Triangle Problem - The Solution and More than You Ever Cared to Know

This is for those who worked on the puzzle that I posted two weeks ago.

OK, so you gave it a shot and finally figured it out. Good for you. Let's see, did you do it the same way that I did? When I tried to solve this problem, one thing that I did was draw a lot of lines on this triangle. I drew bisectors and perpendiculars and arcs and lots of other stuff and looked for a thousand relationships that would give me the answer. Finally, for reasons I can't remember, I constructed a equilateral triangle on one of the lines from the corner to the middle. Then I drew a line from the tip of the new equilateral triangle to the tip of the old equilateral triangle and formed some new triangles. It looked like this:



It was then that I noticed that angle α, cut out the same piece of the little equilateral triangle (aaa) as it did the big equilateral triangle (xxx). In both cases, it leaves the angle 60 - α. The magnitude isn't so important as the fact that they are the same. Now we go back to 10th grade geometry and remember that two triangles are congruent (identical) if they have the same side-angle-side (SAS) pattern. So we see that the external triangle (a,60-α,x) is the same as the internal triangle (a,60-α,x). And that means that the last line that I drew in the new construction is going to be the same length as "c". So now we're done. All we have to do now is fill in the math.

When I first did this, I didn't have the internet and I didn't know the "Law of Cosines". But I did know that if you have a triangle and you know all the sides, there must be a way to figure out the angles. By doing a bunch of construction, I spent a day coming up with the law on my own only to find out that any real math nerd knew it already and it was clearly laid out in my own CRC Handbook of Standard Math Tables. Anyhow, if you have a triangle with sides a, b and c, then the angle (γ) opposite c is given by:

So now the internal triangle axc can now be described. The angle opposite x in triangle abx is γ + 60 and by the law of cosines again:

And now we plug in for γ:

OK, the formula for the area of an equilateral triangle is:

And then swapping out the X squared we get finally:


So I haven't even bothered to calculate the answer with a, b and c equal to 200, 300 and 400 ft., respectively. But maybe I will someday.

I will mention that I have always been bothered by that arccos and cos stuff in the answer. You have to have a calculator or some tables to arrive at the answer and I never liked that. Recently, while I was drawing up these pictures, I came across another solution. Of course, it's related to the construction above. It uses Heron's formula. You might have seen it on the wikipedia page on triangles. Heron's formula gives the area of a scalene triangle with sides a, b and c and one form is:


OK, here goes. As you did in the first step, construct two more equilateral triangles using the b line and the c line. What you will end up with looks like this:



The greens are the constructed equilateral triangles and the pink are 3 identical abc triangles. Now you can calculate the total area of this hexagonal blob as being equal to the three different equilateral triangles and three times the area of the abc triangle. Now look at it a different way:



In this view, you see that in the process you have managed to reproduce all the internal triangles on the outside and therefore the area of the triangle xxx is half the area of the hexagonal blob. So the area of triangle xxx, which was the original question, can also be given as:


And that's enough of that. If you're wondering how I made the equations, go to CodeCogs and open up the LaTex Equation Editor

Triangle Problem - A Hint

OK, here's a hint to the triangle problem if you want one.

Triangle Problem

A number of years (about 31) ago, when I used to work at RTI in the Research Triangle Park, there was an organization called the Triangle Universities Computational Center. They used to put out a newsletter and, on the last page, they often had a nerdy little math problem. I'd often work through the problem because, well, I was a nerdy kind of guy.

One problem proved to be particularly difficult and, oddly enough, it was about triangles. Just for kicks, I'll give it to you.

Farmer Jones had a big field that had the shape of an equilateral triangle. When it came time to spread fertilizer, he needed to know how big his field was so that he would know how much to buy. Problem was, he didn't know the dimensions of his field. All he knew was that there was a natural spring inside the field and that it was 200, 300 and 400 ft from the corners of his field. So how big was Farmer Jones' field? Help him out so he won't waste money buying too much fertilizer.

Or, if you like, given an equilateral triangle with sides x, and internal distances a, b and c, what is the area of the triangle in terms of a, b and c?

