January 10, 2015 in Family | Permalink | Comments (1)
We are officially running the equivalent of a frat house here out on Harris Lake Road. The only difference is that the cans that litter the house the next morning are Coke (which in Texas means Dr Pepper and Sprite as well) instead of beer, and I'm more likely to catch them with an iPad in their bed than a coed.
Yesterday was C & P's last day at Trinity, and Grayson's been finished with Loyola for a few days now, so they are in full summer mode already - sleep past noon, no clothes past pajamas, no showers, food trash and toys all over the place, and good luck getting their attention unless you're a video game. Well, except for blowing stuff up - Grayson's always up for that. They are so lazy I can't get them to make the 12 minute trip out to the lake where they could do, well, summer kinds of things. On the bright side, mornings are quiet, with Sleeping Bear up in my bedroom and the herd down the hall. Well, except for snoring, that is.
It's going to be a long summer.
May 31, 2014 in Family | Permalink | Comments (0)
We have been working recently to have movie nights more often, where we drive the boys up to the movie room and watch something together. Until recently we could only watch discs up there, but after eight years we finally fixed the Ethernet to the room and it now has a Blu-Ray player that can get online so we can watch Netflix and Amazon video demand.
The first one recently was Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters. Grayson has read the books (at least some of them) and the Greek mythology angle is something they have some experience with from their Mediterranean trip. We enjoyed the movie together - a good story, and fun to wacth. Looking forward to the next installment.
The second recently was Pacific Rim. We enjoyed it as a spectacle (it out-Godzilla's Godzilla) but it was a pretty poor movie otherwise. And I saw the ending in The Avengers. Still, a good family movie.
January 25, 2014 in Family, Movies/TV | Permalink | Comments (0)
Jamie and I just got back from our short vacation starting in Istanbul and ending up in Athens. We got to see a lot of small places including a few we had not been to before (like Troy, Hydra, and Paros) and enjoyed our stays in Istanbul and Athens pre and post.
Our ship was pretty small - at one port the brand-new Royal Princess pulled up alongside and we lost our ship!
July 13, 2013 in Family | Permalink | Comments (0)
Made Grandaddy's pancakes for the boys yesterday morning to celebrate end of my latest trial. Since June 20 I've had two patent trials to a verdict and three other patent cases go through the final pretrial conference before ending, and the last trial has been a solid two weeks away from home till late at night.
So it's good to be back.
October 14, 2012 in Family | Permalink | Comments (0)
Before he left for Fern, Grayson had finished plating the hull of his battlecruiser - all the way down the port side and almost all the way on the starboard side. Spent nearly a full day adding each piece, and what I particularly liked was that as he went on he used smaller and smaller strips, which do a better job following the hull countours, and will be easier to putty and sand. You could see him learning as he worked his way along.
August 09, 2012 in Family | Permalink | Comments (0)
Our last three vacations have been with the boys so Jamie and I decided to shoehorn in a vacation for just the two of us between my seminars and trials last month. Jamie came up with a river cruise on the Uniworld River Queen starting in Budapest and ending in Amsterdam (the European Jewels cruise), and giving us an introduction to Central Europe (Hungarians are very serious about not calling it Eastern Europe). We loved the ship - good accommodations, great food, and the staff as as good as I think we have ever seen. We took 823 pictures on three cameras (counting cell phones) so it has taken a while to get all this downloaded and organized.
We started in Budapest, which I've wanted to see ever since I studied at Cistercian Preparatory School in Irving back in 5th grade, where I was taught by Hungarian monks who left the country after the 1956 Communist takeover. Many, including my form master Father Mark Imre Major had been teachers or students at the university in Budapest, so it was something I'd always looked forward to seeing.
We only got a day in Budapest during which we had a bus tour, we walked to the market (and bought paprika) and toured the Buda-side buildings. Then it was off up the Danube to
Vienna, where we again toured the city, including St. Stephen's Cathedral, which lit up like a crayon box due to the solid-color stained glass windows, and the Vienna National Library.
While in Vienna we also saw a
concert and enjoyed our first wienerschnitzel
, and decided this was a place we really needed to come back and spend some time at. Jamie says that this is all she sees on our trips - me with my head
in a book or my backside
because I'm always walking so fast, so I have memorialized that here.
