After some discussion over the last couple of days, I have taken the first step toward really figuring whether I can do a retirement PhD with some old friends. More importantly, if I do not take these first few baby steps, I will never even figure out whether I actually want to do this. What did I do? I filled out an application form, sent in my $50 application fee, and reported in to my potential professors. In addition to that, I started writing the abstract for a refereed journal article that describes some of the work we did on the GaugeCam project that could be a foundation for future work. I still have a lot of trepidation about the idea and if it requires me to take too many classes or get to high a score on the GRE, it might make just make more sense to just do the fun part that I know how to do (vision research) and forget the rest. Who knows though? I might enjoy the process.
This post is inspired by the exemplary calendar keeping of Brett Kavanaugh and, more impressively, his father. I have never really kept a calendar, but I have been assiduously attentive to writing on this blog for a long time. I hardly believe it, but I have been keeping a blog now for over 14 years at a rate of over twenty posts per month. I started in 2004. At the writing of this blog, the post count stands at 3551 posts. Only a handful of them are not mine. One of the more significant addenda to this blog is the tracking of my Bible reading. I started that in 2006 (over 12 years) and my Bible reading and enjoyment of reading has gradually increased to the point where I am on track to make it through the entire Bible in a single year–something I have never done before and thanks, to a large extent, to keeping track of my reading on this blog,
The honest truth is that I do not have much of any real significance about which to write since our homeschool end a little over four years ago. I had heard that people who keep diaries from an early age through their active years tend to accomplish more. There must be some research somewhere that backs that up? I know it has been true for me. When I am inspired to write stuff down, planning before I do it, documenting my steps as I go along, and analyzing the results when I am done, I certainly seem to accomplish more.
My thought, thanks to Judge Kavanaugh, is that if I find something that inspires me to write, maybe that will up my game a little as I move toward retirement–from my profession, hopefully not my active participation in significant projects.
I would like to say this is a birthday gift, but it is not. It is the new, extra-wide display I ordered for my work (on my birthday). Christian recommended this. One thing I did not expect was the width makes me change the way I use the different windows I keep open on the screen when I am programming. It is so wide that if you make something full screen, you often have to move your mouse a long, long way to get to the menu selection you need. All things considered, though, that is a minor quibble. I would definitely get this screen again if the occasion ever arises.
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.
The trip to Boston last week was fruitful because, for the first time on a trip like this, I actually lost weight. For a sedentary desk worker in his early sixties with a propensity for packing on pounds, that is quite a feat. I did not lose much (a little more than a pound), but I did not follow my normal pattern and add a few pounds. Dedicated use of my Fitbit to walk 8000+ steps per day while eating less than 1200 calories did it. I am not sure how this is going to work in the winter in Boston when the snow is a foot deep, but will try to work it out when I get there.
I promised I would put a photo of the JetBlue snack fridge on my trip to Boston today. Pretty handy, but my diet precludes me from having just about anything but coffee and diet sodas. I am grateful for the roast chicken, low calorie sandwiches (one slice of Dave’s Killer bread = 60 calories), and an apple. I am pretty sure I will make it to the hotel before I faint with hunger.
I have always quit my daily weigh-ins when I was traveling, but my weight loss war with has Jon has forced me to re-prioritize. To that end, I bought a Bluetooth scale that can sync with the Fitbit app on my Android phone. It measures more than just weight, but that is all I really want to track because I track food intake and other measures in other ways. The reality is that I don’t really need Bluetooth connectivity and it is a little bit of a pain because I have to keep the thing charged with a USB charger while most of these kinds of scales have (pretty much) lifetime batteries.
No one suffered quite as much as Christian when he was a child.
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.
Lorena found some very cool drawings he made during first grade (one of his only two years in government school). His teacher, Mrs. McCormack was great. There is no need for me to say anything about them. They speak for themselves.
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.
I hope I never get tired of seeing this out my office window. As I write this, I am looking at a doe and her fawn eating plums and apples a little bit further out in the yard.
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.
Bob came over yesterday to picks some apples for us and for him. I said previously the harvest was much bigger this year than last year. The pruning we had done must have helped a lot. We thought we had not done so well with the pears because they were really pretty small, but the ripened up nicely, so Kelly and Lorena are going to try to make something with them today. We also got an amazing plum harvest, but only a few peaches, but the peaches we did get were great.
Before the big party the other day, I moved my office from one of the top floors of house to the basement. This was my view on the first day I worked there. I think this was a good move. There is a good view of the mountain and I am close to things on the ground. The deer come to the back yard to clean up the fruit on the ground. There are a good number of fawns included in their number. I have been trying to get a picture of the neighbor’s cat who comes and visits at the door on a fairly regular basis. All this is really quite peaceful and I am looking forward to the time when I can be down here working on my bean project at a leisurely pace if I ever get to retire.
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.
We are really grateful our friends Al and Michele Rizos came to spend the weekend with us. They were a huge help at our weekend party and we had a chance to catch up a little after everyone else left. We absolutely need to plan to do this kind of thing way more frequently. We ate entirely too much really good food which seems to be a fixed feature of every time we get together and we solved all the problems of the world (in our minds). Not saying it is an echo chamber, but, well, it kind of is. It is a good kind of echo chamber though.
We had quite a nice party of mostly twenty-somethings over the weekend. The shoes and purses were piled up much higher than this at the peak of the party. We cooked hamburgers and hot dogs with very spicy guacamole on Sunday evening and and then quiche with Lorena’s special, extra spicy salsa on Monday morning. I do not think people got a whole lot of sleep, but the “kids” all seemed to have a nice time. We inaugurated or new fire pit and made gallons and gallons of coffee. We were thankful to have an extremely nice Canadian contingent (maybe that statement is a little bit redundant) and a strong showing from the very polished California young urban professional crowd. We are looking forward to doing it again next year.
Kiwi was a little suspicious at first. She really never liked to go downstairs, because we never really went there. It took several hours, but when she saw my office had officially moved, she made her way down and installed herself at her usual location on my desk below the monitor.