I figured out the answer pretty quick using an iterative approach, where I assumed a value for x and calculated the internal angles, which have to add up to 360 degrees. You just vary x until the sum is 360. I even wrote a computer program to do the calculations for me. But I wasn't real happy with that. I wanted an analytical solution. It took me about two weeks of intensive work in the evening and on a couple of weekends before I came up with a pretty solution.

I've shown this problem to a lot of people and only one other person has figured it out. Maybe he was the only one to try. He was a guy I worked with who handled shipping and receiving but had formerly worked in surveying. Actually, one other person figured it out using the iterative approach. I told him that it wasn't a very elegant solution. He disagreed.

Anyhow, give it a try and let me know if you find a cool solution. I'll post an answer someday.

Snow

We haven't had much in the way of snow in about nine years. The last big snow was in 2000 and it was a doozy. At about 14 inches, it set an all time record. And we've been in a snow drought ever since. Well, its snowing right now and we've got about an inch and a half. That may be the most we've had since 2000. It's supposed to snow all morning, though it's not coming down real heavy.

I went out to take a walk this morning, but the driveway and roads were a bit slick so I decided against it. But I did move one of our cars down to the bottom of the neighborhood cul-de-sac so we could get out if we needed to. It was a bit of a struggle getting back up the hill.

I think we were all beginning to take this global warming stuff a bit more seriously. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Although global warming might be a problem, I worry a lot more about the nasty political and economic implications of our energy economy. Although no one seems to be mentioning it, I suspect that the freakish rise in gas prices this summer was instrumental in tossing us into this recession. But enough of that.

Here's an early morning picture of our house in the snow.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Greetings to all. Welcome to our genericized Christmas letter. We're hoping the end of 2008 finds you happy and healthy, if not wealthy. So, let's see what's happening in our Family. The real dilemma in this sort of letter is whether to relate the last year's events chronologically or by family member. We'll try a mixture.

Daughter is now a junior in high school. She's taking the standard college prep classes and continues to play the French horn in the school band and the orchestra. She's singing in the school Treble Ensemble and the youth choir at church, and also takes private singing lessons. She traveled to Boston with the Treble Ensemble last spring to do a little singing. We're starting to think about college a little but not too much. Daughter continues to like to draw, has discovered Facebook and is still fighting getting her driver's license. Go figure.

Son is a senior at Earlham College. After three years, he's decided that maybe he doesn't want to be an economist after all and has decided to double major in math and economics. I think he liked math better all along. He was thinking about graduate school but lately, he's been thinking about working for a while first. He continues to sing in the Concert Choir at Earlham. He also traded off his old girlfriend for a new one, so you can cut out the picture in last year's Christmas letter. This past summer, he worked for local property manager and in the process took over his dad's old Volvo S70, which he took back to college.

Wife continues to use the skill set she obtained in graduate school. She started the year sewing costumes for the church's youth choir spring musical. Then she helped do taxes for her sister-in-law's CPA firm. After April 15, it was back to sewing - this time it was costumes for a Professional Salsa Dance Troupe. Besides getting paid, she and hubby were given VIP treatment at the Salsa Dancing Extravaganza in Durham. In the meantime, she's on the PTA Board, has taken up knitting, vacation planning (see below), and is tutoring math to a Burmese high schooler whose family our church helped relocate from a refugee camp. She does all this and also tries to keep her husband in line. No small feat!

Husband is enjoying another bit of time off. In January we learned that there was a good chance that the small biotech (Serenex) where he worked, might be acquired. Sure enough, in April they were acquired by Pfizer. Pfizer took the intellectual property and dismissed the whole lot of them with some nice parting gifts. We used some of the funds to buy a new car to replace the one that Son took. That was a milestone in our lives since, for the first time in many years, our primary family car is not a minivan. Husband helped with the shutdown at Serenex and left work for good in September. He's enjoying the break but needs to go back to work before too long. He has a few nibbles in a pretty bad job market but nothing for sure yet. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir and will soon finish his term as a church elder.