Because the ship had some engine trouble we actually had to get off for day trips at unscheduled stops, so for Vienna we unexpectedly had to get off in Bratislav, the capital of Slovakia, which thrilled many passengers because it meant they got an extra country out of the trip.
After Vienna we enjoyed the Austrian Wachau Valley countryside from the river, then stopped at the famous monastery at Melk, where we enjoyed the museum, the large marble hall and especially the library. Or maybe that was just me. Jamie helped out a tour group guide at the monastery.
After Melk we hit Passau, and then four "-berg" cities in a row, Regensberg, Nuremberg, Bamberg, and Wurzburg (okay it's a "burg" not a "berg").
Regensberg was one of our favorites because it has the best bratwurst, sauerkraut and beer there
at a thousand year old brat house
, but we also enjoyed the bridge and the city tour - and we got to see the pope's house from the road. (Benedict is from there and still has a little house outside town - doubt he'll get to retire to it).
During this stage of the cruise,
the ship had to retract its pilot house and lower its mast and stack to make it under the bridges, and we went through most of the 160-odd locks
that ships going from the Black Sea to the North Sea have to navigate. Interestingly, once you start dropping, you often go out under the downstream wall - which felt a little like leaving a bathtub through the drain. We also passed the European continental divide, which is marked by a couple of concrete wedges, which I thought was pretty neat.
Nuremberg was a beautiful city, and while we didn't do the World War II sites tour, you still see the Nazi parade grounds and one interesting site I'd never heard of - an enlarged but only partially complete version of the Roman Colosseum that Hitler built on the edge of a lake.
Our guide showed up pictures of what the exterior and
interior would have looked like
.
Again, we did tours of the sites, had the local bratwurst
, sauerkraut and beer, and picked up the requisite Christmas ornaments.
We particularly enjoyed Wurzburg, not just because the Prince-Bishop's palace was really beautiful (I had to buy three books to do it justice), but
because after that we went into the palace cellars
for a candlelit wine tasting, which I highly recommend.
After that we did Wertheim, Heidelberg, including the beautiful ruins of Heidelberg castle, and
Rudesheim.
By this point, I can't keep any of them straight
.
Next was a quick cruise down the Rhine, a day in Cologne, and then the next morning we pulled into Amsterdam at something like 2 am and had to be off the ship at 4:30 am for a flight at 7 am to Frankfurt, then to Dallas. The it was a leisurely drive back to Marshall to unpack - and go straight into a pretrial conference the next morning.
But we had a great time, and really enjoyed the ship and staff and destinations.
July 04, 2012 in Family | Permalink | Comments (1)
Grayson has been on a tear lately wanting to build a R/C boat with massive internal compartmentalization. He initially thought about building the battleship Texas after seeing so much about the Arizona on our Hawaii trip. He wanted a ship with four turrets that also had torpedoes, and ran across that the British battlecruiser HMS Hood had both (as built Hood had torpedo tubes both above and below the waterline).
As luck would have it, I have four books on the Hood, including two sets of plans, and built a couple (including the old motorized Lindberg kit) when I was growing up, so I congratulated him on selected the most beautiful warship ever made, and we started planning building a model out of balsa. We picked 1/350 scale, which is half the size of the R/C combat ships, but big enough that we could get some experience building plank on frame construction.
I forced him - uh, I mean he decided - to start by laying out the frame locations on a pine board and then laying down a keel and a facsimile of the original ship's double bottom, thus approximating the first stages of the real ship's construction, as shown on the right.
Hilariously, it turned out I can't do the math to consistently accurately translate 1/200 1/400 scale drawings to 1/350, so it took a couple of tries before we got the all plans to the correct scale, but today we got the entire hull framed, using the 23 frames in the Polish reference book that was the simplest to copy from. The bottom and all framing was 1/8" inch balsa - we'll use 1/16" for the hull plating. I was particularly please with the compartments, we have a large central one in case we decide to add motors and batteries, and the forward and aft turrets have their own separate comparments, which I hope will make adding scratchbuilt barbettes easier.
W
May 20, 2012 in Family | Permalink | Comments (1)