A Very Merry Christmas

Well I hope that everyone had a great Christmas break, I know we did. It's always hard getting back into gear, especially after spending several weeks doing what ever you like.

Jenee and I arrived in Texas to discover that out of Linda, Joe, Jenee and myself, I was the only one not sick. Poor Jenee had a nasty upper respiratory deal, and Linda and Joe had some stomach bug that was going around, both with different symptoms. By the end of the trip, they cared and shared what they had so I had a little bout of everyone specialness. Thanks to large doses of vitamin C I managed to shake it all off quickly.

I think one of the things I enjoy the most is a different lifestyle. While in town, Jenee and I like to help look after the horses which includes feeding, sifting poop, riding, and changing blankets. Dad, you should watch out, I am getting pretty good cleaning out the stalls. You might need to get back here soon to stake your claim as Linda's stable boy.

Of course one of the biggest differences in Texas for those of us who live in Florida is the cold weather. It's actually cold, not just cooler than scorching. All I can say is whoever invented thermal underwear deserves a round of applause cause I don't know how I would survive with out it, and really it wasn't that cold compared to some places.

Christmas was really fun this year, as always. Jenee and I had made a deal with each other that we would only spend $30 on each other. That represents a considerable challenge. You have to really put some thought into it. I have mentioned elsewhere what I got Jenee, it was a Cricut if you have forgotten, and yes I know it was more than $30, but we agreed to both use our spending money to pay the difference. Jenee on the other hand was very creative and bought me a poster-print of my favorite photographer. She wrapped the poster inside a rifle case so when I opened it I thought she had finally let me get a gun, I was wrong. You can see a picture of the poster below.
I have to tell you that the picture you see here is no comparison with the real thing. Of course Jenee and I look forward to seeing what the family sends from Australia and low-and-behold, apparently my Dad had the same idea and sends me another Ken Duncan poster, as you can see below.Well, as you might guess, I didn't quite know what to do with myself. Two Ken Duncan's in one holiday is alot to take! Now all I need is a house to hang them in. We spent most of Christmas day with family and it was a delight to have nothing to do on boxing day because this year we stayed in Texas instead of waking up a 4 o'clock and driving to New Mexico.

To replace all that snow and ice, our good Lord offered to bring some of it to us to remind us what its like. An arctic front moved over Texas with freezing rain and all was a winter wonderland for a day. Trees, shrubs, fences, and cars were all coated in a thin layer of ice. I will have more pictures in a later post. Before all that happened though, we had a New Years bash out the back. Its fast becoming a New Year's tradition to burn the now dried out and highly flammable Christmas tree and oh how pretty it was.

Well, that's about it for this post. There are more on the way with a slideshow to boot!

Ice on a pine tree in Texas

First Day at Work - 2009

Well, its 4:41 and I am ready for the day to be done. Even though it's Wednesday, I have mondayitis. We'd have been back earlier but we got iced in while we were in Texas. Anyway, it seems that 2009 is going to be a very busy year already. In the next 4 months, I will hopefully be on no less than 4 proposals, 2 papers and maybe a patent...

But to start '09 off with a bang, guess what was on my desk to welcome me back to work!

This is the front cover of the book. Early last year I was asked to write a chapter to a book. I was told I had two weeks to get a completed draft together and I need to write on the topic of powder flow which I know something about. Thanks to Stephen and Milorad we put together a pretty decent chapter in the allotted time slot. After submission of the first draft there was a few more revisions, some imaging and some reprint permissions to be obtained but in the end it was all worth it.

Have a closer look at the table of contents, chapter 8 looks interesting! I think everyone should have a read of it. It's highly relavent to today's society and bears heavy application on everyday life. If you think I am joking, you'd be right, but the truth is it's actually a very important topic and with out thourough understanding in this area, many parts of the industrial revolution would have never happened...


If you would like a signed copy, you can buy it on amazon (click here) and I will sign it for you... :-p

Welcome...

...to blogging, ...to the jungle?, ...to Texas?