To celebrate losing his job, the impending recession and 25 years of marital bliss, husband and wife took off to Europe for two weeks. Wife planned the trip which included BudaPest in Hungary, Vienna, Melk, Salzburg and Zel-am-see in Austria and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany. We had a great time and enjoyed a nice mix of history, art, architecture and nature. We also enjoyed our annual summer and Thanksgiving trips down to Sunset Beach.

Finally, as we close out another year, we thank God for Life, Health and the Joys of friends and family. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Merry New Year.


Husband, Wife, Son and Daughter

Daughter in her Prom Dress


























Sunset at Thanksgiving
















Hiking near Zell Am See with strangers from Isreal



















Our Inn in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

















Some Links:

Ladies in Wife's outfits

Pfizer buys Serenex

Deer Eating Shrubberies

This morning I was upstairs "working" on the computer when I noticed that my coffee cup was empty. So I ran downstairs to the kitchen to get a cup. And what do I see? Four deer directly behind the house, maybe ten feet away, happily munching down on my shrubberies. I ran upstairs and got the camera, took a few pictures, then went outside and shot at them with the BB gun as they were scurrying away. Here's a couple chewing up an azalea. The other two were even closer to the house dining on a camellia.

Something Not Seen in a While

My wife and I jumped in the car today and rode over to visit my sister in Raleigh at her work place. We bought my sister some chocolates in Garmish-Partenkirchen when we were in Europe a few weeks ago as a token of our appreciation for taking care of our daughter for a night while we were gone and it was past time to deliver them. As we left our house, I noticed that the gas was low. My wife said let's wait till Raleigh and see if their gas prices are better than Chapel Hill (ave. 2.0899/gal.). Soon after we got off I-540 and headed into Raleigh on Fall of the Neuse Road, we saw prices a bit lower and then we saw this place with gas for 1.9699/gal. We turned in and I filled up (and took a picture) while my wife went in and bought some chicken salad at Tookies.


After that we went by my sister's place of work and visited for a while. Then we left and went by Costco on the way home. And guess what. Costco had regular for 1.8599/gal. Crap!

Mormon Coke

A few weeks ago a case of cokes in the can showed up in the kitchen on the floor over in a corner. It just sat there. I looked at it and maybe noticed that it had a different color than normal cokes, but I mostly just ignored it. I guess I figured that my wife bought them for some school or church function.

After a number of weeks, the case was still there so I asked my wife where they were going. "Oh, I bought the wrong thing. I guess it's been too long to take it back," she said. So it looks like the case of cokes is ours. It was then that I actually looked at the case. They were regular cokes without the caffeine. "What's the point?" I wondered. Then it hit me. They're cokes for Mormons. So I call it "Mormon Coke." Given that they contain sugar and not an artificial sweetener means that I have to drink them and not my wife. I've been working on them slowly for a couple of weeks and they're about gone. They're not bad, about the same as regular, or should I say, Classic coke.


I wonder if the Mormons are aware of these things.

ps As it turns out, the Mormon view on coffee is not universally held to be about caffeine. Type "Mormon Coke" into Google and have a read (or just hit the link).

Uber Fans

My church is located in downtown Chapel Hill, right across from campus. The pitiful amount of parking that we have, is very valuable. This is especially true on UNC Football Game Days. Being prudent Presbyterians, we sell parking spaces to those out-of-towners who come to the game. The proceeds go to the youth program for various activities. Parents and youth are asked to volunteer to manage the parking and collect money on game days.

I signed up to do the game last Saturday. We were playing Virginia Tech. The youth leader told me that people start showing up as early as 8:30, even for a 3:30 game. Early Saturday morning, I spared my daughter and left her sleeping and headed off for the church. I got there about 8:15. When I arrived, I noticed four cars already in the parking lot. I went into the church and got the signs, which say there is parking at the church and that it's for the youth program and that it cost $15. The $15 dollar part is clearly a sheet of paper with $15 on it taped over the old $10. I also picked up the money bag with change and found some sheets of paper and a marker. I wrote "Tow This Car" in big letters on the sheets of paper and placed one on each of the cars in the parking lot. Then I set up the signs, and sat down and went to work.

