Saw this amazing site on my walk to What-A-Burger this morning. Right in the middle of the city beside the freeway. It made my day.
Category: General Page 4 of 116
When I talk to little kids, I have learned that if I get down on one knee so I can look them in the eye and speak quietly, I do not scare them so badly. I did that after church this morning with a little girl I really had not known very well as she stood holding her mother’s hand. I think she must be about four years old.
I said, “What do you have to say today?”
She said, “I have a secret.”
I said, “Well, tell me, tell me! What is your secret?”
She very proudly and with quite a bit of flair said, “I did not brush my teeth last night!”
I said, “That is a GREAT secret. I promise I won’t tell hardly anybody.”
Then she hopped up and down, quite pleased with herself, as her mother rolled her eyes. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I know, as a Christian, there is not a whole lot of value in being pessimistic, but we all liven in a fallen world and have sinful natures, so it can be a challenge to be positive. I have to admit I have been in a little bit of a funk lately, what with the nature of the political and cultural landscape in America and around the world along with the instability of our own situation. Several events, though, came together to remind me that, in the end, life is good, true believers in Jesus have everything going for them and even though everything might not be hunky-dory right now, they will be in, what is a blink of the eye in the grand scheme of things, not only great, but literally perfect.
There is no reason not to have joy. The reality is that I lead a wildly privileged life in terms of all temporal measures. And from there, things are looking up. Everything might all fall apart later this afternoon (I am not expecting anything like that, just sayin’), but even if they do, I need that not to rob me of my joy.
This weekend was an odd weekend for me. I planned to work through the whole weekend, but got sick and ended up not doing much other than read a few articles on the Internet, talk to the kids and hang out with Lorena when I was not sleeping. Some of the articles on a fairly disjointed set of topics seemed to form a very interesting theme. The theme, you can decide for yourself whether I am imagining things, is that there are huge chunks of society who are tired of the direction of culture and are starting to push back. I talked to Kelly about it and it seems like there is an undercurrent of rebellion against:
- RINO/Neo-conservatives
- Politically correct censorship of social media (which appears to be in serious decline anyway–who uses Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or even SnapChat anymore)
- The emasculation of men in general and college men in particular
There were more articles, but the ones linked above give you the idea. It is probably too little, too late. I have been reading about Josiah in II Chronicales lately. He was one of the great, good kings of Judah. Still, Judah had been so evil for so long, God told Josiah, through the prophetess Huldah in II Chronicles 34:24-38 he would have peace because he humbled himself, but Judah would be judged harshly after Josiah was gone. Maybe that is where we are headed–it is pretty much been promised that judgment is on its way.
Kelly and I talked about all this last night. She was the one who pointed me to the article on the rebellion of the alt-right. It reminded me of what it was like to come of age in the seventies, surrounded by amoral and immoral hippies and nihilists. A lot of conservative Christians felt pretty lonely on the college campuses of America in those days, but their rebellion against the “feel good” generation led to the Reagan Revolution. Kelly mentioned Ecclesiastes commands to “serve God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man…” and enjoy the good things God has given us. Even though, in one sense, all is vain because we all die, God has good things planned for those who love him that should be enjoyed in this life and the next.
I think I have seen what is happening to me as sixty year old guy happen to other people who were working schlubs their whole lives. Over time, one tends to pick up knowledge. If somebody works at one thing, no matter what it is, they accumulate a lot of knowledge over the years, no matter what the field. Then, when they get toward the end of their career and are thinking about retirement, opportunities start coming out of the woodwork. It is not about intelligence, it is about experience. The older I get, the less irritating it is to hear about the importance of experience.
So now I have three active projects beside my day job that have to do with what I did in my career. I need to quit two of them and work on just one of them or I will do a bad job at all three. So, over the next few weeks, I am going to try to decide where it would be best to focus my efforts. This seems to be a very good thing partially because I love what I do, but also because it gives more to do now that the kids are gone. It makes me look back and wonder what life would be like if I had more focus on my career before I was forty. Maybe it would not have been much different and it does not pay to think about it, but it does make me thankful that we helped the kids remain focused on something that would last past their youth both in terms of work and spirituality.
I realize that what I do for a living must be supremely boring to everyone looking on and I have to remind myself that most people do not really care how I do what I do so I have to work hard not to talk about it too much. Still, there are people just like me and even more so. I have the good fortune of working on one of the projects with a guy who is ten years older than and with deeper skills than I. We talk the same language and really enjoy even the most trivial minutiae of our chosen field. I just hope I can get to that point in my relationship with God before I die.
