Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy

Kenrick, Anthony, and Treven spent last Saturday exploring Treven's new yard while daddy helped put a roof on Doug's shed. The 'yard' consists of dirt piles and mud puddles. By the end of the day the dirt piles were a little shorter, the puddles a little muddier, and the boys a little mixture of both. Oh, and the shed has a roof.


Also, Monday was sonogram day at the doctor's office. You guessed it, we're adding another boy to the mix! He seems to be growing pretty happily - all fingers and toes accounted for, good looking heart, definitely boy parts, and a rather large head. Especially for this clan. (Bunch of pin-heads, just look at Kenrick in the picture above!) He waved at us on the sonogram screen. I think he looks a little like Andrea. Now we just have to come up with a name. No, we're not taking suggestions.

Sprouting Windmills

We've had just the right amount of rain this year for growing beans and corn. The windmills are growing pretty well too. I finally got a chance to check out the progress for myself the other day and sure enough, the first five turbines are in the air! Here's a view of one and one under construction from about a mile away, looking out over the bean fields. The picture is a bit washed out and grey because it was, well, rainy.

The car, the crane, and a partially assembled tower. The crane is the same one that I raved about a month or so ago.
For scale, I had Kenrick stand next to the nacelle, or generator housing. The cylinder in the foreground is the top section of the tower. It has the ladder and power cables already installed inside. Cool, huh?
I don't know for sure, but I think these are 1.5 MW (Mega-Watt) turbines from GE. According to the specs, it has a 60 to 100 meter (197 to 328 ft) tower and a 77 meter (252 ft) diameter rotor. That's big, but not as big as their new 3.6 MW turbine, which has a 104 meter (341 ft) rotor diameter! If you laid those rotors flat on the ground, their swept area would cover just over 2 acres! Enough exclamations! Okay, I'm done already! Bye.

Gap Tooth

Kenrick finally lost it. His tooth that is. Here the new gap-tooth grin.

Fun With Cousins

The boys had a great time with cousin Tristan last week. Here are some highlights.



Lego-time! That might be the only airport in the country with happy travelers.



Notice the missing chompers. Kenrick's loose tooth isn't quite there yet, but Tristan is well on his way!



Feeding the geese. Also, trying not to be food for the geese.



This looks like trouble.



The final product. And all thumbs in one piece. Amazing.



Hitch'n a ride with Grandpa. Nice tractor, Grandpa!



Um... Idaho road crew?

Happy Anniversary to Us

Last week was our anniversary. Married life is wonderful when you have a wonderful girl to share it with. And the kids... well, they keep it interesting. Here's the crew, all four and a half of us: (I love them all)

Garden Harvest

We've had pretty good luck with our garden this year. Here's a sample:



(We've had pretty good luck with Kenrick too, although sometimes we wonder if we planted a silly-seed instead of a little boy!)

Tomatoes for Sale

Anyone want any tomatoes? I've got tons, as usual for this time of year. We only planted three plants but they've all just exploded recently. The cherry tomato plant is six foot tall. Unfortunately, everyone else has tomatoes that they want to get rid of too. Maybe if we all coordinated at the beginning of the year ... ("okay you grow tomatoes and I'll grow zucchini")

Anyway, it's probably a good thing to have some extra produce, since today is day six without the fam and the fridge is getting a little slim ("Hello!" Hello! Hello! "Echo!" Echo! Echo!).

On a totally unrelated note, the Journal Star had a few windmill pictures in the paper today. Here's a link to their online archive. The pictures are a little small; you have to pay to get the higher resolution images. Cheapskates. I did see a couple of towers the other day when I was up there and have seen a couple of the central hubs for the rotors go past on trucks, but according to the paper there's actually a couple of fully assembled windmills out there now.

Here's a shot of one of the hubs that I snapped from the car. (Sorry it's sideways!)

Trains, Planes, and Autos

Andrea and the boys got on the train this morning and flew to Idaho! I mean they took the train to Chicago and the plane to Salt Lake where Grandpa and Grandma met them to drive to Idaho Falls. Anyway, I'm family-less again. Here's the crew:



What's the best part about being home alone? The quiet. What's the worst part? The quiet. The house already feels pretty empty, but I'm glad Andrea is adventurous enough to take on the challenge. Not sure what's going to happen when she has a stroller to push in addition to all the luggage!

San Diego

Some of you may know that I was in San Diego last week for a conference. Here's a couple pictures.



The big bonus for the trip was that I got to spend some time with Sally and Matt. They still seem to like each other.



The view from the hotel was out over San Diego Bay. Nice. The little white dot just to the right of center was a huge cruise ship coming in to dock at the terminal in the foreground. The thing in the far background was an aircraft carrier. Big.

(The view from my room was pointing the other direction, looking towards downtown over the train yard and construction projects. Not as nice, but still not too bad.)