Around 8:45, the first customer showed up. A big black Ford Expedition drove up with a bit of Hokie paraphernalia (flags, decals, etc.) attached to the outside and a man and his wife hopped out followed by their daughter. They were dressed in the required glaring burgundy and orange clothing required of Virginia Tech fans. I took their money and sent them off to Franklin street in search of breakfast and shopping.

Next came the first of a regular crowd of Carolina fans. They've been driving from the mountains and setting up shop in the church parking lot for many years. The first ones there buy one parking space and put out chairs to reserve a bunch of spaces for their friends coming later.

Then, as I was going to check on the signs which kept blowing over in the wind, the Uber fans showed up. I think it was a big black GMC Yukon Denali. And it was pulling a big trailer that can only be called a party machine, a big folded up Sports Bar. Before they park, a guy hops out of the SUV and says he needs four spots. He gives me $20 each. "Keep the change, give it to the Church," he says. So they pull in and a bunch of people (six men and four women) hop out and start setting up. Some may have been in another car.

First, they open it up and reveal two large LCD screens, one on either side. Then out come the speakers and associated sound equipment. A long coffin sized stainless steel grill slides out from the middle of the trailer and is wheeled over and set up on one side. Two small LCD screens are bolted from the ceiling on the back above the bright orange bar that folds out from the inside. This is followed by an assortment of flags, tables, chairs, awnings and cabanas, all in that dark burgundy or bright orange color. In the meantime, one guy, who I think is the owner comes over and buys two more parking slots, again for $20 each. Finally, they set up the satellite dish and we're watching ESPN on all four LCD screens.

I walk over to the Carolina crowd, who used to think they had an impressive setup, and tell them they need to up their game. They have a pretty nice functional setup including a little motorized scooter but, well, just look for yourself.



And they do. A lot of Carolina Blue roams over to the Virginia Tech party machine/sports bar. They ask a lot of questions, take a few pictures, and shoot the breeze.


By around 12:30, all the spots are sold out and there's a pretty serious party going on in the church parking lot. The Carolina fans and the Virginia Tech fans are blasting music at each other. One young lady has turned ESPN off one of the LCD's and is playing a game of Wii bowling. It's a pretty festive atmosphere. A lot of people are enjoying a beer and watching the NC State - ECU game on one of the LCDs.



The first family to arrive came back from shopping and set up their station. They said that they met Alexander Julian in his store. They offer me a beer. Since I'm done with parking, I say sure and they give me a beer in burgandy beer jacket with orange dots and fuzzy orange stuff around the bottom. I enjoy the beer, shoot the breeze for a while, watch the State-ECU game and relax for a bit. After a while, I decide it's time to head home. I tell everyone it's last call on the church bathrooms, pick up the signs and the traffic cones, hide the money in the church, then lock up the church and head out. Not a bad job for a Saturday morning.

Lemonade for Obama

Today, I took my daughter to a little party on campus. On the way home, I noticed a group of people gathered at a corner near our house. I thought it was a bunch of kids selling lemonade to make a buck for who knows what. Then I saw the sign:

Lemonade
for
Obama

I drove on home but an hour later, on the way back to pick up my daughter, I stopped. There were a number of mothers and kids. They had run out of lemonade but a new batch arrived just after I did. I asked a few of the kids involved if I could take a picture and they quickly posed for me. I also bought a cup of lemonade and a brownie. I gave them $5 for the cause.


I hope similar things are happening in your neighborhood.

Slow Drying Out

Well it's been about a month since we made the solid balls of g00. As I said, it may take a while for all the acetone to dry out. I began to wonder just how long it would take, so I took a hacksaw and went at the big ball. I cut out a little wedge to get a little cross section of the drying process. As you can see in the picture, the big blob has dried out about 3/8 of an inch from the surface.