We are enjoying our time here in Texas. One of the best things about Texas, now more than ever time, is its place as firewall against many of the evils of America’s current coarse and ignorant culture. You can even see it encroaching here, but if there will ever be a bastion of sanity against the current evil zeitgeist, I am sure it will be somewhere here in Texas. I got to thinking about this because of something someone wrote in a totally unrelated context:
No doubt about it: conservative Bible Christians are under attack — subjected to stereotypes that, for any other group (except Texans) would be taken to constitute bigotry.
The thing that is good and bad about Texas is the frequently don’t care what non-Texans think because really don’t get Texas. How could they? They are not Texan. I am not a Texan and never will be. In some ways, I know I do not understand it all myself. I don’t want to be a Texan, but that does not mean I do not have anything other than a huge (as it should be here in Texas) appreciation for all the good about this wonderful place.
This is one of those posts I have to start by saying it is a true story. So, Lorena’s number two brother, Jorge was in a wreck this morning. It involved two trucks that ran into each other swiping both the trucks off the road along with Jorge. Jorge was OK, but it scared him to death. The police showed up, the insurance guy showed and they had everything just about worked out when the owner of the property on the showed up. It took them an extra couple of hours at the scene because of damage done to the fence. Take a close look at the fence. It was quite impressive to me that the land owner actually convinced the insurance guys to compensate him for damage to the fence. It was also quite impressive that this could have happened just about anywhere in the world. I think insurance turns people into victims–not that we don’t need it, but give me a break. You have to think though that the guy was probably a soccer player. Soccer, of course is a big thing in Mexico. You see what happens when one soccer play light brushes another soccer player in a even the most unimportant of matches.
Lorena arrived at an amazing milestone today. She rowed over 10,000 meters, burning over 500 calories in a little over an hour. I am sure she will get that time under an hour pretty soon, but the fact that she did over 10K in a single sitting on a Concept 2 rowing machine is an impressive feat. She has worked out hard on an uncompromisingly regular schedule for well over a decade now. Kudos to her.
Lorena took all her transcripts into the local community college north of Dallas, Texas and to say her experience there differed greatly from virtually every other community college she has attended would be an understatement. They said they would take almost none of her credits because they were taken in a quarter based system rather than a semester system. When she pointed out that most of the classes she has taken were in a semester system, they said (there were three people there looking at her paperwork), I kid you not, “We don’t care.” So in short, the facilities were shabby, the administration was surly and non-helpful, they had non-standard transfer processes, they required Lorena to take tests required for people just entering the system and not people transferring in with more than half of the credits required to graduate–and there is more, but you get the drift. It was truly a bad experience. These are the same credits accepted at better community colleges and state universities in Oregon, North Carolina and Florida. Oh well, we will find another place for her to attend. Maybe it is time for her to start at a four year college.
It might be just us, but I have to admit we have struggled to find a good Mexican food place here in Texas. Of course we can get it with our Mexican family and friends, but it seems like what they represent to be Mexican food here is really Tex-Mex. I am not even trying to suggest Tex-Mex is not good or that it does not have its place. It is just that we really like Mexican food. We found the closest place yet today for lunch, but it was not nearly is close to real Mexican food as what we (actually took a long time to find) found in North Carolina and Oregon. I am going to start asking our Mexican family what we ought to try next, but we are a little bit suspicious that he conflates the two styles, too, in as much as he has spent the vast bulk of his life here.
Christian was a pretty good cook by the time he left home for college. He could more than hold his own when it came to the basics and had a few specialties he liked to do. Kelly had an even wider repertoire and loved to experiment with her mom whenever she got the chance. I am not sure what I expected when they went off to college. I did not really think about it much, but I have to admit I am a little surprised at how much they have both embraced the art of cooking.
The Strawberry-Rhubarb concoction in the picture was fabulous. Kelly’s efforts aim at health as well as taste. She has somehow mastered the art of crust that is light, flaky and healthy. Up in Seattle, she has access to extensive varieties of fresh vegetables that she uses to eat healthy food that tastes good. Her problem is that she is so busy, her exercise regimen is less regular than it was when she is in her undergraduate degree.
Christian, on the other hand, because he follows a fairly rigorous workout schedule when he is not in finals, takes a more utilitarian approach. During the lead up to the end of the semester he is so busy he depends on this stuff to get the nutrition into his system rapidly and efficiently. That is not a frequent occurrence–the rest of the time he cooks fish, pasta, chicken and eats lots of vegetables and the fruits that are more available in Arizona than colder climes.
The interesting thing is that they both try new recipes on an amazingly regular schedule. Who knew they would get into cooking so much?
I have had little time to work on the GaugeCam project due to other responsibilities. We got a helping hand with this product when we found that there are now cameras available that do precisely the part of the product we did not want to do and at which we were not that good. The camera in this post is an example of that. Before, we had to put together a cellphone enabled remote camera with mounting systems, batteries, a solar setup, etc. Now, you can just buy it and install it yourself. So now I think we will be able to concentrate on the software and the water level data that is accumulated from the product which is really our strong point anyway.