Up the road a little ways was a fine old sailing ship. Kenrick called it a 'pirate ship' when he saw the picture. Any way you imagine it, it would have been some kind of adventure to set sail on one of these. I wish we would have had more time to take a closer look.

The conference I went to is called SIGGRAPH. It's the premier computer graphics and animation conference for a strange mix of academics, computer programmers, artists, and animation studios. And two guys from Caterpillar. I went with a colleague of mine to learn about some programming techniques that are being used by the movie and computer game industry to help speed up some of the same computations that we do in the engineering world. I won't try to explain here, but just say we got what we went for, plus some.



And managed to beat Sally and Matt three games to none in two-on-two sand volleyball on Monday night. :-)

Kid Pix

Some semi-random pictures of the kids from the last week or so...

Sunday duds:

Scrub off the dirt and they look pretty good don't they?

The boys got invited to a birthday party the other day. It was a Princess party, but they went anyway. No sense in turning down free food!

The Pretty Pink Princess:

The guests doing what they do best:

"I shouldn't have eaten so much cupcake!"

Andrea got this K'nex roller coaster at a garage sale a few weeks ago. I finished putting it together just before I left for San Diego. Encouragingly, the kids haven't wrecked it yet.

Finally, a couple of pictures from yesterday when Andrea and the boys met Tammia and Kenna in the Quad Cities for the day. The train look cool, but seems to be going nowhere fast.

"Uh-oh, I think I woke it up!"

Engineers

Kenrick and Anthony got up early the other morning to work on their railroad. When I got home there was a massive matchbox car traffic jam all along the track and across the living room. The train itself seems to be happy to chug along the edge of the rug.

Cycling Milestone

This afternoon I went for a bike ride with a Don and a couple other guys from work. "It'll be an easy ride!", and "We did a loop the other day, it wasn't too bad.", I was assured. Two hours later I'd completed my first 30-miler. I'm beat. The guy who organized the ride didn't break a sweat.



Here's the route:











I also experienced for the first time the joys of drafting (oops, that's not the one I wanted, try this). And the fact that when you get dropped (twice) you have to push the wind yourself to catch back up.



I'm not going to be able to get out of bed tomorrow.

Loose Tooth, soon to be Lotht

We were eating supper last night and Kenrick suddenly said "Oh, I've got a loose tooth!" Sure enough, one of the front gophers was wigglin'. If he's anything like I was at that age (I've matured), that tooth will be out in about two days.

... and all he brought back was one lousy picture!

It's nice to come home again after being in Tucson all week. Somehow home feels extra special after being away from both the place and the family.

I enjoy going to Tucson; the change of pace and focus of work is nice, I've gotten to know some folks there, and the food is phenomenal. But I'm kind of kicking myself that I didn't take more pictures this time. Even though July is about the hottest time of year there, it's also the wettest, so the desert is starting to bloom and the scenery is really quite pretty. I guess it's a testament to how much I enjoy the local cuisine that the only picture I took was of the Cow Palace.


That was Tuesday night's fair. One-pound T-bone. Not bad, but I've had better. Monday was Manuel's in Green Valley, my favorite Mexican restaurant. Fajitas. Very good. Wednesday I met Court and Melanie at a place in Tucson called Neo. Very flavorful Malaysian with some Chinese and Indian influence. Interesting. Thursday was baby-back ribs at the Silver Saddle steakhouse. The open-pit mesquite grill makes the whole place smell fabulous. I went with a couple of colleagues - one Chinese and one Indian. The Chinese guy had steak. The Indian fellow, chicken. When I got home this afternoon we went to a little Mexican restaurant in Peoria that we had not tried yet. It tasted like Mexican frozen dinners. Very disappointing

One thing I wish I could have taken a picture of was how pretty the farmland around Peoria looked from the air. From a couple thousand feet up the corn fields looked like patches of thick green shag carpet, the stripes and patterns like the tracks of a giant vacuum contrasting with the dense, ragged outline of the forests that fill the numerous and meandering drainages into the river valley. I waved as our little town slid under the belly of the plane, and was able to pick out Barry and Sarah's house sitting all by itself in the corn and beans.

As you get towards Chicago, the smooth fields give way to the jumbled crust of subdivisions, highways, and high rises. The endless stretches of humanity never ceases to amaze me. When we flew over Lake Michigan there were hundreds of little sailboats out on the water. I'd never seen that before and it was kind of neat.

Tucson was hot. I think it was over 100 degree every day. And humid too. Not Midwest humid or Florida humid, but certainly not like the dry Idaho heat. Then the late afternoon thunder storms would toss buckets of water here and there and the temperature would drop 25 degrees in a matter of minutes. Every day. By morning the sky was clear and the sun was pushing the thermometer past 85 again. They call it the monsoon season. Strange.

Anyway, I'd probably better quite. I'm glad to be safe at home and I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed.