Nur die Harten kommen in den (Kinder)garten

Hast du etwas Zeit für mich,
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich;
Von 99 Luftballons,
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont.
Denkst du vielleicht grad an mich?
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich,
Von 99 Luftballons,
Und, dass so was von so was kommt.

~Nena

作家 (さっか): 草間 彌生  (くさま やよい)

Introduction.

"Only the Strong come in the (kid)garden." Translated less directly, but more meaningfully, "Only the strong survive nursery." Because we recently had a request for more international material, we have decided to give a small tip of the hat to the numerous German-speakers who read this blog. One caveat to take note of: It has been at least 30 years since either of us had a full conversation in German, so we are a bit rusty.

We spent quite a bit of time looking for a song in German to feature, but we finally settled on essentially the only song in German that is recognizable to at least a double-digit percentage of the population. Based on our research, the Germans stopped singing in German in about 1960. (Which is right around the time the Beatles invaded Germany........interesting).

Astrid Kirchherr took this photo.
Her boyfriend (Stuart Sutcliffe) is wearing the sunglasses.
He was the original bass player.

Der Kindergarten.

Before we go too far adrift with music history, we should introduce the actual topic of this post. As alluded to in the title, we, the engineers of Domestic Engineering, Inc. have recently taken an assignment to assist in the nursery at church. In the ensuing weeks since rising to the call, we have heard many jokes about contraception, ineptitude, diapers, bubbles, youth, offspring, and anti-depressants.  (And even some jokes about offspring and antidepressants as a single topic).

Admittedly, Engineer R was less than thrilled about having to manage 15 young children on the weekends. He handles so much plutonium at his job during the week that he really would rather avoid health hazards on his days off.

The difficult irony is that the people who have actual day to day experience wrangling kinders are usually the last people on the planet who want to wrangle kinders on a Sunday. And the people who possess little experience wrangling kinders are also usually the last people on the planet who want to wrangle kinders on a Sunday. Wait. Does that mean that no one wants to be in charge of gardening the children? Hmmmmmm.

Now, we have heard of people at church who actually profess some sort of aspiration to join the nursery. It is unclear at times if they intend to join as a kid or as a leader. We have also taken note that usually such comments are tendered only by persons who have labored for long periods in callings where they have to essentially play nursery leader to adults. They have already reached catatonia (Die Katatonie) and they no longer want to be called upon to solve people's problems. They want to just slide away to a small room full of toys, where they can hide out their days in obscurity. 

The Nursery Mascot. Yes, that is a snake around the neck.

Benefits.

There are, of course, some benefits to working in the nursery. It is essentially the only position at church where you are guaranteed a snack every week. There is also the aforementioned benefit of being able to hide from any actual labor or responsibility. And you get out of laborious third-hour meetings where people just sit and debate about ministering every bless-ed week. (With the most recent changes, perhaps we now will just debate about the need for 2-hour meetings).

Linguistics and Sociology.

Although not usually cited as an actual benefit, the nursery can also provide an educational forum for studying linguistics and sociology. The names people give their kids these days are something to behold: Prixtley, Kwinten, Zandlee, Hendiryx, Vahnysha, Tom (pronounced "JAY-kub"), you get the gist. I must say that I fear for some of these children in 20 years when they need to enter the adult workforce. I mean, are you really going to hire Traxstin Hanks, Esq. to perform your legal work?

Too hoom it mae consurn,

I am an atturnee and I halve preepared this wyll for mie clyent. All uv the monee is to go to hiz onlee sun Jakxtin. Mie clyunts hows iz too go tu the dawter that lives in Jaxon, Missasipy on the benks of the Haynky-Panky, ware the bullfrawgs jump from benk to benky.

Now, of course, the pronunciation of some names in English has long been in conflict with the spelling of some names in English. Look no further than Jane Eyre with "Sin Jin" (St. John) the clergyman. Somehow the British seem to get away with handmuffing all sorts of questionable English pronunciations across the table. It's like an awful game of Pit where someone does not get the fact that a flax card, an UNO card, and the Bear do not constitute a "four," but you just have to put up with calling them Mrs. "Fanshaw" even though they spell it Featherstonehaugh. All because they say it with a British accent.

