Lorena took the train from SeaTac Airport up to downtown Seattle and hang around window and coffee shopping until Kelly got off work. They went out for dinner and took this excellent Christmas in Seattle picture with the Space Needle in the background. Lorena heads down to areas between Portland and Seattle to look for a house tomorrow. It is supposed to snow on Wednesday night so she only has one day to get it done. Fortunately, our real estate agent is prepared with some specific places to visit.
Lorena flew out to Seattle this morning to spend a couple of days looking for a house. This is a shot she took from the train between SeaTac Airport and Kelly’s house. We have decided to get something we can fix up and live in for a year or three while we decide what/where we want to be when we grow up. It is actually very exciting. We have done new house remodels (How does that work? Isn’t that why you buy it new so you don’t have to remodel?), but we have never done an old house remodel, so this will be a new experience. Lorena has a line on several houses in the right price range and location that she will visit. We hope she can find one she likes and then we can actually buy the thing in time to move in before we have to get a rental so I can start my new job. If we can find the house and work through the contract issues in time, it will be a miracle.
I have seen some of the strange things you can see on Street View of Google Maps, but this is the first time I found one on my own. I was cruising around a small town in Western Washington looking for possible places to live and checking out neighorhoods when I found this image. Maybe we will not look on that side of town. Or, maybe, this is the side of town where we should look because the cops run a tight ship there! The bad part of this whole deal is that we will almost certainly never know what was going on here.
I follow a blog called Dangerous Idea that often has interesting comment conversations on a range of topics, many of them dealing with God and Christianity. One comment provides a list of some reasons why Earth, the only planet know to us that supports life, is very special indeed. I list the first five below, but you can read the rest here.
1. A star not in the central galactic bulge (most of which are “metal poor”, meaning they are incapable of spawning Earthlike worlds) – ours in nicely tucked away in a spiral arm.
2. A star not in the path of sprays of lethal Gamma radiation from the galaxy’s central black hole (which disqualifies maybe 1/5th of the stars in the Milky Way)
3. A non-variable star (the majority of stars are variable).
4. A planetary system capable of supporting stable orbits (most aren’t).
5. A planetary system with no worlds of Jupiter mass near to the star (Most of the discovered systems have such worlds. Ours is a rarity in that it does not.).
6. …
I signed and returned the acceptance letter for a job offer yesterday. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, BC, but I will work from home somewhere in Washington State. This change is quite a big adventure for us. We should be close enough to Grandpa Milo to be able to drive him to church on a semi-regular basis. We will be closer to our kids and be able to see them more often–it is a short drive or train ride to see Kelly or for her to visit us. The job is with a good group of people with whom I have worked as one of their customers for 5-6 years. It is challenging, interesting and will require some travel (Asia, USA and Europe), but not too much after the first round to get to know customers and colleagues.
The adventure part of the whole affair, if we can make it work, is that Lorena wants to find a house to remodel close to a city center. We loved living in downtown Wilsonville when we were last in Oregon with the ability to walk to stores and restaurants. We want to try to duplicate that. We have a real estate agent who says he thinks he can find us something that fills the bill within our budget. He sent us links to places that look great. It might not work out exactly like that, but we are going to give it the old college try and see what happens. Lorena has a plane ticket to fly to Seattle on Tuesday morning to, hopefully, find us “the” house somewhere on the I-5 corridor between Vancouver, WA and Tacoma. We expect to stay in Texas until the second week of January and get back to the Pacific Northwest with our truck full of worldly goods in time to attend Grandma Sarah’s funeral on MLK day in the Portland area.
- W. of D. = Word of the Day
- Water Spinky = Reminder to water boss’s office plant
- Latin words = The person’s animal in Latin–People guess what they are and write it in the blank
- COD = Colloquialism of the Day
- Tony Salad Tally = Count of how many salads vegetable hating office mate has eaten
Kelly is having too much fun at work.
