Christian picked Lorena up at the airport for a short visit to Tempe. Lorena loves to be there and Christian loves to have her. She is an insanely neurotic neat freak and the apple did not fall far from the tree with Christian. Christian is in the middle of preparation for his comprehensive exams. Lorena is down there to help him out a little, but more than that, just to hang out together, go to the best taco house in phoenix, drink good coffee, and make it through the incredible Phoenix summer heat. Christian will be up to Washington for a week or two in the late summer before he starts what we hope will be his final year (or two) before he graduates.
I thought this was kind of a cool. A beautiful smallish dog came by with his handler and sniffed all the suitcase, purses, and backpacks in the area where I was sitting at the airport waiting to catch a plane to Boston. TSA rightly gets a bum rap for a lot of the stuff they do, and for going off the rails on what seems like a clockwork-like basis, but this seems to be a good thing. The handler brought along a toy (the blue thing in his mouth) and after the dog had done his work, they played for awhile It was fun to watch.
Wilder Penfield’s conversion from ardent “strident materialist” to “passionate dualist” was a result of the scientific brain research he performed in his work as a neurosurgeon. Michael Egnor explains it all here. Egnor further notes that there is an even more compelling case for dualism based on a philosophical and logic arguments that dovetail nicely with the scientific ones. The article is well worth the read. He makes this statement at the end of the article.
The denial of free will is an ideological bias, not a credible scientific or philosophical conclusion.
I am anywhere from four to ten years from retirement. I really do not like the idea of retirement. I do neither fish nor golf although I do not mind doing either, but on a once or twice a year basis, not every day. I would like to take up guitar and/or saxophone. I have a saxophone and Christian says I can use his old acoustic guitar–he moved on to classical guitar a long time ago. The problem with that is two-fold–I will always be really bad at it for everyone else but me and it still does not get me out of the house and fill my days with anything meaningful. So I have trying to figure out what to do.
I have been talking to my GaugeCam buddies. One of them is a tenure track professor at University of Nebraska. The other is still at North Carolina State University. There are lots and lots of research they want to do, but for which they do not have time, money, and or help that has the sometimes odd skills they need to do make it happen. We are talking now about whether it might be possible to start an unfunded PhD program that I can do as a hobby for now, then as a full time project after I require. If I do, I will FINALLY have something fun to talk about other than the trivialities of my life on my blog again. I am not sure whether or not it will work out yet, but I will start reporting on my efforts here.
I had to drive down to Kelso to drop off some equipment from my old company, but I left my wallet on the counter in the kitchen when I left. Then the guy I was dropping the equipment off to called and said he would be an hour and a half late so I was stuck at a McDonald’s beside the freeway with no way to buy an Egg McMuffin. I decided to go ahead and try to add one of those telephone pay apps. it worked really really well and if I didn’t hate Google so much I might even keep it on my phone.
I started a new job last week. I flew to Boston to get started with the new company. I had a good number of firsts while I was there–at at Wahlburgers, stayed at a bed and breakfast, flew on JetBlue, and gave a talk at Harvard. I have to admit that the best of all of those was flying on JetBlue. I am a big fan now. The work looks like it is going to be very interesting, but there will be a LOT to do, especially as I get started. The plan is to travel to Boston once per month for a week at a time–maybe a little more than that as I get oriented. This time, I am at a medical device company, but there are really no FDA compliance issues yet, so I will not be hung up in paperwork ninety percent of the time. The problem is a hard one, but it should be fun and interesting, too. I ordered a new computer, a really nice one and everyone has treated me really well. It is a small startup with big ambitions which is exactly the kind of thing I like.
Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash
I just bought a new foldable bluetooth keyboard to use while I am traveling with my Pixel 2 XL cellphone. This is just a test to see how it works. It surely seems like it works pretty good. Lorena took this picture and texted it to me.
Grandma Sarah was a pharmacist. She loved to stay up on the state of knowledge in the medical field by reading the scholarly (and popular) literature and with the continuing education required to maintain her license. She always got a lot more continuing education hours than was required. Because our family has tended toward the fanatical end of the coffee drinking spectrum, maybe more in terms of quantity than quality, Grandma Sarah stayed abreast of the research on the ills and benefits of coffee drinking.
