Month: January 2018

Here’s a shot of the tachometer in my car the other day, which shows the temperature after I finished playing ultimate.

Yeah, that’s January in Colorado this year. We could sure use some snow…

As we continue working on cleaning out our crawlspace, I was struck by how much stuff we have… here’s a shot of the basement, where we’ve been staging everything:

It made me think of those clown cars, where you can’t believe how many clowns can fit into such a little car. It’s amazing how many boxes fit into our little crawlspace (and there are still at least a dozen in there, and five in my office).

Still, it feels good to de-clutter…

I’ve decided that in 2018 I’m going to work on working less.

For years I’ve been hoping to put in fewer hours, leading (ever so gradually) to my retirement in June 2019. It’s been a long process, and over the past few years I’ve successfully reduced my average hours at work. Yet I’m still a long way from that magical zero that means retirement, so I need to step up my game.

This year I figured I’d leave the office around 3pm. That would more or less force me to work fewer hours. As a side benefit, it would give me time to work on my seminary lessons in the afternoons, meaning I’d actually have my evenings free. (For the past two years, every school night has meant I’m spending two hours after dinner working on a lesson, and then basically going to bed.)

Two weeks into the year, it’s going well. I think I left at 3:30 yesterday, but the other work days were right around 3:00. Success!

However, both yesterday and today I skipped my lunchtime ultimate games, because I was really busy at work (servers to patch for Spectre and Meltdown) and figured if I wanted to stick with my 3pm target I couldn’t take an hour or three to play ultimate.

This afternoon as I clacked away at my keyboard, it occurred to me that the biggest reason I want to reduce my work hours is so I can do non-work stuff. Like… ultimate. Why, then, was I giving up playing ultimate so I could put in the hours to leave early so I could do things like play ultimate? Argh.

Clearly I’ll need to refine my goals a bit.

Well, another kid off to college! Alex starts his first semester at BYU on Monday, so we packed everything into the van and headed out to Utah.

The night before, we celebrated with a nice dinner at Outback (because, hey, gift card!). I wanted to capture Alex’s excitement about going to college the next day.

Actually, I wanted one last picture of his epic beard. This is two months of growth. ZZ Top he’s not.

We headed across Wyoming on Friday and managed to find his new apartment, even without (shudder) the help of Google Maps, which was mysteriously not working on any of our three phones. I was pleasantly impressed with how nice and tidy the place was. The kitchen looked good:

Out of curiosity, I checked the cupboards and was satisfied that they indeed were well-stocked for the average college student.

Frosted cereal? Check. Peanut butter? Yep. Pancake mix and instant oatmeal, for hot breakfasts (or late-night snacks)? Of course. Throw in a bag of chocolate chips, and you’re all set.

We headed over to campus to get his new student ID card, but were foiled because in order to get your photo taken for an ID card at BYU, you must obey the “dress and grooming standards” of the university, which include a prohibition on facial hair. So back at the apartment, Alex went to work on the beard.

And now he’s clean-shaven again, and ready to charm the ladies!

We unloaded some of his things, but left the bulk of the room setup to him. He decided to pose beside his desk.

Notice the pen behind his ear, which he set there just for the photo because, in his words, it makes him look “more academic”. Yeah. Because everyone puts pens behind their ears these days.

To wrap up the day, we went to the Olive Garden for dinner (another gift card!) and enjoyed a delicious meal. Alex signed for the check, and made me proud with his “signature”:

Normally I sign with a little boat on the ocean, some sun and clouds, and the occasional shark in the water. One time I couldn’t finish my masterpiece because (apparently) these little table kiosks only allow a certain number of strokes in a signature.

La and I said our good-byes and headed east, eventually finding a motel in Evanston WY for the bargain price of $45. Who knew any motels were that cheap any more? Although it looked like it had slipped through a time vortex from 1978, it was nice and clean and the bed and pillows worked just like regular beds and pillows, so we slept fine. We finished our drive home today, chatting a bit in the van about how exciting this must be for Alex. I’m sure he’ll do great at BYU, and I’m excited to hear about his next adventures.

For the past couple of months I’ve been wearing some spandex pants when I play ultimate. For indoor league, they’re great because they save my knees from the little turf sand/pebbles when I dive, and for outdoor games they keep my legs toasty warm when it’s 30 degrees. They’re awesome.

Bonus: they’re hot yellow and have little racing stripes on the back. I don’t think the stripes make me any faster, but I can only hope my opponents see them and think I’m fast.

The problem? What to call them. They’re tights or leggings, but both terms are very… umm… feminine. Only girls wear tights and leggings, right? I came up with “meggings”, which are “men’s leggings”. Laralee suggested “mights” (men’s tights) but I don’t think it has quite the same panache. So I’m going with meggings.

Once the term catches on, remember you heard it here first.

Zaque’s hair has been growing more “unkempt” over the past few weeks, and now that school is starting, La and I felt like it was time to trim the mane.

This was what he looked like this morning:

From his expression, one might think we dragged him out of bed at 6am or something. Nope, it was 11am.

