Roblog

This weekend marked our 9th annual "cookie party" - a weekend in which we make as many cookies as possible. In the past, we'd invite people over to help, but this year we needed a weekend to ourselves, albeit a hectic weekend.

Thanks to Donna's skillful planning and stamina, we broke a record making 1181 cookies this weekend! We tried a few new recipes this time: Peppermint Ribbons (minus the white chocolate) and Butterscotch Pennies (an egg-free recipe for my niece who is allergic to eggs). The other cookies we had made before: Mounds Bar Cookies (my favorite), Snickerdoodles, Molasses Crinkles, Chocolate-dipped Orange Melts, Sugar cookies, and Spritz cookies.

The girls, being almost 7 now, are able to help with many steps instead of just "help". Mostly, they were good with decorating the cookies, but they also helped mix the ingredients at times. Since there were frequently hot pans of cookies going in and out of the oven, we didn't ask them to help during the actual baking process much.

It snowed yesterday evening in Houston. It was the second time I've ever seen it snow in Houston, and this is my 17th winter in Houston. I called my wife from my car phone (I don't have a cell phone, just the free one-year OnStar service in my Saturn) to let her know as soon as I saw flakes drifting across my windshield. It wasn't much, but was was still pretty neat!

Needless to say, my daughters were very excited. Although the accumulation (dusting) was limited to the valleys of the roof of the house and a few pieces of patio equipment, it was still great fun for them to cavort outside in the lightly falling snow. [In my native Delaware, we have many words for snow. We would have called this kind of snow "flurries".]

Someone at work told me that day that snow was predicted for Houston that evening. Since I'm used to the "winter" weather forecasts down here to be a little alarmist, I pshawed him without thinking much about it. Not two hours later, I was driving through some falling snow. I will try to keep from pshawing prematurely in the future.

I've been wondering for a while if the beach we visit in the summers, Bryan beach, survived hurricane Ike. I was never able to find anything specific about that particular stretch of beach. My curiosity got the better of me this weekend, so I loaded the girls in the car to drive down there, risking the possibility that there woudl not be a beach to go to.

As it turns out, the beach is as good, if not better, than it was this summer. The beach appeared quite a bit larger than it was before. The only noticeable effects 2 months after the hurricane was that the line of sand dunes behind the beach are now gone. I don't know what impact that will have on the beach long-term, but I suspect there'll be an effort to reestablish the dunes before the next storm hits.

So we had a fun hour at the beach on Sunday. It was breezy and sunny - perfect for playing in the sand. The water wasn't even that cold; it was too cold to swim but not too cold to wade. This was the first time at this beach we encountered lots of little clams (the absolute largest were the size of a dime) just under the surface of the sand. We couldn't help but dig a few up with every scoop of sand. They usually would rest for a minute, then tilt up and burrow back under the sand. We had quite a bit of fun with them.

I've always wanted to be able to do 3D modeling, but the professional tools are too expensive. There is an impressive open-source (free) tool available, Blender, but its learning curve is rather steep. But I've never lost interest, so when my wife and I started talking about remodeling our office, I finally had the spark that allowed me to actually learn and use Blender.

I relied heavily on the plethora of video tutorials available for Blender, and have read through many documentation sites about Blender. There is no way I could have ever figured anything out in Blender without those resources.

But after about a month of using it, I now feel like I'm competent with creating objects and scenes in Blender. I am still no good at animation or lighting, and only barely passable with materials, but I'm really pleased with my first finished product with Blender: a three-dimensional representation of our office (without all the piles of clutter that currently overwhelm the room). I can now reposition furniture, add new furniture, or remove walls, and see what that makes the office look like from any place in the room.

This desktop-picture-sized view of our office includes all the current furniture but has the closet removed.

I have to record the events around Hurricane Ike in my blog, even though everyone I know who would want to know how my family fared has gotten phone or email updates from me.

But, for the record, Hurricane Ike struck the Houston/Galveston area the night of Friday, September 12 into Saturday, September 13. The downtown Houston office I work at was closed down at noon on Thursday, September 11. My daughters' last day of school before the storm was that Thursday, too.

