Hello lovely people! I was hoping to write last week, but I was traveling back from a test trip, and that just makes for a rather busy day, so I didn't quite get to writing the blog. But that's okay, I've got two weeks of news now! We'll kick things off with yesterday, at the Love 'em or Leave 'em valentines day race! I think it's been 2 years since I've run in the town's races, and it was SO great to be back! Monica and the kids all played on the playground while I was out racing, but came over to cheer me on to the finish line! I think everyone had a great time. After Monica was telling me she loved being there because it's so fun to see all the positivity everyone has for each other. Hopefully she'll be able to come out and run again soon! I managed to get 2nd in my age group, and 6th overall in the race. To be honest, from my training recently, I had no right to be running as fast as I was, so I'm really happy with how I did, and I'm REALLY feeling it today!
Rolling back two weeks, the kids wanted their play tent out, so it came out for a few days. At nights we'd stick it up on the couch so we could run Dobby to vacuum the floors, and in the morning the girls would just sit in it on the couch and hang out!
On Tuesdays Monica volunteers in Brooke's class, and Grayson needed a nap. So I put him down and then kept an eye on him with the video monitor. It's really nice to have, or else I wouldn't have been able to work until he was asleep. Anyway, he's usually good about not coming out of his room, and while sometimes he'll open his door, he usually never leaves the doorway. On this occasion, he went just outside of his door and laid down. I slid my phone around the corner to get a video in hopes he wouldn't notice right away. He did finally see my phone, and I wish I hadn't stopped the video right away because he got up and ran straight back into his room!
I reminded him it was nap time and closed his door again, but he poked back out. Eventually he fell asleep, and this is how I found him once he was asleep. His monitor can see out the door, so I knew where he was and what was going on the whole time.
Thursday afternoon I left for San Bernardino. Not a terrible place to head this time of year. It was in the 60's and 70's and felt rather nice there. Of course I was there for work. We went to the proton facility at Loma Linda University Hospital. The trick with protons is that they make everything radioactive, and then it scatters in all directions, so we ran a cable up to our part, and tried to shield all our equipment so it wouldn't break. That's a very special kind of plastic, and we had it 4 to 6 inches deep all around our test equipment. We believe we still took one or two radiation events to our control board, but it definitely helped a lot.
Before the trip one of my coworkers mentioned that right by the facility was the worlds largest paper cup. I went online to look up where and found myself on roadsideamerica.com. Turns out that paper cup isn't San Bernardino's only claim to fame, they also have the original McDonalds location, which is now a museum. Here I am on the outside.
Inside was a LOT of happy meal toy displays. They had some other memorabilia as well, but a lot of the space was happy meal toys, which makes sense. I took a picture of the 90's toys as I can actually remember getting a bunch of these as a kid. It was really fun to walk through.
Afterwards I headed to the worlds largest paper cup. Ah yes, I also had a choice between rental cars when we arrived, and it was either a Camry, or a Mustang. I had quite a bit of fun driving around! Also, it makes the paper cup much more interesting.
There was also a basketball hoop at the hotel, so I checked out a basketball and played for about an hour after getting back from my sight seeing. Oh yeah, bit of background. We went to the facility around 3:30 on Friday to set up and then run our test, and finished about 6 in the morning. I stayed up for breakfast at the hotel at 7, and then slept until 11 or 12. I don't mind only getting 4 hours of sleep on a day like Saturday as it helped me switch back to not staying up till 6 in the morning. So from noon on I had Saturday to myself.
Sunday morning it was time to head to the airport and come back home. I had to hop up on the hood and get a picture to match the one from when I got the Charger two-ish years ago.
At work they had this little guy on display. This is the box I helped with on my one and only flight program I worked at SEAKR. This box was on the Artemis I mission that just went around the moon. Yes, my hardware that I designed was put onto a rocket, flew around the moon, crashed back into the ocean, was removed from the capsule and sent back to SEAKR! It was nice to see it again! We had two boxes on the first flight, and one was returned to do some tests on to make sure the other one will survive it's second flight. It's cool to know the stuff I work on goes to space, but I think it's a pretty rare opportunity to actually get to see your work again after it's done it's mission in space!
I was trying to put the laundry away this past week, and Jelly just had to help out. She kept climbing into the drawers that I'd open to put clothes in. This one I particularly appreciated, since she laid down and was trying to climb out the back of the drawer.
This past week both of the girls had their 100th day of school. Since the preschoolers don't have to wear uniforms, they dress up like old people for school that day. Here's Winry ready to go to school!
And here's Winry with her teacher. Great news, when Monica went to pick her up they told her that all day long when they went anywhere they always had to wait for Winry because she was hobbling along so slowly!
Somewhere in the past week we came into possession of these glasses. They worked their way home from school, I believe with Winry. Anyway, all the kids took a turn wearing them, and they were pretty great!
And now we're back to the race. The town took some pictures, but they aren't all on facebook yet. So hopefully tomorrow I'll get their picture of me running. I don't know that I even noticed them taking a picture at the starting line before we started running.
And here we are enjoying our pancake breakfast after. I really like the pancake breakfast. I mean, I'd do a race without one, but it's probably what keeps the kids going the whole time, knowing that once I finish we'll get pancakes and sausage!
When we got home from the race Monica took Winry to basketball. I asked Grayson if he'd take a nap, but he wasn't ready, so I gave him the tablet to watch the Hungry Caterpillar and earned myself six and a half minutes to shower. I made it out just in time.
After that Grayson really wanted to play outside, and it was a pretty warm day so we went out. Jelly was watching us from the door, so I got her harness and she came out too. She was out wandering the yard for about an hour before she headed back inside. I really like this picture because I like her paw print in the snow. You can see it in the full size picture, it's harder to see in this smaller inline picture though.
And Grayson had a great time with all the toys. We had to pull a bunch of balls up out of the ice and snow, and he spent quite a while swinging a basketball and soccer ball. Eventually we did head in, and Grayson went down for a nap.
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