This section can be summarized with a quote from the 1964 fraternal twin books 3000 Names for Girls and 3000 Names for Boys:

Avoid an unusual spelling of a name if it makes the name difficult to pronounce. No one wants to go through life hearing his or her name mispronounced and, worse perhaps, no one wants a name that new acquanintances are hesitant or embarassed to say aloud.

Conclusion.

We conclude with a list of things we never thought we would say, but that we yet find ourselves saying.

• "Please do not use the toilet as a sink!"
• "Please do not use the sink as a toilet!"
• "Stop licking your neighbor."
• "Stop licking your neighbor's Play-Doh."
• "Put your shirt back on please."
• "Jesus does not want you to become a pirate."
• "Do not put raisins in your nose."
• "Please remove the dinosaur from your pants."
• "The sunbeam sticks are not for picking your nose."
• "Why are you wearing swimming goggles to nursery?"
• "[Girl], please stop flirting with the boys."
• "[Boy], please remember not to throw the babies."
• "[Boy 1], do not ride [Boy 2] like a horse."
• "[Girl], why are you hiding under the table with a toy snake?"

After a Long Time

There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend
~Bob Dylan, Duluth, MN. 
 

On a slow boat to China.

~Frank Loesser, New York City, NY.

After a significant period of time away from the blog, we have returned to writing.  We know of people with several younglings still at home who pump out more blog posts, so the gauntlet has already been thrown and we have fallen short. (Note: Although there have been some rumors that we were consumed with pursuing opportunities in the luxury chicken diaper business, such rumors are false). 

Back in the day, on his old blog, Engineer R was much more consistent with pumping out posts. It wasn't necessarily that he had more time then, but rather that he had a more reliable paycheck and didn't have to do the double-dutch with a duo of distracting dogs.

As it would obviously be impossible to relate all that has happened since the last installment, we will forebear with trying to formally catch readers up on what transpired and proceed from where we currently stand.

First, a general thought for the day:

"If one desires to remain in one's job for any significant length of time, missing 40% of your scheduled meetings with clients usually will not bode favorably in any regard when your on-the-job performance comes into question before upper-level administration. They will act swiftly and succinctly in removing you from your duties. Your self-inflicted predicament will be exacerbated by writing explosive epistles in response to their decisions."

That is a quote from Effective Tools for Being an Effective Playground Aide, written by Jorgia Loois. We have found this to be an apropos quotation as of late.

On a completely unrelated note, Engineer R has successfully defended his dissertation. We will not entertain you with the details of the dissertation or the defense thereof, but anyone desiring to read it can contact Engineer R and he will send you a digital copy. He can also try to procure a bound hard copy for the cost of $20 if you are really, really, really desperate. In fact, Engineer R has already had someone request an exclusive copy from which they* can borrow and promulgate important passages they do not know anything about! Very Exciting! He was thrilled to hear of this reader's enthusiasm for his work.

In line with his successful defense, Engineer R can now begin his full-time job. Due to a number of security protocols stemming from the classified nature of his work, he is unable to disclose where he works or who he works for. Furthermore, in answer to several inquiries on the matter, no, he cannot give away his keypass to the plutonium storage facility. He is only allowed to take three guests a year and he has already used up his allotment. A spot for the year 2019 can be held for a small fee (no personal checks please).

Engineer J recently began a job working in the medical industry. She too is unable to disclose the details of her job, as doing such would violate hippo privacy law. Who knows why we're so concerned about preserving these hippos' privacy, but I guess it's always a good idea to avoid angering the largest artiodactyl (even-toed ungulate) on the planet.

This hippo is skeptical of any promises of privacy.
He is pretty sure the giraffes just leaked his banking information.

We will attempt to be more consistent about posting regularly now that we are doing "real life" again. As always though, one's intentions may not be matched by one's actual actions.

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*Yes, as the grammar police persons will note, this should be "he or she," not the plural pronoun "they." Modern English has come to accept this usage of "they," however, and we here find it to be usefully vague. We can solace in the fact that there exists no sentences in this post which end in prepositions, which should make the Latin purists pleased.

