After church a couple of Sundays back, I was talking to the elder, Al R. (we meet in his home), about the doll house business my father ran for many years. He told me he made birdhouses that were similar. I thought that was nice and interesting, but did not think much of it. Then he texted me a picture of his work and I was completely amazed. It is not just that they are beautifully done with a lot of ornate rock work, but the houses are weatherized so they can handle the outside, too.
Our new place in Centralia (keeping our fingers crossed) is a perfect place for birdhouses. We are right in the middle of a forested area with a river (with salmon and steelhead in it) just a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies. Al only makes them for fun to give to friends and family. I am going to have to be on especially good favor if I want to ever commission him for one. We absolutely need to have some bird feeders and some birdhouses, but my understanding is that to have any success with them, you have to do war with the squirrels. I suppose that is true everywhere.
There is enough wildlife in the area that the porch should be a great place to just sit with a pair of binoculars, a telescope and a camera. There are black bears, bobcat, mountain lion, deer, elk, etc. all over that part of Washington, but we really do love to watch the birds, too.
The appraisal for our house purchase came in fine yesterday. We signed off on all the improvements required for the sale. The only thing left is to close. The close will occur, God willing, at the end of the month. So now we are are excited about making the move. We know a lot about that part of the world, but not so much about the particular place we chose. We love everything we have seen in our visits and within a two hour drive of our house we have a gazillion old friends. Right in town it surely seems like we have a great and growing group of new friends we look forward to getting to know better.
I am starting to talk to truck rental places. Some of you might know that, even though we are currently living in Dallas, all we have is an apartment and enough “stuff” to live there short term. Most of our “stuff” is still in a warehouse in Raleigh. So, this trip will entail me flying from Dallas to Raleigh, loading up the truck, driving to Dallas, picking up Lorena and the “stuff” in our apartment there, driving to Tempe to spend some time with Christian and go to one of our church conventions, then driving (through California, not Utah) on up to Washington state. I put “stuff” in scare quotes advisedly. Why do we need all that?
We bought a new house in Albany, Oregon back in about 2004 (picture to the left). When we bought the house it did not have anything but a small slab for a patio in the back. Grandpa Milo helped us put in a beautiful, stamped concrete patio with large planters in the back. There was no landscaping other than a small patch at the front of the house; all of the rest of it was dirt and weeds. I have to say we had a great time putting in the lawn and doing a little landscaping around the house. We planted rows of trees along both streets (it is a corner lot) and the back property line. There were some electrical services at the front of the lot that drew attention that we did not look. Since there was a very slight slope toward that corner of the lot, we put a small retaining wall around the services, built up the dirt behind the wall a little and planted some trees and plants. We also added the porch roof and decorative posts that cover the porch that leads to the lawn on two sides of the house and the French doors that lead out to the porch. lead out to the lawn from(well that was our builder Mark, but we paid for it). What you see here is the result.
Lorena and I need to decide how much of the lawn we want to maintain as landscape and how much we want to maintain as “forest.” We definitely have an opportunity to put in some terracing that will change the area behind the house into something eminently more usable. One of the first things we plan to do as soon as we get out there is take a bunch a pictures of the yard and start figuring out what we want to do. Part of our goal is to get me some manual labor with a shovel in doing any kind of transformation we plan. I think the landscape will be at least a three phase effort, especially since I am going to be providing the manual labor (unless I wimp out).
Kelly and I had an interesting discussion last night about her work. Her work is very similar to mine in many ways. The work Christian does has similarities to mine, but they are superficial (see his office in the picture to the left). Some have assumed I pushed Christian toward the kind of work I do to live vicariously through his superior training and skills. Over all the years of homeschool, I fought against that, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. In the end, though Christian went off into an area for which I am admittedly a fan-boy, but that is so deep in the bowels of the theoretical math associated with network information theory, I have no clue about how even to talk about it with him.
One of her first steps was to find where and how different sets of features (answers to survey questions) cluster with respect to the characteristics of the customers who took the survey. Crazily, she is using precisely the same algorithms I use every day to find clusters of motion pixels in video images that indicate someone is about to fall out of a bed in a hospital. She predominately uses the R statistical programming language, but also Python which she is in the process of learning. The clustering algorithms she is trying are k-means clustering, mean-shift filtering, density based spatial clustering, support vector machines, etc.
Lorena is at the airport right now, waiting to return home from a very good stay with Christian. Of course Christian was slammed with work–he had to respond to reviewers on a paper he wants to publish, prepare for a technical presentation for his Network Information Theory class, etc., etc. But at least now he is slammed with a shiny clean apartment, food in the pantry, rotated tires and all those other little details of which Lorena is queen.
Grandpa Milo was an amazing cook. He always said presentation of food is often more important that even taste. He said that to everyone who ever cooked with him. Every time Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah came to visit us, Kelly and Christian cooked with him so they heard that mantra a lot. Christian is a good cook, but does not have a lot of time to spend on food. It is so bad, he usually keeps a case of 
Lorena arrived in Tempe now and Christian is taking her to lunch. She is sending me all kinds of meaning
I dropped Lorena off at the airport at 5 AM this morning to go spend a week with Christian in Phoenix. They have a great time when they get together. It seems like every time Christian turns around there is another road block that seems insurmountable. This morning, he goes in to serve jury duty. And it is not just jury duty, it is grand jury duty. That means if he gets picked he will be stuck there for four months. He is scheduled to move to Boston in a couple of months in his first pass working for MIT. I hope they let him out of it because if they do not, it means he will almost certainly have to stay in his program for an additional year due to classes they only give once per year, missed research opportunities and the need to drop all his classes for this semester which is half way complete. I surely hope he does not get saddled with this burden.
Our new friends, Bob and Gena E. (we have so many common, old, old friends and things in common they actually feel like old friends) ran up to the house we are still trying to buy in Centralia and took a picture of these snowdrop flowers. Lorena loved them and is dying to get some more things planted around the place and start cleaning up the yard. There is just too much stuff to do both inside and out on the place it is going be a few years to get it how Lorena wants it but we are both, very much looking forward to the task. Now we just have to make it all the way to closing.
I have been reflecting on it quite a bit lately and it seems kind of weird that both of our kids have been on their own and paying their own way for over two and a half years now. For our part, we have been in upheaval since they left North Carolina for graduate school in late June of 2014. We have moved three times (once to Oregon, once to Texas and once in Texas) and we are about to move again. I am currently on my third employer with a couple of contract jobs on the side. It seems they are the ones who are stable right now. I thought that was what parents were supposed to do, but it has pretty much been the nature of my kind of skill set to have to switch around a bunch.
Lorena took me to McDonald’s early this morning then dropped me off at the airport. If all goes well, I will have a look at our (hopefully) new house along with my real estate agent and my builder (thank you Mark P. for driving up from Oregon). Then I will get on a plane at midnight and arrive back in Dallas just in time to go to work on Tuesday morning when we are going to make the first major new installation of some machine vision/machine learning/video analytics software.