want to read, a book strap that I also want, and other amazing things). We had a small(ish) party at our house for him and his friend Aaron. It went well enough we want to do it again next year.
I am on the plane flying to PDX from Boston. Lorena worked frantically for the last week getting the house ready for an influx of twenty-somethings. Fortunately we have a couple of friends to help us as the hired servants. Actually, we look forward to it all and are looking forward to meeting a few new young people and to hang out and talk about life with old (in both the “we have known them for a long time” and the “they are getting past middle age” senses) friends.
Our dear friends from Chula Vista to spend one night in Centralia with Lorena. I wish I could have been there, but they will be back in a few days to stay one or two more nights. They are family and we hope this becomes a habit.