Twenty Mule Team Borax and the Silver Cloud

Here we are visiting the University of Illinois campus. These photos are actually from several weeks back, but we are just getting to them now. Part of the campus was under construction and we found a Caterpillar E318 L. Engineer R did a project at work dealing with track excavators and this was one of the machines he worked on.

Ant Experiment.

In keeping with the loose overall theme of occasionally doing actual scientific things on this blog, we are going to write about one of the domestic experiments that we performed recently.

When we moved into our current apartment, it was overall a large improvement over our last apartment (see previous post). However, one slight issue with the new apartment was the infestations of ants. Although we live 20 feet above the ground, a colony of ants had seemingly established itself between some gaps in our baseboards. Insofar as can be determined, the species of ant that we had was the Monomorium minimum, aka the "Little Black Ant." As the name suggests, these were black ants that were little. After a week or two of living in the new apartment, we became tired of finding ants crawling everywhere as we were eating.

There are numerous suggestions online for how to rid one's house of ants, but the solution that seemed to be reported as the most effective was borax. Borax, also known as sodium borate, is a salt of boric acid (Whatever that means). When mixed with powdered sugar, Little Black Ants cannot distinguish the borax from the powdered sugar.

20 Mule Team Borax.

We took a trip to the local Meijer and purchased one box of 20 Mule Team Borax (not to be confused with the Las Vegas band by the same name), and indeed, when mixed with powdered sugar, it acts as effective ant removal mechanism. We have since had one small breakout of ants in another room, but we have for the most part been ant free ever since.

The bait bringing the ants in.

Engineer J Builds a Layered Cake.

A few weeks back, Engineer J decided to make an ice cream cake. I am not sure of all of the sources that she drew from, but the end result was quality. Note the well executed layering here.

The basic set up here is a thin brownie bottom, a layer of mint chip ice cream, a middle layer of brownie, and then a top layer of mint chip ice cream. One of the trickier things about making an ice cream cake like this is successfully placing the second brownie layer on top of the first ice cream layer without destroying the delicate brownie. You have to be in top form to remove the middle brownie layer from the baking surface and place it on top of the lower ice cream layer.

Chicago.

Since we are living at least somewhat close to the city of Chicago, we decided last weekend to pay a visit to the place. Before going into the city proper itself, we stayed a night in Glenview, Illinois. According to Wikipedia, Glenview is an "affluent suburban village located in Cook County, Illinois." (Although, for being an "affluent" area, their roads were in pretty bad condition in places. For as much income tax as we pay in this state, you would think their roads would be in better condition).

One of the main attractions in Glenview is the Chicago Illinois LDS Temple. I think we actually can indeed call it a main attraction, too. Of the three photos of Glenview on Wikipedia, the Chicago Temple is one of them.

The Chicago Temple has a twin temple in Boise, Idaho, although the Chicago Temple retains its original variegated marble exterior. (In 2012, the Boise Temple was remodeled and the exterior was changed). As far as I can tell, the floor plan layout is quite similar in both temples. 

The next day (Saturday), we rode the L (the train) into Chicago itself. It just happened that there was a Chicago Cubs game going on that day, as well as the Chicago Blues Festival in Millennium Park. Long story short, everything was incredibly busy. We saw all sorts of people ("Diversity." See below.) on the streets. There were your basic pink-haired girls with a belly button and/or nose rings. There were your 13 year olds dressed like 30 year olds (they too probably had belly rings). There were the super buff guys who constantly wear those "fashion" shades that probably do not even block any light. I saw a woman who was about 6'5". I saw a man who was about 5'0". We even saw a few guys trying to sell perfume from shoulder bags. I will let the photos explain the rest. We saw very little of the city, mostly because we were on foot and it was hot and there were 6 million people out on the streets that day.

Engineer R plays an Epiphone Masterbuilt acoustic guitar.
An Epiphone Riviera (with Bigsby) gold top is on the right.
The Epiphone Emperor Swingster Royale is on the left.
Directly behind him is the Epiphone Casino, which he already owns.