Continue reading "My Hurricane Ike Story" »

I've neglected my blog for a long time. Mostly, it was because my gargantuan entry chronicling my experience with Hurricane Ike was in a continually unfinished state, and it has served as an effective stopper to any other blog posts I might have otherwise done. And now I'm at a point where I don't remember all my detailed hurricane Ike experiences!

So I'm going to post my first half of my hurricane experience, which will be followed someday by the second half. In the mean time, I will feel free to blog about other topics that I, and I alone, care to post.

I've been told that one way that you can identify a personal strength are those tasks that seem fun and effortless for you, but others find difficult or laborious. I've discovered one of my strengths that way at my current project: visualizing concepts, diagrams, or process flows in a presentation or handout.

I've done a lot of process design and communication in my current project, which includes developing the materials for that. Rather quicly, I became the person putting together the presentations. At first, it was just because I knew the material and had the time, but over time I started getting ad-hoc requests to translate someone's scribbles into a coherent, pleasant, and understandable display. I enjoy doing that, so I've never complained.

So now I'm known as the expert for diagrams and regularly get such requests from my team. Yesterday, in fact, my manager came to me with some scribbles, which I converted into some diagrams in Powerpoint a few hours later. That afternoon, he mentioned multiple times how great they were, and how when he showed it to his peers and his manager they appreciated the graphics and thought it really made the concept clear. Personally, I thought this was a little over-the-top for just a couple of Powerpoint slides - it was easy. But I had to remind myself that this is not false praise from him, but a genuine appreciation of something that he finds difficult or impossible to do.

I'm finding it hard to translate "Powerpoint artist" into a substantial item on my internal Accenture resume, but it has lead me to think that perhaps I should seek future roles that allow me to continue to utilize this strength of mine.

A group at work (what Accenture calls a "community," which is a group of geographically related, if not project-related, employees) was planning a meeting with a "games" portion at the end. There were going to be 3 Wiis (Bowling, Boxing, and Trivia), Bingo (I'm still puzzled why this game was selected), and Pictionary. Excellent! Pictionary is my game.

Continue reading "Anally-Retentive Rob Gets His Way" »

I stumbled upon instructions on how to create a water sprinkler toy last week, and they made it sound easy enough for even me. I am not a "handy man" by any stretch of the imagination, so I was excited by the prosepct of making something myself.

So on Saturday, I took the girls to Home Depot to get the materials. It took me a long time because I am not familiar with any of the materials (OK - I know what PVC pipe is, but that's about it). It took me an especially long time to fing the "misters" that would provide the pleasant spray. I ultimately had to settle for nozzles that didn't say "misting" on the label, but they turned out to be a fairly good facsimile. The other shopping challenge I had was my purchase of a "hole punch" that would make the neat little holes that I could fit the nozzles into. Only after I destroyed the tool by whacking it with a hammer against the PVC pipe did I realize it was designed to make holes in a garden hose instead. I used a drill to make the holes.

Even despite my novice handyman status, this project was fairly easy and fun. I did have difficulty making the right size holes in the PVC pipe, since I was determined to fit the 5/32" nozzle ends into a 5/32" drill hole but the threading on the nozzles were wider and never bit into the pipe, no matter how hard I pressed and turned. Once I made the hole 3/16" wide, it worked fine. There is also one nozzle that doesn't spray. Since that's just 1 nozzle out of 10, I haven't diagnosed it yet. I'm sure there's just some obstruction in the nozzle that I can clear once I take it out and examine it.

So now I have this very homemade-looking water arch that looks identical to the one shown on the Instructables site. It's light and easy to setup (although it's a little bulky), and the girls like playing in it. Frankly, I enjoyed walking through it during my brief breaks from cutting the grass last evening. Refreshing!

Building it made me remember how much I enjoy water features. Before the girls were born, I had ideas to make a water fountain in the backyard. Flush with my recent minor success building water a feature, I'm thinking about that again. But even do-it-yourself fountains get a little pricey ($100 is probably as cheap as I could do it), so I doubt I'll start that until our bathroom remodeling is paid off.

If it wasn't already clear from my previous post, I have uploaded some select pictures from my Kelleys Island trip and my visit to West Grove.