morrowlife

Here’s the ballroom in the conservatory at Longwood Gardens.  Just a humble little place to meet in a modest little 4-acre indoor garden.  That DuPont guy knew how to live.  Also, he could afford it.  Note the image on the projector – we were there during the Orchid Festival (or whatever they called it) and they were all over the place.  Beautiful.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken during our springtime visit to Longwood Gardens, and part of my famous Machinery series.

I’m sure there’s some machinery in there somewhere.  The slide projector?  The chandeliers? Something else?  Maybe I need to come up with a new famous series or two.

More about Longwood below.

Lots going on.  The Las Vegas house project is moving forward!  LRN4 has been very busy picking options, we’ve been signing all kinds of stuff, and we’re about to send a pretty big check for the options that won’t be included in the mortgage.  Plus, they’ve done their digging in the dirt.  That wasn’t nearly as extensive as when we had our house in Virginia built, which actually included a basement.  In this case, they’ve kind of scraped it a little and put up concrete forms for the foundation.  Oh, well.  It’s still exciting!

I only wish I could be there to see it happening.  Or at least convince somebody to take some pictures for me.  I’m the boss.  Need the info.

The pace at work continues to pick up.  I’m pretty much running from morning until afternoon.  It’s fairly satisfying, but I think I could be satisfied with just a little less work.  Have to look into that.

LRN3 and LRN15 came to visit us this past weekend.  We had a very nice visit.  LRN3 is looking and sounding great!  So is LRN15, of course, but then she was always that way.

Had a pleasant birthday and Father’s Day.  We didn’t do much of anything either day, but that was how I wanted it.  Plus, we went to Longwood Gardens the day after my birthday for the exclusive evening show.  They were open until 11:00 and had some pretty cool indoor and outdoor lighting displays.  We saw almost everything and really enjoyed it.  It was a hot, muggy day, though and we were pretty sick of walking around by about 9:30, so we went home.  We hope to go back again sometime soon, though.  Great Art of the event coming Real Soon Now.

For LRN4’s birthday, I ordered her a new [amazon asin=0528006223&text=road atlas].  I ordered the 2012 edition, which never seemed to come, so I finally got curious and discovered that the 2013 version is already out.  I switched the order and it arrived yesterday.  She loves it!  Her old atlas was from about 1980.  A few roads have changed since then, so it was time.  Yes, I know road atlases are somewhat obsolete in this newfangled age of the GPS.  She likes having it anyway.  Not that she doesn’t trust our GPS receivers.  But she doesn’t.  Not really.

Tomorrow night – free tickets to a Phillies game.  The company is giving them away to employees, along with a very nice tailgate party.  We’re looking forward to it.  It’s supposed to be 97 degrees and humid tomorrow, but we’re looking forward to it anyway.

And it’s way past my bedtime (seems like it’s always way past my bedtime, doesn’t it?), so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: basil attack during meat flap!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the other end of the train tracks I’ve shown in the last few posts.  This is the side where the ferries arrive from Ellis Island.  I believe the same thing used to happen in the old days, with perhaps fewer tourism-oriented passengers.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken during our recent visit to New York, and part of my famous Machinery series.

I realize a building may not qualify as Machinery in some people’s view.  I urge those people to inspect the large clock prominently placed on that building.  It still tells the correct time and is machinery, without a doubt.  Not to mention those fancy-looking lights.  Plus, there’s a hint of leftover ferry-landing equipment there in the foreground.  So I stand by my statement.

Well, it’s happiest-day-of-the-year eve.  Tomorrow’s my off Friday, so I’ll have the whole day available for fun and frolic.  Ought to be nice.

LRN4 spent about a week and a half in Virginia recently, visiting LRN1 and LRN15 during a few difficult days for them.  She enjoyed her visit and is glad to report that things are going well down there.  It’s also nice to have her back home.

Work continues as normal.  I’m working harder than I want to and mainly enjoying it.  I’m enjoying the people very much indeed.  In some ways, I’ll be sad to leave here when that time comes.  In other ways, I’ll be delighted to be moving forward with my life.

Speaking of moving forward, dirt has been scraped on our behalf in Las Vegas!  Apparently, concrete forms have also been placed for the new house’s foundation.  We’re supposed to get pictures over the weekend, which I might even share here.  Exciting!  We’ll soon be three-home people.  Think of all the homeowner’s insurance!

Otherwise, not so much new since we last spoke.  So I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: fruit-related traffic jam!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s where the Queen of the Valley stops.  Good old Track 5.  Based on the appearance of the platform back there, though, I suspect the train is running a bit late.  Great Art taken at the Ellis Island railroad/ferry terminal and part of my famous Train and Machinery series.  Sort of, anyway.