Lake Michigan

Lake Michigan

A panoramic view

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A small side comment on "Diversity." Since moving to Illinois, we have had several people inform us that where we are living now is much more "diverse" than Utah. I always think, "Well, no. We have our freaky nut cases as well." But seriously. Engineer R's home town has a lower percentage of Caucasians than our current locale. And, based on the overall weak, weak, weak Mexican food here, the diversity blanket didn't quite reach that part of the bed either. (Well, and based on the 2010 Census).

We have also had some hilarious ideas thrown at us about what the weather is like in Utah. I have had people ask me if it ever gets cold in Utah. Yes. It indeed does (See previous post). I wonder where these people were during the 2002 Winter Olympics. On the other side of the coin, I have also had people ask me if it ever gets hot in Utah. Maybe that is actually a legitimate question. (See previous post).

1400 Miles Later

As many of our readers know, our updates have been sparse over the last few months. We hope to be better about updates over the coming weeks as we will have more free time. As a brief update, Engineers R and J have moved to Champaign, Illinois for the summer. We have moved the 1,411 miles for Engineer R to pursue an internship with Caterpillar. While Engineer R is working Engineer J will be thus occupied with 17 online credits of school, in pursuit of a technical sales marketing minor.

The next few paragraph will focus on the events and travels that have occurred since we left Logan, Utah. Most of this was written in “rant” style by Engineer J in the times were no Internet was present and frustrations were high. You have been warned.

The days were rough and the rough kept goin'.

The first few days of travel were pretty much as expected. Long drives past towns with two radio stations: the good old country station and a station playing 1980s rock music. All this, in the most desolate land you’ve ever seen out your window. It took a total of 23 hours to drive from Logan to Champaign with brief interludes in hotels. Not much more can be said about the drive because frankly nothing eventful really happened, which is a good thing as well. Overall, we arrived in Champaign very tired but also in one piece, at least physically.

Here are some pictures. If I had to describe Wyoming it would be “brown”, Nebraska would be “windy,” (and also brown) and Iowa would be “water tower” ( I guess that’s two words but you get the picture)

Nebraska. That's pretty much all there is.

 

Winter Quarters LDS Temple. (Omaha, NE)

Altoona, IA. We visited their church branch here.

Crossing the Mississippi River. The picture makes it look much smaller than it really is.

 

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It was what happened upon arrival that was perhaps the most stressful. The apartment that we had agreed to lease from two girls, who were supposedly law school graduates, were not there to let us into our apartment. We spent three hours sitting on a curb trying to get into touch with them but to no avail as did not answer there phones. Come to find out that one was “passed out” (in her own words), probably from a post-graduate hangover (this was 6pm at night). 

We also tried to call a maintenance man who had an “angry” hick accent, that made him to sound like he was yelling at you. Finally, after some hairs were pulled and some tears shed, we got into our apartment via an emergency key. Relief! Or so we thought. The apartment was in such a state that it was unlivable, and we immediately were overcome with stress and anxiety about our new very, very, humble abode.  I don’t really want to go into the details of what was wrong with the apartment, because they could take up the entire post, but needless to say it would have cost about $700 to clean the place. So, in defense to our safety, our time, and our sanity we set out to find a new apartment. 

This task of finding a new apartment was mostly undertaken by Engineer J,
as Engineer R was working 8 hours a day at his internship. This was not the best because Engineer J spent hours and hours over the course of three days looking for apartments instead of actually doing homework. This caused a great time of stress for both of us, especially for Engineer R because he was worried about Engineer J trying to juggle too much. However, a fortune cookie from the previous night did provide a great deal of wisdom: "Life’s greatest gift is a sympathetic wife." You can’t make this kind of stuff up! Anyway, on Wednesday, three days after we arrived we were able to secure a quite posh apartment that was a hundred times better. 

Here are some pictures of the old apartment (unfortunately it is impossible to convey over the Internet the smell of cigarettes and cat urine that met you as you enter the apartment):

You know. Just your usual trash heap.