Considering that the rate of evaporation will probably slow down, I estimate that it will take about 7o years for this process to finish. That's a real seat-of-the-pants estimate. After that, I took the hacksaw to one of the smaller blobs. I sawed that sucker in half. It's interesting cutting this stuff. When you're cutting through the hard stuff, it cuts well. As you get into the center, it's more like cutting through a squid. It's arduous. Anyhow, just like the big blob, the smaller blob was still pretty acetone rich in the center. In other words, it still reeked of acetone.



So this got me to thinking about mailing off the plastic challa bread to it's maker. I hope the trace of leaking acetone fumes won't set off some alarms and send the Homeland Security guys down on my ass.

By the way, that white bucket with the red lid in the first picture has a fresh batch of melted polystyrene foam for my entertainment.

Bye for now.

Making Blobs

One of the things you do when you lose your job but you haven't quite lost it yet is try to find things to fill your time. You're getting paid but after a while you get tired of sitting on your butt, surfing the web.

One of the neatest things one can do, which fills time and has little or no value, is melt styrofoam with acetone. Actually, it isn't really styrofoam but is instead "expanded polystyrene foam", which everyone who doesn't respect Dow Chemical's trademark, calls styrofoam anyhow. You know it as that white stuff used in coolers and packing material and coffee cups. What it is, is a little polystyrene and a lot of air. By adding acetone, you start to partially dissolve the polystyrene and release a lot of air. It's not really dissolution so much as solvation. No chemisty takes place in the process.

I guess one could argue that melting it makes the "expanded polystyrene foam" take up less space in the landfills and it does that remarkably well. But the real reason to do this is to have fun.

So I decided to do a little. First I enlisted the help of my humble but able assistant. She's always up for something a little off the wall. We started collecting a lot of the stuff. There was the stuff in the solvent boxes, which cushions the glass bottles during shipment. There were lots of coolers from the bio guys and gals. There was a variety of packaging for syringes and tubes and who know what else. Let's just say there's no shortage of "expanded polystyrene foam" to be found in a lab environment.

We gathered up a lot of this white stuff. Then, to get a nice visual effect, we eviscerated a number of Sharpie pens of different colors and dropped the inky insides of each into acetone squirt bottles. This gave us a variety of colored acetone solutions to shoot at the various "expanded polystyrene foam" products. When acetone hits the "expanded polystyrene foam", it melts to a goo, much like the faces in "Raider of the Lost Ark", when they opened up the Ark. If you use colored acetone, you get colored goo. Cool!!

We got a big plastic (polypropylene) tub and poured in a bit of acetone. We then started stuffing the white stuff into the acetone and watched it disappear into goo. After a while we had a good base and the melting slowed up a bit, so we started spraying down the pieces with the squirt bottles of colored acetone. This elicited squeals of glee from some in attendance. Then we squirted designs in the coolers and as they melted, we stuck pieces together to make a variety of creations. If something didn't look quite right, we shoved it into the acetone vat and reduced it to goo.

This process went on for a few weeks. If you got bored, you went down to the lab and melted more "expanded polystyrene foam" into a growing ball of goo. Eventually, this got to be boring, so we stopped and let a lot of the acetone evaporate while my assistant took a few days off. When she returned we had a nice workable blob. All the colors combined gave a dark green hue to the acetone wet goo.

When I say workable, it's important to remember that you're dealing with a ball of goo that resembles taffy but reeks of acetone. So it's important to wear good solvent resistant gloves and work in a hood. After a while, I decided to try something different. I poured off any excess acetone and added a lot of water. This dramatically lowered the acetone fumes and seemed to semi-seal up the surface so the vapors went down a bit and the surface turned into a greyish green. If you squeezed a bit on the goo, you could expose fresh dark green acetone soaked surface. So we pinched off a few bits of the big goo ball to play with. My assistant took one small blob and fashioned a piece of challah bread. I took a couple of small pieces and mushed them around. Right before I went on vacation (see below), I dropped the two smaller blobs into water and filled the vat with the rest of the big blob with water and left them for ten days. I left the challah bread out on the hood surface. When I came back, the two small pieces that I was playing with had hardened and the smell of acetone was essentially gone. The big blob still reeked of acetone. Here's how they looked (click on the pictures for higher resolution):