Now I will be able to concentrate on my EKG project a little more before I go back to GaugeCam. Also, I will be able to use the BeagleBone Black I purchased on the EKG if I want. I am hoping to communicate between the Arduino/EKG electronics and the mothership computer via Bluetooth, but I am not sure I can get it to go fast enough. The Bluetooth will handle it, but I do not know if the Arduino can shovel the bits fast enough for the EKG sample rate I need (1K Hz). We shall see!
Yesterday was a long day with some accomplishments. First, and maybe most important, Kiwi did not die while we were gone. Lorena’s cousin Beto was there to look in on here every now and then, but for the most part, she was on her own. She was and continues to be annoyingly happy to see us.
Toward the end of the day, I had the chance to work on the EKG project. I did not finish as much as I wanted because there were interruptions. I had the signals coming into my program from the EKG by the time I left town for vacation so now I am working on the strip chart that appears on the GUI as it is recorded. I hope to get the charting part complete by the end of the weekend so I can move on to record the data into a database. We will probably need some help from Christian to get the math right on parts of the signal processing of the two different heart rates we want to measure (a pregnant mother and her baby). I hope I have time, but I also am excited that I might get to work with him on something that is so closely associated with the work he does for his school.
Sometime this week, I have to get my Texas drivers license. I am at that awkward stage of life where I am more worried about the eye test part of the exam than the written or driving part. In fact, I do not think there will be a written or driving part. Lorena did not have to take those.
Lorena has all her transcripts from her all the community colleges she has attended so far (Portland, Linn Benton, Johnston, Wake Technical and Clackamas) turned into our new local community colldege in Texas. She has to take an orientation test this evening–we are not sure what that is about.
Beside all that, I am wanting to get back to work on the GaugeCam/Beaglebone Black project because people want to buy more cameras and our cell connectivity system is getting discontinued. I have it started and it has been running at the house for over a month now. My problem is that I just have too many other things going right now to get it done in a timely manner. Maybe I can get someone to volunteer on the project to help us. It is a great little project.
Lorena and I spent the weekend with Christian and our friends, Al and Michele and their family in Casa Grande, Arizona. It was a weekend for reflection. We needed that and came away invigorated. We got up at 2:30 AM in Phoenix to catch a plane so I could get to work in Texas on time this morning. I am not even tired. I am sure I will hit the wall sometime this evening, but it was WAY worth it.
I read a Facebook post from the daughter of a friend this morning that truly captured the zeitgeist of the day. It’s premise was that personal happiness based on one’s own personal preferences is the highest level of human achievement and a worthy way to live one’s life. That seems to be what has gotten this country and the entire world into a state of denial and decay. Self denial and allegiance to a goal higher than one’s own gratification is the single thing that leads to personal happiness and the betterment of society, but only if that higher goal is to follow the commandments of Jesus.
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
This says nothing about self gratification.
We have turned off or cellphones and have no computer access during the day. We need to do this more often. It is amazingly refreshing. All we do is sit in done meetings, eat good food, talk with old friends and make new ones, all with no outside interruption. It is very interesting that it seems I am moving a little off the very edge of the extrovert spectrum. That is no to say I am anywhere close to being am introvert–but maybe just a little bit less of on extrovert.
We made it to Arizona. Christian made it through his finals. We had a relatively leisurely breakfast at ihop. Now Christian is back to work and we are here in the apartment kicking back until he gets a few things done in the lab after which we can start our vacation!
When I got my new $27 EKG running a few days ago, I used a Windows program that came as a binary and that is no longer being supported. I decided I wanted to write my own GUI to read this, at least one more EKG channel (which requires another $27) and maybe accommodates the $99 EEG electronics that is available from the same company. I used the audio button (play/pause/stop) to control the data stream and connection with the EKG electronics. Right now, the only things that happens with this is that the numbers are added to the text box labeled “Data” and the numbers just scroll as they come in for the EKG electronics (fly by actually). The next thing I am going to do, though, is to plot the EKG signal as it comes in the area above the text boxes. I can already tell I am going to need to reformat my GUI to show the data in different ways and to add some configuration capability.
I negotiated the next couple of days off when I was offered my current job so Lorena and I could fly to Phoenix to see Christian and attend a church event. Some of our old friends from San Diego will meet us there. We will have a chance to see old friends, visit and eat good food. Christian finished his last final for the semester yesterday, so he will be free to spend at least a little time with us. He is in the thick of his research right now and expects to remain that way for the next two and a half to three years. He needs to take seven more classes and they really just get in the way of what he is research.