Birthday cake


Here are LRN1, three other missionaries, and his landlady celebrating my birthday. How thoughtful of them.  That’s LRN1 over there in the background on the right.  I have no idea why those people over there on the left are hiding their faces.  Maybe my birthday is illegal in Guatemala and they want to avoid prosecution.  Can’t be because they’re ashamed to be a part of it.  And don’t even get me started on that guy flashing the gang sign there in the middle.  And what’s that electronic thing with the antenna over there on the right?  A CB radio?  A primitive Wifi router?  The mind boggles.  Part of my famous Guatemala series.

Okay, it wasn’t really for my birthday, but I can dream, can’t I?

Monotonous day today.  I worked on next year’s funding proposal.  Again.  And I’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow.  Again.  I’m not getting anything else done.  I do want to have funding next year, though, and I seem to be getting most of what I ask for.  So far.

LRN2 got his wisdom teeth removed today.  He’s doing remarkably well, but he is finding it difficult to eat much and he’s pretty sleepy.  He’s upstairs sleeping right now.  I hear tell he was quite happy and talkative when coming out of the sedation.  Which is better than angry and sullen, I suppose.  Like when I broke my leg as a teenager and made my dad hold my wallet so the doctor – a renowned bone specialist, respected church leader, and family friend – wouldn’t try to grab it.  Sorry about that, doc.  It was the morphine talking.

Anyway, I have high hopes that LRN2 will recover very quickly and be back to normal in just a few days.  We’ll see how that goes.

LRN3 is still trying to find out what’s up with his health, which has gotten pretty bad.  They’re making all kinds of dire diagnoses, but they keep changing them every week or two, so I guess he can just pick a dread disease and stick with that one.  We’re praying for you, LRN3!  Get it figured out!

No post on Friday.  It was my off day and seemed like the weekend.  No Loyal Readers appear to have been injured by my absence, though, so it’s all working out.

The weekend was fine.  I worked on next year’s proposal for a couple of hours on Friday, but at least I was at home.  Spent some more time on the Arduino project on Saturday, along with much of the morning outside working on the pool, yard, sprinklers, and pond.  LRN4 trimmed a bunch of plants back, which made a big difference.  I spent a lot of time sweeping the bit and pieces of the trimmings out of the pool.  Strangely, I enjoyed it.  Fixed a couple of broken sprinklers, including one that bit the dust while LRN2 was mowing.  That will happen from time to time.  The yard’s looking pretty good.  Needs some fertilizer and 24-D still.

Didn’t swim.  It was really hot, but it was also really windy and nobody ever felt like it.  Except me, but it wasn’t very comfortable, so I refrained.

The Arduino project is coming along.  I started building a prototype board for my SD card data logger.  It’s going very slowly – it’s hard to get the solder bridges built where I want them between pads and not where I don’t want them.  So I’m going slowly and making progress.  It’ll probably be at least another week before the board is done.  After which, I have some software changes planned to make it a truly generic data logger for any project.  I’ll produce an interface definition document and publish that, the source code, and a schematic on my Gardenville website and see if I can figure out how to get people interested in it.  I’m thinking of producing some custom boards and seeing if there’s any demand.

In other hobby-related news, I’m also working on refreshing my knowledge of C++ so I can do a bit of experimentation with a GUI framework called Qt (pronounced “cute” – how cute).  A couple of my subordinates at work want to start using it for some of our work and I decided it might be helpful if I learned a bit about it.  It’s supposed to allow you to write programs that will compile equally well on Linux, Windows, OS X, and a bunch of cellphone platforms.  We’ll see how that goes – there’s going to be a very steep learning curve, but I really want to have a programming project or two to work on.  There’s the Arduino project, but I want more, More, MORE!

Anyway.  It’s late and I want to get to bed early for once, so I’ll end with this shocking food violence news: botched food order fight!

See you tomorrow.

2 Responses to “Birthday cake”

  1. Shannon Says:

    I believe LRN#1 said the people were hiding their faces and laughing because he missed getting into all the pictures with a timer set on the camera except his own–but I like the birthday idea better. Much more creative and interesting.

    Maybe America needs to stop watching “reality TV” shows that display such behavior at fast food restaurants as a solution to problems!

  2. Anonymous Says:

    Missed your blog.

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