Anyway, La went to work with the trimmer, and he looked much better afterward:

Interesting side note: in the morning he was wearing his Tacocat shirt, and this evening it was Tacosaurus…

Also in the old college files, I found that– for reasons I still don’t comprehend– I’d kept all of the rejection letters I’d received over those years. As a freshman, starry-eyed with ambition and planning a career in nuclear engineering, I remember applying for internships at all the cool physics labs around the country.

Jet Propulsion Lab, of course:

And then again a year later. By then I’d changed from nuclear to aerospace engineering, which one might argue is more apropos for JPL, but alas:

Argonne National Lab would’ve been amazing:

Oddly enough, a few years later I presented an undergraduate research paper at Argonne.

I think I also wrote to all of the NASA facilities:

There were at least twenty more rejection letters from aerospace companies, national labs, and on and on. I still remember the feeling of receiving a letter in the mail, with a return address of one of these places I thought were so awesome, only to open the envelope and see another form rejection letter. After two years I stopped applying for internships altogether and spent the next two summers working on research projects which later brought me to Argonne and even an international physics conference in Toronto. Hah!

Perhaps the most interesting series of rejection letters was from the Department of Residential Life. During my sophomore year I applied to be a resident assistant. After going through the interview process, I received the sad news that I’d been declined:

I was heartbroken, because I’d been working in hall government (with the Department) for two years and had quickly risen through the ranks to become the vice-president and then president of my entire residence hall of 1,200 students. I figured I had a pretty good shot. A couple of my friends did as well, and it made it even harder to learn that they’d been accepted as RA’s when I hadn’t.

Then, a few weeks later, hope was born anew when I received a letter informing me the Department had re-opened one of the RA positions:

Maybe this would work out after all!

But, no. Ten days later they turned me down a second time. Rude.

Amongst these papers, I found the assessment I’d received as part of the interview process. It was kind of funny to see that my communication skills were rated very highly, but my people skills weren’t all that great, and my leadership skills were absolutely horrendous.

Apparently I wasn’t much of a leader.

In an awesome turn of events, a few weeks after receiving these rejection notices, I learned that another RA position had opened, and they’d decided to give it to me. Hooray! I went on to a glorious career in Residential Life, serving as an RA, summer RA, senior RA, summer RA (a second time), and finally Head RA. Take that, interview process!

As I continued the “slash and burn” of my old papers and files from our crawlspace (well, technically, I’ll be recycling it, not burning it), I found all of my old class files. I’d literally kept about sixty manila folders with my homework, tests, and papers from all of my college classes. In true OCD fashion, each folder was neatly labeled with the course name and number.

Of course it was a time-honored tradition to share “files” like this with other students who came after you. If, for example, my friend was taking Calculus III, she might ask me if I’d had the same professor a semester or two before and, if so, whether she could borrow my files for the semester. It would help her with double-checking homework, preparing for tests, and so forth. The fraternities were famous for this, and I remember seeing dozens of full-size filing cabinets filled with hundreds of thousands of pages of old homework assignments for this purpose. Of course the professors knew it happened, and would tweaks exams now and then to make sure their students weren’t just memorizing the files.

Anyway, it was fun to go through them and stare in awe at the cryptic scribbles, thinking “Wow, I used to know this stuff!” Today, of course, they’re just cryptic scribbles. But there was a time, some 25ish years ago, when I completely understood things like…

Linear algebra:

Particle motion equations:

(This was from the introductory physics course.)

Three-dimensional calculus:

(Actually, I loved this stuff! Yay, triple integrals!)

Circuit analysis:

Electromagnetic theory:

Solid-state physics and crystalline structure:

Statics:

(I don’t even remember what “statics” means, but I do remember it being the “weed-out” class for the mechanical engineering majors.)

Oh yeah, and quantum mechanics:

(This stuff kicked my 21-year-old butt and I remember it was the only “C” grade I received in college. Quantum mechanics is awesome, but wavefunctions make my head hurt.)

And who could forget the FORTRAN class I took as a freshman, where we’d write programs on a VAX mainframe, print them out on continuous-feed green paper, and hand them in to the professor.

(The crazy irony is that despite how useless I perceived FORTRAN to be, I spent my first year out of college programming in it.)

I also found things like study cards for tests, where I’d cram everything I knew onto a 3×5″ index card:

(I think this is for stellar astrophysics.)

Of course not everything was math, physics, or computers. I actually took literature and history and foreign-language and government classes. One of the professors on campus was a world-renowned expert on Shakespeare, and he was an awesome guy, so I took his Shakespeare course. During the semester we studied all of the Bard’s “major” works, but honestly I only read Hamlet. We were supposed to write three papers– they made up our entire grade– and somehow I managed to talk him into allowing me to write a single three-part paper on that one play. Behold:

And all of this is just a smattering of the stuff I had. Thousands upon thousands of pages of it. It boggles the mind that not only did I once have all this knowledge crammed into my skull, but that would I keep it tucked away in my crawlspace 25 years later.