 

The picture does not capture the crustiness.

 

Here is a picture of the new apartment:

In order to not disclose all the details of where we live, we are only posting this one photo.

The new apartment was indeed quite posh but it was one of the only apartments that was available and was priced quite low, so we got it for a steal of a deal. For about a day everything went quite fantastically. Engineer J was finally able to catch up on homework and Engineer R’s internship has finally picked up so he could began his projects (the first few days were orientation and a lot of waiting for security clearance). However, on Friday, lightning struck… literally. Yep, a lighting bolt struck our building and fried our internet router. I mean seriously!!!! How does this kind of stuff happen?! So Engineer J was stuck at home waiting for a tech guy to fix the internet unable to do homework again. Keep in mind this was 5th day internet struck out,  out of 6 days! Needless to say, the internet was fixed and all things seem to be back to normal, at least for now.

Regardless of all the unexpected roadblocks in the first few days these last few weeks have been much better. 

We will post another blog post soon with more updates on recent events such as Engineer R's birthday. 

The Long Winter and the Long Break

For those of you that have read the books from the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, perhaps the title The Long Winter will ring a bell. For those of you that have not read the book, The Long Winter is pretty much about just that: A long winter. Of the eight main books in the series, this one is by far the most depressing. Laura's older sister Mary is blind from a previous illness, it snows almost non-stop, and everyone in the town almost dies from starvation waiting for two of the men to bring back bags of wheat from a town 20 miles away. 

Since we last wrote, there have been a few larger winter storms in our area. Engineer R has now dug the cars out of multiple feet of snow three times. When the only shovel you have is a broom dustpan, this can take a while. During one of the more recent storms, school was cancelled for a day, buses almost crashed, and 8 foot long icicles formed. The usual stuff for these parts:

A few weekends ago, a downpour hit and all the snow melted, which inundated the sewers with copious amounts of rain water and melted snow. The associated influx of water overloaded the sewer system, and a few people had basements full of....sewage.  Since we live on the second floor of our building, we were able to avoid the deluge.

Bless the heart. We do hear that the summers are pleasant.

Internship

Since Engineer R will be doing an internship in Champaign, Illinois this coming summer, no one from Domestic Engineering will be present to actually verify if the summers in the current location are nice. Perhaps next summer (2018) will be the summer of glory.

Engineer R's internship will be with Caterpillar. Most of you will probably recognize Cat by their products:

While Engineer R actually knows next to nothing about tractor and dump truck engineering, he will be working more in a data "engineering" role. His work will deal with survival and reliability analysis of large mechanical components. He is hopeful that this will lead in the future to a job that pays a livable wage in a livable location. By livable wage, he means "more than $15/hr" and by livable location he means "not too many people who think we want to read about politics on Facebook." Perhaps some of you that claim to have been to every state in the nation can suggest some jobs and locations. I am resisting the urge to tell an unemployment joke now. Resist, resist, resist.

Engineer J has a very full class schedule this semester. Since she has to take a minimum of 15 credits a semester, she has to take several long lab classes this semester. She will be starting a marketing minor this summer. She is also looking into doing some research over the summer at the University of Illinois (at Urbana-Champaign). The benefits of being 5 minutes from an AAU campus. She is on track to graduate in December and will be looking for a job for the few months that follow until Engineer R finishes up. His plan is to finish up by hopefully August 2018.

Comment below if you have any comments.

Ice Cream and Head Cheese

It has been a while since we last posted. This has been for one reason or another, but mostly it comes down to just being busy. Since too much has happened since we last wrote, we will dispense with trying to fully catch up and instead will just pick up again at recent events.

One of the most recent events that we dealt with was a near blow out of our tire. Last Friday we had new tires put onto our car. Somehow in the process, the tire people broke the tire. Long story short, the tire developed a bulge and began coming off of the rim. It probably was a good thing this was noticed, since we would have otherwise experienced a blow out on the interstate.

The bulge is at about 4 o'clock on the tire.

