Unbelievably bad timing. Lorena dropped me off at Panera to work on GRIME3 only to find their internet is out. I checked in my backpack for a cable to tether my phone, but I had taken it out for some unknown reason. Now Lorena is running to Kroger to get me a cable so I can work while she shops and we both wait for our house showing to be over.
It was not so bad to resolve this. Kroger had what we needed and it took all of 15 minutes to get up and running.
My brother Doug and I were huge fans of Davy Crockett when we were kids. It was because of the Disney TV program about him. I think it must have been at the time of the one of the rebroadcasts of the program because the short series was filmed in 1955, before I was born. This all got brought to my attention when my sister Julia sent us some pictures she had scanned in from our wonderful Finnish grandmother, Ida Jenkins. The picture is of the Davy Crockett outfits my mother bought for us one Christmas. We cherished those outfits and the toy rifles we got to go along with them.
I have exclusively used Xubuntu Linux on my personal (home) computer since 2012. It was a struggle to do everything I wanted to do for quite a few years, but little by little, the issues faded away until now there nothing I normally do that is not easily accommodated. We use Linux on the instruments we make in my day job, so I do not have to spend anytime at all on Windows or Apple. Right now, I am on version 24.04 LTS, but will move to 26.04 LTS as soon as it has a chance to stabilize a little more. I am a little wary about changing versions, but the move from 22.04 LTS to 24.04 was absolutely painless. Hopefully, I will be able to remain on Xubuntu for the rest of my computing days which, admittedly, are not that many. It is truly impressive what the Ubuntu ecosystem has become. The same is true for Linux as a whole. My brother, Doug, who has been exclusively on Windows for decades is making the switch to regular Ubuntu right now and is amazed how easy it is to install and use software and especially amazed with how fast things run without all the Windows bloat-ware.
I emptied all the books from my bookshelf and packed all the other books for the move after throwing away about half of them. Now, the house has been slow to sell, we have a three day weekend coming up and I have nothing to read. I just ordered a couple of novels from ThriftBooks, but they will not arrive here in time for the weekend. Serves me right for not reserving just one or two books for just this kind of a situation.
Still fat, but doing better. Still a few weeks from my intermediate weight goal. I was hoping I would make it by the Independence Day on July 4, but I really do not think that will happen. Still, my leg press is back up to 385 lbs. for 3 sets of ten reps. I am hoping to hit 405 lbs. and then just stay there for awhile. I am thinking of moving away from the chest press machine to do real bench presses. I am not sure where I am with that. It would be nice to be able to get back to my one time working weight of 225 lbs., but that might be a bridge too far. I am currently doing 3 sets of 10 reps at 170 lbs. on the chest press.
Kelly and I had an interesting chat session this morning about work and vocation. We did not actually call it that, but realized that was the core topic when I thought about it afterward. No one in our family is very comfortable with not having work and income. I fell like that is true and this is what I wrote to her:
I get it. It is your life and our family in general is kind of like that. Sadly, I think we have about 5 generations of that built into the family culture going all the way back to Finland in the mid-1800’s and even the family that moved out to Oregon in the mid-1800’s. I wish we could break that cycle a little. You (and all of us) are in not danger of starving and being uncomfortable is not a bad thing if it leads to something great.
I think it would be very sad for any of us to not follow a vocation given to us by God. Of course, one has to put beans on the table, but it is also true that a vocation given to us from God will do that.
Troy has been sending me links to new papers on the measurement of water level with cameras that kind of make me crazy. We have been doing this for over fifteen years now and papers are coming out that do not cite us that describe things we did with thousands and thousands of images. Beside the fact that virtually every paper we have ever seen used data sets of 10’s to 100’s of images with maybe one or two that had up to a couple thousand. But they were presenting nothing new on with super small datasets on stuff we had already done on tens of thousands of images. One of those papers even used stop signs to perform a pixel to world coordinate conversion. Oh well.
We are in a period of lives where there are lots of things we (Lorena and I) would like to be doing, including taking time off to smell the roses. It does not make a lot of sense to start most of those things that attract us until we sell our current house and relocate closer to Lorena’s family. Both of us realize that is a ridiculous way to think about our current situation. There is really not much stopping us from doing all of those things right now. Maybe the habits we have picked up during our marriage and the raising of our kids has us handicapped with unnecessary anxiety about paying the rent and putting beans on the table when those are no longer problems of high importance. So, we are going to continue working on getting the house sold, but also plan a trip or two starting in the fall. The time we have spent where we are right now has been spiritually profitable for us and maybe God, in his mercy, is keeping us where we are. We are thankful for that.
…and people who are not and do not are just part of everyday work life. I truly love my job. I had the good fortune to have helped build an incredible work culture during my eight years at the company. It is hard to watch that culture break under the weight of a non-contributor, especially if that non-contribution is both in attitude, work ethic, and competence. It is a huge relief, from the company perspective, to see an influence like that removed whether it is through their on volition or not. That happened to day at my work. My colleague said something to the effect that something happened that was going to make me very pleased. It had the opposite effect. I was just saddened that years and resources were wasted, both the company’s years and resources and that of the ex-employee. It was good for no one.
This month has been a roller coaster. We have been up and down with all the stuff we are doing and the lives of the kids. Things are starting to level out now with a to-do list that is growing and has some finite end-points. An agenda of things to do to work toward a finite end has a stabilizing effect on me. It even helps me with my normal day-to-day work that I would be doing even if I did not have some big goal in front of me. Lorena is the same way. We have two showing and an open house between now and Sunday. We might not sell the house, but there seems to be continuing interest in the house. The moment it sells, then we are on a good path to something stable that allows us to start doing some other things projects we love to do. Beside the move, both Lorena and I truly want to maintain our current Bible study schedules, workouts, and diets. I want to accomplish the next GaugeCam goals. And we want to visit family in Mexico and Oregon very soon. All, God willing.
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