Tío Lauro took Lorena and Grandma Conchita to visit his atelier in Loma Prieta yesterday. They are having entirely too good of a time for me to not be there with them. The image on the left is side of the atelier that used to be a complete mess, but honestly looks amazing. With the recent rains, the nearby (one block from the atelier) is beautiful and the Río Ramos runs clear. The inset image is of an enchilada plate from a recent Lorena had never previously visited in the town of Santiago.
Almost everywhere we put our GaugeCam cameras, raccoons show up. They are amazing little animals. They have been particularly prominent at the KOLA location in Kearney, Nebraska. They are totally fascinating–I get addicted to watching them.
My wonderful bride is headed off down to Mexico to visit her mother who is having some medical issues. She and her brother Lynn are going to go over all aspects of their construction business, investigate plans for their next project, and most importantly, figure out how long it is going to take for Lynn’s crew to get our house on the hill in good enough shape so that we can go start spending a bunch more time down there. Lorena and I went to DQ for lunch to celebrate Valentine’s Day before she left. Notice she dressed all in red for the occasion and I wore my red Nebraska ball cap.
Lorena is taking a framed copy of the picture in this post down to Grandma Conchita. We would like to say it is for worthy reasons, but the reality is that it she has more things to brag about. She is totally sin vergüenza when it comes to her family and I am wildly grateful that I get to be counted in that august number. She currently has my dissertation on a little stand in a cabinet in the living room and are hoping for a prime location for the portrait alongside the dissertation. She drags anyone who comes into her house over to look at her shrine in the cabinet which include pictures of Kelly and Christian. I know I will never arrive to the high level of appreciation as her grandchildren, but it is kind of nice to at least be featured on a shelf on level lower.
I finished reading “Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus–Volume One” by Michael Brown just a few minutes ago. It covered what Dr. Brown titled “General and Historical Objections” and was (trying not to be hyperbolic) enlightening, to say the least. I am now moving on to Volume Two which covers Theological Objections. I can only hope that the second volume will be as good as the first. If nothing more, my improved understanding of my place as a gentile in the spiritual ecosystem God created is very, very helpful to me in my understanding of how to worship better and to advocate for Jews and gentiles both.
Lorena is on day 2 of her watercolor painting ambition. It is kind of amazing that this is only her second watercolor. She plans to go through this same video tutorial a couple more times before she moves on to another. Not a bad plan. In addition to doing a painting per day, her plan is to save all of these paintings and write the date and the chapters she read in the Bible for that day. I am wildly optimistic that she is going to be very, very good at this over time. I really do not want her to give up on her pottery wheel ambitions to just do watercolors, but I am very impressed with her watercolor skills. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Lorena has wanted to start painting watercolors for a long time. Today, at long last, she started. She did not want to start too big so she ran down to Michael’s and bought only a small set, a few brushes, and a pad of watercolor paper. Her first painting was based on a training video and it came out really, really nice. The idea is to practice for a while before starting to paint landscapes, animals, and maybe even people in some future. Honestly, though, I think she mostly wants to paint landscapes.
I went way too cheap by far ($26)–the writing is very small. I could read it, but it would be a painful process. I think I am going to give this to one of the kids and spend enough money to get a hardbound version with bigger print. Just reading that first paragraph in Genesis makes me wish I spoke Hebrew (almost as much as I am now wishing I could speak first/second century Greek. I am really glad I got it though because it is pretty much like looking at art with the different alphabets. And, because it is Hebrew, the book starts at what would be the back of an English language book. I should have thought of that.
Congratulation to Professor Troy, Gilmore for the publication of his first textbook with co-author Kip Solomon. I am very proud to have gotten my PhD under his tutelage. It is great to be volunteering with him still at University of Nebraska. In addition to the University of Nebraska projects, I am also volunteering with Troy’s old North Carolina State University professor. It only takes a handful of hours per week and it is very enjoyable. I am hoping to continue to work on this for the foreseeable future, God willing. There are a number of opportunities I want to explore with universities in Mexico, too. The connection between UNL and ITESM Guadalajara continues with new initiatives cropping up. It is odd that I am working in an area way outside what has ever previously interested me and enjoying it a ton. In the end, it is the people of good will who make it worthwhile.
This is a nice view of the Huasteca from our house on the hill. The new Tesla plant is being built toward the left side of this photo and the large buildings right in front of the Huasteca, off in the distance, is the center of Santa Catarina. With the passing away of our next door neighbor and the funeral we attended this weekend, Lorena and I have been giving a lot of thought to what we are doing living so far away from family right now. Our idea is that we want to make the house in Mexico our primary residence while we still have Grandma Conchita and, maybe, while we are there start figuring out how to downsize. We have to figure out where to go before we can do any downsizing, but it is definitely on our mind.
Lorena and I drove a couple hours to a funeral today. We really did not know the person who had died, but I knew her sons really well. We had studied together at Texas A&M. It was really good for us to be there. This event and the passing of our neighbor that we learned about yesterday has given us a strong wake-up call that we are just passing through this life. It was great to have the drive with Lorena, too. We stopped at Hico, Texas–one time on the way there and one time on the way back and back. Both stops were spectacular. We had zero thoughts on the other handful of times we passed through there, but now realize that it is a MUST to stop there whenever we go to Austin, San Antonio, or when we drive to Mexico. The talks on the way there were challenging, and on the way back were reflective. Our conclusion, at the end of the day, was that some things are within our control and some things are neither in our control or even knowable. We don’t know what is coming in the next year or so, but we are willing to go wherever we are either led or compelled to go.
