Usually I do not feel the sense of malaise that is my current frame of mind at the seeing in of a New Year, but reminders of the nature of man can start to get in the way of progress. That is especially true when one realizes their nature is susceptible to the same defects as those that caused the current jaded outlook. Still, I must say that I am grateful for what I have in this life and the hope I have for the next one. I will just list a few of the things, good, bad, and indifferent, that are happening as we move toward 2019. First and foremost, we are healthy and free to pursue our dreams more than any time in our memory. The kids are making it on their own and progressing in ways that would make any parent grateful.
Second, the malaise comes out of a desire to do something good. Desiring the good is, of course, not the problem. The problem is figuring out how to partner with others of good will who have a world view, work ethic, and level of passion similar to your own. Right now I am contributing to three projects where there is a fairly large disconnect in at least one of those areas. This has given me pause so I am taking a few days to reflect on where I really want to go as my career winds down and “retirement approaches.”
This my first post since I decided to take the ChapmanKids blog private. It will allow me additional freedom to discuss things about which I have been reticent to write in the past. Frankly, that is a relief.
It has been a month or so since I have provided an update on the Retirement PhD/GaugeCam projects–they are kind of tied to each other. Everything is not complete (I think we are about halfway there), but everything that is complete has been up and running for over a month on two separate computers: 1) A Raspberry Pi and 2) a plain vanilla Ubuntu Server. The plan for over the holidays was to jump back in and see if I could get the project to the point where we could do a beta deployment, but that was not to happen–suffered a minor setback due to a cold. So, now I am talking to my buddy John H. down in Arizona (well, up actually, if we are talking altitude and not global direction). Hopefully, I can get him on the project, partially because he is a profoundly better embedded programmer than me and partially because it is a lot more fun to do this kind of thing with a friend. We are still on a long slow approach to entry into a PhD program, but it is still on track. We have added two new sets of functionality that will be required for the GaugeCam work and John will be perfect for that if he has time to do it.
Well, the process was quite nice. The end product was just OK, but the planning, baking, constructing and decorating was lots and lots of fun. So the plan is to take a more structured approach next year by starting earlier, then getting Mom, the queen of arts and crafts in this household, involved both for her cooking and her decorating prowess. We (that is the royal we in this case, because I have been relegate to staying out of the way) have all ready started to plan for next year. We WILL make something that is not just edible, but art if we are all still around!
We had a truly amazing Sunday morning meeting this morning. After meeting, Kelly cooked up some foo-foo scrambled eggs with fancy mushrooms and smelly, old cheese. I am not admitting it to anyone, but it was really pretty good. Then the kids went back to work on their gingerbread house project. It looks to be somewhat more complicated than I would have expected. Lots of design work and planning, lots of intricate little pieces, lots of process steps, AND it has to taste good, too. It really did look like a good time doing the thing. I have to admit I was very skeptical, but the stencils worked great and the little pieces, which I thought were impossible were a little bit tedious, but came together just fine. After they finished their intricate English Country Home, the kids made enough walls and roofs for Mom to do her own little cottage on the side.
The bottom picture is of Kelly cutting out the windows and door for the front wall of the house. The little pieces of white paper at the bottom of the image are stencil pieces for the parts that make up the dormer and window shutters and other assorted “gingerbread” for the house. They even made some long slivers of gingerbread to fill in cracks. After this, Kelly made caramel to serve as glue to put the pieces altogether. They are so involved in the process, I don’t want to break their concentration to ask about the different colors they want to put on the house. I assume it will be frosting, but I guess I will just have to wait and see.
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.
It is great to be back in Centralia for at least three weeks. We read in the newspaper there would be a brilliant full moon (there was) coupled with serious meteor showers (there might have been, but we were in bed. Still the views were spectacular. This picture does not really do it justice. We had made arrangements for our lawn service to get rid of the vegetation and put a layer of gravel on our “RV pad” which is just really another driveway parking area that terminates above the house. More than anything it was just great to be home.