Well, I am sitting on the couch at the in-laws and it has been a crazy couple of days. First of all, welcome Jenee to the world of publishing. Hopefully we'll see some more posts from you and you will keep me a little more honest :-)

Now what about the jungle? Well, first of all, before you read any further I want you to know that all is well at the end of the story. It all started this week. I should know better but I perhaps niavely thought that this week would be slow at work and I would be able to take it easy. Wrong. Let me say it again. WRONG.

On Monday a large project for an industry member was dumped in my lap. I had about 15 sampes to perform mercury porosimetery on. Now, I haven't done mercury porosimetry for about 3 years and I forgot how it takes about 90 minutes per sample. So after a short 4 hour refresher, I started on my way. Two and a half days later I finished the samples. Two and a half days of standing in front of the machine, two and a half days of being bored, but having to pay close attention to what I am doing... so much for an eazy going week.

This was followed by something didn't quite exepect, in fact, I don't think any of us expected. On Thursday afternoon, I was sitting down to a short lunch when our building was rocked by a large rumble. Grabbing my safety glasses, I rushed down stairs to be met by another technician. We started to race through the building to try find the source of the noise. We found it, turned out that an acid waste bottle had exploded in the building because of poor sample labling. Fortunately no one was hurt, but that didn't stop the rest of the afternoon to be filled with firetrucks, fireman, ambulances, police officers and outside emerency washes. It was quite an ordeal.

Ironicaly, the following day was our lab clean-up day and we were all very cautious, not wanting another visit from the boy's with big red shinny trucks. I spent yet another day on my feet. Actually I spent all week on my feet come to think of it. That wasn't all of it though. I got an offer from someone to buy my old HP laptop computer. On the way to drop the computer off we got rear ended by a little blonde ditz who apparently was examing a microscopic scratch on her finger and forgot to leave her foot on the brake. To my amazement, there was no damage to the cars. Amazing...

To top Friday off, I forgot to run some other samples overnight, so I had to go back to work at 11pm Friday night. Put it down to excitment for the end of the year. I eventualy got to sleep, and actually rested up. We got up early and hit the road for Orlando where we were greated by the most fantasticly dense fog. Floridians don't believe in slowing down, not for hurricane grade rain, not for smoke and aparently not for fog. And it didnt stop us us, if you slow down on the highway, your dead. We did have a nice adventure on the way. About 10 minutes down the turn pike, past the last rest stop my brain got a message. The special message that means I have to find a bathroom really, really, really quickly. Well, I thought I would ask the lady at the toll booth and to my delight, she told me that there was a toll booth operators toilet, if only I could cut across several lanes of trafic. Its amazing what you can do when you need to. And then all was good with the world again.

Now we are in Texas, relaxing with the fam and ready for Christmas. I think after this week, I'm ready for a few less supprises.

Jenee's Correction

One more correction to this post. It was not organized to Nate's liking or understanding, therefore he would like to reorganize them and that is fine by me :) Isn't it amazing how differently we see things!

Correction on Jenee's picture / iTunes Libraries

In the below post I commented "on to Jenee's disastrous photo and iTunes libraries" and I need to make a correction. Her libraries are not disastrous, just, how should I say it... less organized than mine.

Yay for Obsessive Compulsive Organisation!

Well, it's taken about 2 and a half months but I have done it. I have culled 8561 images (20.1 GB worth of data) from my photo library. That's a lot of junk come to think of it. Of course I had to follow strict guidelines as given by the Mrs:

No deleting photos of people
No deleting photos of important events
and
Delete all of the boring photo's that don't have any people in them...

Of course, I ignored that last one, and kept my interesting, artistic photos that will one day be worth something, or not...\. So now I have 160 folders containing some 24,300 photos that are named accordingly, taking up a fraction over 50 GB. All I need now is a little more backup protection for the data, and I'll be feeling a lot better about all those memories sitting on my hard drive.

For the record, my iTunes and photo libraries are now impeccable. Hence, of course, Jenee now want's similar organization for her media libraries, soo...

...on to Jenee's disastrous photo and iTunes library...YAY!!!

Want to go home...

I have a cracking headache and its only 9:30 am...
Blaming the sudden change in weather...
Stupid Florida...