That all being said, it has been kind of shameful that the kids have had less than stellar coffee brewing equipment. We got them each a K-Cup coffee maker that can also perform single brewing from grounds. I am not sure these are the most brilliant coffee machines in history, but they are definitely adequate and are profoundly better than what Kelly and Christian had before. One thing that I had not figured out about the K-Cup thing is that they definitely compete with the traditional brewing of a carafe of coffee just because you never have to through away half a carafe because your coffee drinking ambition was moderated dramatically after your first three cups. And it is WAY cheaper than buying it at Starbucks.
Lorena planted a little garden this year. We are pretty sure we will lose most of if to the deer, but plan to put a deer fence around a small garden in the next year or two after we finish getting the house to where we want it to be. It is pretty gratifying, though, to see some results. Lorena only planted squash, cucumber, and tomato this year.
My last day for my current job is Friday. I work with an absolutely great company, one of the best bosses I ever had and an amazing team of engineers at LMI Technologies in Burnaby, BC, Canada. I will miss them a lot. I was actually not too excited to leave, but got an offer I could not refuse doing very interesting work in the area of medical research equipment. I will be traveling a little more, but to only one location.
I worked with a close-knit team of engineers in China, Europe, Canada, and the US. We accomplished amazing things in the 14 months I have been there adding an amazing amount of new functionality that should bring in a ton of new business fore the foreseeable future. Most importantly, I made good friends with whom I expect to stay in touch over the long haul. I cannot thank them enough.
I will write a little about the new job as I move into my new position. While it is exciting to me, it might be a little dry to most so I will keep it short.
Everyone is now gone from the Fourth of July holiday. I am back to work, getting ready for my job change and finishing up well with my old job. The best part of this kind of transition is the pressure is relatively low for awhile. That means that on a Saturday afternoon, I can eat popcorn and read my book, mostly to my hearts content. Kiwi goes with me wherever I go. Right now, she is sitting on my chest hoping that I will head down to get her evening meal, but knowing (I KNOW she knows) that is really over an hour away. Lorena is off at Costco and Good Will looking for stuff for her house. Life is back to normal again.
The sole purpose of this post is to find some common ground with Cousin Merle and his apostate daughter, Trisha, who think it is OK to eat hot dogs with ketchup. It is not. That being said, I walked into the kitchen just now an found my dear wife Lorena eating hot dogs with extremely spicy Mexican salsa. I think ALL of us can agree that that is just wrong. In no known or unknown universe is that OK. I hate to air the family’s dirty laundry in a blog post, but wanted to show Merle and Trisha who offensive it is when they eat their hot dogs with ketchup in a public setting. At least keep it to yourself.
The entire purpose of this post a marker to this new article by Michael Egnor on the mind brain problem described in this article at the Discovery Institute. He is a pediatric neurosurgeon who has considered both the physiological and philosophical (with special emphasis on the writings of Thomas Aquinas) implications of the conflation of the mind with the brain. This article, titled Science and the Soul, as is the the entire body of his work that I have read so far, is extremely well written makes a very, very strong case that the mind is not the brain.
Christian flew in from Tempe on Monday night, then took Amtrak down from Seattle to Centralia with Kelly after she got off work on Tuesday. It will be a whirlwind trip because they have a friend flying into Seattle on Friday to hang out with them. Our time together has been very relaxed time with them and, as usually, has centered on cooking, food, conversation, reading, and music, not necessarily in that order. Exercise has been on hold for a couple of days which affects all of them, but (shame) me because they all work out at least five days a week while I give lip service to working out five days a week. Is there such a thing as a Fourth of July resolution?
Yesterday, Lorena and Kelly picked 15 pounds of blueberries while I worked on some stuff for my new job and Christian worked on his dissertation research and comprehensives preparation. We spent a lot of time doing similar things growing up so it was very nice and relaxed. As for the blueberries, my understanding is that there will be pie sometime before they get back on the train to head back to Seattle later tonight.
After the blueberries picking, we all headed off to Bible study in Olympia. It truly is a gift to be in that Bible study and with our new church community here in the Olympia-Centralia-Chehalis area. We really think this is a good place for us to be for the foreseeable future. God might have other ideas, but we are certainly happy with where we decided to settle in.