Had a nice weekend.  Didn’t do all that much – we went to the Bristol Amish Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning.  Had a nice time.  It’s much roomier than its equivalent in Newtown, but not really all that much different otherwise.  Fun trip!

And we also did . . . umm . . . not that much.  It was great!  I’m feeling rested.

I did, however, get some pretty big stuff done this weekend.  I finished revision 1.1 of the Brewing Co. app!  Got it submitted to Apple this evening.  It ought to be available for download within a few days!

Next project: finishing the Android version.  LRN1 got it off to an amazing start.  I just have a little bit more to do.  And I’ll do it!  I’m studying up as we speak.

Actually, I’m really watching Catch Me if You Can.  We’re only a few minutes into it, but it’s pretty entertaining so far.  Not necessarily happy, but entertaining.  So I’m going to get back to it.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: rampaging kangaroo!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s some happy, peppy zoo attendees, featuring LRN4, some non-Loyal-Reader grand-nieces, and an extremely rare appearance by LRN16.  That’s LRN4 there in the foreground, pushing the stroller.  Great Art courtesy of my old exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Vacation and Machinery series.

A [amazon asin=B002WB2G9I&text=stroller] is machinery, isn’t it?

Extreme Short Shrift.  It’s way past my bedtime and I have a lot of boring meetings to attend tomorrow.  Need my sleep.

Worked on the Brewing Co. app again.  I finally figured out how to the Contact page.  LRN1 and I had figured out this extremely complex way to do it, which was sort of working, but it finally occurred to me to look at how I had done it in my old Morse code apps, and I got the behavior I wanted with a simple UIWebView.  Duh.  It’s easy to implement, very controllable with CSS, easy to change, and it looks very nice.

In the meantime, LRN1 made amazing progress on the Calendar tab for the Android app.  It’ll be done before you know it.  Also, [amazon asin=0553386603&text=we’ll be rich] before you know it.

Otherwise, worked, ate, and slept.  Oh, I also went to Young Men this evening and we had the missionaries over for dinner.  Otherwise an uneventful day.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: renegade math freak!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN4 in a slightly very dark picture of our Oahu-based scooters, posing beautifully in a beautiful location overlooking the beautiful Pacific Ocean.  It really is pretty in Hawaii.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive (and new that day) iPhone-cam and part of my Machinery and Vacation series.

Not much new to report.  We all got disgusted with our hosting service, so LRN1 finally called them (impersonating me – I wonder if there’s a reward for turning someone in for that) and asked what’s going on.  They told him we’re sharing a server with a busy website, so it’s slow for us.  The didn’t offer to move either us or the offending individual to a different server, but they did offer their new cloud-based service.  I have no idea whether they even know what the “cloud” is, but we signed up for it anyway.  The price is the same and they promise to scale up as we (and all their other clients, presumably) need more bandwidth, so it’s supposed to go from very slow to very fast.  It appears to be faster already, although GoDaddy’s account manager tells me the change is still pending.  Maybe that just means they’ve move some stuff over already but not other things.  In any case, it’s supposed to be totally transparent to me, so I have high hopes.  Not necessarily borne out by experience, but there you go.

Let’s see, what else is going on?  We’re making good progress with the app for our non-Loyal-Reader (ahem) friend Cliff.  LRN1 has had way more time than I have to work on it, so he has written a bunch more code than I have.  I haven’t been exactly sitting on my hands, though.  I have the Music Samples and Slide Show pages up and running, although they both need quite a bit more polish.  But they’re functional!  I expect we’ll have the app done within a week or so.  Then LRN1 is going to try his hand a porting it to Android.  Good luck with that, LRN1!

Speaking of LRN1, he was just informed today that he has a full-tuition scholarship for the Spring and Summer terms at BYU.  That’s in addition to his existing full-tuition scholarship that kicks back in for the Fall semester.  Congrats, LRN1!

Time for some shameless commerce.  LRN4 is thinking of buying an [amazon asin=B003NRWJR4&text=Android tablet] pretty soon.  She thinks she’d enjoying having one, and it would be very useful for us to test our Android apps, since we have no other Android devices in the house.  LRN3 has one, as does LRN5.  That’ll be very helpful too, but not as easy as having one right here.  So she might buy the one at the link.  What do you think?  If any of my Loyal Readers buy it (or anything else at Amazon after clicking on it), I’ll get a little kickback!  Buy, buy, buy, Loyal Readers!

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this combination shocking food violence news and exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity:  gorilla-attacking banana!

See you tomorrow.