We have been in our current neighborhood for just about three years now. Our next door neighbor, Darrell was a good friend during our time here, helping us out with one thing or another and reminding us it was time to do some seasonal maintenance or adjustments, always ready to stop and chat about local and national politics-we had similar ideas about most stuff. We were shocked when our neighbor across the street knocked on our door after church this morning to tell us that Darrell had passed away. It was a sudden and totally unexpected event for everyone. Lorena and I talked about the relative unimportance of whole swaths of our lives. Darrell will be missed. He was a good friend and a good neighbor.
Lorena and I have been reading a chapter of the Reina Valera (1909) Spanish version of the Bible aloud with Grandma Conchita via audio chat for the last few months. Our plan, God willing, is to work our way through the New Testament, then go back and read through the Old Testament. It will take several years to do that at our current pace, but we are enjoying it a lot. In that same spirit, I have decided, for my next read through the Old Testament, I want to read through a Hebrew Bible (English) commonly used by Jewish congregation. So, yesterday, I ordered a Hebrew-English Tanakh translated by The Jewish Publication Society (JPS). I do not think I will be able to get to it until toward the end of 2024, again God willing, because of my current reading trajectory, but I am very much looking forward to it.
I think this video is at the core of why I am a Christian. It is a question that deserves an answer. I know why I am a follower of Jesus and this is a big part of it. I have the sense that many would reject Christianity even if Jesus were raised from that dead. That makes me sad. A lack of belief is one thing and I understand that some look at the facts available to them in do not believe, but a willful choice to ignore reality brings me to the point of despair. John 8:32–And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
The image to the left is of the street or front-of-the-house view (away from the spectacular valley view) side of the house. It should be noted that there is a really nice view of Cerro de las Mitras looking across the street from where this picture was taken, but not nearly as nice as the valley below and mountains across the valley behind this view. When Tío’s Lauro and Lynn took Grandma Conchita to see the house last weekend we arrived at a consensus on a new first floor design that we believe will add a TON of value to the house and make the first floor a much desirable place.
There is only a medium size window in the wall at the back of the second floor. It lets in a good amount of light, but it is not really possible to see out very well. We knew we could not attach a balcony to the back of that first floor because we would be encroaching over our neighbor’s property line. The thing we figured out is that we can build a balcony by tearing down the wall a the back of the first floor, putting up balcony railing (a short wall, actually), adding sliding glass windows to from the top of the railing to the ceiling and then building a new interior wall a couple of meters away from that outside wall. There will be french doors in the interior door that lead out to the balcony. All this means we will have spectacular views of the valley behind the house from the Azotea (essentially a floor above the second floor that is mostly open, but that features a roof, bathrooms, an outdoor kitchen, a hot tub, etc.), the second floor and the first floor. We are working through the structural issues right now, but we think it is going to work great!
I am very proud of my buddy John S. who had his first PhD committee meeting at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I meet John in 2007 when I started a new job in Raleigh, North Carolina. We worked MANY late nights together and formed a life-long friendship. He is about a decade younger than I am so, while he is younger then me, I could not say that he is young. One night when I was about a third of the way into my PhD program, we got into a conversation about what I was doing. He thought he might like to do something like that, too, so I connected him up with my professor Troy G. To make a long story short, they talked, he applied to the program and has been working on it ever since. He has had a HUGE impact on our area of research. I have to say that is significantly greater than my own research. I did perform the prototype work for his research topic, but he has taken it wildly beyond what I did or even imagined. I think he is about half-way through his program now, has been instrumental in helping to secure grants for Troy and is on the way to very big things in the area of ground-based imagery analysis and machine learning/artificial intelligence for ecology and hydrology. His committee meeting went really well. We are all very much looking forward to where his research leads.
It is another beautiful day in the barrio in San Pedro. My brothers-in-law, Lauro and Lynn, took Grandma Conchita up to look at the house on hill and at the apartment building which is still not quite complete. It is getting close, but there always seems to be on other “little” thing to do. The view here is from the second floor balcony looking to the right in the direction of the Huasteca and the location of the new Tesla factory in construction in Santa Catarina. Lauro showed live video of the house and the hill. I am glad he did because we decided, on the spot, to add a balcony to the first floor so there will be more light and a great view out to the valley below.
I am working through the weekend to finish some algorithms for a demo one of our sales people needs to do on Monday. The purpose of the demo is to show that we can measure bacteria in images with sufficient precision and enough features (contour roughness, 3-D, inferences, shape analysis, texture analysis, etc.) to inform the customers about the things they want to know including differentiation of bacteria types, size, growth rates, etc. Honestly, I love doing this kind of task. It seems like when there are “hair-on-fire” moments, ideas seem to percolate a bit more than at other times. I think that might be because as the results from one algorithm are available, the knowledge derived from that can inspire new ideas.
Puedes decir que quieres, pero la verdad es que Tejas tiene atardeceres sin par. Lorena tomó ese foto alrededor de Navidad con una luna hermosa y colores increíbles. Es una de las muchas cosas que hemos disfrutado con todo que da durante nuestro tiempo acá. Lo probabilidad es que no vamos a estar acá mucho tiempos mas pero es cierto que lo hemos disfrutado mucho.
We have a big demo coming up at my day job that has to do with the ability to measure different types of bacteria and one type of fungus in an time series of images. Of course, I have only gotten this one image so far, the whole time series is to follow soon, so the clock does not start ticking on the demo development until I have downloaded all the images. What that means is that I am almost certainly going to be working all weekend long, late into the night on these things. This probably should make me sad, but frankly, this stuff is really, really fun when one can get it to work and I am pretty much looking forward to the work–or at least the end product if I can get it right.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén