Sunday, May 27, 2007

News from MN, 5/27/2007

HiYo,

Happy springs. Jessy has been training for her first marathon for the
last 6 months. Today she ran her first 20 mile run in the local
Rochester marathon. She sprinted the last bit, so looks like she will
be good for her first full marathon in Duluth in a few weeks.

Nick made it to Virgina Tech ok last week. He will be working on a 3d
sound research project for 2 months. There is a bit of travel in our
future also. In 2 weeks, Helen and I will spend a few days at a
conference in Chicago, then fly for a few days to New Hampshire for her
fathers 75th Birthday. Then we drive out to Syracuse in a month.
Finally, in 2 months, Helen, Zach, and I (grammatic note to you
grammatically incorrect youngsters, it is foo and I, not me and foo!)
booked flights for a week in Montana, 7/29 -> 8/5.

Helen's Mom found a place we can park Helen's dog Toosik for a while, at
a rural home in NH. We will either fly him out to meet with us in NH
in 2 weeks, or drive him out with us in July.

Speaking of driving, I decided to give my RX/8 back when it's lease
expires in a month. I was going to buy it, but decided to lease when
dollars added up to be about the same (they had a good lease incentive),
then buy it when the lease was up. But since Helen will be usually
walking or biking to work, and I'll be working from the apartment, we
barely need one car, much less 2. And Helen's Subaru Outback gets much
better gas mileage. Zach blames my decision on Gore's 'An inconvenient
truth', and he is partly right.

And Zach just sold HIS mazda (the red miata). He decided he wanted to
get out of various debts and have some moneys he could use to get his
Del Sol running. So he is currently car-less, but will likely buy a
beater soon. We might become a 0-car household for a while. That will
freak the insurance guys out.

Pictures. First one is a much less fuzzier version of the one I tookat Silver Lake a year ago when Helen and I first met. Same spot, but my camera got a little smarter. Or maybe it was the rock wall that took the picture that got a little smarter.


The second one shows Zach's super human strength, lifting the gutted
blue car with one finger. Actually, the superhuman part was when Zach
removed the engine and trany (third picture) by himself earlier that day.










The last picture is Helen's over-loaded arm. Why 2 watches? Good
question, one repeated by many a curious Mayo-ian. She left the fancy
atomic watch on the right on Eastern time, since fancy atomic watches
require an atomic engineering degree to set their time zone.





One last thing ... I think I keep forgetting to post a pointer to

Helen's web page: http://toughshiitake.org (shiitake is a mushroom and
she is a big shroomer). The photo blog (1st link) is a lot of fun.

Bruce

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

News from MN, 5/07/2007

Hellos to the people I know,

Apartment is rented and the hole is filled. Actually, I said that in
reverse order. As soon as the ground thawed, my shovel pushed the dirt
hill back into the hole. Turns out some of the dirt evaporated somehow,
so we now have about a 6 inch by 20 foot dent in the yard. This is
where I will claim a meteor hit.

That 2nd photo is from a driveway cookout. The blue cars in the
background are undergoing the equivalent of a heart/lung transplant.
The party eventually died out, but Zach continued working by flashlight
till midnight, and the refurbished car was happily rolling the streets
the next day.

Helen and I got back from our 2 week trip to NY, NH, and Boston last
night. Missions accomplished, but finding an apartment was harder than
we expected. Apartments withing biking/walking distance of a large
university is tricky, apparently typically done a year in advance. I
had lots of leads from the internets, but most of them fell through (web
pictures somehow always look better than in real life). So by day 3, we
resorted to randomly driving streets and dialing any phone numbers we
could find. Which lead us to the top floor of the 3rd pictures. Helen
walked up to it and said 'This smells right'. I didn't think that was a
good sign, but then a multi-colored cat walked up and said hi. Russians
view this as a good sign. They landlord had a stack of applicants for
this newly available apartment, but liked us best, so we sealed the deal.

After Syracuse, we visited Aya at here school in (RISDI) in Road Island.
The photo shows her explaining how the 16 mm film machine she uses
in her animation major works.

Then we went to Helen's house on 'the lake' where she finally had a
chance to prepare her presentation at the big annual Neurology meeting
in Boston. Whilst at the lake, we reveled in the last quickly melting
snowbank (5th photo).

The last 3 photos are from Boston. While Helen gave her talk to a big
crowd, I touristed the streets, only getting lost a few times.

2 urls to share. A few weeks ago I did a Internet radio/podcast
interview on MisterHouse. About 20 minutes, really of interest only to
home automation types. podcast link here: http://sitescollide.com

The other is Laurie's blog, which she started about a month ago.
Creative, inspiring, and fun words found here:

http://laurelwinter.blogspot.com