I have worked as a Machine Vision engineer for over thirty years. Grandma Sarah actually found an ad for a technical writing/industrial training position with a robot/vision company in Corvallis named Intelledex back in 1983 shortly after I returned from a three month stint at University of Guadalajara to learn Spanish. The industry was very young at the time, but both the hardware and software to do useful work with cameras hooked up to computers was starting to make economic sense to solve a few classes of problems in the semiconductor, defense and electronics industries.
From then until now, there were a good number of people who focused on writing algorithms to do useful things with images. There seemed to be fewer people who dedicated themselves to cobbling those algorithms together with statistical, database and robot and equipment control algorithms to measure stuff, guide robots and perform solve “on the factory floor” problems. From the very beginning, I was one of those guys. It seemed then (and it seems like it has not changed much over the years) that most of the capable vision engineers wanted to write individual, low level algorithms while only a few of us were dedicated specifically to algorithms. The funny deal is that after ten years or so of application development it dawned on me that low level algorithm development was easier and more powerful when it was informed by knowledge of a broad application domain.
To make a long story shorter, after about fifteen years in the industry, I started to follow a career path solely devoted to solving especially difficult machine vision problems (inspecting chip capacitors for defects at 35 parts per second, finding retinal features in very noisy OCT images at high rates of speed, measuring 3d surface defects in U235 pellets as the bounced and rotated down counter rotating roles, performing pupil/gaze angle tracking at 400 frames per second, etc.). So the last fifteen years or so, I have gone from position to position to find hard problems, solve them and move on to the next thing. It is work I love.
I said all that to say that I have just about finished the work I came to do in Texas (performing video analytics to determine, in real time, whether someone in a hospital is about to fall out of bed so a care giver can be signaled to go to the aid of the patient). I have been offered a position out west to work on 3d imaging problems, not to write low level algorithms although there will be some of that, but to use these 3d cameras to create solutions to families of industrial problems around the world. Lorena and I have decided I should accept the position.
The other upside to this new position is, hopefully, I will be able to stay there until I retire. There are so many opportunities to solve hard problems with the new and improving 3d cameras and scanning systems, that I will likely have gainful employment as long as I am able to do the work. In addition, we will be closer to Kelly, Christian and Grandpa Milo and should be able to see them more often. There will be more about our move (when/where) as soon as I find out where we will move (it is a work from home job).
All Grandma Sarah’s remaining childern (me–Dad, Uncle, Aunt Julia and Aunt Jean–on the left two boxes of the conference call video strip at the top of this post) as well as most of the grandkids (Amy–not pictured, Kylee, Julia and Charlie–in the left three boxes of the strip) as well as some good help from Uncle’s Rich and Jerry got together for a video conference on GoToMeeting to remember Grandma Sarah and plan the funeral. Our sister Amy died of SIDS and Kelly and Christian were traveling home from Thanksgiving.
We laughed and cried, heard lots of stories and had some ideas about what we want to do. It was truly wonderful. I thought he thing that was most interesting was that each of us had a story or two that we just assumed everyone new, but when the story was told, there were some who had no idea. We have a good plan and I have a continued appreciation for the kindness of my siblings. I guess that is an additional tribute to Grandma Sarah and Grandpa Milo, too.
Aunt Jean sent me the grainy picture of Grandma Sarah and I from many moons ago. Like all the other kids, I felt like there was something special between her and and I that was unique to just us. I love that picture.
Even thought Kelly and Christian could not be with us for Thanksgiving, we were thankful they could be with family in California.
Lorena has been earning points for shopping at the Tom Thumb supermarket near where we live. She used all her points to buy a new turkey cooking pan and rack because our old pan started to rust. She is giving it double duty to cook the flan. It does not get much better than that–flan and a turkey in a free pan! Lots of reasons, big and small to be thankful.
Grandpa Milo called this morning, too. His Thanksgiving with my siblings and all the kids’ cousins will be tomorrow afternoon just because of how all the timing worked out. The reason he called is because he remembered a hymn he thinks might be good for Grandma Sarah’s funeral. We have to look up–we know the hymn really, really well, but do not know the number off the top of our heads. He sang “…we’ll gather round the throne, a victor throng” and a few more lines we could not quite make out. He is obviously very sad, but much better than a week ago. These are more things for which to be thankful–a recently passed Mother/Grandmother in a good place and Grandpa Milo who stays optimistic in the face of a very difficult time.
Christian hitched a ride with his friend Nathan to spend Thanksgiving weekend with the Rizos in San Diego. Kelly flew down last night from Seattle to join the crowd. We tried to figure out a way to be all together this year, but it just did not make sense. We could not be happier about the alternative as the Rizos selflessly made it all work out (again).
Kelly sent out this photo of Christian working on term papers, test preparation and homework. This is probably the last Thanksgiving he will ever have to do this. He has one more semester with a full load of classes followed by a semester with only one class, then he will be all dissertation all the time until he graduates. That is something for which he can certainly be thankful this Thanksgiving.
Lorena and I will spend some time with friends, but sometime during the weekend, we will cook a turkey–the thought of not having turkey sandwiches and other leftovers is more than we can bear.
Kelly sent me a great article on how to raise successful girls. I think it is great and almost surely applies to boys as well. It is titled Want to Raise Successful Daughters? Science Says Nag the Heck Out of Them and was pretty much the operating mode of our family from about when the kids turned two (tongue in cheek, but maybe only slightly). I honestly think there is a good bit of truth to the claims in the article. We had our own little spin on it, but I cannot say that I am not guilty of at least a little bit of this kind of behavior. On the other hand, the über-tiger-mother-from-hades meme is one we rightly loathed so we are not buying this lock, stock and barrel, just maybe lock and stock.
By the way, does the girl in this picture look harassed and put out?
Trisha sent this along and it is just perfect! Kelly and Christian, please take notes.
Over ten years ago (starting in February 2006), I decided I would try to be more consistent in my reading of the Bible. One thing that helps me stay on track with that kind of thing is setting a goal and keeping a record. I set what I thought was a modest goal of just reading one chapter per day until I had read through the entire Bible three times and for each time I read through the whole Bible, I would try to read through the New Testament an additional two times for a total of three times through the Old Testament and nine times through the New Testament.
Today, I finished my third read through the Old Testament which leaves with three reads through the New Testament to complete my goal. I had been faithful both in reading and keeping track for quite awhile, but sometime last year I found myself reading more than one chapter per day. Actually, when I got to the Psalms, I generally read more than one chapter per day the whole time, but the amount of time I spend in the Bible now is surely more than double what I did previously.
The great thing about all this is that my level of enjoyment and benefit in reading has increased over time, too. I know a lot more about the entire flow of the Bible than I did when I started this. I highly recommend setting some goals and keeping a reading record for people with a mindset like my own (I am an engineer at the core of my vocational being). When I hit my goal, Lord willing, I hope to set some new goals, probably starting with a read through a couple additional translations (probably NASB and ESV). Then, I want to find a systematic way to do some topical studies.
The results of this effort are joy, a firmer grasp on a great, overarching plan set into motion by the God who has our best interests at heart even when we ourselves do not.
Update: Our friend David K. made some nice comments about this post and it dawned on me that I had not mentioned that my entire reading history for this goal has been in the KJV. I love the KJV and I cannot imagine a time when it will not be my favorite. That being said, after learning Spanish, the Reina Valera 1960 version of the Bible is way up there on my list of translations and has no need to apologize in any way to the KJV. Really, reading the Bible in Spanish has changed the way I think about translations of the Bible.
Just one more Grandma Sarah story (I cannot help myself). Aunt Julia sent me a chunk of an old instant message she sent me sometime last year. It reminded us that one of Grandma Sarah’s greatest qualities was her boundless kindness and efforts to help “the least of these.”
From Aunt Julia:
I just found this except on a messenger string between Ken and I on 8/4/2015. Mom was feeding a guy named Mike who used to sit at her table. He could still kind of feed himself but Mom would help him because he struggled so much. This is after she had recovered from her surgery but before she got C-dif.