We got home at between 9:30 and 10:00 PM last night. The Centralia neighborhood fireworks that were so spectacular last year had already started, but I have to admit we were a little disappointed relative to the experience we had last year. Maybe it is because it was on a Wednesday night. We are hoping for more next year when it happens on a Thursday with a possibly a bridge day off for a four day weekend.
Lorena got all her official transcripts in from the five community colleges she has attended over the years. She has credits from Clackamas, Linn Benton and Portland Community Colleges in Oregon and Wake Technical and Johnston Community Colleges in North Carolina. She applied for admission and got accepted at Centralia College. They have all the transcripts and as soon as they are reviewed, she will be able to get and adviser to determine which classes she needs to finish her Associate Degree. There should only be a few. The good part about Centralia College is that also gives Bachelors Degrees and she can just continue there if she wants.
It was great to be in Puerto Vallarta with half of Lorena’s family, but it is great to be home now, too. This was my first real vacation in the last several years. It turned into a time for reflection that I hope Lorena and I can repeat more frequently now. We talked a lot about the fact with the kids grown, on their own and paying there own way for over four years now, we have the freedom and responsibility to set some new goals. The difficulty of giving up control of one’s kids is not diminished by the fact that, if you did your job right as a parent, it is going to happen whether you want it or not.
There is a lot that happened over the week, but one of things that cast a pall over some of the vacation is the looming election of a new president in Mexico who appears to have plans to push the country along a similar path as is currently being followed by Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. That happened the day after we returned to Washington. Everyone is pretty worried, but there is nothing to be done about it other than wait to see what happens and hope for the best.
Lorena and I planned to go to Mexico for our 25th wedding anniversary (only we are a year and a half late). We are having a great time. We are going to do more, maybe in Monterrey, but this has been a super time just to be with family when there is no pressure. We miss Grandpa Lauro a LOT. We are at a place where we have all been together before–with Doug and Sheila, Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah and most of Lorena’s family. This is OUR place.
By complete accident, I have been in Mexico for at least part of this and the two previous World Cup’s. I am not that much of a soccer fan, but this is definitely and iconic event. Today, because of my delicate skin, I sat in the lobby next to the Starbucks, drank coffee and sparkling water and watch Argentina squeak past Nigeria (Argentina does not deserve to be where they are) and France play to a 0-0 tie with Denmark (what do you expect from France). Tomorrow morning it should be pretty fun here with Mexico playing Sweden. Definitely not a fan of Sweden and have great hopes for Mexico. Not knowing anything about soccer I just go by my most recent feelings about the countries playing and the people watching to help me to decide for whom to root. It is also kind of fun to be the foil for all who wish to pontificate about the intricacies of the game in general and this World Cup series in particular–EVERYONE here, including the little kids, knows more than me about this stuff. It is all professional wrestling to me (especially Argentina).
Lorena and I made it to Puerto Vallarta after two excellent flights from Portland to Phoenix and then on down to Mexico from there. Tio’s Jorge and Lauro, along with Grandma Conchita picked us up at the airport. Much to our surprise and great happiness, we found we were staying at the same place we stayed the times we went with Uncle Doug, Aunt Sheila, Grandpa Milo, and Grandma Sarah the two other times we vacationed in Puerto Vallarta. Of course, the very first thing we did when we got there was eat way to many hand made tamales brought on the plane from Monterrey. We all agreed the one true style of tamale comes from Monterrey. The picture is of Jorge’s family (L-R) Jorgito, Valeria, Mari, Brandito, and Jorge.
Kiwi gets up at 4:00 AM every morning to do the hard work of being irritating enough to wake us up and keep us awake long enough so that we can lock her into the laundry room to get just a little more sleep. At about 6:00 AM, one of us gets up and feeds her and lets her out of the laundry room. We get a brief reprieve until about about 10:00 AM when the process starts over again. We give her lunch at about 11:30 after which she harasses us to give her part of our lunch until we lock her into the laundry room again so we can have enough peace and quiet to enjoy our lunch. That peace and quiet really does not happen because she makes such a racket through the hollow core laundry room door. After lunch, she takes a nap for another couple hours because she knows she will have to start in again at 4:00 PM so we will feed her on schedule at 6:00. This is our life.