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.

Wearing Spandex and Riding The Bus

The original title of this post was "Sorcery and Science," but the current title is more catchy I feel. Nevertheless, the original title does give a nice introduction to two of today's prevalent themes. First we talk sorcery. Then we talk science.

Nice leather spandex pants

As some of you are aware, last weekend was not successful for those who fall in the upper echelons of the ovine-caprine scale. Losing to a team whose core fan base considers pro wrestling re-runs to be quality entertainment can be frustrating. Now admittedly, not every Fruit is MUSSing themselves over men wearing spandex and women in leather pants (although some still are). Indeed, these spandex and leather loving fans are more recently being supplemented by persons that would otherwise just fall in the ambivalent middle of the o-c scale.  These persons only like to ride the fruit wagon now that being a Fruit is popular. 

Just remember, the longer a Fruit is on a wagon, the more rotten it becomes. Eventually the sorcery ends.

Do you ride the bus or the bandwagon?

In other news, Engineer R pulled the bus cord for the first time after almost a year of riding the county bus. This is that cord you pull when you want the bus to stop. Since he previously always rode to stops that multiple parties had selected as their destination, it had never prior been necessary for him to pull the stop cord. However, with the change of residence--and in an attempt to avoid riding the bus that slowly ambles about campus shuttling mostly freshman from their dorms--Engineer R rode an obscure bus to an equally obscure location. Hence the pulling of the chord.

Engineer R rides the bus

When he is not pulling cords on buses, Engineer R pretty much does nothing. He has two classes on mathematical statistics and time series, then some credits of research, all of which he dabbles in. This leaves him free to eat dinner at home and to exercise and lose some of the 90 pounds he has gained in the last year. (Good thing spandex stretches, right? Rest assured though that he is not going to become a pro wrestler.)

Engineer J has significantly more responsibilities at school. Because of the structure of her major, she has ended up taking a number of 1-credit courses that meet for long hours each week. Some of these classes take place in the evening. They offered sections that were earlier in the day, but they were all full by the time Engineer J could send something like 29 copies of her transcripts and finally get approval to register. Engineer R has found by sad experience that it often takes a lot of attempts to finally get it right with these state schools. Maybe next year.

In closing, we are going to include some images from Engineer J's homework. These are images she has created. Comment below if you have further questions or comments. Or if you need a referral of a good leather clothing shop.

The (Nearly) Yearly Fate

Within the past few years, it has come to our attention that some things are just facts of life.

If you do not go to the dentist, your teeth fall out.

If you come to teach a class in a belly shirt, people will make fun of you on Facebook. (Pro tip: don't wear belly shirts if you have stretch marks on your stomach).

If you eat 60 chicken nuggets in a single sitting, you might end up in the ER. (I actually have witnessed such a feat three times: With chicken nuggets, with tater tots, with breaded shrimp. None of them have resulted in hospital visits). These are just the facts of life.

Dame à la mode.

As some of you are aware, this weekend will pit persons of various extremes on the ovine-caprine scale in an athletics competition. Engineer J maintains a pretty even keel throughout these (nearly) yearly proceedings, but Engineer R is (unfortunately?) quite involved in them.

• He wonders why the caprine student section purposefully chose to name themselves after a near-euphemism for cow-pies. 
• He wishes we could hang onto the ball better. We just cannot keep stepping in the cow muss. 
• He wonders why it has become a fact of life that the goats always end up eating our laundry. 
• He wonders if it even matters.
• Thank goodness for regional conference. No hats on the pulpit this week. 

Admittedly, neither of us have lost much sleep over the upcoming weekend. Most of our lost sleep has come at the hands of the 5 a.m. visits from the garbage truck. (Why did we have the unfortune of being assigned the apartment that is right above the communal dumpster?) 

Since most of our waking hours seem to be spent chasing papers around the diaspora of buildings and bureaucracy, this post will have to end here. Next week we promise some photos of what we have been doing, so consider tuning in. 

The Land of Milk and Honey

This past week we [returned/came officially for the first time] to the land of milk and honey (LoMaH). As I explained last time, this piece of titular geography should be taken more literally and less figuratively.  For some reason we use the term "milk and honey" to refer to a place of regal opulence and promise. But, I mean, does anyone actually consider the consumption of milk with honey to be a delicacy? If so, you are probably one of those freaks that also eats honey on your stewed tomatoes. (Yes, I have eaten this. No, it was not appealing in the slightest). Milk and honey is one of those food combos that falls into the category of "all my real food is gone, but tomorrow I go on Christmas break so I better not go shopping, let's just eat cherry pie filling and a handful of uncooked rice" type of foods.

I think this literally is a re-labeled jar of  spoiled mayonnaise.

Every time that I drive into LoMaH, I always drive past a shop that purports to sell "raw honey." Isn't "raw honey" just a euphemism for "still probably has wax and bee's wings in it, but we will pass this off as healthy"? When I Googled "raw honey" most the sites that came back were from the nether-regions of the interwebs. I'm sure we have all seen such sites. They have the ads for "One weird tip to cut your belly fat in half" or have flashing banners proclaiming "This little-known loophole saves (fill in current state) drivers $297 a year on car insurance." Maybe my time in LoMaH will help me better understand the benefits of raw honey.

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Part of getting all of our possessions to LoMaH was renting a UHaul truck. Although we have only been married for a short while, we have a lot of stuff. I think that this is one of the major reasons why the median marriage age is on the rise around the world. Back when our ancestors got married, they were lucky if they even had a change of pants or a pair of shoes to their name. We've all heard stories about great-great-great Granny Mildred and how she moved an entire city block in a 4' x 4' handcart. Now days getting married necessitates having at least three or four pairs of shoes. And let's not get started on pants and their necessity in marriage. (Okay, in a word, they are necessary; however, you would not know it from the looks of some of these LoMaH denizens. Perhaps this is to cut down on moving costs).

To make a long story short, we ended up renting a UHaul truck from a place that pretty much resembled Watto's Junk Shop. The place was run by a squat balding man that probably was wearing a shirt, but I cannot remember. (Pants are a definite check mark though. He must not be a LoMaH local). The walls of the shop were adorned with all sorts of blasters and gadgets that who-in-the-galaxy knows what did. There may or may not have been a small horse-like creature trotting around the show-floor. We did not go in the basement part of the shop, but I'll bet that Jabba the Hutt had someone in carbonite down there.

Originally we had reserved a 15 foot truck, but I guess that reservations with UHaul are just façades to make you think you will get what you want. We ended up getting a 10 foot truck, which worked out just fine. At one point we were actually offered a 20 foot truck, but when you are expecting to be flying an X-wing, being offered a Death Star instead is not exactly what you want. We had a lot of stuff, but not that much stuff. Plus, we did not have designs on shooting a high power laser cannon at anyone.

Our apartment here in LoMaH is pretty nice, certainly a step up from where we were before. No snoring neighbors, no maggots in the vacuum, and no people playing night games until 3 a.m.

Tune in next week. I do not know what the topic will be, but it probably will have something to do with the U of Fruits.