In other news, last week I took a survey that asked if I blogged, and if so, what on. Of the 15 different check boxes, I think that I had blogged about 12 of them between this blog and my previous blog. The people recording the responses probably wondered how someone could write a blog that covers fashion, cooking, travel, music, religion, academics, science, car mechanics (see tire above), child rearing, sports, and philosophy. Nevertheless, today we will be blogging about only three different topics: food, academics, and politics. The first topic is accessible to  pretty much everyone. The second topic is of a more limited scope in terms of interest. The final topic is of little interest to anyone.

Ice Cream.

One activity of interest that we have started doing is making ice cream each week. Engineer J is the lead researcher for this endeavor, since most of the ideas come from Pinterest. So far we have made five batches of ice cream:

• White Mint Grasshopper: This ice cream had mint flavoring with crushed up grasshopper cookie in it. The sweet and condensed milk was a bit strong, which we have subsequently covered by using a bit of imitation vanilla. 

• Chocolate with Strawberry Wafers: This ice cream was a sort of Neapolitan flavored ice cream. We tried to use those pink wafer cookies as a mix in for this ice cream. The results were mixed, since the flavor was fine, but the texture was off. The wafer cookies became slightly soggy, which detracted from the experience. 

• Pumpkin Spice and Chocolate Chip: This was a somewhat seasonal ice cream. This ice cream seemed to be a nice convergence of our earlier experiences making ice cream. There pretty much were no issues with ice cream. We had a bit of an issue getting it to freeze, but the final product was an overall success.

• Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough: For this ice cream we made some eggless chocolate chip cookie dough and divvied it up through a vanilla flavored ice cream. It was a little tough to get the dough to go into the ice cream is small enough chunks, but the result was pretty successful.

• Green Mint Oreo: This week we made a mint flavored ice cream with crushed mint Oreos broken up and mixed in. This ice cream was a success we felt.

Comment below if you have a flavor that you think we should try. We can also provide the recipe if you really desire. It is quite simple.

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Academics.
Since there is a small faction of readers who actually care about what we do in school, here is a quick update about our academic pursuits.

Engineer R still does his research. He has spent the past several weeks researching what can only be described as head cheese. For those who have been blessed to never encounter head cheese, and hence are unaware of its off-putting taste and appearance, head cheese is a meat product made from pressing scraps of garbage meat together with other animal byproducts to form an amalgamate of meat, fat, cartilage, and "other stuff." But what does this have to do with Engineer R you ask? This can be explained as follows.

In "the business," people will sometimes refer to a student's mathematical calculations as "head cheese." Used this way, head cheese refers to a calculation that is altogether complete nonsense, but has meaningful parts that have all been added or multiplied together. You see things like this occasionally on exams of students who just want a "formula" or who just see two numbers and automatically multiply them together.

Think of a scurry of squirrels. One can find the average length and the average weight of the squirrels in said scurry. But if you multiply these two values together, you get a meaningless piece of head cheese. The unit is the ft-pound, which is a unit of energy. Although, squirrels are energetic, so I guess this totally makes sense after all.

Over the past two weeks, Engineer R has been tasked with explaining to a colleague (of sorts) why head cheese is not a valid method for evaluating a data set. This week he feels like he finally made some progress in loosening said colleague's iron grip on the validity of her formula. It does not matter how many times you roll the dice, head cheese is never going to be a winning combination.

Here are two pictures from Engineer J's work with a molecule modelling program called PyMol.

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Politics.
(Editorial remark): This is the part that you can totally skip if you are tired about reading about politics. Frankly, I would skip this part myself I had not actually written it. What you see below is a very condensed version of some different thoughts that I (Engineer R) wrote. It has not been thoroughly edited, so enter at your own risk. There might be grammar and spelling mistakes.  

As most of us are aware, there has been a large fervor of activity lately surrounding the election for President of the United States. Even some people who usually avoid posting about politics jumped into the fray. Naturally, there was an uptick in posts about how the government is going to steal everyone's guns and land (maybe that is just because of our current location), as well as an increase in posts about some lady's emails. Strangely enough, Engineer R has actually done a school project on that lady's emails. It was probably one of the most boring things he has ever worked on. (Most of the  actually interesting stuff was probably redacted).