Although these things look kinda mushy, they're really quite hard at this stage. And here's a closeup on the big blob:


And here's the challah bread:


The challah bread was interesting because it was sitting on the bench instead of in water. Over the week I was at the beach the top got hard but the acetone couldn't escape from the bottom and so it stayed soft and supple. Here's a picture of the bottom:


It almost looks like one of those geode things. When it dries out, I'm going to send it off to it's maker.

And that's all I have to say for now about melting "expanded polystyrene foam". Maybe one day I'll calculate the volume of material that actually went into the big ball but I'll have to wait for all the acetone to escape. That could take a while.

Beach Pictures

We recently went to Sunset Beach for a week. We took some pictures. Here they are:

Beach August 2008

A New Career

Earlier this year, back in February or March, our church's youth group put on a play called the Cotton Patch Gospel. It's a musical that retells the story of Jesus as if in modern day, rural Georgia. In one scene, Jesus is telling a modern version of the Good Samaritan story. One of the groups that comes upon the man recently beat up by robbers and left on the side of the road is a hot gospel singing group, called the Quintessentials. That's because there's five of em. Anyhow, they drafted 5 of us older gentlemen to play the part. This is what it looked like.



It's not hard to tell which of this group is more comfortable performing.

New Car, Old Job

I haven't written in my blog in quite a while. So for a quick update to those who occasionally read it, here's what's happening.

The company where I work got bought by a big pharmaceutical company whose logo appears below. They liked what we had, but they didn't think it would be worthwhile keeping us around so somewhere around August 31, I will be out of work. We'll get a nice severance and some other parting gifts, so if I'm not out of work too long, it won't be a bad thing. If I am, it will.


In the meantime, my son came home and got a job and needed a car. We've already got 2 cars with over 100,000 miles on them so we decided to get an new car with no miles on it. My son gets to use my old car. For the reasons mentioned above, we didn't want to spent too much money and we wanted reasonable gas mileage so we got a new Honda Accord. It looks like the picture below.
And that's all the news I have for now.

Some Art from Philip

Often this blog is about technical things in my life. For example, I recently wrote in detail about the wiring that goes into my computer setup. One thing I didn't write up more recently (OK, back in August 07), was that we got a new computer. Maybe I'll talk about that some day. The new purchase was precipitated by some pretty stupid moves on my part in which I destroyed the Mac Mini.

OK, this blog is about my initial forays into computer art. My daughter likes to draw and she often scans in her artwork so that she can colorize it on the computer. So we got her a new Wacom Intuos3 pen tablet. They sort of let you write or draw or paint or whatever in a more natural way using a pen and the tablet captures your input and puts it into a computer picture. Here's a picture of it.


So I decided to try it out and do a little artwork. First, I did a still life.


It's not bad. I think the fruit is a bit out of proportion. I kind of liked this picture and I use it as a desktop for my computer.

Next I tried a man. Here he is:


My daughter thought he looked a bit creepy. It was something about his eyes.

Finally, I did a beach scene. It's pretty clear that I was getting bored by this point.



Maybe I'll get inspired again some day and embellish this beach scene or try a bit more to hone my skills.

Bye-bye for now.

Merry Christmas!

(Adapted from my wife's annual Christmas letter)

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at my nose, Yuletide carols ……….

Seems I’ve been hearing those carols being played since Labor Day but it didn’t feel like Christmas until the weather finally turned cold this week. Suddenly, Christmas is less than a week away! I went out for 3 hours today and got all my shopping done. Now, I’ve given myself a day to get out these cards before I start the baking for teachers/neighbors/friends.