A day after we arrived (today) I found my wallet was missing. What a joy. Fortunately, no one had been using the cards, but unfortunately we had to cancel everything and only found out an hour ago that we have one card that still works until the other stuff is replaced sometime in January. All good, though–with the best “bank” in the world (
After six months, I still love my new job, even with every other week being in Boston. Yesterday morning, my boss came around the office in Boston and gave everyone a really nice bottle of wine but be because I travel. So instead, he got me a gift certificate to take Lorena out to dinner and gave me a really nice card. I am working with really good people on a really hard project. The company listens to me–we have brought in two of my ex-colleagues to speed up the process. If it remains like this, it would be great to stay here until I retire in a few more years.
I traded emails with my friend Troy today. We are making a plan to investigate a way to determine the toxicity of the water in agricultural settings by looking at satellite or drone images in a super secret way. It involves both imaging and knowledge of water chemistry. This is one idea we have for my doctoral research (if I actually to that). I am excited. Tomorrow I will write a couple of paragraphs for a proposal that explains my part of this work for a funding proposal that will allow us to gather data to do this. The whole retirement PhD thing continues to inch forward.
The girls recent trip to England reminded me of a trip we took almost exactly 12 years ago to see a full size replica of Stonehenge put up as a memorial to the soldiers from Klickitat County, Washington who died in World War I. There is a description of it all 
This endless refrain has been taking up again that it is time to start the fight against the waistline. Lorena bought me several packages of vegetable mixes compatible with the 1200-ish calorie per day intake I need to take my weight down at a reasonable rate. Jon and I are back in the fight. We opened the spreadsheet back up and are recording our weight, steps, and, for me, calories. Right before Christmas is a really rough time to take up such an enterprise, but “if not now, when?” I cannot believe I am not only saying it, but I actually embrace the fact that I enjoy this kind of a diet and tend to get more exercise and more work-work and project work done when I am on this kind of a program because I have to stay pretty regimented to be able to handle it.
Lorena and Kelly are safely back home now. I picked them up at the airport yesterday. They had a fabulous time and are already planning their return to Europe, or maybe down under. Either way, they are now world travelers, or so they say. One thing is still true, it is always good to be back on terra firma in the United States with their constitutional rights intact, now longer depending on the “free” NHS of the UK for what passes as health care (oxymoron that it is in that part of the world). They met wonderful people, ate wonderful food, and have wonderful, wonderful memories of a wonderful place. Rightly so. A truly phenomenal first trip over the pond.
After high tea at the Savoy Hotel, the only logical way to up your game gastronomically is to go to McDonald’s. I am seriously worried about Kelly though–she actually said, “the ketchup is better here.” A couple of questions are begged at this point. 1) Who goes to London for food? and 2) Who judges a McDonald’s by the quality of its ketchup. Still, there is no down side to a happy meal. Still I am happy for Lorena. As an avid McDonald’s fan and ex-multi-year employee, it was important for her to check out the McDonald’s in England. She has visited a McDonald’s in every country in North America, so now she wants to do Europe.
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.
Lorena and Kelly are now ensconced in their Bed and Breakfast after a long day with new friends. Just by time and chance, there was a special meeting of our church rather than the normal Sunday meeting today, so they were able to meet a lot of new people they might not have otherwise met. They got up early, had a cup of coffee and a croissant with ham and cheese at a local shop, then made it to the meeting at a school on the tube and a bus. They even made plans for Kelly to get together with a group of the young professionals in London tomorrow evening.
Lorena and Kelly made it to London last night. They had a great flight, saw the Aurora Borealis as they flew past Iceland, landed at Heathrow Airport late morning and made it to their Bed and Breakfast by 1:30 PM London time. That got a little rest, went out and got some dinner, took this photo of a lamppost by a picturesque church and then made their way back to the BnB to make an early night of it having spent the entire previous night on the plane. When they were looking for something to eat, the found a restaurant named Wahaca (Oaxaca) that is part of a chain in England. Even if that was done by Mexicans trying to spell the name phonetically so that Englishmen can pronounce it right, it is just wrong! 🙂 I am never again going to make fun of the way English is spelled improperly on their signs. Never. I do hope they get to try it out though.