It does seem like there are a number of people hurting after this election. The weirdest thing is how people from all sides of the political spectrum think they are the ones that got the shortest end of the stick.

Before the rather surprising results of the election actually came out, there seemed to be a local consensus that something catastrophic would happen to our society. It was never quite clear which candidate they thought would bring this about. Of course, none of these people sounded at all paranoid or given to conspiracy theories. Most of the loudest voices were from people that lived through the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the impeachment of Dick Nixon, the Cold War, the Iran hostage situation, an AIDS epidemic, and numerous conflicts in the Middle East (some stemming from September 11)--if they think something serious is going to go down, they must have had some sort of remarkable vision about it, right?

Post election, the tides of trouble seem to have mostly shifted to people who have lived through nothing. A Donald Trump presidency is the greatest tragedy of their life. They obviously have never been forced to eat head cheese covered with Vegemite.

All that can be said now is that President-Elect Trump better find a way to get robots to give their jobs back to 1 million Steelers, Packers, and 'Ganders by 2020.

The Eight Hour Meeting

As is the case with most weeks, this week was pretty much completely normal. Pokemon Go was probably the most exciting thing of the week, and that is not saying much. After a long slow climb, we were able to level up in Pokemon Go. Since we do not devote very much energy to this game as of late, our progress has been rather slow.  For over a month now, we have been saving up our coins in the game to buy some magic egg and evolve a whole bunch of our Pokemon all at once. This in turn allowed us to quickly level up and become Jedi Masters/Pokemon Sensei.

Our hope is to out wait everyone else who is still playing Pokemon Go (which has to be like what, 40 people, right?) then take over everything. "Slow and steady wins the race" is what we keep telling ourselves. There is a girl that Engineer R has peripheral and brief association with through school who plays Pokemon, but she more seems like the lone wolf type of player.  Surely her stamina will begin to wane soon..........

In other news, don't sit on wet grass.

It was wet grass. I promise.

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As a number of you are aware, sitting in meetings can be rather boring. I've never really met a meeting I like. Meetings are for people that wear Desert Beige suits from Mr. Mac.

For some reason, people see the need to schedule meetings in the early hours of the day or at 4:30 pm, right when you are trying to go home. And at times, people will schedule meetings that start in the morning and do not adjourn until 4:30 pm. Engineer R sat through such a meeting this week. If meetings bore you, this post may not be the best thing to read right now.

I would tell you that the meeting Engineer R went to was highly enlightening and engaging. But that would be stretching the truth further than a pair of leather pants being stretched between two fruit wains. (I'll bet you never expected us to use both spellings of wain/wane in a single post, did you?).

Nice shiny leather pants.

This meeting Engineer R attended was supposed to teach graduate students how to obtain funding from national agencies. (The NIH, the NSF, the NBA, the NFL, the NRA, the NAACP, etc.). Obtaining external funding is of course a rather worthwhile goal. Maybe at some point Engineer R will desire to devote three straight months of his life to such worthy goals. Although, knowing how slow some of these national agencies move, Donald Trump could be finishing up his second term in the White House by the time Engineer R gets a reply. (It all depends on who shows up more strongly to the polls, the NRA or the NAACP).

The speaker at this meeting was one of those pant-suited ladies with a brushed aluminum coffee thermos permanently affixed to her hand. Most of her jokes either dealt with various methods of imbibement or were rooted in arcane references to 14th century humanist philosophy.  She also liked to throw around big words like "cognitive dissonance," or "post-masticative hypoglycemia," or "Massachusetts." And of course, Engineer R was the hapless sap whom she chose to sit by at lunchtime. Out of 70 tables in the room, she just had to choose the one where Engineer R was merely trying to eat a roast beef sandwich without drawing attention to himself. 

Engineer J continues to do the school thing. The bulk of her week is taken up by listening to people with large vocabularies, but few spoken English skills. We are considering sending an anonymous email to the professor to request that he send a different graduate student to teach the course for him.

This about sums up the post. Tune in next week to possibly hear a story about a job interview with a tractor salesman.