It’s been another rather uneventful year and that is a real blessing. Locally, weather has dominated the news as our drought conditions have gone from mild to moderate to severe to extreme to exceptional. For the past few months, a drop of rain generates the kind of excitement usually reserved for snow! We have all learned to take much shorter showers, surrounded by 3 large buckets. I have managed to keep most of my perennials and bushes alive with that collected water. We also have been following the mantra “If it’s yellow, let in mellow….” . They are talking about mandating that even for public restrooms! Between the drought and all the high-temp records broken this year, there are only a few die-hard global climate change skeptics remaining in this area.

Phil has had a good year at work and he’s still employed. For a chemist these days, that’s certainly not a given. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir. He’s also serving as an elder and chair of the music and worship committee - which means he spends many an evening on the phone trying to round up smiling faces to greet or usher. He recently joined AARP to get reduced hotel rates for a business trip and had the gall to sign me up too. We can’t possibly be that old, can we? We do, however, enjoy being able to excuse the occasional odd mishap as “a senior moment”.

I started the year by turning the house into a sewing factory as a friend and I made 125 costumes for our youth choir production of “The Wizard of Oz”. Later, I actually made some money sewing a few costumes for a small, professional salsa dance company. Then I started a project that seemed to go on forever. I decided to turn the ugly, pie shaped slope at the front of our property into a terraced perennial garden. I (with help from my wonderful hubby) began by digging out a foot deep of the heavy, hard, rooty, rocky clay soil. Then I terraced it by building stone walls, moving 4 ½ tons of stone. It turned out to be a great way to get to know the neighbors better, as they would often stop by to chat (and give me kind encouragement). I’ve now turned my attention to the inside of the house. We have lived here for 16 years now, and most rooms are in need of an update.

Blake is in his junior year at Earlham, double majoring in math and economics. He’s having a great year and really appreciates his single room this year after being in a triple last year. He works as a teaching assistant/tutor for the math department, and seems to enjoy that. He took a semester break from concert choir , but will start back in January. This past summer, we were happy to have him at home. He spent the summer baking bread at Great Harvest Bread Company. His 5 AM start time was a wonderful incentive to do well in college. He has been dating a very nice young woman, Hannah, for about 2 years now. She came home with him for spring break and we look forward to her coming again this year. He, in turn, will be spending the last week of his Christmas break with her family is Seattle. Could this be getting serious?

Whitney is now a sophomore in high school. Music keeps her busy and happy. She is in the treble ensemble and band this year, and also plays in the small wind section with the orchestra (we had 3 concerts in one week - full of wonderful Christmas music!) She also sings in the church youth choir and is on their leadership team. In addition, she continues to take tap dance lessons - and has absolutely no interest in any other sporty endeavor. She’s a typical, lovely 16 year old girl, spending hours chatting with her friends, not on the phone but on the web. She is in no hurry to learn to drive and has yet to take drivers ed. It feels rather strange as a parent to be pushing a child to start driving!

As a family, we’ve continued several wonderful traditions this year. We had our 20th annual summer week at Sunset Beach with Phil’s extended family and were joined this year by our good friends Jay, Sue and Haley from Pa. In Nov., it was back to the beach for our 15th annual Thanksgiving celebration. During Whitney’s spring break, we headed down to Charleston, SC. We took some wonderful tours (I highly recommend the Gullah tour if you are ever in the area) and ate some great food. We also managed a quick trip to Iowa after dropping Blake off at college in Indiana, and managed to catch up with family and friends.

We hope you and your family are well and find time to enjoy the blessings of this wonderful time of year.

……Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin; Glad tidings for Christmas and a happy New Year!

And now some pictures.

The Thanskgiving Bunch


Parts of the Beach Crowd


Blake and Hannah


Whitney and cousins, Joni and Paige


Donna's Project (before plants)

Nightmare

About a week ago I woke up early, shaken by a horrible nightmare. First, some background: I have a 1999 Volvo S70. Now to the nightmare, it's short. I took my car to the dealer to have it worked on, maybe it was a tune-up, that wasn't really part of the dream. The bad dream was picking it up. I went up to the cashier and asked how much it would be. She casually said "Fourteen thousand dollars". "Fourteen thousand dollars?," I said. A horrible feeling of terror swept over me. How could it possibly be $14,000? My worse fear was how I would explain it to my wife that I let them charge me $14,000 for a simple checkup of a car that was worth, at best, $4,000. I remember standing there stunned with a whole bunch of emotions running through me and then I woke up, badly shaken by the whole affair. I got up and went to the bath room and was turning it over in my mind. I was relieved that it was a only a dream but I was still pretty upset about it. There was a mixture of anger at the dealership for not calling me before doing the work and that helpless sensation anyone feels when you don't have control. The emotions I felt at the dealership in my dream stayed with me for a few more hours, wearing off gradually over the morning.