Wii Ray Blu Fit

I hope that title made no sense what so ever. It wasn't really meant to.

This weekend gone Jenee and I got the urge to go for a walk because we'd been stuffed inside all day and needed some fresh air and what better place to go walking than Butler Plaza across the street.

Off we went and visited a few of our local favorites, finishing off at Best Buy. I went off in one direction, she went off in the other. About 5 minutes later I find her with a big, sweet smile on her face, clearly hiding something. It turns out that she had sweet-talked an associate into getting her Wii Fit, before it was meant to be put on the shelves for a sale. Wii Fit is an interactive game with an electronic board that you stand on. You can do stretching, yoga, fitness training and more. With out too much trouble I am persuaded to run home and get my wallet (lets face it, I wanted it too). I told her that I wanted something too, just cause, and in my excitment I picked up Wall·E on Blu-Ray.

So off I went, then back I came with my wallet and we left with a new game, a movie and some Christmas CD's (because apparently 2 weeks of Christmas music straight isn't enough).

Well, how exciting is all this. We plugged the game in, we listend to the CD's and I though, "hmm, I'd like to watch Wall·E."

Genious here didn't think about it.

Lesson of the day: If your going to buy a Blu-Ray disc, make sure you have a Blu-Ray player...

Masters of Black Friday!

What is Black Friday? According to Wikipedia: Black Friday is a term for the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, which is the beginning of the traditional Holiday shopping season.

Typically most major synicated retailers are open and there are some pretty incredible deals advertised about a week before the big event. Shopping for the best deals involves lining up/camping a few days before hand or if you are not so desparate, waking up at 1, 2, 3 or 4 am and making your way to your local retailer.

By fluke chance, we found out that the awesome Cricut machine was pretty much half price ($200) with two included cartridges ($50-90 ea) at Wal Mart. Jenee has been wanting one of these for about 3 years so we decided to go and do some homework. We found out that they had a "pallet" of them, so our plan was to go home, wake up at 4am, get there about 4:20am and wait for the 5am sale.

Our logic was "really how many people in Mansfield would want a Cricut?". Turns out about 10 people at about 5 am. We had arrived early enought that we could stand right next to the machines and pick one up as soon as we were given the go ahead by the manager. There were a few other ladies around the machines who we made friends with, and cornained off the access, to ensure that we could all get one, and we wouldn't get rushed by and craized shoppers.

Once we had the go-ahead, I picked up one of the Cricut boxes, and we headed toward the cashier (we also picked up something else, but thats a Christmas present for someone so I cant say much), only to be out of Wal Mart at 5:05. Too easy. But I was glad to be there early, some of those ladies looked like they could throw a mean punch. I was just glad we weren't trying to get something in the electronics area. From my understanding there is a good possibility of getting bruised, bumped and knocked down in those high demand areas.

So really, we had quite a pleasant experience, but I was prepared to use a Tai-Chi warm-up on anyone stupid enough to get in my way. We got home safe and I let Jenee look at her new toy before making her put it back and wrapping it up for Christmas (insert evilness here). I told her next year for Black Friday we're going to Arlington camera with the credit card...(I wish)...

Feels Like Forever

...since I posted. You could probably draw two conclusions. Either nothing has been happening or I have been distracted with other things. But who cares, here is a small post to keep the wheels turning.

If you didn't already know, its nearly Christmas, and this weekend we put our Christmas tree up. Jenee and I collect ornaments from places that we travel to and so far we have probably 10 or so unique items for our tree. Sadly we have suffered a few casualties though. Two of our beautiful ornate glass spheres that were given to us for our wedding have suffered from several moves and broken, kinda sad really because they were really beautiful and special to us.

This last weekend gone Jenee and I spent working on our year-end goals. Nothing really exciting here, just things like "finish off xxx's quilt" or "finish organizing my 30,000+ photo library". Some progress has been made on our goals, but I really need to learn not to take so many photos.

I have some recent pictures to post but that may not happen for a week or two so hang in there. Well, thats about it for right now, hope all is well. Nate