“Mom helps them spoon feed people when they can’t get to everyone. I wish I would have had my camera today, it was very sweet but painfully slow since she can’t see. She would pick up a bite and push it in his direction and he would lean in a bit and she would stretch out a bit and he would lean a little more and so on until the fork reached his mouth… then I would heave a sigh of relief and the whole process would start again It took about 30 minutes for them to get through half of his plate with neither of them getting impatient or losing interest. I just about lost my mind!!!”
My brother, Uncle Doug, my sisters, Aunts Julia and Jean and I all feel good about the arrangements for Grandma Sarah’s funeral. In particular, we feel good about making sure Grandpa Milo gets what he needs. In addition to our plans to make sure someone is checking in on Grandpa Milo now in the short term, but also through the holidays and later on when things settle down after the funeral in January. The sheer number of family and close friends who have reached out to us is testament not only to those friends, but to the lifetime of good will Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah built up over many years.
There was a period of emotionally charged frenetic activity following Grandma Sarah’s death the transitioned into, for me anyway, a couple of days of phone calls with friends and family to thank people for their kindness–family, family with no blood re
lation (you know who you are), especially people who met in Grandpa Milo’s and Grandma Sarah’s living room for church meetings every Sunday morning or Wednesday meeting for decades and special friends of every stripe.
There are many things for which I am thankful going through these events. One of those is that I have truly loving siblings. They have been absolute champions in every way. They have honorably, selflessly and humbly done everything within their power to not only preserve the dignity of everyone involved, but they have done it at great cost to themselves. I love them and am very thankful for them.
Now, I am just about all cried out–at least for awhile. It is sad that Grandma Sarah is gone, but she had a great live. She loved much and was much loved. Next weekend, the family will help Grandpa Milo get some closure and in January we will look forward to saying a more formal goodbye. We will all miss her, but I can honestly say that the greatest gift she gave all of us is that “it is well with her soul.”
The photo to the left is of Grandma Sarah picking beans with her twin sister Janet’s second son Neil. It is pretty descriptive of a lot of my upbringing. Neil and I were both second sons of about the same age and spent a lot of time together at Grandma Jenkins’s (Grandma Sarah’s mom) and Aunt Janet’s house together for overnight stays and the like. More importantly though, it is a reminder that my generation and the generation before that grew up as a family that harvested crops by hand as manual laborers on farms. In my case, it was mostly beans and strawberries, but a lot of other crops in the previous generation (cherries, hops, etc.). Grandpa Milo’s family worked as migrant farm workers every summer during the harvest seasons of his youth. Grandma Sarah picked strawberries and beans in the summers of her college years (and before) to help pay her way through pharmacy school.
I probably should not tell this story in public, but it is so iconic in terms of how I think about my mother, I just cannot help myself. Both Grandma Sarah and I graduated from Oregon State University. In 1973, I moved into a student co-op directly across the street from where Grandma Sarah lived when she started at Oregon State in 1948. I wrote about that place and its connection with Ted Bundy the serial killer in a previous post on this blog. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah lived in Newberg when I started school and I often caught a ride with friends to go back home for weekends. Grandma Sarah would then drive me the 60 miles back to Corvallis on Sunday afternoon after church. We would always stop in Monmouth on the way to eat lunch. I have been at that J’s Family Restaurant a lot of times not only for this, but because it is the same restaurant where our dear friend, Susan Rodriguez worked while she was getting her degree at what is now Western Oregon University as well as a good place to eat on the way to watch a Beavers game.
I need to give this story a little context now to diminish the trouble this will cause me. Grandma Sarah had a wonderful uncle who always went to her house for Christmas while she was growing up as a young girl. He smoked cigars and she associated the smell of those cigars with some wonderful memories she had as a child. So, when the mood struck us, we would buy a couple of REALLY cheap cigars (Swisher Sweets) and smoke them together while we finished our drive to Corvallis. She would get that twinkle in her eye that everyone who really knew her has seen when she was about to say something or do something just for the sheer joy of it even though it might be a little bit off in the eyes of those who were a little to uptight or ungracious. I LOVED those trips. They were our thing. I was talking to Aunt Julia last night and she reminded me that she had actually been there one time with us and we bought THREE cigars. I am glad she was there and can confirm my story because I think there are a lot of people who might not believe it if I did not come from someone with a little more credibility than myself.
I thought it would be good to explain the funeral arrangements we are making to say goodbye to Grandma Sarah because they are a little bit out of the ordinary. Doug, Julia and Jean who are very close to the situation and after a lot thought have decided the best way to handle this to accommodate Grandpa Milo’s capabilities would be to do this in two steps. I completely concur with what was decided as it was a kind solution and what the family feels is a fitting way to say goodbye respectfully given the circumstances. Since it was Grandma Sarah wish to be cremated we have more time than we would otherwise. In that light, this is our plan:
Step One. Many know that Grandpa Milo has Alzheimer’s disease and is not as able as in the past. It was felt that in the short term, based on Grandpa Milo’s capabilities and all of our need for some closure it would be good to do something in a much smaller, more controlled venue. To that end, we will have a small family-only dinner in the next week or so to remember Grandma Sarah and disperse the ashes in the rose garden by the pond Grandpa Milo built like they had planned.
Step Two. All of us wanted to have a traditional funeral so all the family and friends Grandma Sarah loved so much and who loved her back can say goodbye, too. Because we have time and due to a number of considerations including the upcoming holidays when it is hard to plan travel, the family thought it would be easier if we did the funeral after the first of the year. It seemed odd to us to wait so long, but someone remembered that was the way it was handled with our dear friend Beth Bellam and it not only went well, but allowed more people to make plans to be there. The next consideration was that Special Meeting rounds start right after the first of the year and end on January 15. Mom’s birthday is on January 18th and we thought that might be a good time to have the funeral and celebrate her life. We talked to our ministers and they thought that would be just fine if that is what the family wanted. We are not sure it will happen exactly on January 18th, but if not, it will be within a few days of that date. We will keep everyone posted.
Mom (Grandma Sarah) died last night. She was with Aunts Julia and Jean, Uncle Doug and two of her grandchildren, Amy and Charlie. I flew out from Texas to Seattle last weekend and was able to drive down to Portland on Saturday with Kelly to say goodbye in person. She recognized us and was able to say one or two words and squeeze our hand to answer questions while we were there. Kelly and I took turns reading the Bible to her, Psalm 23, Matthew 5-7 and the three epistles of John. Then we sang some hymns with the help of Grandpa Milo. Grandma Sarah, Kelly and I held hands and we each prayed for her. After that, she lost focus so we kissed her and said goodbye. We knew it would be the last time and were very thankful we had the chance to tell her we loved her and say goodbye.
Mom was a faithful woman who always looked out for “the least of these.” She had a great love for Jesus and He was what her life was about. It was sad to see her go, but she is in a better place.
The selection of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton yesterday is the strangest ever election season in my experience. It is not so much that way because of who is running or what is at stake for the county although that does to be quite monumental. It is more because, even though the stakes are monumental, it really is because my mindset on this election and maybe even elections in general has changed fairly dramatically. It would be wrong to say I do not care what happens or that I should not participate. I think I should participate. It has more to do with the fact that my mother is on her death bed and I have been focused on bigger and much, much more important issues than just the election of a president.
At the same time, I have gotten a kick out of watching my family watch the election. None of us think Trump will be much good, but we do think he will be better than what would have been perpetrated on us by a Hillary administration. The thing that has been interesting is how much of a kick Lorena got out of the election, the horror of the illegal Mexican community of our acquaintance here in the US and the very interesting reaction of our close family in Mexico who are certainly not Trump fans, but believe the Mexicans who reside here illegally are getting what they deserve.
All said, this is the first election since I had the right to vote that I went to bed early and did not get the result until the next morning with only mild interest. Sadly, I think we are living in the interesting times alluded to in that famous Chinese proverb.