I wonder what Freud would say about this.

Some Photos from Thanksgiving

This was the 15th Thanksgiving that we spent with family at the beach. We do the traditional turkey thing on Thanksgiving day and have a little cocktail party on Friday night where we steam a few oysters. We always take a couple of walks down to Bird Island and visit the Kindred Spirit mailbox. This is to get rid of the cobwebs in the brain from maybe a bit too much wine the night before and to take time out from constantly eating. As you can see from the pictures at the mailbox, it cooled off a lot from Thursday to Friday. A good time was had by all. Here are some pictures.

Thanksgiving 2007

Video Test

OK, I haven't blogged in ages and it's time that I started back. There are a lot of reasons that I haven't blogged lately. The biggest ones are that I don't have time, I don't have much to say and I'm lazy. But, I've decided to get back on the circuit. I have an upcoming blog on the work my lovely wife has been doing out in front of the house. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to experiment with posting video. I have a nice little piece of video that I shot, oh, about 19 years ago. I've recently turned it digital and now I'm going to put it up on my blog. It's from the very early days of my son learning to talk. Here goes. (By the way, let's not mention this to him).

Beach Photos, Summer of 2007

Hi guys. We go to Sunset Beach every summer during the week that crosses over from July into August. Sometimes I take pictures. Here's the ones I took this year. The link will take you to my public photos on Picassa.

Enjoy.

Simpsonize Yourself

Could anything be cooler than this. There is a new web site that allows you to upload a picture of yourself and turn into a Simpson's character. I took that photo over on the side of my blog and used it to make a Simpson of myself. Here it is:



I could have messed around with it a bit more but this is OK for now. If you want to make one of your own go to the Simpsonize site and give it a go.

In Fairness to Durham

In all fairness to the City of Durham, North Carolina, they finally finished the corner and a lot of other stuff. They even had a celebration. I didn't go but I did take a picture of the finished corner for you to see.

Enjoy!

How to Prepare a Gourmet Meal

Recently, my wife went somewhere and I had to feed my daughter and myself. This was an excellent opportunity for me to prepare a real gourmet meal. It's not hard. You can do it, too. Here's what I did along with some instructions and illustrations.

First choose a gourmet meal. I chose Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie, a delectable mix of chicken, vegetables, crunchy crust and some weird creamy yellow goo to hold it all together.



The first thing you do is turn on the oven to 400 F. While the oven is heating up, open up the boxes and place the pot pies on a tray. Then you tear off little strips of tin foil and wrap them around the edges of the pot pies. This keeps the outer edge of the crust from drying out while you're trying to bring the bulk of the food from rock hard frozen up to steaming hot. When the oven hit's the desired temperature, in they go.



Now comes the hard part. Set the timer for 60 minutes and go work on the Sunday Cross Word puzzle. You're supposed to cook then for 65 minutes, but you'll need 5 minutes to fix a couple of glasses of milk.

OK, times up. Open up the oven and give them a look. They should have a nice golden color. They should look like this.



Now comes the really hard part, the Flip. The real test of the gourmet preparation of a pot pie is a successful Flip. Basically, you have a fragile crust holding a flowing magma of goo and your job is to flip the whole thing over onto the plate and keep it all intact. Of course, the successful Flip must include a good release of the pie from the container. Nothing is worse than a good Flip, followed by tearing away the pie bottom and releasing the pie's contents before its time. If you do it right, it looks like this.



Bon Appetite!